Twelve by Twelve by Micahel Powers

Author:Micahel Powers [Powers, Micahel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9781577318989
Publisher: New World Library
Published: 2011-10-09T03:01:03+00:00

SIMPLIFY

14. THE IDLE MAJORITY

ON JANUARY 21, 1949, some two billion people woke up and got out of bed, still unaware of the terrible change that had taken place in their lives. Sip some tea, chat with a spouse or a neighbor, the sun tracing an arc into the sky; take winding paths to a farm field for a few hours of work. Lunch. Siesta. Maybe a little nooky. The day seemed the same as the one before for half the planet’s people, but it wasn’t. Whereas before they had been, well, regular people living regular lives, now they were something else, something ghastly: underdeveloped.

The day before, President Harry S. Truman, in his inauguration speech, declared that the era of “development” had begun, thereby minting a new terminology to conceive of the world:

We must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas. The old imperialism — exploitation for foreign profit — has no place in our plans. What we envision is a program of development.

Suddenly two billion people who had been doing all right — like my ambling Mayan friends in Guatemala — were no longer doing all right. They were underdeveloped. And in one of the most spectacular missionary efforts in history, the rich nations henceforth strove to lead the underdeveloped of the world to a paradise of development, where they too would be domesticated and tethered to a logic of Total Work.

Truman might have more accurately called these “underdeveloped” people the planet’s Idle Majority, the billions who reject the Puritan work ethic and extol leisure. This “leisure ethic,” as I’ve come to dub it, isn’t laziness; it is an intelligent, holistic balance between doing and being. It is embodied by the Aymaran philosophy of “living well,” which includes enough (and not more) food, shelter, fresh air, and friendship.

In international aid work, the philosophical chasm between living well and living better can lead to culture clash — as well as to serious marital problems. I know a French aid worker who married a woman from Burkina Faso. Their most difficult problem isn’t money or in-laws but idleness. His wife, he confided to me one day, “has to have five or six hours a day of doing absolutely nothing in order to be happy.” My friend is inclined to fill every available moment with work, hobbies, and travel, but his wife prefers to simply sit on the stoop watching the breeze in the trees, idly chatting and joking. If she doesn’t get this idle time, she becomes grouchy.

On another occasion in the Gambia, a West African country, I found myself explaining to a local guy in a town called Gunjur, down the coast from Banjul, how workers in the United States and Europe waged decades of union battles to win an eight-hour workday.

He looked at me with complete amazement, as if I had just said that Papa Smurf lived on the moon and was waving down at us.

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