[iDC] Re: The Ethics of Leisure

[Ryan Griffis]

On Jan 7, 2007, at 11:02 AM, idc-request at bbs.thing.net wrote:

> This is the intellectual market dialectic as I see it - As more noise
> flourishes, one has to be on lists, blogs, etc constantly - the  
> more the
> better.  On the other hand, this consumes one's life to point where  
> there
> can be nothing but practice.

Patrick's post called up some recent reading - Chris Rojek's "Culture  
and Leisure" (2000), where he has a pretty thorough analysis/history  
of criticism surrounding leisure and work. This discussion on the  
list seems to be covering some similar territory...
Rojek talks about 2 kinds of leisure (borrowing from someone, whom i  
can't remember) - "Serious leisure" and "casual leisure" - serious  
being the kind of activity that is focused and "beneficial" to life  
goals (participating on lists, or going to art museums for example),  
casual being things like drinking and surfing the tv. He does a  
pretty good job of critiquing this dichotomy while finding a use for  
classifying leisure time. Most significantly, he discusses the need  
for an "ethics of leisure" to help shift things from the "work ethic"  
that dominates US life especially. he marginally gets into the  
implications of distributed technology upon both of these "ethics",  
mostly using the cache of Western critical theory surrounding  
rationality and commodity fetishism (predominantly the Frankfurt  
School).
he also goes over some post 1970s theories that attempt to solve the  
problem of work, following post industrial criticism (Galbraith, etc)  
- namely in ideas like guaranteed wages, decreasing work hours,  
redistributing wealth to narrow the income gap, etc. he has some good  
criticism of these as solutions, especially the idea that more  
leisure time wouldn't improve many peoples' lives without developing  
a radical ethics of leisure. he goes a little too far in the  
direction of arguing "human nature" as a barrier to solving wealth  
inequities for my predisposition, but he makes some valid points  
nonetheless.
anyway, i thought i'd throw out another discourse around ethics that  
seems to intersect with the discussion here...
best,
ryan