Business and Leisure
Good run this morning, despite a variety of transient pains and stiffnesses; fruit and coffee, then cleaned up and went to Morning Prayer, and now settled at R&R for public office hours.
Since the public isn’t flocking to consult me — can you imagine? — I’ll take a few minutes to vent and amplification of something from my post in response to Mark Clavier last week. At the end of that post, I noted that ‘[T]he single greatest impediment to clergy flourishing is the demand on their time. The church needs clergy who are not running at full speed fifty hours (plus) a week.’ That’s true and important, but I want to note that almost everyone in today’s neoliberal economy has been squeezed for productivity like a lemon wedge until there’s little left but macerated pulp and skin. You and I can identify a tranche of the population who haven’t been afflicted in this way — but even the privileged elite have swallowed the pernicious myth that unless work is exhausting you, making your life a woeful succession of frustration, desperation, and drudgery.
I wish I could turn up the volume on my shout of No! to this. Everyone ought to benefit from the leisure, the slack time, that insulates workers from the parching, fraying, abrasive effects of unrelenting demands to extract more from our lives, all to the profit of the unimaginably wealthy. Literally ‘unimaginable’: hardly anyone can imagine what it would mean to have at one’s disposal even one billion pounds, much less multiple billions. Yet the financial oligarchs crave more, and expect that it’s their prerogative to extract it from your nerve and sinew. If you’re not miserable, you’re not enriching them enough. Nowadays, the most obvious tactic for reclaiming this time comes from digital distraction on an employer’s time, but this is a pallid substitute for rich, deep, healing leisure.
Subsistence labourers have always known this, always felt this misery. As the regime of industrial and post-industrial capital has advanced and progressed, it has immiserated more and more of the populace. The once-secure middle class erodes day on day; home ownership (problematic as land ownership will always be) dwindles and disappears as one of the last bulwarks against predation from above gives way to the rentiers’ goal of eliminating the last trace of possible independence from their private taxation draws closer to realisation. ‘Wretched man that I am [ed: I’d say ‘Oh, the humanity I am!’] Who will rescue me from this body of death?’ Clue: it sure won’t be any of our current proliferation of self-interested billionaires.
Cory Doctorow constantly quotes Stein’s Law — “anything that can’t go on forever eventually stops” — perhaps hoping that by dint of repetition, the import of that maxim will at last sink in. Eventually, this ouroboros will be slain by government regulation (which is why the predators so dread regulation) or run out of tail to swallow (which is why they preach the false gospel of limitless growth, in the hope that the snake will provide a continuous diet of added length to consume).
To return to where I started: since the economic role of clergy is, to a great extent, symbolic (and I mean that in a very positive sense), one way we can push back on this matrix of extraction can involve recognising and encouraging a clerical vocation of leisure (for the benefit of our cures, not for self-interest, though some will of course abuse that opportunity). Unionise. Demand that real academic communities offer their teachers the time to ruminate, not just pump the human equivalent of AI slop into print month after month. Find ways to pay workers what their employers won’t. Unionise, again. Press for a diminished working week in the teeth of demands for greater productivity. Tax wealth. Tax surplus (as, for instance, vacant housing stock and vacant commercial property). Refuse to feel guilty for loafing. And for those who will, pray.