The Forgotten Bargain. Or what America forgot and Europe still keeps. | The Idle Gazette

This is the sentence that made me close my laptop for the day. — ed.

There is a particular expression that crosses the face of a certain kind of American visitor at about a quarter to noon on a Tuesday, in a café in Cluj or Lyon or Trieste, when he looks up from his phone and registers that the three men at the next table, all of working age, all apparently solvent, have been sitting over the ruins of their espressos for upwards of an hour, discussing nothing that could be called actionable, and showing no signs of concluding. It is not envy, or not only envy. Envy would be simpler. The expression contains a measure of genuine moral offense, the look of a churchgoer who has wandered into the wrong building and found the congregation worshipping incorrectly. The word for what he feels, if we are being precise, is contempt.

The contempt is usually rationalized in economic terms, and the rationalization is where everyone, defenders and prosecutors alike, goes wrong. The prosecution counts vacation days, early retirements, the thirty-five-hour week, the August in which entire countries go conspicuously dark, and concludes that Europe is a continent living beyond its means, subsidizing its naps with borrowed money. The defense counts the same things and calls them civilization. Both sides are doing accounting, and the accounting misses the asset entirely. The vacation days are not the wealth; they are the fence around the wealth. The wealth is a capacity: the trained, maintained, intergenerationally transmitted ability to do nothing productive with one's time, on purpose, at length, without guilt, and without narrating it afterward as recovery, recharging, or self-care. Call it strategic idleness. The European has not merely negotiated time off from his employer. He has kept the skill of spending that time on nothing, which is a different and much rarer possession, and the one thing the visitor at the next table cannot buy.

That this should register as sacrilege rather than mere inefficiency tells you the dispute is theological. Max Weber traced the genealogy a century ago in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905): a religious tradition in which work was evidence of election, in which time wasted was the gravest of sins, gradually shed its God and kept its guilt. Benjamin Franklin had already supplied the catechism in Advice to a Young Tradesman (1748): "time is money," three words that sound like a proverb and operate like a curse, because anything that can be converted into money can be squandered, and a squanderable hour can never again be an innocent one. Under this dispensation the American mind can forgive almost anything. It forgives failure generously; failure is a stage of the journey. It cannot forgive unproductive contentment. The unemployed man is a project; the idle man is a heresy. He is not failing to produce. He is declining to, which is far worse, because it implies the whole cathedral was optional.

And here is the joke buried in the foundations, the one the industrious mind has worked hardest to forget: industry was sold, originally and explicitly, as a machine for manufacturing idleness. Every engine, every loom, every line of code since has been pitched the same way, as a servant that would free its owner. The bargain was never less work for more work. It was less work for more life. Paul Lafargue, Marx's own son-in-law, argued in The Right to Be Lazy (1880) that three hours of daily labor would suffice once the machines were properly harnessed. The American labor movement of 1886 marched under a banner that did not mention productivity at all: eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will. John Maynard Keynes, no romantic, predicted in Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930) that his grandchildren would work perhaps fifteen hours a week and face, as their chief difficulty, the problem of filling the rest. Bertrand Russell, in In Praise of Idleness (1932), proposed four hours and suspected even that was generous.

The productivity arrived on schedule. It doubled, and doubled again, and kept doubling. The grandchildren are here, and they are answering email at eleven at night. What happened is not that the bargain was broken; broken bargains get litigated. The bargain was forgotten, which is cleaner. The gains were converted, decade after decade, into more production, larger inventories, and the felt obligation to want things nobody had yet thought to want, and the destination was quietly deleted from the itinerary while everyone admired the speed of the vehicle. Thorstein Veblen saw the residue early, in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899): a country in which the only respectable leisure is leisure that performs, that displays wealth or restores the worker to working condition. Rest as maintenance. The weekend as pit stop. The vacation,...