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.
Today, broadly speaking, most Europeans are slowly taking Russell’s advice and opting for less work and more leisure, whereas most North Americans seem to prefer the opposite. If you measure progress by conventional measures of GDP, the US is leaving Europe far behind, but if you measure progress by a broad range of benevolent social outcomes, Europe is leaving the US behind. There are also differences between the US and Europe when it comes to the distribution of the wealth that has been created, and the overall pattern seems to be that those who care most about maximising the quantity of wealth tend to worry less about its concentration, whereas those who care more about the quality of life also tend to care more about the equality of outcomes across society. I know where I would rather live.
There is, I think, a third type of work, which Russell ignored altogether in his essay, which is puzzling since it was precisely the sort of work that he spent his long life engaged upon. Perhaps he mistook it for leisure. The best way to describe this third kind of work is the consumption of significance through the interpretation of signs, and to understand what sort of work this is, and why it matters, we need to consider the ideas of another philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce. Russell once described Peirce as certainly the greatest American thinker ever, although anyone familiar with the final chapters of Russell’s History of Western Philosophy will know how modest a compliment this was.
Peirce developed a novel theory of signs – the discipline we now call semiotics – central to which are two important conceptual triads. First, for a sign to be effective there must be three connected elements: an object, a sign, and an interpreter. Take a simple example, say the sound of an alarm clock. The alarm is the sign – sometimes known as the signifier – which draws attention to the object – the signified – in this case the morning hour at which the alarm on the clock has been set, and the interpreter is the person who, upon hearing the alarm, understands that it is now time to wake up and get out of bed. Signification, for Peirce, is a triadic relation because a sign can only signify its object when it is correctly interpreted: the meaning of a sign is manifest in the interpretation that it generates in sign users. This formulation matters, because for Peirce the success of the sign depends upon the understanding of the interpreter, rather than the intentions of the originator of the sign: if I were to turn off the alarm in my sleep, and fail to get up on time, the object signified, but the signifier failed.
Peirce also thought that there were three different ways in which signs could signify. The first is where the sign and its object share a likeness or a quality, and he refers to these signs as icons. The photo in my passport signifies to the border control agent that my passport is valid because my photo is a passable representation of my face. The second is where the sign and its object have a correspondence in fact, that is, there is some direct causal connection between the two, and he refers to these signs as indices. A smoke signal from a fire, or the direction of a wind sock at an airfield, of the shadow of a sundial are all examples of indexical signs. Finally, there are some signs where the relation between object and sign is imputed, that is, established by convention, which Peirce calls symbols. A national flag would be a good example of symbolic signifier, or perhaps a cardinal’s hat. In previous times, icons and indices were highly important forms of sign, especially in religious contexts – think of churches full of images and relics of saints, which are, respectively, iconic and indexical signs – but in the modern world, increasingly symbolic signs have become dominant, and in particular signs that take the form of groups of words and images.
For many of us today, our work mostly consists in the creation and the interpretation of symbolic meanings. We spend our time producing sequences of words and images that are intended to signify for others, and we study sequences of words and images that have been produced by others, trying to interpret them correctly so they signify for us. This text is a series of symbolic signs, made by me, the writer, and interpreted by you, the reader. The work of signification takes place every time I send an email, or a text message with an emoji, every time I read a book, every time I visit an art gallery, and every time I look at images on a screen or text in an advert. Compared to the often difficult and exhausting task of altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter, the production and interpretation of symbolic signs should be good and pleasant work, sometimes a little taxing on the eyes, but neither physically tiring nor dangerous. Except that some of the time it is very unpleasant, because some makers of signs are intent on signifying something other than what the interpreter wants, needs, or expects.
We are accustomed to the danger of our desires being manipulated by adverts, thinking – perhaps only a little, perhaps only subliminally – that if we drank that beer, wore that shirt, drove that car, ate that pizza, lived in that house, booked that holiday, swallowed that vitamin supplement, and used that toothpaste, then our lives would immediately become so much better. True happiness appears to be within our grasp, merely a change in branded product away. The same is true of many films and tv series: we are encouraged to imagine ourselves as characters in a different, more satisfying world, one in which things work out better for us and our actions receive the admiration and respect they truly deserve. Even though we know that the worlds of advertising and movie-making are fantastical, there is something slightly addictive about imagining that it might – somehow – be possible for our character, our lifestyle, and our happiness to be meaningfully upgraded by means of some modestly improved consumption choices. Reminding ourselves every day that life is not really like that is hard work: the critical interpretation of signs, the refusal to be conned by plausible but erroneous acts of signification.
In recent years, the rapid expansion of forms of social media, now embellished by the arrival of speedy and sophisticated predictive text tools – all christened with benign sounding names – has created a new variant of this form of labour, characterised less by resistance to the attempted manipulation of our desires, and more by resistance to the attempted deception of our minds. The world is being deluged by symbolic signs that are designed to deceive. Just as the speech act of lying is parasitical upon the predominance of truth telling – that is, dishonesty is only likely to be effective in a speech community where honesty is the norm – so too the manipulation of signs to encourage an interpreter to acquire false beliefs, or to act in ways that are against their true interests, only gains traction within a context in which most communication is designed to share information and ideas honestly, accurately, and openly. Only when candour is the norm can the disingenuous make any headway.
When we read novels and poetry we engage in symbolic interpretation. Specialist hermeneutic tasks – the study of the law, of religious texts, and of artefacts from cultures that are not immediately familiar to us – require additional skills, to make sense of meanings that are not immediately obvious to us. Likewise when we visit an art gallery and look closely at the paintings, some images disclose their significance easily and others require more effort from both the eyes and the brain. Photographs too demand a distinctive form of symbolic interpretation, which can be learned through practice. All these activities are commonplace in our society, but the range of skills among the reading and viewing public vary quite widely.
Learning to use critical interpretive skill successfully takes time, but it brings plenty of reward in terms of heightened pleasure and understanding. In an article called ‘Denoting’, published in the journal Mind in 1905, Bertrand Russell set out to show that the sentence, the present king of France is bald was false rather than meaningless. Writing an essay on that claim and the multitude of subsequent papers that either disputed or elaborated on Russell’s argument, is a standard task for undergraduate philosophy students. It is an excellent way to learn about how meaning signifies in written text. Similarly, I imagine that for a student of art history, a standard task might be to learn to ‘read’ the meanings in a Renaissance painting, through an understanding of the colours, the gestures, and the relative position of the figures.
This form of work is becoming increasingly important, as the volume of symbolic signs and the ease by which malevolent signifiers can be created and distributed rapidly increases. Today, the key interpretive skill is to learn to treat what appear to be symbolic signs also as indexical signs: we need to check the physical or causal relationship between object and sign first, before worrying about the imputed meaning. We should only treat the sign as a genuine symbol once we are satisfied as to the character of the object from which it has come. Then we can begin the interpretative work.
In the future, we should all be able to spend less time moving stuff around, on or near the surface of the earth, and we can surely do with fewer managers – and their advisors – telling us how to optimise our working lives. There are machines that can do both of these tasks for us, and they will probably do them much better than we currently do. But the third type of work – the interpretation of signs – will become more important and more time consuming for us all, to prevent the wanton moving around of meanings.
Peirce believed that truth is the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate. Perhaps we should qualify this definition, to say agreed to by all who investigate in good faith. It is an optimistic view, and one I have great sympathy with, but it will not be achieved easily. Instead of a life of idleness, we all share in carrying this heavy burden of interpretive labour.