An Apology For Idlers
Mar 11th, 2007 by francis
Most people would think of Robert Louis Stevenson was a productive man. He wrote book after book of compelling stories that are perfect for passing slow childhood Sunday afternoons while rain drops chase each other down the windows. But Stevenson was no fan of the treadmill, and he loved his sloth enough that he wrote an essay, ‘An Apology For Idlers’. that gives us some food for thought on why the obsession with productivity is not always a good thing…
In his essay, Stevenson gloomily observed that:
”…every one is bound, under pain of a decree in absence convicting them of LESE-respectability, to enter on some lucrative profession, and labour therein with something not far short of enthusiasm”
and touched on an issue which we will return to, in future posts in the Sloth Ethic – the political dimensions of sloth, and the question of who benefits from the work ethic, from the ceaseless rush of do, do, do, more, more, more, faster, longer. harder.
“Idleness so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognised in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry itself.”
Stevenson thinks that the pursuit of idleness leads to tolerance, a repudiation of doctrinarian and ideological absolutes:
“He who has much looked on at the childish satisfaction of other people in their hobbies, will regard his own with only a very ironical indulgence. He will not be heard among the dogmatists. He will have a great and cool allowance for all sorts of people and opinions. If he finds no out-of-the-way truths, he will identify himself with no very burning falsehood.”
And it seems that he looks rather unkindly on those who are too wrapped up in their work to the exclusion of other things:
“There is a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation…They have no curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and unless Necessity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand still. It is no good speaking to such folk: they CANNOT be idle, their nature is not generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold-mill. When they do not require to go to the office, when they
are not hungry and have no mind to drink, the whole breathing world is a blank to them. If they have to wait an hour or so for a train, they fall into a stupid trance with their eyes open. To see them, you would suppose there was nothing to look at and no one to speak with; you would imagine they were paralysed or alienated; and yet very possibly they are hard workers in their own way, and have good eyesight for a flaw in a deed or a turn of the market. They have been to school and college, but all the time they had their eye on the medal; they have gone about in the world and mixed with clever people, but all the time they were thinking of their own affairs. As if a man’s soul were not too small to begin with, they have dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and not one thought to rub against another, while they wait for the train.”
His views are influenced by a cold and realistic view of the last value of what the professional interest of anyone – himself included – add up to in the long run.
“And what, in God’s name, is all this pother about? For what cause do they embitter their own and other people’s lives? That a man should publish three or thirty articles a year, that he should finish or not finish his great allegorical picture, are questions of little interest to the world. The ranks of life are full; and although a thousand fall, there are always some to go into the breach. When they told Joan of Arc she should be at home minding women’s work, she answered there were plenty to spin and wash. And so, even with your own rare gifts! When nature is “so careless of the single life,” why should we coddle ourselves into the fancy that our own is of exceptional importance? Suppose Shakespeare had been knocked on the head some dark night in Sir Thomas Lucy’s preserves, the world would have wagged on better or worse, the pitcher gone to the well, the scythe to the corn, and the student to his book; and no one been any the wiser of the loss. ”