In praise of idleness

The Nation reviews two books urging us to drop out of the rat race, or at least work a heckuva lot less.

The British sociologist P.D. Anthony wrote an interesting book called The Ideology of Work, which attempted to trace the shift in attitudes from seeing work as irksome and burdensome to seeing it as the locus of personal worth and fulfillment.

In the Lutheran tradition work is seen as one of the spheres where we live out our calling, which is to love God and serve our neighbor. Since our worth is established by God’s grace, we don’t need to find our identity in our work, but we can and should serve our neighbors dilligently through it. But paid work doesn’t have any preeminent importance in this respect; we serve our neighbors in our roles as parents, citizens, members of a community, etc. And there’s no reason that paid work should trump these other obligations. That would seem to argue for maintaining a sensible balance, rather than letting work consume our lives.