Scotland on Sunday 'Play Ethic' article, 5 Jan 1997

WHEN ANGELS GUIDE THE HANDS OF IDLENESS.

1336 words

5 January 1997

Scotland on Sunday

Has the time come to abandon the Protestant work ethic? As technology advances and the structure of work changes, Pat Kane suggests a different, more creative philosophy to suit the new era

DOES the devil necessarily make work for idle hands? The most momentous changes in the structure of employment are upon us: it is time we looked anew at our oldest prejudices. With the information age transforming all social co-ordinates, we should think about a replacement for the work ethic - in a world where work, as we know it, is evaporating before our eyes. I bid for the play ethic.

Some may react negatively: can play be ethical? To be sure, we have a long historical precedent for the ethics of 'work'. Employment became 'good for the soul' in the early 19th century. Britain's capitalist class faced a workforce growing debauched, unruly and radical. They had been dragged from rural self-subsistence into the punishing regimes of factory labour, and were coping none too well with the booms and slumps of early capitalism.

The 'Protestant work ethic', as defined by sociologist Max Weber, was intended to discipline the early proletariat - through spiritual, as well as monetary, means. Large churches spread throughout the industrial cities of Britain, expounding the virtues of honest, upright labour to their flock, via well-chosen Gospel precepts. "In the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread" (Genesis 3:19). "If any would not work, neither should he eat" (2 Thessalonians 3:10).

This notion of the work ethic has an extraordinary tenacity, even as we progress through the Second Industrial Revolution. There is still no more basic formation of personal esteem than our job: and there is still no more basic shame than our unemployment. From Blair to Major, idle hands are still presumed to be jumping to the devil's work. What else motivates the cross-party admonitions against welfare 'dependency', and the move towards workfare schemes, other than a fear of what the unemployed will do with their enforced free-time: take drugs, procreate, slump before screens, occupy the streets, get involved in the black economy ...?

The 'Protestant' aspect of the work ethic is still strong here, raising deep emotions of guilt and resentment. The employed are encouraged to regard their leisure, their play-time, as compensation for the punishments of work: thus the often frantic nature of their recreation, chasing one intensity after another, fuelling consumer society. Yet the idea of the unemployed having access to even a portion of this leisure, without paying its price in the ardours of work, threatens to reveal the absurdity of the lifestyle of the employed - they are working too hard, playing too hard, endlessly chasing their tails.

The moral rectitude of the Blairite project augurs well for a revitalised work ethic - in the form of national duty, the main virtue binding together all parts of the social spectrum, from the newly-defined 'job-seeker' to the 'stakeholding' company executive.

The objection to this is simple: how can you sustain a work ethic, when work itself is deconstructing before our very eyes? The massive shifts towards short-term contracts, part-time work, self-employment and manufacturing-to-services are well enough documented. Their causes - new technology, global competition, individualism - are recognised and accepted by most of us. And it is a standby of current social thought that the relentless automation of labour - mental and manual - is laying in store an unemployment problem of massive proportions.

Around 75% of the labour force in any industrial nation is doing little more than simple repetitive tasks, and is thus potentially automatable: less than 5% of companies round the world have begun to use new technologies fully in their workplace (an excerpt from Jeremy Rifkin's The End of Work).

The forthcoming clash of party-political nationalisms in the UK is a mere distraction to this coming holocaust of employment - which will do away with humans, says the Nobel laureate economist Wassily Leontief, "in the same way that the role of horses in agricultural production was first diminished, and then eliminated, by the introduction of tractors".

Devotion to the work ethic, in a time where work (as traditionally conceived) is disappearing, will only result in greater gloom and despair than necessary. To propose a 'play ethic' may seem like suggesting we fiddle while Rome burns; a degraded messing-about in the social ruins of cyber-capitalism. Yet if we can bring the same moral fervour to the values of openness, creativity and self-realisation as we have done to those of obedience, discipline and self-regulation, then we may yet make a triumph of what appears to be an impending civilisational disaster.

Intellectually at least, the case can be made for play's virtues. Psychologist DW Winnicott cited play as the "creation of personality" - that exciting sharing of self and world that make new ideas possible. The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga has called us Homo Ludens: in that exhaustive book, he states that "pure play is one of the main bases of civilisation". And in the sciences of complexity, play is regarded as the central process that brings order to the chaos of natural creation - in the words of biologist Brian Goodwin, "our creativity is essentially similar to the creativity that is the stuff of evolution".

Practically speaking, the play ethic can be applied most readily in the realm of education. Most of those who are joining further and higher education, as a means of lifting themselves away from obsolete or declining jobs, find the experience to be more than just a reskilling exercise. From the perspective of the work ethic, students have always been regarded as slightly suspect - and rightly so. The activity of reading books, being taught and socialising for two to four years always had far too much autonomy in it for the wage-enslaved.

Even with the utilitarian strictures now placed on education, the most vocational business or marketing degree will make connections to areas of psychology, social theory, philosophy - knowledge that will often transform the student into someone with a radically self-directed mentality. This builds what the sociologist Anthony Giddens calls the "autotelic" self - someone who has an inner confidence based on self-respect, whose happiness is prior to their position in the marketplace or the organisation.

It is precisely these balanced, autonomous selves - the bearers of a play ethic - that info-capitalism needs to thrive. Their principles of creativity, empathy and innovation were never more appropriate to the service-driven, decentralised organisations of our times.

Over the next decade (and despite electoral posturings), it is more than likely that most European governments, faced with the implosion of work, will be forced to implement fundamental changes in their welfare system and the labour market. Much shorter working weeks, technology taxes, perhaps even a citizen's income, may be the only coherent responses to the upheavals of a hyper-productive capitalism. In this climate, work won't just be quantitatively a lesser part of people's lives, but qualitatively too. Will the fundamental idea of 'useful toil' - that effort required for society to function - begin to decay, in a haze of leisured hedonism?

Yet the idea of a play ethic implies just that - an ethical stance towards play that moves away from the idea of leisure as purely individualistic and undemanding. A play ethic would be social, concerned with the pleasures of others as well as oneself; it would be effortful and demanding, setting itself performance targets and goals; it would make possible intense experiences, alone and with others.

There will be a place for 'useful toil' - or a minimalist work ethic - in such a culture of creativity and play. If we can make the needed structural and attitudinal changes to cope with the end of work, angels will surely guide the hands of idleness.

If not, then the devil of social division will have his claws on all our wrists.