#daniel rodgers

Productivist ethics assume that productivity is what defines and refines us, so that when human capacities for speech, intellect, thought, and fabrication are not directed to productive ends, they are reduced to mere idle talk, idle curiosity, idle thoughts, and idle hands, their noninstrumentality a shameful corruption of these human qualities. Even pleasures are described as less worthy when they are judged to be idle. And what might be cause for ethical distaste in the case of the individual can, when compounded into a generalized indiscipline, become a threat to the social order. This fear of free time, whether manifested as idleness or indiscipline, should not be underestimated. If nothing else, it can testify to the ways in which models of both the individual and the collective have been shaped by the mandate to work, and continue to be haunted by what [Daniel T.] Rodgers describes as the 'immense, nervous power' of the contrast between work and laziness.