work to live, or live to work?

[excerpt, Rybczynski]---------------------
What is the meaning of the weekday-weekend cycle? Is it yet another symptom of the standardization and bureaucratization of everyday life that social critics such as Lewis Mumford or Jacques Ellul have warned about? Is the weekend merely the cunning marketing ploy of a materialist culture, a device to increase consumption? Is it a deceptive placebo to counteract the boredom and meaninglessness of the workplace?

Or is this the heralded Leisure Society? If so, it is hardly what was anticipated. The decades leading up to the 1930s saw a continuing reduction in the number of hours in the workweek -- from sixty to fifty to thirty-five. There was every reason to think that this trend would continue and workdays would grow shorter and shorter. This, and massive automation, would lead to what was then starting to be referred to as "universal leisure."

Not everyone agreed that this would be a good thing; there was much speculation about what people would do with their new-found freedom, and some psychologists worried that universal leisure would really mean universal boredom. Hardly, argued the optimists; it would provide opportunities for self-improvement, adult education, and a blossoming of the creative arts. Others were less sanguine about the prospects for creative ease in a society that had effectively glorified labor, and argued that Americans lacked the sophistication and inner resources to deal with a life without work.

...
All this has called into question the traditional relationship between leisure and work, a relationship about which our culture has always been ambivalent. ...The Aristotelian view that the goal of life is happiness, and that leisure, as distinguished from amusement and recreation, is the state necessary for its achievement.

"It is commonly believed that happiness depends on leisure," Aristotle wrote in his Ethics, "because we occupy ourselves so that we may have leisure, just as we make war in order that we may live at peace." ...

Opposed to this is the more modern (so-called Protestant) work ethic that values labor for its own sake, and sees its reduction -- or, worse, its elimination -- as an unthinkable degradation of human life.

"There is no substitute for work except other serious work," wrote Lewis Mumford, who considered that meaningful work was the highest form of human activity and who once went so far as to liken the abolition of work to a malignant Final Solution.

According to this view, work should be its own reward, whether it is factory work, housework, or a workout. Leisure, equated with idleness, is suspect; leisure without toil, or disconnected from it, is altogether sinister. The weekend is not free time but break time -- an intermission.
------------------- [end excerpt]

{Waiting for the Weekend, by Witold Rybczynski.
Copyright 1991. Penguin Books, New York.}

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