Gotham Diary:
Leisure and Mindfulness
23 May 2014
In this week’s New Yorker, which I got to only yesterday, Elizabeth Kolbert takes a break from doomsday scenarios and reviews a book about what I shall call the lack of leisure. (Brigid Schulte’s Overwhelmed.) To get the essay going, she dips into a fanciful vision that John Maynard Keynes had, way back in 1928, about the “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” Keynes foresaw that a huge growth in economic wealth, coupled with increasing automation, would relieve “mankind” of the need to work to capacity every day, leaving everyone with plenty of free time. A lot of what he predicted has come true, but, to hear people complain, free time is less plenteous than ever.
Keynes was no futurologist; nor was he handing out carrots to make his serious policies more attractive. Keynes was piqued by the problem of leisure, which is, basically, that you have to be fit for it. You have to be in shape. Ideally, an undergraduate course in the humanities would show students how to make the most of leisure. Ideally, such courses would not to be open to anyone who had not worked for a living for three years — precisely because leisure means nothing unless you are familiar with what it is not. The defining negative characteristic of leisure is that it is unproductive: things are not made. In everyday use, “productive” has come to be a loose synonym for “good,” so it is important not to apply this vernacular word to leisure, which can be extremely “productive” indeed. By and large, though, objects are not produced, and money is not traded for time and effort.
Even worse is the vernacular idea of leisure itself, which, in American terms, seems to go out of its way to exclude the defining positive character of leisure, which is mindfulness. As anyone who has seriously striven to achieve mindfulness will tell you, it isn’t easy. Our nervous systems are cued to respond to all sorts of distractions, many of them internal, and not a few of them actually cerebral. To put it another way, it is difficult to concentrate on anything — unless you have the habit of concentration. Concentration is an incredibly intimate activity, as picky for satisfaction as anything carnal. Indeed, for concentration truly to take hold, so that the mind’s contact with what it is considering is wide-open, unobstructed, and sealed off from background noise, there has to be something of an erotic charge, a desire to make contact. I can’t imagine how concentration might be taught — perhaps by magicians, who keep playing tricks until something works.
In today’s “overwhelmed” world, of course, leisure seems laughably unattainable for anyone who has not retired from the working world. And it is unquestionably unattainable for a certain class of people: the parents of young children. The loving parents, I should say. All of a parent’s mindfulness during these years — until a child is eight or so — must be devoted to nurture, and this attention cannot rightly be delegated. (Except to pre-Kindergarten “schools.” One thing that the ideal course in the humanities would teach is how to endure the personal mindlessness of parenthood, the utter displacement of importance to a being outside oneself, how to bear in mind the fact that it will pass — only to be missed.) But we still need to correct for the gender bias that has by no means been stripped from serious ideas about leisure. This bias is a legacy of thousands of years of male monasticism, of male-only higher education. The importance of leisure is coded into the very architecture of schools like Yale and Princeton. Women have not been taught to read it. Perhaps women would prefer a different architecture. One way or the other, the bias ought to be removed. It explains why Brigid Schulte is so angry (in her book only, one hopes) with her husband.
The bias is not only unfair but corrosive. In an anecdote from Schulte’s book cited by Kolbert’s review, Tom, Schulte’s husband, decamps from the home on Thanksgiving Day, just as his wife is about to prepare dinner for eighteen guests. He grabs a sixpack of beer and heads over to a friend’s house. I very much doubt that true leisure is subsequently pursued by the men. I somehow see a television in the picture, and, so far as mindfulness is concerned, television is an Orwellian device of monstrous, consuming distractions. Schulte, by the same token, ought to realize that, in today’s world, the preparation of a dinner party is no longer drudgery, if only because it is wholly elective. Properly planned — and note my insistence that the preparation must be planned — making a good dinner can be richly mindful. It doesn’t just happen. You have to know not only what you’re doing but who you are. There is no reason why following a recipe in Julia Child (for the tenth time) might not be a kind of leisure.
***
Tante Hannah
Nor is there any reason why everybody should devote leisure time to the reading of Hannah Arendt. No: she ought to be required in the final year of high school.
I’ve just read a book that anybody could pick up and get through without difficulty. You might have to know a little history — the Civil Rights struggle, opposition to the war in Vietnam (the “American War,” as the Vietnamese quite properly call it), student unrest in the late Sixties — all of which Arendt witnessed; it wasn’t history for her. But you won’t need any philosophical training. The four pieces in Crises of the Republic, one of them an interview with Adelbert Reif and translated from the German, appeared in either The New Yorker or The New York Review of Books. And the problems that Arendt sees are still very much with us. Consider this nugget, from “Civil Disobedience”:
Representative government itself is in a crisis today, partly because it has lost, in the course of time, all institutions that permitted the citizens’ actual participation, and partly because it is now gravely affected by the disease from which the party system suffers: bureaucratization and the two parties’ tendency to represent nobody except the party machines.
If anything, things have gotten worse since the days of Nixon.
Ever since the Clinton Administration, I’ve been clamoring for the dissolution of the Democratic Party precisely because of that “disease,” although I didn’t know how to put it so well. It is no longer fashionable to talk about political “machines,” but they continue to crank away and shall go on cranking as long as political campaigns depend on the labor of political operatives, staffers who know “how to get things done.” These operatives constitute the bureaucracy that sets a campaign’s agenda in party terms.
Ideally, a party would dissolve upon the achievement of some precisely-stated political goal. The problem remains, however, of the professional operatives. These people want to keep their jobs, and they’re probably more sharply gifted at figuring out ways to do so than any other workers. They will never, however, be anything but a pox on the political landscape. This is but one reason why a combination of local counsels and voluntary associations, coupled with the restoration of indirect elections, might be the only way to save democracy from the parties.
Follow me through it — you can think about it over the weekend. Local counsels, comprising everyone in a locality who cared to show up for meetings (which might well be online) would elect local — municipal or county — officials. These officials, in turn, would elect the next tier of representatives —at the state or, better, regional, level — but not without the advice of the local counsels. While the members of the local counsels would vote as individuals for local officials, their advice to these officials regarding higher elections would be decided by majority decisions. So onto the top, or federal level.
Perhaps there might be two sets of counsels, one for local officials and legislators, the other for executives.
Go ahead and laugh. Then imagine it as science fiction.
Bon weekend à tous!