Leisure and Puritan Guilt

A contempt and animosity toward leisure has been a part of American culture through its Puritan heritage, inherited by certain elements of the middle class, and formerly held among the old wealthy families of the Northeast. Leisure was identified with idleness, the proverbial "devil's workshop". Only in constant work could evil temptations be held in check. To be sure, such a formula of tireless commitment to "divinely ordained labors" could work toward personal success. Witness the famous New England families who began as simple religious separatists of dour intellectual disposition in the seventeenth century, and by the nineteenth century, they had become captains of industry, political reform and advanced jurisprudence. Nowadays, it survives among upper middle class circles of Puritan heritage (even if no longer Calvinist in religion), slamming American society with such pronouncements that our "leisure" comes at the sacrifice of the developing world, or citing certain exploiters of the welfare system as typical (when in fact most use it as a necessary and temporary safety net from homelessness and hunger). To be sure, vulnerable people outside America who cannot escape the juggernaut of the global economy are often tragically sucked into lives of unregulated labor, often working dawn to dusk, often without days off. Yet the ancestors of these same workers once had stable traditional cultures of self-sufficiency where leisure was a part of life to serve as a healthy counterpoise to life's necessary demands. As for American leisure, those that enjoy it in our surviving middle class and working class, have it in balanced proportion: two days off and evenings off. Unions fought hard for that time. Some few even still get a week or two of vacation a year, and there is certainly nothing wrong with being restored by getting away from grinding routine for awhile. I cannot see a causal relationship between (on the one hand) regular people who work forty or more hours a week, and (on the other hand) greedy corporations in developing countries who employ people without any laws for fair labor practices to impede their exploitation of the area's human population. The Kalahari Desert's Bushmen, whose culture is one of the oldest on Earth, have leisure built into their autonomous hunter/gatherer society. Leisure is important for renewing the mind and body, for allowing the imagination to play and discover novel patterns of thought, to properly assess the changes of life, to fully digest recent insights, to rekindle one's humor. I could go on about how it is actually an "angelic workshop", but I feel I have established the fundamentals of my point. I will close by pointing out that the people that might be suffering a negative form of leisure are actually the unemployed. The psychological torture of joblessness is no leisure at all. We have thousands upon thousands of skilled, semiskilled and manual laborers who would love to see such centers of employment as the steel mills, the machinist industries, the ceramics plants, the household fixture plants, the electronic assembly plants, and the garment factories reopen. Most of those industries have moved to the developing world, but the people who have replaced our own citizens on the factory line do not enjoy the lives our union workers once had. There are no unions in the developing world. So we have an awful imbalance: people with no respite for leisure and people with onerous idleness. There must be a healthy balance to strike between these extremes, and it has nothing to do with leisure being a source of evil.