a kashmiri manifesto for our times

You think to yourself, especially on a Sunday: there are many things that are useless (thank heavens!). Useless knowledge, for example. Of course, one can call it 'useful' in another sense, to the extent that it is an end in itself or that it contributes to peace, beauty, human flourishing...

In a similar vein, there's also useless work (perhaps it should be called 'labour' to distinguish it from work that serves a purpose beyond our physical sustenance). Labour, here, being associated with pain and suffering and toil, with a process of the transformation of energy: energy expended, energy consumed. animal laborans.

Work, on the other hand, is fundamentally different because it opens the way for hope: hope for rest, hope for producing a world in which one can derive worthwhile pleasures; and hope in the joy involved in creative and free work-alone and with others-in itself. Work that not only engages the whole person-mind, body, and soul-but that also connects us with the experience of other people, both past and present, in the world.

Not, then, what is the point of working but, rather, what is one working towards? Work that sustains not only life, but a good life, a good life for all. What can be said for a system that is either based on exploitation or that leads to terrible inequalities and a soul-numbing culture? Work that would open us up to taking a pleasurable interest in all the details of life rather than fostering on us the idea that work is something one either has to be "compensated" for or fled from.

So, a rather basic question for my economist friends: what's the point of producing more and more rubbish? All of that Chinese gaudy, plastic crap floating around the seas to bring the middle classes some small addition in pleasure (quantity over quality, as always). Remember, the whole aim of production is profit and in that endeavour it doesn't matter what "type" of desires are stimulated..in fact, there is no question of type, of "higher" or "lower" pleasures.

We must begin to build up the ornamental part of life-its pleasures, bodily and mental, scientific and artistic, social and individual-on the basis of work undertaken willingly and cheerfully, with the consciousness of benefiting ourselves and our neighbours by it.

Such a notion of work is, it seems to me, inseparable from the task of thinking about education in a different way. Work, in that sense, has to be connected with intelligent interests, with pleasure, and with a heightened sense of place and attachment.

---bits from William Morris's wonderful 'useful work versus useless toil'.