The disappearance of the work routine will also mean the disappearance of the counterpole of much of the pleasure we feel. Most of us will, in capitalist or
36 The only persons who have been able to support endless free time without damaging society have until now been the polymath, the scholar, the scientist and the artist; the person of multiple culture. The only work that can never end is the pursuit and expression of knowledge.
37 The state of the future will not be the industrial state, and cannot be it, unless automation is retarded artificially. It must be the university state, and in the old sense of university: a state in which there are endless opportunities to acquire knowledge, where the educational system is the widest possible (of the type I propose in the ninth group of notes), where there are faculties, enjoyable to all, to learn and to create and to travel and to experience; where the element of hazard, of surprise, is incorporated into the social system; and where pleasure is not monetized.
38 Slave-owning societies of the past show the obvious dangers facing a leisured class. They have been either stagnantly sybaritic or aggressively military. Leisure that has no other aim than the perpetuation of leisure breeds decadence or war, since peace and leisure need frequent purges. Soon, in much less than another hundred years, it will be the machines that are the slaves, and slaves that cannot revolt; and all humanity will then be potentially the leisured class. But we are long past the age of clysters and bleeding.
39 Evolution seems always to seize on some such force as the obsession with money, because it is easier to organize life when there is such a force on hand. Such forces invariably land mankind in the Midas Situation – almost literally so, in this case. The lust to find cheaper methods of production, such as automation, finally destroys the lust itself. We chase the reward, we get the reward; and then we discover that the true reward is always the next reward. Automation may seem an end in itself, just as buying pleasure may; but these false ends in themselves simply take us to where we can see they are not.
THE DUTIES OF LEISURE
40 That leisure seems to have no duties is precisely what puritans object to in it; the puritan fallacy is that there is something intrinsically noble in work. This historically explicable need to enhance the value of work really undertaken only in order to get wages has created a climate in which too much external pleasure and enjoyment very quickly cloy. It is a mistake to think that a man who has been long conditioned to enjoy three weeks’ holiday a year is necessarily happier when he is suddenly given six. Whatever situation we are in we try to derive some relativity of recompense from it; and so in a condition without, for a stranger, any possibility of happiness a habitue will find some happiness. Indeed, he is almost certainly a habitue because he has found rewards in the condition. Our ability to enjoy is conditioned by the situation in which we have had to learn to enjoy.
41 The first duty of having leisure is thus to learn to enjoy it; and this seems to me enormously more difficult than the optimists would have us believe. No union has yet called its members out on strike for less wages and longer hours; but the day may come.
42 The second duty of having leisure is more like one of the old duties. It is to share one’s leisure, that is, to give some of it to those who still have insufficient leisure.
43 Poverty is the counterpole that drives us now; soon it will be ignorance. The hungry brain, not the hungry belly; lack of knowledge and experience, not lack of food. A society of leisure must to begin with be a minority society. The counterpole of ignorance will be easily found outside its frontiers. The chief function of the first leisure societies will be the education, improvement and enleisurement of the backward societies of the world. There cannot be any true leisure until all the world possesses it equally.
44 This is the great change that must take place in human history. The rich societies must give away not only their surplus money, but their surplus leisure and their surplus capacity to educate.
45 These things will never come to be without planning; above all planning and reorientating our systems of education. Shaw (in Major Barbara) saw the pointlessness of expecting any moral progress before economic advancement has been achieved. In some countries that economic advancement has now largely been achieved; yet there is no sign of any change in the educational systems. They are still geared to the necessities of the first stage – to Andrew Undershaft’s insistence on concrete economic achievement-not to his daughter Barbara’s vision of a proper human education.
DEATH BY NUMBERS
46 Over all this obsession with money, this lust for an equal happiness, hangs the black cloud of the world population rate. This is the ultimate horror in our present situation.
47 At current birthrates the population of the world will have doubled in fifty years. Therefore in the lifetimes of many of us every problem caused by overpopulation – big-city neurosis, traffic problems, famine, inflation, foul air, the annihilation of nature, the regimentation of the individual – all these will be at least doubly intense. In this context the human and economic wealth poured into space travel and the nuclear arms race is the most stupendous example of fiddling while civilization burns in the history of man.
48 There are two kinds of objection to the controlled reduction of population; one, that such control is morally bad, and the other, that it is evolutionally wrong.
49 The opposers on moral grounds are of three principal kinds: religious, political and individualist.
50 There were formerly very dubious ecclesiastical reasons for encouraging a high birthrate: more of the faithful were born, and large families created or perpetuated the kind of economic situation in which poverty, ignorance and despair drove the victims into the ‘sanctuary’ of the church. But such policies worked only in priest- dominated environments, and these have largely ceased to exist except in a few backward countries.
51 A much more convincing religious argument is this: birth-control practices encourage private promiscuity and in particular adultery. It is difficult to deny this, but equally difficult to show that the suppression of birth-control practices (the repression of private promiscuity) would bring a stabler society. The flood current of evolution is set for sexual freedom. It is no longer a question of damming it up; but of controlling the flood. And this is a flood of something much more dangerous than water.
52 Some religious people still believe that birth-control practices are contrary to divine will. But the ‘divine will’ is not against life insurance boards, or parapets, or insecticides, or surgery, or computers, or antiseptics, or sea walls, or fire brigades. Why does it allow these forms of scientific control (some abusable) of the hazards of life, and not birth control?
53 Another absurd religious argument is this: prophylaxis is murder, since it prevents the unconceived child from being conceived. But this doctrine, even if one accepts its premise (that we exist before we are conceived), raises considerable problems. There are a thousand ways of preventing a child being conceived without resorting to specific prophylaxis. Should husbands go away on business? Are they murdering every conception-phase night they are away from home? Are all copulatory positions except the most apt for conception murder?
54 We can stop babies being conceived; but we cannot murder unconceived babies. All law requires a body.
55 We are given freedom so that we may control; and there cannot be special fields in which control is totally forbidden; in which, in short, we are condemned not to be free.
56 The opposers on political grounds say this: a powerful state needs a large population, and the higher the birthrate the more soldiers and workers it will have.
57 Since the advent of atomic weapons it is clear that what matters militarily is not number but know-how; this situation was already apparent as soon as the first machine gun was invented. Even from the point of view of conventional military requirements every country in the world today, including those with the most overseas commitments, is overpopulated.
58 Since automation, it is quite apparent that the unskilled workers of the world must become increasingly
