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BY JOHN SANFORD If America is the land of dreams, a place where anyone, supposedly, can succeed with enough hard work, it's also a land where many people let their jobs define who they are -- wittingly or not -- and are unable to make leisure meaningful. These were themes that emerged during the Feb. 10 Aurora Forum, "Doing Good Work," at which panelists discussed why Americans both celebrate work and try to eliminate it, and why they have trouble nurturing a healthy relationship with leisure. "The amount of time we spend at work has risen steadily," said forum moderator Debra Satz, associate professor of philosophy and director of the Ethics in Society Program. "We work more than we did in the 1950s despite the advent of many time-saving technologies. Americans work longer hours -- 350 additional hours a year -- than their European counterparts. We work even more than medieval peasants did." Kresge Auditorium was filled almost to capacity for the second installment of the Aurora Forum, a public-conversation series sponsored by Stanford Continuing Studies. Joining Satz on stage were author and journalist Richard Rodriguez, whose recent book, Brown: The Last Discovery of America, has been nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, and Joanne Ciulla, a professor of leadership and ethics at the University of Richmond and author of The Working Life: The Promise and Betrayal of Modern Work. In her opening remarks, Ciulla noted that Aristotle once considered what life would be like if every tool could perform its function without help from humans. The Greek philosopher imagined a kind of utopia, where manufacturers wouldn't need workers and there would be no need for slaves. "Today the tools and machines that Aristotle dreamed of are the technology of everyday life in industrialized countries," Ciulla said. "Aristotle might have rejoiced. ... Many of us don't. Instead of greeting this era with joy, we cling ever more tightly to our work." Americans' famed "work ethic," which gave work a kind of moral value, has gone bananas; many people these days rely on work as the main source of their identity -- "the mainspring of individual self-esteem and happiness," she said. The danger is that work becomes a substitute for the fulfillment people once found with family, friends, community and religion, Ciulla said. "We live in extraordinary times in which we have an unprecedented array of choices about how we live, where we live and work, and what we buy," she continued. "This is an era when life should be filled with all sorts of rewarding activities. Yet many find themselves caught up in long hours of work, debt, stress, loneliness and crumbling families and relationships. Why?" The problem and the solution may stem from this plenitude of options. "We think we are entitled to have it all -- a great job, a large income, plenty of leisure and security. With so many desires and so many choices, some can't or don't choose how they want to live. Instead they let advertisers, employers or the opinions of others choose for them," Ciulla said. She suggested that work dominates Americans' lives because they have not learned how to make these decisions and, as a default, let work organize their lives for them. It's an easy choice and has built-in rewards, she said. "Aristotle tells us that the liberal arts teach us how to make choices in a free society and that the liberal arts teach us how to use our leisure," she said. "Work ties us to necessity, but leisure is when we are free and most fully human." Ciulla emphasized that liberal arts education can help people decide how to lead the kind of lives they want. Rodriguez, who attended Stanford as an undergraduate in the 1960s, recalled reading the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga's book Homo Ludens ("Man, the Player") while at Stanford. "I remember the argument of Huizinga's book -- that the highest form of human behavior is found in leisure, not work," Rodriguez said. Rodriguez's father died last year at 95, and his mother died last month at 90. Recently, he spent a day looking at gravestones in Colma. "So I was looking at the ways the dead are remembered by the living or the ways the dead wanted to be remembered, in stone," he said. "In an afternoon of looking, I did not find a single gravestone that referred to a person's occupation. Every single life in the cemetery was remembered through relationships -- those relationships that caused people to get up, to go to work everyday and often to jobs they hated." Rodriguez described leisure as a "profound inactivity, an openness to ideas -- what the ancients would call 'inspiration.'" But unlike Renaissance princes, most people these days don't know what to do with the "open space" of leisure, he added. "We only trust the employer who says that, at 9:45, I want you to come here to this corner of the assembly room." The Aurora Forum brings panels of socially engaged writers, artists and scholars to campus to discuss the past, present and future of the nation's ideals and aspirations. The conversations are recorded, and four will be broadcast on KQED Radio in September, before the beginning of the next Aurora Forum series. The conversations also are posted as audio files (about 10 days after the event in question) at http://auroraforum.org. The next Aurora Forum, "Simply Delicious," is scheduled for March 3 and will feature Alice Waters, founder of Chez Panisse restaurant, and Francis Moore Lappé, co-founder of Food First and author of the celebrated book Diet for a Small Planet. All
events take place at 7:30 p.m. in Kresge Auditorium and are free
and open to the public. SR |
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Stanford Report, February 19, 2003
