Author: Mark Hannam

In 1932, Bertrand Russell published an essay in Harper’s Magazine called In Praise of Idleness, in which he provides a clear and succinct definition of work: work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so .  The second kind, he continues, is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders but those who give advice as to what orders should be given.  Today, nearly a century later, the first kind of work remains very important, including energy extraction, industrial production, farming and food distribution, textiles and clothes manufacture, building construction and renovation, transportation and storage, painting and decoration, and – arguably – most professional sports, but the numbers of workers employed in altering the position of matter is proportionally far smaller than it was when Russell’s article was written.  The second kind of work – management and its ancillary disciplines – has grown significantly in scale and complexity in the last hundred years, although qualitative improvements in its outcomes remain hard to demonstrate. 

Russell set out to argue that, a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by the belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.  Idleness – or laziness – was once the prerogative of the ruling class, he wrote, whether the slave owners of ancient Athens or the aristocrats of feudal Europe.  In these societies, the small number of men and women who were rich did no work, but lived comfortably by forcibly appropriating surpluses created by the work of many others, who were left merely with sufficient to survive (and not always that much).   In his day, Russell observed that within the new capitalist ruling class, the men and their sons prided themselves on their own hard work, which they believed justified their wealth, but were determined that their wives and their daughters should lead lives of leisure.  Russell concludes his essay with the claim that technology now allows for all members of society to enjoy much greater leisure time, if only work and resources were move evenly shared: modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen instead to have overwork for some and starvation for others … we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines … in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever.

Continue reading “Work hard”

At the junction of Fournier Street and Brick Lane, about 15 minutes’ walk from where I live, there is a building that has hosted religious services for almost three hundred years.  From the mid-eighteenth century it was used as a chapel by the Huguenots, the French Protestants who congregated in the Spitalfields area after having been forced to flee their homeland following persecution by the Catholic church, enthusiastically supported by the French king, Louis XIV.  Around sixty years later, the building was taken over by the Methodists – another group of Protestants, who, like the Huguenots, dissented to submit to the authority of the Anglican Church – and was used by them for almost a century.  In 1891, the building was occupied by the local Jewish community, many of whom were recent immigrants from Russia and parts of Eastern Europe (including what are now the Baltic States, Belarus, Poland, and Ukraine), and it became known as the Great Synagogue of Spitalfields.  By the mid-twentieth century, many Jews had moved away to other parts of London and its suburbs and, in the 1960s and 70s, the local area repopulated as a result of yet another wave of migration, this time from Sylhet – a region in what was then East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh – who came to work in the textile industry that was concentrated in east London at that time.  In 1976, the building was renamed the Jamme Masjid Mosque, and for the past fifty years it has served as a religious centre for the local Muslim population. 

Last month, I spent a few days in Köln, on the banks of the Rhine, home of the famous Catholic Cathedral, which is reported to attract around six million visitors each year.  This building was first started in 1248 – five hundred years before the Huguenot chapel opened – but was not completed until 1880 – shortly before the building on Brick Lane converted to a synagogue.  The Cathedral is huge and impressive, and thirty years ago it was designated a UNESCO world heritage site.  Despite its very different scale and grandeur, and despite its longevity – almost three times as old – and despite the fact that it was built by the same branch of the Christian church that persecuted the Huguenots, when I stood outside Köln Cathedral in the cold December air, looking up at its spectacular twin Gothic spires, I was reminded of the Brick Lane chapel/synagogue/mosque.  Not because the buildings are visually similar, but because both are suggestive of the sharp contrast between the durability of building materials and the transitoriness of human beliefs.

Continue reading “Change of use”

In the spring of 2018, I went to the Royal Ballet in London to see a performance that celebrated the centenary of the birth of Leonard Bernstein, the American composer and conductor.  One of the three items on the programme was a revival of The Age of Anxiety, first performed in 1950 with choreography by Jerome Robbins (who also collaborated with Bernstein on the musicals On the Town and West Side Story).  Robbins used Berstein’s second symphony as the setting for his ballet, which had premiered in April the previous year, conducted by the legendary music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Serge Koussevitzky.   (Here is an early recording of the symphony, with Bernstein conducting, from 1950.)  This score was Berstein’s musical reinterpretation of a long, book-length poem of the same name by the expatriate English poet Wystan Hugh Auden, written in America towards the end of the second world war, and published in 1947.

Auden’s poem The Age of Anxiety was immediately recognised as having captured something of the spirit of the age of those post-war years, but more for its snappy title than for its unperspicuous contents.  Today the poem remains better known for Bernstein’s musical adaptation and Robbins’s ballet – which Auden reportedly disliked – than for the ideas presented in verse.  It is structured as a discussion between four people who meet by chance in a New York bar, but this is no simple late night conversation or pub argument.  Rather, Auden offers his readers a sophisticated attempt to analyse the problematic spiritual condition of modern western societies, characterised by the loss of traditional faith and the loss of a sense of shared community.  The opportunity to exploit these absences for our own advantage, “the temptation to sin” – which, a few years earlier, Auden had described as “what the psychologist calls anxiety, and the Christian calls lack of faith” – is contrasted with the opportunity to establish community and solidarity with others, who share both our recognition of this loss and the sense of impossibility of recovering faith or community in their tradition senses.

Continue reading “The anxiety of age”

Last month, I travelled to a small industrial estate a few kilometres outside Reading, where I spent three hours undergoing a series of medical tests.  I am not ill, and I am not aware of any serious underlying health conditions or significant risk factors that I should be concerned about.  I was not being treated, instead I was participating in a medical research project, that aims to gather data about the health of a large number of people over a lengthy period of time.

Biobank was established in the UK between 2006 and 2010 and has a cohort of just over half-a-million volunteers, who were aged between 40 and 69 when they joined the project.  This makes it the largest and most detailed research study that traces the long-term health outcomes for people in the Western world, with vast amounts of data on biological, environmental, and lifestyle factors that impact the development of a range of diseases and health conditions.  I joined in 2009, and at the outset I went through a series of tests to get baseline data on my health.  These included blood and urine samples, measures of blood pressure, my weight and height, a series of online cognitive tests – the sorts of memory and pattern recognition exercises that teenagers now do for standardised testing – together with some lifestyle questions about diet, exercise, sleep patterns, and my own perceptions of my degree of social interaction or loneliness, and my levels of happiness.  Since then I have been asked several times to complete online questionnaires on various aspects of my health and my sense of well-being, and on a couple of occasions I have also worn a wristband containing a small tracking device for a week, which measured my movement and activity. 

Continue reading “Knowledge and human interests”

On a recent trip to Rome, I visited the Galleria Borghese where I stood for several minutes admiring Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath (1609/10). It is an impressive painting.  David, young and lean, but not overly muscular, holds his enemy’s head away from his body with his left hand, his facial expression more meditative than triumphant.  In his other hand he holds Goliath’s sword, which he has used against his dead foe.  Blood flows from Goliath’s neck, suggesting his decapitation has only just occurred, his fixed final facial expression is of shock and surprise, in contrast to the dispassion of his conqueror.  This is a picture that portrays victory in combat not exultantly but with nuance and sympathy.

Caravaggio had painted this scene at least twice previously: there is a version from 1606/07, now in Vienna, similar in construction, with David’s upper body once again half-covered by a thin white shirt, although in this version the different position of his right arm (which is almost invisible in the Rome painting), holding the sword behind his head, draws our gaze away from Goliath.  I think the Roman version has a stronger compositional structure.   Another version of the scene, from 1598/99, now in Madrid, shows the moment at which David severs the head from the body.  Goliath’s face, in the bottom right corner, is less expressive than in the later paintings, but David’s face is partially obscured by shadow: it is almost as if Goliath’s head has fallen from David’s body.  All three paintings remind us of Caravaggio’s innovative and virtuosic use of light and shadow in his construction of the scene, and his delight in the portrayal of young male flesh.  Beyond his technical mastery, he also interprets the story for us, the victory of the young, unknown Israeli shepherd boy over the giant Philistine warrior.

Continue reading “Severed heads”