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2017考研英语完型填空&新题型题源
Would a Work-Free World Be So Bad?
People have speculated for centuries about a future without work, and todayis no different, with academics, writers, and activists once again warning thattechnology is replacing human workers. Some imagine that the coming work-freeworld will be defined by inequality: A few wealthy people will own all thecapital, and the masses will struggle in an impoverished wasteland.
A different, less paranoid, and not mutually exclusive prediction holdsthat the future will be a wasteland of a different sort, one characterized bypurposelessness: Without jobs to give their lives meaning, people will simplybecome lazy and depressed. Indeed, today’s unemployed don’t seem to be having agreat time. One Gallup poll found that 20 percent of Americans who have beenunemployed for at least a year report having depression, double the rate forworking Americans. Also, some research suggests that the explanation for risingrates of mortality, mental-health problems, and addiction among poorly-educated,middle-aged people is a shortage of well-paid jobs. Another study shows thatpeople are often happier at work than in their free time. Perhaps this is whymany worry about the agonizing dullness of a jobless future.
But it doesn’t necessarily follow from findings like these that a worldwithout work would be filled with malaise. Such visions are based on thedownsides of being unemployed in a society built on the concept of employment.In the absence of work, a society designed with other ends in mind could yieldstrikingly different circumstances for the future of labor and leisure. Today,the virtue of work may be a bit overblown. “Many jobs are boring, degrading,unhealthy, and a squandering of human potential,” says John Danaher, a lecturerat the National University of Ireland in Galway who has written about a worldwithout work. “Global surveys find that the vast majority of people are unhappyat work.”
These days, because leisure time is relatively scarce for most workers,people use their free time to counterbalance the intellectual and emotionaldemands of their jobs. “When I come home from a hard day’s work, I often feeltired,” Danaher says, adding, “In a world in which I don’t have to work, I mightfeel rather different”—perhaps different enough to throw himself into a hobby ora passion project with the intensity usually reserved for professionalmatters.
Having a job can provide a measure of financial stability, but in additionto stressing over how to cover life’s necessities, today’s jobless arefrequently made to feel like social outcasts. “People who avoid work are viewedas parasites and leeches,” Danaher says. Perhaps as a result of this culturalattitude, for most people, self-esteem and identity are tied up intricately withtheir job, or lack of job.
Plus, in many modern-day societies, unemployment can also be downrightboring. American towns and cities aren’t really built for lots of free time:Public spaces tend to be small islands in seas of private property, and therearen’t many places without entry fees where adults can meet new people or comeup with ways to entertain one another.
The roots of this boredom may run even deeper. Peter Gray, a professor ofpsychology at Boston College who studies the concept of play, thinks that ifwork disappeared tomorrow, people might be at a loss for things to do, growingbored and depressed because they have forgotten how to play. “We teach childrena distinction between play and work,” Gray explains. “Work is something that youdon’t want to do but you have to do.” He says this training, which starts inschool, eventually “drills the play” out of many children, who grow up to beadults who are aimless when presented with free time.
“Sometimes people retire from their work, and they don’t know what to do,”Gray says. “They’ve lost the ability to create their own activities.” It’s aproblem that never seems to plague young children. “There are no three-year-oldsthat are going to be lazy and depressed because they don’t have a structuredactivity,” he says.
But need it be this way? Work-free societies are more than just a thoughtexperiment—they’ve existed throughout human history. Consider hunter-gatherers,who have no bosses, paychecks, or eight-hour workdays. Ten thousand years ago,all humans were hunter-gatherers, and some still are. Daniel Everett, ananthropologist at Bentley University, in Massachusetts, studied a group ofhunter-gathers in the Amazon called the Pirah? for years. According to Everett,while some might consider hunting and gathering work, hunter-gatherers don’t.“They think of it as fun,” he says. “They don’t have a concept of work the waywe do.”
“It’s a pretty laid-back life most of the time,” Everett says. He describeda typical day for the Pirah?: A man might get up, spend a few hours canoeing andfishing, have a barbecue, go for a swim, bring fish back to his family, and playuntil the evening. Such subsistence living is surely not without its own set ofworries, but the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins argued in a 1968 essay thathunter-gathers belonged to “the original affluent society,” seeing as they only“worked” a few hours a day; Everett estimates that Pirah? adults on average workabout 20 hours a week (not to mention without bosses peering over theirshoulders). Meanwhile, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the averageemployed American with children works about nine hours a day.
Does this leisurely life lead to the depression and purposelessness seenamong so many of today’s unemployed? “I’ve never seen anything remotely likedepression there, except people who are physically ill,” Everett says. “Theyhave a blast. They play all the time.” While many may consider work a staple ofhuman life, work as it exists today is a relatively new invention in the courseof thousands of years of human culture. “We think it’s bad to just sit aroundwith nothing to do,” says Everett. “For the Pirah?, it’s quite a desirablestate.”
Gray likens these aspects of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to the carefreeadventures of many children in developed countries, who at some point in lifeare expected to put away childish things. But that hasn’t always been the case.According to Gary Cross’s 1990 book A Social History of Leisure Since 1600, freetime in the U.S. looked quite different before the 18th and 19th centuries.Farmers—which was a fair way to describe a huge number of Americans at thattime—mixed work and play in their daily lives. There were no managers oroverseers, so they would switch fluidly between working, taking breaks, joiningin neighborhood games, playing pranks, and spending time with family andfriends. Not to mention festivals and other gatherings: France, for instance,had 84 holidays a year in 1700, and weather kept them from farming another 80 orso days a year.
This all changed, writes Cross, during the Industrial Revolution, whichreplaced farms with factories and farmers with employees. Factory owners createda more rigidly scheduled environment that clearly divided work from play.Meanwhile, clocks—which were becoming widespread at that time—began to give lifea quicker pace, and religious leaders, who traditionally endorsed mostfestivities, started associating leisure with sin and tried to replace rowdyfestivals with sermons.
As workers started moving into cities, families no longer spent their daystogether on the farm. Instead, men worked in factories, women stayed home orworked in factories, and children went to school, stayed home, or worked infactories too. During the workday, families became physically separated, whichaffected the way people entertained themselves: Adults stopped playing“childish” games and sports, and the streets were mostly wiped clean of fun, asmiddle- and upper-class families found working-class activities likecockfighting and dice games distasteful. Many such diversions were soonoutlawed.
With workers’ old outlets for play having disappeared in a haze of factorysmoke, many of them turned to new, more urban ones. Bars became a refuge wheretired workers drank and watched live shows with singing and dancing. If freetime means beer and TV to a lot of Americans, this might be why.
At times, developed societies have, for a privileged few, producedlifestyles that were nearly as play-filled as hunter-gatherers’. Throughouthistory, aristocrats who earned their income simply by owning land spent only atiny portion of their time minding financial exigencies. According to RandolphTrumbach, a professor of history at Baruch College, 18th-century Englisharistocrats spent their days visiting friends, eating elaborate meals, hostingsalons, hunting, writing letters, fishing, and going to church. They also spenta good deal of time participating in politics, without pay. Their children wouldlearn to dance, play instruments, speak foreign languages, and read Latin.Russian nobles frequently became intellectuals, writers, and artists. “As a17th-century aristocrat said, ‘We sit down to eat and rise up to play, for whatis a gentleman but his pleasure?’” Trumbach says.
It’s unlikely that a world without work would be abundant enough to provideeveryone with such lavish lifestyles. But Gray insists that injecting any amountof additional play into people’s lives would be a good thing, because, contraryto that 17th-century aristocrat, play is about more than pleasure. Through play,Gray says, children (as well as adults) learn how to strategize, create newmental connections, express their creativity, cooperate, overcome narcissism,and get along with other people. “Male mammals typically have difficulty livingin close proximity to each other,” he says, and play’s harmony-promotingproperties may explain why it came to be so central to hunter-gatherersocieties. While most of today’s adults may have forgotten how to play, Graydoesn’t believe it’s an unrecoverable skill: It’s not uncommon, he says, forgrandparents to re-learn the concept of play after spending time with theiryoung grandchildren.
When people ponder the nature of a world without work, they often transposepresent-day assumptions about labor and leisure onto a future where they mightno longer apply; if automation does end up rendering a good portion of humanlabor unnecessary, such a society might exist on completely different terms thansocieties do today.
So what might a work-free U.S. look like? Gray has some ideas. School, forone thing, would be very different. “I think our system of schooling wouldcompletely fall by the wayside,” says Gray. “The primary purpose of theeducational system is to teach people to work. I don’t think anybody would wantto put our kids through what we put our kids through now.” Instead, Graysuggests that teachers could build lessons around what students are most curiousabout. Or, perhaps, formal schooling would disappear altogether.
Trumbach, meanwhile, wonders if schooling would become more about teachingchildren to be leaders, rather than workers, through subjects like philosophyand rhetoric. He also thinks that people might participate in political andpublic life more, like aristocrats of yore. “If greater numbers of people wereusing their leisure to run the country, that would give people a sense ofpurpose,” says Trumbach.
Social life might look a lot different too. Since the IndustrialRevolution, mothers, fathers, and children have spent most of their waking hoursapart. In a work-free world, people of different ages might come together again.“We would become much less isolated from each other,” Gray imagines, perhaps alittle optimistically. “When a mom is having a baby, everybody in theneighborhood would want to help that mom.” Researchers have found that havingclose relationships is the number-one predictor of happiness, and the socialconnections that a work-free world might enable could well displace theaimlessness that so many futurists predict.
In general, without work, Gray thinks people would be more likely to pursuetheir passions, get involved in the arts, and visit friends. Perhaps leisurewould cease to be about unwinding after a period of hard work, and would insteadbecome a more colorful, varied thing. “We wouldn’t have to be as self-orientedas we think we have to be now,” he says. “I believe we would become morehuman.”
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