What’s Wrong with the World

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What’s Wrong with the World is dedicated to the defense of what remains of Christendom, the civilization made by the men of the Cross of Christ. Athwart two hostile Powers we stand: the Jihad and Liberalism...read more

Leisure, Economy, and the American Dream

Geraniums are the hardiest of flowers around here. Aside from verbenas, roses, and a few bulbs, they are the only perennial flowers I have planted that have lasted more than a season. Presently the geraniums are in a spectacular bloom. At the moment I am looking at the bright red colors of a geranium that we once thought dead. It has come alive through the spring showers, lending its beauty to the white statue of Our Lady of Grace at its side, beneath a sprawling pine-like tree I have never bothered to identify. Beyond the fence our flock of red laying hens is wandering contentedly through the evening shadows in the orchard, feasting and fertilizing. Is it a sign of mental illness to be mesmerized by the sight of feeding chickens for, say, more than ten minutes at a time? Twenty minutes? One hour? I hope not. I keep the door of my office open just to watch them.

In his latest work of whimsey titled "Civilised Barbarism, Barbaric Civilisation", Andrew Cusack remarks on the contemptuous attitude of many north Americans toward Latin cultures in general:

And for every Americano sneering at the North, there is an Estadounidense who sneers at the laziness and corruption of the South. “Why don’t these people WORK?!?” (The answer: because there are more important things to do: namely, to live; there are more important things than railroads and factory chimneys).

This is a complaint that goes way, way back. Here in California, most of the invading yankees held the Californios in contempt for their lack of industry and ambition. The locals would practice their riding skills, enjoy their many festivals, court their pretty women, and generally lay-about their sprawling ranchos until the cattle drives, when they worked feverishly for a few short months in the one enterprise that was sufficient to keep them fed and comfortable the rest of the year. Needless to say, they were no match for yankee ambition and were eventually dispossessed of everything.

It would be wrong to idealize the Californio ethic altogether, which had serious limitations, but it seems more wrong to idealize "the American Dream" as popularly conceived - work, ambition, power, fame, getting rich, "winning". This isn't a caricature. A few weeks back, I actually heard a talk radio host say "America is all about getting rich". What a country! Every man a Donald Trump, the emptiest of empty suits. Can you imagine a better recipe for despair? Every schoolchild is told cruel lies from pre-school onward, told he can be anything he wants to be, taught to strive to be the president of the United States or, failing that, someone wealthy and famous and powerful, like a corporate CEO, a professional athlete, a rock star. To paraphrase a 19th century European observer, whom I have long thought was Tocqueville but now am not so sure - "Mexico is tragic, poor and Catholic, and the people are happy. The United States is progressive, prosperous and Protestant, and the people are depressed." An overstatement, to be sure, especially in light of Mexico's ongoing crucifixion, but there is enough truth in it to merit pause.

Leisure, according to Pieper, is "a form of stillness that is the necessary preparation for accepting reality; only the person who is still can hear, and whoever is not still, cannot hear ... Leisure is the disposition of receptive understanding, of contemplative beholding, and immersion - in the real." I would add that stillness, or true leisure, is also a necessary precondition for repentance and conversion. Men without leisure properly understood are not only cut off from reality, but have rendered themselves incapable of repentance. St. John Climacus writes in Ladder of Divine Ascent: "Intelligent silence is the mother of prayer, freedom from bondage, custodian of zeal, a guard on our thoughts, a watch on our enemies, a companion of stillness ... a hand to shape contemplation, hidden progress, the secret journey upward." Leisure, then, is not necessarily play or recreation: it is the use of time for the profit of the interior life, most profoundly in silence and stillness.

That Americans do not know, experience, or even seem to desire leisure is not so much the result of economic conditions, but of the ubiquity of the American Dream, which conspires against leisure in every sphere - including, but not limited to, the economic. It's primarily a tyranny of the mind but is not without the assistance of external pressures. It's the reason that you can't escape the beat at the gas pump, or the supermarket, or the hotel lobby. It's the reason you can't get those jingles out of your head. It's the reason you feel guilty when you're not busy earning or producing or consuming. It's the reason that if you're not climbing that corporate ladder, you're falling behind.

It would help if we freed the American Dream from the prison of economics, or if that is asking too much, freed economics from the prison of materialism. The highest economy is the divine economy, that which is worth doing in the sight of God - an economy in which contemplation, kindness, generosity, sacrifice, the enrichment of the mind, and the life of the spirit are added to the Gross Domestic Product. In this economy what we once thought prosperity might actually be poverty; what we once believed progress might truly be perdition; what we once considered happiness might in fact be despair. And if we see all of this clearly, we will dream different dreams.

Comments (39)

That's not the American Dream I know of-- success, yes, but in work and home. Hard work for pay, yes, but playing hard, too. The goal is to get to where you don't depend on anyone, and people can depend on you.

Is leisure a necessary but perhaps not a sufficient condition for cultivating a life of the mind? Doesn't a reserve of free time to think on the eternal verities have to be earned by means of some worldly activity?

Can the production and consumption of goods and services ever take place outside the 'prison of materialism'?

There is an element of mysticism in some of Jeff's observations.

Great post, Jeff. Once again the Wordsworth lines are apposite:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

There is a quote in I'll Take My Stand from Donald Davidson about the frantic nature of modern leisure. And that was written in 1930. What would he think about today? I'll find the quote later and post it.

"Can the production and consumption of goods and services ever take place outside the 'prison of materialism'?"

It can, but in this era of homo oeconomicus it takes a fair amount of effort on the part of both producers and consumers. You have to train yourself to think and act outside the confines of the cash nexus.

I second Alex's point about the need for "worldly" activities (by someone, at least) to earn the money for leisure. If a given person can earn enough three months out of the year for leisure the rest and is happy with his life, provides for his family, in that way, bully for him. Most can't.

I also question the association of noise (e.g., at the gas station) with the alleged American work ethic. I deplore our noisy culture as much as anyone. I'm sickened by the proliferation of televisions in every possible location and the near impossibility of getting them turned off. I cannot understand how anyone can work at a coffee shop while muzak is playing overhead. One of my nightmarish old-age scenarios is being stuck in a nursing home where I cannot find any silence. But I believe none of this has anything to do with alleged American dislike of leisure. In fact, a lot of poor souls think this _is_ leisure and deliberately associate their leisure time with sound (or noise) rather than silence. How many times has one heard people talk about leaving on the radio or television in the home "for company"? Shudder. By all means, feel free to deplore the noise aspect of American or any other culture. (By the way, my good friends who have spent a lot of time in Bangkok as missionaries tell me the noise is much worse there.) But connecting them with America's alleged love of hard work just seems flat incorrect. I'm not sure entirely where the "background noise" phenomenon came from or why it's getting worse, but it certainly isn't getting worse because Americans are getting more and more obsessed with working all the time!

Is it a sign of mental illness to be mesmerized by the sight of feeding chickens for, say, more than ten minutes at a time?

Chicken voyeur!! Where I come from, padnar, that's a hangin' offense.

The Chicken

Leisure, according to Pieper, is "a form of stillness that is the necessary preparation for accepting reality; only the person who is still can hear, and whoever is not still, cannot hear ... Leisure is the disposition of receptive understanding, of contemplative beholding, and immersion - in the real."

No, no, no. Charles Ives once remarked, "My God, what does sound have to do with music?" Leisure guarantees nothing, in itself. It may be used for prayer, but it may also be used for self-delusion. Idle hands are the Devil's workshop.

There is a form of leisure which is a predisposition for prayer, but there is a form of leisure which is a predisposition for mayhem. Leisure is not the issue, properly speaking. It is focus. What are you looking at? If one is looking at God, then any situation speaks of God, whether at work or rest. One may have a conversation with God while crossing the street. When you focus on the chickens (shudder), you are loving the chickens. You are appreciating God in his creation.

St. John of the Cross, in, Sayings of Light and Love, wrote:

54. Souls will be unable to reach perfection who do not strive to be content with having nothing, in such fashion that their natural and spiritual desire is satisfied with emptiness; for this is necessary in order to reach the highest tranquility and peace of spirit. Hence the love of God in the pure and simple soul is almost continually in act.

The problem is that many people have a divided attention and silence helps them to focus on one thing, but it makes a big difference what that one thing is. One may use silence to focus away from self or towards self. When Christ went up to the mountain to pray, it was not for silence for himself - he was always in the presence of the Father, but so that there would be no one else around to ask for his focus.

Leisure may be juxaposed to economic rat-racing, but it is possible to be silent, properly speaking, in either case. Silence is cause by the pure and simple transfer of order to order, of love to love. In a soul that is properly ordered, there is no distinction between leisure and work. I do not mean to sound Zen-like. Someone once wrote that love turns a Hell into a Heaven. Love is never noisy - even ten children running around is silence within the love of a mother. Let one of them go missing and the silence is deafening.

The American Dream? Pshaw...What profit a man to win the world and lose his soul? Having money will not guarantee eternal life, so why pursue it? If one has food, clothing and shelter, as St. Paul commented, one has enough. Who really needs a 52 - inch plasma screen tv?

The really interesting thing lurking behind the background, here, is the contrast between the Protestant work ethic, of which the American Dream is an offshoot, and the Catholic idea of detachment from created things. One is a state variable, the other a process variable. Let me explain. Conscientious working was seen as a visible sign of election in some Calvinist circles, so there came to be a connection between the goodness of work and the goodness of the individual. Work is reflective of the state of the individual soul. On the Catholic side, work is a sharing in the divine work, but, strictly speaking, does not determine the state of the soul. The soul may be progressively purified, but only by detachment from all that is not the love of God. In this sense, physical work is neutral in determining the state of the soul: the bad and the good might both be hard workers. Work which related to salvation was the metaphysical process of detaching from created things and this form of work had various states of the process. Thus, this tension between leisure and work depends on what underlying theology of work one assumes.

The soul is only affected by the moral quality of work or leisure. Thus, either work or leisure can lead the soul to salvation or lead the soul to perdition. The soul is only stillness and silence, however, when it and God are in such loving union that the stillness and silence of God and the soul are one. That is always a work - the work of love acting through faith.

The Chicken


The problem is that many people have a divided attention and silence helps them to focus on one thing, but it makes a big difference what that one thing is. One may use silence to focus away from self or towards self.

I dearly love actual physical silence and am subjectively inclined to think it necessary to my sanity. But I know what you are saying here, Chicken, to be true in the plainest and most literal sense--when I try to pray surrounded by silence, I often find that I am merely worrying systematically under the guise of talking to God. Which, I'm afraid, isn't very good or very valuable praying.

That's not the American Dream I know of-- success, yes, but in work and home. Hard work for pay, yes, but playing hard, too. The goal is to get to where you don't depend on anyone, and people can depend on you.

Foxfier - apparently I have communicated my thoughts very poorly. The goals of success at work, success at home, playing hard, independence, etc., are all fine and good, but in various ways they either fall short or completely miss the mark. Man can be whole without any one of these things, but he cannot be whole without leisure.

Is leisure a necessary but perhaps not a sufficient condition for cultivating a life of the mind?

If leisure is defined simply as "free time", then yes. But I would say that leisure properly defined is not the time, but the interior disposition necessary for cultivating a life of the mind and spirit.

So to be a little more systematic about it: time is necessary for leisure, and leisure is necessary for attaining man's end. In that sense it is not impossible to possess leisure "on the job", and it is entirely possible for leisure to be absent in one's "free time".

Far better, though, that some time every day and every season be devoted exclusively to leisure. What might that look like concretely? A Mass, a rosary, feeding the chickens, a pilgrimage, courtship and romance, penance and mortification, and so forth - but more important is what happens beneath appearances.

Doesn't a reserve of free time to think on the eternal verities have to be earned by means of some worldly activity?

We must work to sustain our bodies, of course. But the problem of the modern world is not a lack of free time - all the time necessary has been purchased many times over - but that our time is consumed with more work, more play, more distractions, more pursuing "success" in one worldly form or another. We have time for everything but leisure.

I also question the association of noise (e.g., at the gas station) with the alleged American work ethic.

It's definitely related. What is the noise there for? To sell things - specifically, to sell things that don't need selling, for people who don't need any more money. How does noise sell things? By preventing reflection.

Jeff-
it's not a matter of you not being clear that you think the odd definition of leisure you offered is needed to be whole, it's that you set up a version of the American Dream that is a gutted parody of what I've actually seen folks work for. Good heavens, there's an entire swath of popular(ish) culture going back to old western music my grandparents listened to emphasizing that exterior success is nothing without interior success, and that's without any research needed at all! (That horrible song "Cat's in the Cradle" is an example.)

If we want to overlook that shaky foundation, we could move on to the notion of leisure being "a form of stillness that is the necessary preparation for accepting reality; only the person who is still can hear, and whoever is not still, cannot hear ... Leisure is the disposition of receptive understanding, of contemplative beholding, and immersion - in the real."
True enough, so far as it goes.
You seem to then conflate a form of stillness for the more simple, physical, obvious sort of stillness. To that, I'd have to point out that requiring actual stimulus isolation to reach an interior state of stillness is a crutch. Not a shameful one, any more than any other tool is shameful, but not something to pat one's self on the back over.

My parents are two of the least leisurely folks around; they work a minimum of 12 hours a day, week in and week out, sometimes in highly natural places and sometimes in places that aren't. (Yay, ranch work.) When they're not working, they're usually inside, dad watching TV and mom with something to read.
My dad practically has an aura of peace around him. That said, he'd be one of the first to tell you that actual lack of sound and movement is really rare-- usually, it just means you're not noticing something. Sometimes, it means that things are horribly wrong or out of place.
Think of the sudden silence in a woods when the animals are startled, the dead silence and true dark in a cave (the lava caverns in Oregon have small tours set up to expose people to this; it's a big impact), the sudden silence when power dies... scariest one for me was when I was on a boat that suddenly lost power. (An engine rod shattered, basically. REALLY bad, since best case if they didn't get it back up would be several thousand dead.)

Some people need the crutch of no artificial sound; some people need the crutch of artificial sounds they can zone out. Some people can simply block out the stimulus either way and focus. (My husband can do this-- I can't.) Some people need to do something to reach that point. (Knitting or simple manual labor like chopping veggies does this for me.) Some people find it by subsuming themselves in singing, I've heard.

It's like saying "stop and smell the roses"-- you don't have to literally do what it says, it means take the time to give attention to the joy and small wonders that are around you.

And from another angle, think about how much noise our 'labor saving' devices can make. To save a half-hour of yard work a couple times in the fall, you pay $X.XX for a leaf blower which is so loud you have to wear ear protection when you use it.

The average American needs a leaf blower about as much as a miniature golf course needs a ball washer. Yet we will allow ourselves to be convinced that we need one, and will feel deprived if we don't have it. Who was it who said that "we buy things we don't need, with money we don't have, to impress people we don't like"? Is it any surprise that so many of these things are noisy or distractions or both? An hour in the yard with a rake would do a lot of folks a world of good, much better than a half-hour carrying around a heavy, noisy, reverse vacuum-cleaner.

it's not a matter of you not being clear that you think the odd definition of leisure you offered is needed to be whole ...

I think part of the problem is that I'm leaning on a classical definition of leisure, which departs significantly from the colloquial, as described in Josef Pieper's "Leisure: The Basis of Culture" and other works.

, it's that you set up a version of the American Dream that is a gutted parody of what I've actually seen folks work for.

What I describe as the American Dream is, of course, not universally held by every American, but I disagree that it's a parody. It's the air most of us breathe, day in and day out, unless we're somehow unplugged or disconnected. The "entire swath of popular(ish) culture ... emphasizing that exterior success is nothing without interior success" is: a) tiny, and b) the exception that proves the rule.

I am well acquainted with farm and ranch work. Ranchers work very hard, but their work typically has built-in opportunities for leisure (which, again, is not to be confused with idleness) throughout the day and cannot be considered normative in this country.

Rob and Jeff, both:
Who's we, Kimosabe?

Most folks I know don't own leaf blowers-- the guys who upkeep the apartment or housing complexes do, and use them about once a week. I can't even imagine how much time it would take to sweep the area they blow clear.
"Most" of us breathe that the American Dream is to be successful with a gutted home-life?

Guess you really do see what you look for; like your bit of a radio quote. Do a quick google on that phrase--notice that what comes up is mostly breast-beating on how horrible all of them are, or just generally nasty. (Such as the ones about getting rich off of stupid people.) The only result that google brought up when I added "American Dream" was this very post. Looking just for "The American Dream" and you the uniting theme is "if you work hard, you can be successful, no matter who you are." Success is usually symbolized by owning your house and being able to choose what to do.


How classical a definition do you want? The 1800s had the "leisure class"-- those who do not have to work. The Greeks' word for "leisure" gave us scholar, and implied time that you could choose to do things instead of having to work to keep body and soul together. Our word leisure means permitted, or "free to."
You'll further notice that I pointed to YOUR odd definition; Mr. Pieper's special definition as provided works alright, because he doesn't cut out that it's a "sort" of stillness, nor does he project it to his surroundings.

Leaf blowers range in usefulness depending on where one lives, the size of one's property, one's age and physical capacities, and the size of the leaf blower. A lot of factors. Ours has proved less valuable than I thought it would be, because it isn't really powerful enough. It can be used for some parts of the job but not others, and only when the leaves are completely dry. The one recent year I tried to rake my own leaves I ended up with an allergic reaction to the leaves--just like me to have that happen. The kids help with it, but there are a whole lotta leaves on our property in this part of the world, including the ones that come over from our neighbor's yard to join the party, so I'm back to paying somebody to do it several times in the fall.

Leave it to Rob G. to declare leaf blowers a self-indulgence of consumerism. Rob, a word in your ear: Even the issue of leaf-blowers is more complicated than your categories seem able to handle.

It's not so much that some people can't have the American Dream. They can't even fall asleep. Many modern in-debted college students will never know the American Dream.

On the other hand, how, exactly, is the American Dream really different than any other? That's a serious question. Does money equal a dream come true? I wanted to solve Fermat's Last Theorem. No one will remember me in 500 years, let alone 50, just because I made a pile of money (not that I want people to remember me...who cares as long as God is pleased with me). I do not dream of money or even an easy life. The American Dream is boring. Just when they say, "Peace and security," God is saying, "You fool. This night your life will be required of you.". Man really needs very little. In fact, I would posit that we have enough money trapped in this Country so that no one need go hungry or not have a roof over their heads and it is precisely the American Dream, badly done, that is preventing that from happening. St. Lawrence when told to produce the Church's wealth to a conquering barbarian brought the lame, the blind, and the poor.

Silence, even in a material sense, will not lead to spiritual progress. Pieper's definition of leisure is as worldly as the definition of the American Dream because it does a very poor job of explaining how reality penetrates the soul. Sometime, one single word that breaks the silence can be more of a revelation than any stillness or any leisure. Leisure, paradoxically, can occur where there are the most restrictions and when their is the most work being do. Again, true silence is never a solitary thing. It involves a transfer of order to order. Trying to define leisure in relationship to work is not the correct comparison. Work occurs when one order must be modified by another. True leisure occurs when two orders can be joined as they are. That is why the soul in union with God is always at leisure.

The Chicken

Rob G. (and Lydia),

My wife uses our (rather noisy) leaf blower all the time as we have lots of leaves, that seem to come down on our propery all spring, summer, and fall long (right now we have the 'propeller leaves' and later in the fall, we'll get the regular leaves).

The device is delightful, saves her (and me!) lots of time and since it is electric, we don't worry about the gas fumes. In addition, the blower is really a marvel of engineering and the Toro Company, which makes our blower, is an American success story, which employs a couple thousand people here in America:

http://www.thetorocompany.com/careers/careers_our_locations.html

Three cheers for lawn mowers and leaf blowers and American engineering and ingenuity! They have given the Singers, at least, more time for leisure -- which is the story of many if not most of the labor-saving devices marketed to consumers in the West, and why we should all be blessed with more leisure than we know what to do with.

Pieper's definition of leisure is as worldly as the definition of the American Dream because it does a very poor job of explaining how reality penetrates the soul.

It's not Pieper who did a poor job, but me. Mea culpa. Besides, you can't say everything in a blog post. May I suggest reading the book?

Rob - I never really understood leaf blowers, either, at least not for residential use. Leaves make great compost. And great big piles for children to play in. Besides, raking leaves admits the possibility of leisure (as you point out) while the noise of leaf-blowers is rather an impediment.

Although one can get used to things. I think I've experienced leisure, or something like it, on diesel tractors and riding lawnmowers. But never using weedeaters or chain saws, which I'm not giving up, despite Wendell Berry's passionate advocacy of the scythe, so maybe leaf blowers have their place as well.

Jeff C., I "experience leisure" looking at my beautiful green lawn. If I didn't get the leaves off of it in the fall pretty sharp before the snows come down and rot the leaves, they would kill the grass, meaning weeds everywhere, a much less attractive sward of green, and less of that mental rest when drinking a cup of coffee and looking out the window.

As I say, our small leaf blower isn't the entire solution for this purpose, but it has its place in the whole process.

Well, Lydia, now that you've outted yourself as a public menace (i.e., user of a noisy electric leaf blowing machine), I'm not sure your reputation will ever recover. Tell you what. I'll send you one of our old rakes, shipping paid. Maybe you can redeem yourself this Fall. We'll need photos. :-)

Oh, we rake, too. But not me anymore, not since that strange allergic reaction two years ago. Getting the leaves off before it snows is what you might call a "combination process" around here. If the leaves would fall tidily in September it would help a lot, and raking could be done at more...leisure. Instead, they usually aren't all the way down until November, and it's a toss-up as to whether the leaves or the snow falls first.

"Although one can get used to things. I think I've experienced leisure, or something like it, on diesel tractors and riding lawnmowers. But never using weedeaters or chain saws, which I'm not giving up, despite Wendell Berry's passionate advocacy of the scythe, so maybe leaf blowers have their place as well."

Couldn't live without without the little John Deere. Chainsaws and weedeaters are a necessity as well as a Honda 800 rototiller, a Mantis tiller and a BCS shredder/chipper which takes anything 3" and down and turns it into a fine mulch. In some circumstances blowers make life a lot easier. Lydia have you considered using a mower with a mulching capacity - may depend on your area, here grass is what you get unless trees or berries take over? A scythe up here? Sure!

The shredder allows me to turn trash into a useful product and the tillers let me do my potato patch in minutes instead of all day
which gives me the leisure to watch the quail and deer (watching chickens works too). The weedeater lets me have a berry patch. I do have a blower and would use it if I needed to.

The city doesn't want us to mulch up our leaves, Al, because there's this weird mold patch that the leaves get on them for many species of maple around here, and mulching them into the lawns just spreads it to the grass. Most annoying. Besides, on our property the quantity is just too great. If we can get them out to the street on the magic day, the city comes and sweeps them up into grand piles and carts them away. Another reason a blower is useful: You aren't allowed to put them into the street until the day before the big sweepers come, so it all has to be done with pinpoint precision.

"Leave it to Rob G. to declare leaf blowers a self-indulgence of consumerism. Rob, a word in your ear: Even the issue of leaf-blowers is more complicated than your categories seem able to handle."

Whatever. Good luck to Jeff C. and Paul, and their fusillades against the market/modernity worshippers, but frankly I don't think it's going to do much good. As for me, it grows tiresome, and it becomes ever clearer why Maximos left. Ciao.


I'm a modernity defender, not a modernity worshiper. Because the present is much like the past. I'm not persuaded it's strongest critics have grasped it all that well, and I'm actually very sympathetic to critiques and can give them too if I choose. But I'm not sympathetic to unbalanced critiques that don't fairly judge in the comparison.

I totally get the differences Jeff is referring to between Latin America and us. They were colonized by Spain and we by Britain.  Having lived and worked in both I can see it from both sides. I will say I learned a lot about how to live a more balanced life in Mexico as a young Easterner (the Midwest is an anachronism.). But others learn the same lessons in other ways, and some people just know better to begin with.

As for the leisure of ranching, I think you'll find the same is true of any cyclical work so I don't think it is unique in that, for all the uniqueness and goodness of farm/ranch life.

I'm with Foxfier that Americans aren't as enslaved to the dream, nor is the dream of caricature so easily adopted by Americans. I've had opportunity to work for or at several Fortune 500 company facilities for extended periods of time and I can tell you that most I've been at had a culture that highly valued and promoted NOT working too much for the sake of families and life in general.  People can grasp what is bad for them and adjust, and there is a great deal of evidence that Americans have been increasingly striving for a more leisured life for quite some time now.

Good luck to Jeff C. and Paul, and their fusillades against the market/modernity worshippers, but frankly I don't think it's going to do much good.

Rob, your perspective is much needed and appreciated around here. Whether it does any good is out of your hands, but some things ought to be said anyway. If you're taking a recess, please make it a short one!

"People can grasp what is bad for them and adjust, and there is a great deal of evidence that Americans have been increasingly striving for a more leisured life for quite some time now."

The American union movement, from the beginning, has been about humane working conditions. Reducing the number of hours that folks are required to work is central to that goal. We should remember that at the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution twelve hours (or more)/day, six and seven days a week was the norm. Lots of folks died to make even modest leisure for the average person thinkable.

Perhaps we should ponder the implications of electing folks (cough, Walker, cough, Snyder, cough, Scott, cough, Kasich, cough, Corbett) whose "values" don't include a respect for working people and a century and a half of gains by labor. Perhaps leisure and a decent wage are values that trump most others?

Oh please. Unions have squat to do with leisure in this time unless you mean sitting on the job and collecting a paycheck. I had a job where I had to interact with a union to get my job done sometimes. Left a bitter taste in mouth. The rust belt is the rust belt for a reason.

"Left a bitter taste in mouth."

Life is full of petty annoyances. Convincing regular folk to make life-changing decisions based on a small-picture focus is precisely how the plutocracy divides and conquers. I understand why Reagan Democrats voted the way they did. I also understand they were fools who set the stage for our present misery.

Jeff C., on audio ads at the gas station, I suppose I was classifying them with televisions at the DMV and in doctor's office waiting rooms (the latter being a pretty new phenomenon) rather than with billboards (i.e., just more advertising). I can see your case for classifying them with the latter. On the other hand, the former--the proliferation of TVs everywhere one is waiting, leading to the near-impossibility of sitting and reading a book in peace and quiet while waiting--do not seem to me to be assimilable to your diagnosis of the alleged evils of American preoccupation with work. On the contrary. Americans seem to me to have been harder-working at a time when no one would have thought of forcing everyone to watch television while waiting in a doctor's office. My guess is that many of the more recent (and spreading) assaults on silence are the result of the death of literacy. The assumption is that people literally *have nothing to do* while waiting in these places and *cannot do without* television. The idea of working a crossword puzzle or (now) Sudoku or reading a book is just too radical to contemplate anymore. Full-screen visual entertainment must be provided. Which is really not at all related to a love of work nor even to advertising. (I tend to question the relation of advertising to work, by the way. It seems a little attenuated, especially for the people _encountering_ the advertising--the potential customers--who may not be working at all at the time.)

Funny,I just found this thread as a result of being chased out of my garden by thunder and lightening. I was busily spreading oak leaf mulch on my garden paths, in the rain, before I gave it up to avoid being toasted with the shovel in hand.

I don't know what to say except for me, work is leisure. I hate the craziness of modern American life with the running to and fro and really I only find true leisure digging in the dirt. There are 10 very important things I should be doing right now, but as soon as the weather permits, I ignore the tyranny of the urgent and resume pulling weeds, moving/splitting plants and spreading the oak leaf mulch from last years Autumn drop.

I once attended a very good conference at L'Abri (Minnesota) on leisure. I wish I could remember all that I learned, but the speakers did take a slightly more European view of how we Christians should spend our leisure time, especially in regard to the Sabbath. Susan Schaeffer MacCauley was gently critical of the American preoccupation with perfectly clean houses and the extent to which that obsession can discourage us from having spontaneous Christian fellowship for fear of judgement. That was an important talk for me and freed me from worrying about having a picture perfect house. Everytime I invite people to stop in, I immediately remember MacCauley's admonition.

My husband's aunt was raised on the family farm and acquired the homemaking skills reminicent of Laura Ingalls Wilder's early life. But, Gert grew up to be a Phd research chemist with a large pharmaceutical company and worked full-time her whole life after University. For Gert, and her husband, leisure was planting a garden, vegetable and flower, and maintaining that garden on weekends.

I have no idea what my point is.

Rob G., I dunno, Jeff Culbreath and I disagree a lot on various issues in the Crunchy Con, Front Porch Republic, agrarian vs. capitalist vicinity, and we still get along just fine (as far as I know). Maybe he should give lessons: "How not to be driven crazy by Lydia McGrew despite being sympathetic to distributism"--something like that.

The American union movement, from the beginning, has been about humane working conditions. Reducing the number of hours that folks are required to work is central to that goal.

Welcome back, Al. Hope you're enjoying this crazy weather. You missed some tornado action up here in the hinterlands.

You'll get no argument from me against an 8-hour workday or other past gains of the union movement - in principle. (Procedure is another matter.) But that was then, this is now, and today's unions too often mistake the icing for the cake.

And it's all rather beside the point. Tens of thousands leave their jobs at 5 or 6 pm, hop into their cars and turn on the radio for half an hour, get home and turn on the television or log into their computers, eat " dinner" in front of one screen or the other, spend several more hours in front of the same before falling asleep, wake up to their favorite rock music station, drive to work listening to the morning show, spend their lunch hour playing video games ... lather rinse and repeat until Friday ... spend the weekend "playing hard" with expensive toys, or recreational shopping, or "hanging out" aimlessly - none of which has anything to do with true leisure.

Perhaps leisure and a decent wage are values that trump most others?

They are only values at all insofar as they derive from a larger, transcendent reality. We don't get to cherry pick.

"Left a bitter taste in mouth."

Life is full of petty annoyances. Convincing regular folk to make life-changing decisions based on a small-picture focus is precisely how the plutocracy divides and conquers.

Petty annoyances? If it were that I wouldn't have the unfavorable attitude about unions that I do. In my experience with the UAW, they are a bitter and angry lot who'd prefer to spread discord and strife than work. Their view is so warped they spread vicious false conspiracy theories as gossip. My experience on the job is matched by my relatives who are retired from the union who are retired and gather in coffee shops and do the same thing amongst their buddies. My father belonged to the union too but disposed the scumbaggery and corruption rather than join in. He had other work in farming that gave him another perspective. So many others could not see beyond the propaganda of their union bosses and peers.

Maybe he should give lessons: "How not to be driven crazy by Lydia McGrew despite being sympathetic to distributism"--something like that.

Holding what I'd call "literary fallacies" (after DeVoto) with a little less certainty is probably going to be a necessary first step. Then those who disagree wouldn't seem as unreasonable. But since I'm not a voluntarist, I think that would likely involve a lot of work. No charge for the advice.

:-)

I do find that some with these sympathies are less prone both to sweeping overstatements and to implausible specific statements. Jeff C., for example, condemns leaf blowers only with a gentle twinkle in his cyber-eye.

In line with the main post, a blessed Rogation Sunday to all the farmers, ranchers, and gardeners who might happen to read this thread. That includes Jeff C. _and_ Gina (a gardener). And heck, we should include Al as well while we're at it. He looks like he plants stuff.

I think we have the whole "work ethic" wrong. We intrinsically hate working, we don't want to do work more than we have to, we create machines to work for us becuase we want more liesure, we want that peaceful absorption Pieper and Aquinus speak of. Instead we created "spin" jobs (see graph http://iwillknow.jesaurai.net/?p=156 ) to keep the money flowing through wages and to stop us thinking of ourselves a Sisyphus.

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