On the decline of work and rise of boredom

George Bernard Shaw, of Pygmalion/My Fair Lady fame, raised the question: “Have you ever wondered why I am a communist?” His answer: “Well, it is largely because of my sense of the great importance of leisure in civilized society.”

Indeed, people need time to read books, be they about literature or science, or Mao, Marx and Shaw himself; debate them and go to movies and theaters; surf the internet or go to Church.

But Shaw neither looked into how either the increased leisure would be financed or induce the expanded leisured classes to read, reflect and debate substantive issues rather than spend time on Tik Tok, taking endless selfies, gobbling conspiracies and avoiding debates by joining echo chambers.

However, Shaw did write that for leisure to create and sustain his image of civilization, people must be “informed, trained and disciplined.”

If not, the result would be just the opposite: With “too much leisure” a society emerges that will be wholly sterilized “for cultural purposes, as if you brought them up to work as slaves to the limit of human endurance without any effective leisure at all.”

The outcome of undisciplined use of leisure is “that the little religion and art, literature and science we can obtain, would be frightfully corrupt.”

This happens as, with too much leisure, the “idlers” – Shaw’s term for members of the “cultural and academic” sectors – certifiably “come to loathe education, culture, literature and everything suggestive of intellect” and “use their freedom from toil to cultivate the art of amusing themselves or letting other people amuse them.”

As a result, without self-restraint and discipline, people end up neither civilized nor uplifted. Pretty prescient: Recent Gallup polls show that