The Ethics of Doing Nothing: Rest, Rituals, and the Modern World
200
The Ethics of Doing Nothing: Rest, Rituals, and the Modern World
200Paperback
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781626985025 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Orbis Books |
| Publication date: | 03/02/2023 |
| Pages: | 200 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.38(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.50(d) |
| Age Range: | 16 - 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Introduction
Justifying an Odd Investigation
What Is the Value of Doing Nothing?
The above question is not often contemplated by most politicians, scientists, businesspersons, activists, or even philosophers. Largely, the modern world consists of a summons to do—to make, invent, restore, and alter. We want to earn new degrees, go places, and find ways of being more productive in our jobs. When we are not actively working at our careers, we strive for self-improvement through physical exercise, mental cultivation, hobbies, and family investment. We dread gaps in activity, such as periods of unemployment, canceled dates, or long lines at the amusement park. Younger generations chafe with a type of anxiety often given the acronym FOMO (fear of missing out). Our lives our consumed with kinetic and spiritual forward momentum.
Of course, doing is good. “Six days you may labor and do all your work,” the Pentateuch says (Ex 20:9). The ancient Jewish sage Qoheleth concurs: “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your strength” (Eccl 9:10). Disciplined, focused action has brought us tremendous benefits in the modern world. The industrial revolution—notwithstanding its pollutions and oppressions—created efficient technologies, scientific advancements, and medical wonders that have made living in the twenty-first century a relative luxury for many of earth’s inhabitants. The prolific researcher and statistician Steven Pinker has shown that by almost every metric of health and socioeconomic security, the current time in earth’s history is the most comfortable for the greatest number of people.1 A few simple contrasts establish this point beyond doubt. No more than two centuries ago, a toothache could be a death sentence; today, it requires only ibuprofen and a quick trip to the dentist. In the 1800s, wash day for a medium-sized family meant literally an entire working day devoted to hand-scrubbing laundry with skin-blistering soap; currently, machines wash our clothes for us while we do other things. A trip from New York to California in the 1820s for most Americans would have been a risky, months-long journey costing someone’s life savings; today it can happen in a few hours for the price of a cheap sofa. Occasional Luddites and other nostalgic rustics may complain of the woes of a hyper technologized society, but few truly want to return to a romantic hunter/gatherer or Stone Age agrarian existence. Camping, we say, is fun only because we do not have to do it all the time.
Also, our constant activity shows no signs of stopping, and it is continually improving our lives. Even setbacks such as the COVID‑19 pandemic may serve as springboards for scientific advancements, such as rapid production of effective vaccines. Agricultural technologies have made farming easier, with less land use than ever before. Genetic engineering holds promise of ending some of the most vexing medical problems human beings face, even the most inevitable ones such as natural aging. In the realm of industry, Henry Ford’s assembly-line efficiency was only the beginning; factories today are simultaneously speedier and less (physically) dangerous than ever before (though perhaps not less psychologically dangerous), and we have not yet reached our industrial productivity ceiling. The lesson of the last five hundred years seems to be, work, work, and keep working!
Nevertheless, all these accomplishments zealous work has created return us to the initial question, phrased differently: What do we do when all our work is done? What happens when human beings become inoperative? This may not seem like an imminent possibility, and it probably is not for most people. It is also possible that the amount of work to do in the universe is practically endless. Human beings will always face challenges that require labor and ingenuity. Technology is labor saving, but with every increase in technology more education is needed to shore up the workforce for maintaining the laborsaving technology, which means more work as well. But if we describe our work as progress (as most inventors and activists do), we must ask to what we are progressing. Furthermore, if the end goal of technology and industry is efficiency, this must mean that the total amount of human labor being performed will go down over time (unless technological innovation is a giant industrial treadmill, which would be a depressing thought to most innovators). As it turns out, this seems to be the case in some sectors of the so-called Western world. Research by Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst shows that from 1965 to 2003, the amount of average leisure time Americans had access to increased dramatically, almost by a full working day.2 A nostalgic cynic might argue that this is a result of increasing laziness and resulting poverty, but statistics indicate that the poverty rate in the United States has actually fallen substantially during that time, so a supposed “moral decline” in diligence cannot be an explanation.3 It may be that human efficiency is truly resulting in less work to be done, leaving us more time to amuse ourselves.
The strange possibility of human beings running out of necessary work also lies behind recent politicians’ calls for a universal basic income (UBI). During the 2020 presidential election, businessman Andrew Yang became famous for arguing that increasing use of automation in factories, transportation, and even healthcare would render so many jobs obsolete that a publicly funded universal wage would become essential. Research by the Brookings Institution backs up his claims somewhat, demonstrating that numerous jobs have (and likely will be) affected by the rise of robots.4 Although the era of selfdriving trucks and computer-conducted surgeries may be far off, the possibility is no longer pure science fiction. If such an economy does hypothetically emerge, what should those people do who cannot find a materially useful role for themselves? What value would their existence have?
You Can Rest . . . But Not!
Here we reach a paradox. If the future prospect of millions of human beings standing around twiddling their thumbs with nothing to do sounds absurd, there is ample reason why. Despite our access to increasing levels of leisure time, Westerners do not feel constantly rested and refreshed. It is quite the opposite. We feel burned out, stressed, and pushed to our limits. In her intriguing research on contemporary work habits, journalist Brigitte Schulte calls our collective feeling “the overwhelm.”5 She interviews an assortment of sociologists, economists, and philosophers who have puzzled over this feeling. If we actually have extra time on our hands (as the statistics clearly show), why do we feel so busy?
One cynical answer is that we truly are not very busy at all but simply wish to look like we are. Being harried can—at least in some circumstances—be a status symbol in a capitalist society where no one wants to appear slothful. Nevertheless, Schulte and most researchers handily reject this easy answer. Most of us truly feel overwhelmed—the evidence from therapists, anonymous surveys, and popular life experiences is just too, well, overwhelming. Furthermore, if anything, lavish vacations and relaxing getaways are just as much a sign of status as long days in the office. Some of the most prominent influencers in the modern world acquire their status from using social media to give the impression that they perpetually relax at the edge of infinity pools in tropical paradises. I personally know some people who will take hundreds of photos while on a once-a-year vacation and then purposefully post them on Instagram sporadically throughout the year to make it appear that they take more leisure trips than they really do.
There are two more convincing explanations for why we feel overworked and constantly busy. The first is that our apparent access to leisure time is illusory—we are not really resting when we think we are. The upside of modern technology is that it makes our work more accessible than ever, but its downside is that it also makes it sometimes impossible to escape. When the COVID‑19 pandemic struck the United States, numerous workers found themselves virtual commuting from their bedrooms, which seemed delightful until they realized that this new arrangement made them de facto constantly available to bosses, managers, and clients. This problem can be compounded by the fact that often the most stressful and exhausting aspect of work is not the labor itself but the anxiety from being constantly under pressure to perform, or not knowing whether your job is secure. As many medical professionals know firsthand, lying in bed while being on call is not nearly as relaxing as lying in it with no potential obligations.
The second reason we may feel overwhelmed is also the pernicious flipside of an otherwise positive modern phenomenon: We feel as if our career possibilities are endless, and thus our work drive can never be satisfied. We must create work to do, not because we have to but because we can.
Alain de Botton claims that modern self-help literature and motivational rhetoric have set us up for this weird phenomenon. Prior to the arrival of industrial democracy in Europe and America, de Botton argues, class stratification enabled people to accept their lot in life. If you were a pauper, you stayed a pauper no matter how hard you worked. De Botton notes:
The rigid hierarchy that had been in place in almost every Western society until the late eighteenth century, denying all hope of social movement except in the rarest of cases, the system glorified by John of Salisbury and John Fortescue, was unjust in a thousand all too obvious ways, but it offered those on the lowest rungs one notable freedom: the freedom not to have to take the achievements of quite so many people in society as reference points—and so find themselves severely wanting in status and importance as a result.
Toward the end of the 1700s, official class rigidities began to relax, even as the forces that kept classes in place continued. Although for most people being born into poverty meant staying in poverty, it became theoretically possible to rise through the economic ranks with a smidgeon of diligence and a platterful of luck. Consequently, writers such as Benjamin Franklin inaugurated the “rags to riches” genre of literature, one continued in the present day by voices such as Tony Robbins and Ben Carson. Popular phrases such as “you can do anything you put your mind to,” “with enough hard work, anyone can succeed,” or de Botton’s favorite, “we all have the capability to carry out our dreams,” lead us to think that if we have not created the perfect career, the fault is ours.
A careful investigation of these widely accepted phrases reveals them to be manifestly absurd. Not everyone can win the gold medal in the Olympics, write a book on the New York Times bestseller list, play in the NBA, or win a teacher of-the-year award (there are way too many teachers and too few years). But somehow we believe them anyway. And if we believe deep down that we hold the capacity to accomplish anything, career inadequacy becomes an unbearable load of shame. If an aspiring actor believes he has the talent for Broadway and he does not get a role after a decade of auditioning, there is no one else to blame but him. A bodybuilder who thinks that she can win a Ms. Olympia if she trains diligently enough will be crushed when she loses, because she thinks she could have won if she tried harder. A parent who believes his focused nurturing can produce a prodigious, successful child will face a crisis when the child drops out of school. De Botton concludes that “the price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.”7 The terror lurking in the modern career is not that we are unable to do what we want, but that theoretically we can.
The result of our sense of limitless possibilities through work is that we feel compelled to never cease working, or at least worrying about working. Our brains are addled by a toxic drive constantly to thrust ourselves at perfection. We view contentment as laziness, and thus discontent rules our lives, directing us to always work harder and longer—regardless of whether our work is truly needed.
In our more reflective moments we may sense that we are working too much, and so we schedule time off. But the mirage of indefinite success hangs over us even when we try to relax. In a cruel twist, even our forms of relaxation are subject to the success drive. The aforementioned influencers have persuaded us that our vacations must have certain status symbols associated with them. We must go to the best resorts, see the most beautiful sights, and drink the finest beverages. We must only go to the beach if we have svelte abdominals, and if we go on a skiing trip we must buy a luxurious parka. Our holiday dinners require idealized features that necessitate days of backbreaking kitchen labor. Holidays themselves have become work. A friend of mine revealed to me that even video gamers feel status anxiety when they compare their recreational feats to those of elite players.
The modern person is therefore overworked not always because of the material necessities of life, but because the modern paradigm has identified human nature with work. The upshot is that the thought of doing nothing terrifies us. An inoperative person is literally worthless. Historian Richard Donkin points out that the modern career-minded person has learned never to challenge the necessity of work: “Suggesting that we might enjoy more leisure time, or asking ‘Why do we work?’ is looked upon with scorn and suspicion, as the language of the shirker.”8 Expanding on Max Weber’s thesis, Donkin argues that this mentality emerges from a framework in which work is a sacred way of being—and its opposite is therefore sin. I would argue that in many cases, the situation is far more intense. In the prevailing paradigm, work is the only way for humans to establish their humanity, to confer existence upon themselves. The modern career is therefore a treadmill poised above an abyss. To step off it is to enter a void of unmeaning so terrifying as to boggle the imagination. And if that does not scare you, there is yet another outcome that might.
And Now We Have Become the Destroyer of Worlds
Everything I have described thus far may sound to you like so much “yuppie kvetching,” as Elizabeth Kolbert calls it.9 We are too busy, we have no time, we are miserable, we need a break, and so on. The most austere among us might tell us to “suck it up” and be glad we have jobs to do.
Everything I have described thus far may sound to you like so much “yuppie kvetching,” as Elizabeth Kolbert calls it.9 We are too busy, we have no time, we are miserable, we need a break, and so on. The most austere among us might tell us to “suck it up” and be glad we have jobs to do. However, there is a much more lethal crisis looming behind the modern compulsion to never stop working: climate change. As the scientific community repeatedly warns us, this is no minor problem on the stage of earth’s history. A recent report by the United Nations soberly reminds us that global warming may reverse many of the advances in health and living standards reached by developing countries over the past century, as well as introducing new ones.10 Although the effects of climate change seem less severe in temperate regions of the globe, desertification and atmospheric upheaval in equatorial regions may lead to exacerbating economic inequality worldwide, leading to increases in migration and potential violence.11 And researchers at the World Bank warn that climate change could shove an extra 100 million people below the poverty line by 2030.12 Truly this is no slight hiccup in the majestic drama of human progress.
The causes of climate change are complex, but they all eventually lead back to human activity or work. It is tempting to think that global warming is a problem caused by a few vicious industrialists—the coal-mining system, manufacturing, and meat production. In a sense this is true. But we are all part of an interwoven fabric of human cooperation, and all the activities of these nefarious actors are—in no metaphorical sense—our own. Whether we fall on the political left or the right, we elect politicians who promise to boost growth, which means doing more work, which invariably means emitting more greenhouse gases. James Carville’s 1992 quip, “It’s the economy, stupid,” is both an electioneering slogan and a factual explanation for the causes of climate change. The planet heats up because we do not want to cease working.
The roots of climate change in our robust sense of diligence are also part of the reason why coming up with solutions to the climate crisis is so difficult. Our brains are wired to think that if certain people are causing disastrous problems in the world, those people must be evil, easily identifiable, and inhuman in certain ways. This is often true. The evils of Nazism were caused by Nazis, whose inhumanities were evident. The perils of Maoist communism were caused by coldhearted Maoists. But climate change is only slightly similar to those things. Granted, there are scheming CEOs and denialist politicians whose vicious contributions to the problem are probably much greater than those of the average citizen. But all of us participate in the process—both through tacit compliance with economic expansion and through direct engagement with it. Moreover, the human impulses that have led to climate change are usually portrayed as laudable—they are the fundamental impulses that propel our humanity, in the modern paradigm of the person. We extol the drive to hard work, a “go-getter” mentality, and taking advantage of the resources at hand. The origins of the problem reside in our virtues, not our vices.
The result of this paradox is that so long as we perceive never-ending labor as the pinnacle human virtue, the climate crisis will continue to make our heads spin. We will look for a moral hero to swoop in and save our planet, but no such character can emerge, because our fundamental moral values are the cause of our predicament.
I am not suggesting that we must replace hard work with laziness in our ethical canons, or that diligent labor will play no role in addressing the climate problem. Technology is essential for human well-being, and primitive, romantic naturalism cannot help us. Creative genius—the soaring of the human intellect—is what leads us to efficient technologies that we so desperately need, and genius is the result of hard work. Our world craves more scientists, engineers, artists, philosophers, and the practical artisans to put their ideas into action.
But all labor must eventually come to an end. Greater and greater efficiency leads to less work required. If we continue to exert ourselves beyond the point of necessity, we end up destroying our own accomplishments. We become like a sculptor who ceaselessly whittles away at the statue, constantly trying to perfect its visage, until eventually the entire project has become shreds on the ground. To avoid this outcome, the sculptor must step back at some point and say, “It is good, very good”—and set the chisel down. The full goodness of the artwork cannot exist without a decision to stop—to do nothing.
Today, human beings have not yet reached the point where we must finally lay down our chisels. We are still honing our living space on earth. Also, unlike a statue, earth is a dynamic, living artwork, of which we ourselves are a part. So there will never come a point when all productive human activity will cease. Nevertheless, if we are making real progress, we must eventually recognize the achievement of a goal, embracing who we are and what our planet is. Unlike other virtues such as honesty and kindness, diligence is one that must at times be put aside, and we struggle to understand this. There must come a point when the word useful takes on a different meaning, referring not to labor for acquisition of material resources, or the utilitarian remolding of the planet, but something more aesthetic, or even playful. Such an idea strikes most of us as preposterous. Millions of years of evolution and hundreds of years of industrial expansion have trained our minds to maximize output, to value the sculpting of our material resources. The specter of inoperativity looms before us, and we do not know how to comprehend it.
Enter Rituals
Fortunately, human beings have developed certain ethical tools for learning how to embrace inoperativity. They are found in religious traditions. For hundreds and perhaps even thousands of years prior to the advent of capitalism, humans in the context of religion have practiced the intentional, honest, and forthright (non)act of doing nothing. Rituals such as Sabbath, shmita, meditations, vigils, and fiestas have in different ways summoned human beings to cease their work and frolic in the realm of the superfluous. It is true that all these rituals have additional utilitarian purposes, such as education, mental cultivation, community development, and—in some religious mindsets—the placation of a deity. Nevertheless, at their core is an element of cessation and nonproductivity. Etymologically, the Hebrew noun meaning “Sabbath” or “Shabbat” correlates to the simple verb meaning “to stop.” If we wish to learn the value of stopping, we need look no further than ancient rituals such as these.
The problem is that not everyone who engages in rituals of inoperativity does so with a consciousness of truly doing nothing. Religious persons may easily shuffle through them in a mindless, production-oriented manner. They may become yet one more objective on a working person’s checklist. For this reason, if we wish truly to grasp the inoperativity at the center of rituals’ being, we must carefully examine and parse them, looking at them through a sharply focused ethical lens. We must engage them as vantage points for learning how to live.
Currently, this is not a task most academic disciplines are accustomed to doing. Ritual studies are commonly the domain of anthropology, sociology, and history. Ethics, meanwhile, tends to perceive rituals as impediments to moral thought. In English, when we describe something as being done in a ritual manner, the word tends to become synonymous with “perfunctory.” We thus tend to assume that no ethical awareness arises from it (as in, “ritual anti-racist training”). In Protestant Christianity, particularly, rituals may appear as the embodiments of legalism and the enemies of true moral development. Protestantism’s focus on productive work casts a judgmental glare on the aesthetic, stylistic excess of ritual behavior. Even among religious observers who explicitly appreciate rituals, there may be a tendency to separate ethical reflection from direct engagement with them.
This separation is unfortunate, because rituals are the grounding points for ethical systems. David Graeber and David Wengrow, echoing theorists like Emile Durkheim, observe that basic ethical ideas such as the notion of private property and human rights have their origins in rituals.13 The connection between rituals and ethics may be invisible to those who have become jaded to them, but it immediately appears whenever the ritual system is disrupted or altered. For example, the custom for American athletes to stand during the national anthem before televised games seemed insignificant for many years, until a few athletes decided to kneel in protest for how the nation has treated black citizens. The simple act of kneeling exposed the ethical turmoil at the heart of American patriotism and the complexity of living as a marginalized person in a country one is expected to celebrate.
In a similar way, the act of ritually doing nothing reveals an ethical paradigm. This is why the command to ancient Israel to keep the Sabbath is found juxtaposed with ethical maxims such as “honor your father and mother” and “do not steal.” This placement of “remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy” is not a category mistake. Sabbath keeping is an ethical way of being just as much as honesty or respect for life. If ritualized inoperativity is carried out with intentionality and conscious awareness, it can make a massive impact on how we think about ourselves and our world.
What This Book Offers
The following pages unveil an “ethics of inoperativity” for a modern society, particularly one that is obsessed with working and is beginning to suffer the consequences. Here I should provide a brief definition of the technical term inoperativity and the playful colloquialism I use for it, doing nothing, both of which appear frequently in this book (I provide a more expanded definition in the first chapter). These terms both refer to actions or states of being that have no purpose outside of themselves. In other words, they are not means to an end. The weekly Sabbath is perhaps the best example of a ritual of inoperativity, but lesser-known rituals such as shmita (the sabbatical year), vigils, and fiestas (a category of Latinx popular religion analyzed by Roberto Goizueta) add different dimensions to the practice of ritual inoperativity that deserve consideration as well.
To develop an ethics of inoperative rituals, this book is divided into two parts. The first section consists of three chapters that investigate the theory behind these rituals. The second section provides three chapters that apply the theory of ethical inoperativity to the problems of modern work and climate change set forth above.
In the first section, Chapter 1 explores the question of what rituals of inoperativity involve at a philosophical level. To explore this question I engage three modern philosophers whose work addresses inoperativity: Jean-Yves Lacoste, Josef Pieper, and Giorgio Agamben. Lacoste argues that basic acts of worship like prayers and vigils place human beings in a state where they automatically “do nothing”—they are rendered inoperative before the Absolute. Pieper argues that this status of doing nothing or “leisure” is not only important for religious reasons, but it establishes the only way in which humans can truly perceive the world. Agamben, probing the same idea, differentiates between two types of inoperativity. A sovereign form of inoperativity maintains the apparatus of power, while another “messianic” inoperativity disables the categories that preserve hegemonic power. Combined, these perspectives demonstrate that inoperativity is a central part of human life that can have widely varying ethical implications. This will be crucial to showing the ethical impact of inoperative rituals on practical life.
Chapter 2 investigates the theological ideas embedded within inoperative rituals, particularly Sabbath. Two thinkers, Christian theologian Jürgen Moltmann and Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, show that within biblical theology God’s own being can be understood as inoperative, setting a pattern and precedent for human identity.
Having established that inoperativity is central to human identity, we then turn to a key question: How can pointless actions be the subject of ethics? In Chapter 3 we explore a paradox that emerges from this question: Inoperative rituals are intrinsically pointless, yet they must have a point. A comparison of two approaches to inoperative rituals shows how this paradox fits together. The selected examples are early-twentieth-century chief rabbi of British Mandate Palestine Rav Kook’s work on shmita and contemporary Catholic theologian Roberto Goizueta’s approach to popular rituals in Latinx religion. Kook’s advocacy for the heter mekhira (the partial suspension of the sabbatical year) demonstrates the idea that inoperative rituals must be able to suspend themselves to produce the context for freedom and greater inoperativity. In other words, they must be oriented toward an end or goal. Goizueta makes what initially appears to be the opposite argument. Focusing on Latinx rituals such as the fiesta, Goizueta claims that inoperative rituals must not be framed as a form of poiesis, or productive action, but must remain praxis—a form of life in themselves. Despite the apparent contrast between these two practical angles, this chapter argues that they expose two sides of liberating ritual inoperativity. To create life, it must be truly inoperative.
In the second section, Chapters 4 and 5 show how the ideas explored in the first three chapters impact ethical paradigms in two key areas. The first example, analyzed in Chapter 4, is the domain of labor. This chapter shows how the paradigm behind inoperative rituals such as Sabbath and fiesta calls us to think differently about the ethics of work within a capitalist economy. In Chapter 5 we explore how inoperative ethics summon us to reimagine approaches to the problem of climate change. Theorists usually tackle the climate problem as a technical governmental or scientific problem rather than as a struggle for human identity. This chapter presents evidence that the climate problem requires us to fundamentally restructure our view of our role within the world, placing value on living itself (sabbatical living) rather than production of material resources. We can only do this by reversing the modern tendency to see life as a means to work.
The goal in this book is to show what inoperative rituals teach us about the ethics of our everyday lifestyles, our politics, our ecology, and especially our work. Naturally, this study will fascinate members of religions that utilize these rituals, but it might also interest readers who follow no particular religion but are keen to learn what ancient rituals have to say to modern problems. If, as suggested above, a realm of inoperativity looms before all of us, we need to learn how to live with it.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Justifying an Odd Investigation 11. The Philosophy of Doing Nothing 17
2. The Theology of Doing Nothing 48
3. The Practical Paradox of Doing Nothing 73
4. Doing Nothing and Work Ethics 107
5. Doing Nothing and Climate Change 145
Conclusion: Praying and Resting in an Overworked World 175 Acknowledgments 184
Index 186