Worker bees, playful cubs and human be(com)ings

We take philosophical journeys on this blog more than occasionally (the nature of the topic demands it). And it's been a quiet train-journey pleasure to read a paper from Steven Overell of the Work Foundation, titled 'Work and the human claim to uniqueness: A contribution to the philosophy of work'. His aim is to explore "what exactly is it that separates the work of human beings from the ‘work-like behaviour’ of many animals such as birds building nests or bees building hives". 

Overell's argument is careful, well-referenced and clear. But reading him from a play-centric perspective highlights some interesting gaps.

Overell wants to claim that what distinguishes "human" work from "animal" work is intentionality - our "work" is "'exertion for a purpose’ with the caveat that the exertion has to involve significant, goal-oriented effort and the purpose ought to be related to a clear ‘product’ or ‘outcome’." Worker bees or nest-building birds aren't "purposefully" building their constructions: their intricate activities are driven by evolutionary adaptation, nothing more. 

Yet it strikes me that there's a much longer and deeper natural continuity between human and non-human work, than there is between human and non-human play. Particularly if we think of work, in Stuart Kauffman's defintion, as something an organism does to transform external material into energy or internal reproduction and survival. We all "work", in that sense, simply to maintain our existence. 

But as many scientists are beginning to note, the emergence of play - if we define play as the simulation and testing-out of strategies for survival - is often tied to a very specific set of evolutionary conditions. Essentially, play happens if you have a complex brain that can enjoy processing options; if you have a high metabolism that compels you to burn off excess energy; and if you have parents that tend to feed and protect their offspring, which gives their children the spare time to use their bodies and brains. 

Play is evident in birds, some octopuses, and obviously in all us highly strung mammalian descendents of that original 100-million-year-old rat-creature. Yet it seems to me that a capacity for play might be a better indicator of the growing autonomy, sophistication and consciousness (ending up in self-consciousness) of an organism than a capacity for work might be. 

As a researcher in the Work Foundation, Overell quite understandably wants to deepen the meaning of work. Yet the specificity of work keeps escaping his analysis. In this passage he puts play in a familiar corral:

In work, there needs to be an ultimate purpose to the activity that is more essential than the activity itself, otherwise the difference between play and work would be difficult to fathom. If ever work becomes an ‘end-in-itself’ it must by its nature stop being work and become something else.

These days, it's an unsophisticated account of play that keeps it confined to a definition as "activity-without-a-definite-purpose" (though it is of course that also). What of gambling/ financial speculation, or team sports, or social celebration, or the serious games movement, or child-centered pedagogies? As Brian Sutton-Smith has helped us to see, our play is essentially a range of "adaptive potentiations" - a mimicking or mocking of social reality so we can survive and thrive better in it. And some of that play will be pointless and an 'end-in-itself' - but some of it will be very "goal-directed" and "outcome-oriented" indeed, though always occuring in its own set-apart play-space and play-time. (As many of those toiling away in the salt-mines of their multiplayer online games will tell you, there can be a lot of labour in game-play).

Overell worries at the end of his paper that we only separate ourselves off from the "work of animals" by an act of arbritrary cultural definition. We use our language and intelligence to tell ourselves stories about and add values to, the purposeful activity of our lives - and we tend to call that "work". 

Well, some of us want to argue that, in these immensely productive and technologically transformative times, we could instead call some of that purposeful activity "play", and some of it "care". Play to characterise how we extend the potentialities of our networks, our computers, our genomics, our materials and bio-science. Care to characterise how we extend the benefits of our productive play to all in the human community, recognising that fraility and dependency (not just humanity, but nature too) is what brings moral measure to our vigorous experimentation.  

Is this mere semantics? Overell almost admits, in closing, that his freighting of work with so many meanings almost dethrones its centrality for him:

The point here is not that work is directly central to human beings so much as indirectly so: what human beings need is meaning, purposive action, content for one’s life, structures for one’s time, paths to one’s goals, the accumulated habits of social interaction, and finding such things has always tended to accord a primary role to work. It is meaning that is the fundamental need, not work; but work is the vehicle through which meaning is created. Life without it is life-less. 

Really? We might not just add 'play' or 'care' to those capacities which keep life from being life-less, but also 'love', 'sex', 'education', 'inner peace' ... The paths to meaning are various and multi-levelled; they should not be streamed together into one vast, thundering highway, heading under a giant metallic archway called Work. If we choose to freight work with so much of our search for meaning, we can also choose not to. 

And if our only solution to an economic slump is to revert to the blindly-accumulative, debt-laden, passively-consumerist habits that got us here in the first place, then perhaps we need to.