For the Ancient Greeks, the Good Life depended on how you could use your time. Their idea of time differed from modern thinking. They divided it into four categories. They distinguished between labour, activities done for pay or as a slave, which they avoided, and work, activities done around the home, in philia (civic friendship), associated with care, craftsmanship and creativity. And they distinguished between recreation, mainly physical activities, sport and participating in drama, from which they learned the values of empathy and compassion, and leisure or schole, the combination of participation in public political life and education, in the broad civilising sense of the term.
Progress was measured in how much time could be devoted to schole, particularly public action in the agora, the commons, in which citizens could forge morality and the capacity to be political. Vitally, it was recognised that this required deliberation and learning. A special place was also given to what Aristotle called aergia, idleness, regarded as vital for contemplation.
Today’s way of looking at time is a far cry from all that. The rot began in the way work was reinterpreted over the ages. For the 18th century Physiocrats, only agricultural labour counted as productive work. For Immanuel Kant, anybody doing what we call ‘services’ was unfit to be a citizen. For Adam Smith, the father of economics, services in general were unproductive. By the 20th century, the silliness reached new heights. Only labour done for income was counted as work, and only labour boosted economic growth, which became the yardstick of progress.
The rot began in the way work was reinterpreted over the ages.
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