A few years ago, I was invited to observe some student presentations on the topic of Leisure: The Basis of Culture. It is one of the perks of my job as a professor at a Catholic liberal arts university that I get invited to such events. I thoroughly enjoyed the presentations, but I could sense from the Q&A that one part of the audience remained unpersuaded: the students’ parents. Moms and dads who had worked hard to pay for their children to attend college were not enthusiastic about the main point their sons and daughters were making: work is not what life is all about.
Leisure is the goal of work, after all. Leisure activity (rather than do-nothing inactivity) awakens the greatest part of our souls, the part that is capable of wonder and contemplation. Beginning with Aristotle, excellent philosophical authorities over the years have made that very argument. Classicist Sarah Broadie once observed that Aristotle’s idea that “we are not-at-leisure in order to be at leisure” remains understudied—except by the mid-20th century Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper, the foremost recent thinker who has argued for leisure’s importance. In 1948, he wrote that “the power to be at leisure is the power to step beyond the working world and win contact with those superhuman, life-giving forces that can send us, renewed and alive again, into the busy world of work.”
Pieper (channeling Aristotle) is philosophically correct about leisure. So why weren’t the students’ parents sold on the idea? My guess is that in part they very rationally wanted their kids to get jobs after college. The “useless” aspect of leisure activities is not very marketable. I could not help but think there was a further reason—that Pieper’s arguments failed to acknowledge something the parents intuitively knew about work and a happy life. That is in fact the case. But the only thinker who successfully made those points was not a European philosopher, and so is not often brought up in these discussions. He was (gasp!) an American. I have in mind the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, Booker T. Washington.
Work, Work, Work
Washington stands on the opposite pole from Pieper on the work-leisure question. He loved work and wanted all his students and readers of Up from Slavery to love it too. He was born a slave, but by a very young age, Washington rejected and rethought every attitude the slave masters had enforced. He recognized (as Tocqueville did) that slavery was bad not only for the slave but also for the slave master. Work was seen as punishment, something to be avoided—now it was rewarding.
It was hard work that allowed Washington to escape the drudgery of working in a West Virginia mine as a teenager and attend Hampton Agricultural and Industrial School, where the habit of hard work was taught before anything else. Work was an important part of living a good life, because it allowed him to be independent and use his freedom to create things of value.
To that end, Washington had his students at Tuskegee construct their own dormitories. In the midst of building them, he wrote that students “would be taught to see not only utility in labor, but beauty and dignity; would be taught, in fact, how to lift labor up from mere drudgery and toil, and would learn to love [it] for its own sake.”
At the same time, Washington railed against education focused on leisure activities such as reading the classics. Such an education in his view was just for show, a kind of get-rich-quick sophistry that had a negative effect on the culture. It was an education only good for producing politicians and preachers of a questionable sort.
Those pursuing classical education thought that “as soon as one secured a little education, in some unexplainable way he would be free from most of the hardships of the world, and, at any rate, could live without manual labor.” In a passage that surely rubbed W.E.B. DuBois the wrong way, Washington wrote, “The community may not at the time be prepared for, or feel the need of, Greek analysis, but it may feel its need of bricks and houses and wagons.” Since America was a culture of economic competition, African Americans had to outwork others and beat them at their own game.
Work as an End and a Means
The parents of the students at my university would find much to appreciate in Booker T. Washington’s articulation of why education should prepare students for work. As Peter Lawler once argued, vocational and trade schools ought to be making a comeback in 21st-century America. So should skipping college altogether. And there is something to be said for majoring in a subject with an eye toward a job after graduation (we cannot all go to law school).
In addition, so many of our universities teach pure relativism in “studies” majors that are not serious academic subjects. Many universities pamper students with amenities and turn a blind eye toward decadent campus party scenes. John Henry Newman once argued that the proper aim of a liberal arts education was to form gentlemen who have a taste for higher pursuits. However, our universities have been making students into worse people, giving them a taste for alcohol and hookup culture. All of that is anathema to Washington’s way of thinking about education, which focused on virtue by putting work first.
When Washington arrived at his school at Hampton Roads, he understood the meaning of his life: to help others through work. And at Tuskegee he recognized that his fellow teachers were “happy in working for others.” Charity was the proper goal of a Christian, he realized. He utterly rejected the message of a preacher who said that “God had cursed all labour, and that therefore, it was a sin for any man to work.” That misinterpretation was nothing new (St. Bonaventure made similar arguments), but Washington understood it was only toilsome labor that Adam was cursed with. In the preternatural state before original sin, God had already commanded Adam to tend to the garden. These theological points about the goodness of work and the call to share the products of work are best made in Polish, perhaps by Cardinal Wyszyński and St. John Paul II in his encyclical On the Dignity of Labor. But a proud American, Booker T. Washington, already had work figured out.
Although he did not fully articulate it, Washington likely had an intuition of Pieper’s point about the place of leisure as well. Toward the end of Up from Slavery, he acknowledged that many people ask him, “What do you do to relax?” He did not have a good answer. Washington said that when his body didn’t feel healthy, he went to the doctor; that when he could not get much sleep, he mainly read newspapers; and that the time he spent with family in nature and with his pet pigs was far too short. “Games I care little for,” he said, and that included sports. All of this is to say that he did not engage in leisure activities.
However, in the following chapter Washington recounted how his wife and some Bostonian civil rights activists finally persuade him to go on a European vacation. Here we finally get a glimpse of his appreciation for rest and contemplation. “From the time I could remember, I had always been at work, and I did not see how I could spend three or four months doing nothing. The fact is, I did not know how to take a vacation.” As the boat pulled out of New York Harbor, Washington was filled with a feeling of “awe mingled with delight.” He recounts sleeping “at a rate of fifteen hours a day during the remainder of the ten days’ passage. Then it was that I began to understand how tired I really was.” Washington got a wonderful vacation and learned to appreciate other cultures such as the staid British, whom he wonders “if, in the long run, they do not accomplish as much or more than rushing, nervous Americans do.”
The same Booker T. Washington who railed against studying great books and only read newspapers was of a mind on the return trip to visit the ship’s library and pull down a copy of the Life of Frederick Douglass to read. Surely, he realized in those moments that work is a beautiful part of God’s design for the good life—and so is true leisure.