Alastair's Adversaria - Leisure the Basis of Culture (with Christian Leithart and John Ahern)

Episode Date: February 17, 2025

Christian Leithart and John Ahern join me for a discussion of Josef Pieper's essential essay 'Leisure: the Basis of Culture': https://amzn.to/4317bzk. Within our discussion, we mention several other books and articles, including the following: Mark Helprin, 'The Acceleration of Tranquility': https://ayjay.org/helprin.html C.R. Wiley, 'In the House of Tom Bombadil': https://amzn.to/41jPn0P Johan Huizinga, 'Homo Ludens': https://amzn.to/3WZxMsn John Hughes, 'The End of Work: Theological Critiques of Capitalism': https://amzn.to/4jVZYqd John Ahern, 'The Alienated Man's Guide to Modern Music': https://thelampmagazine.com/issues/issue-21/the-alienated-mans-guide-to-modern-music Find out more about the work of my guests in the following places: https://christianleithart.com/ https://goodworkmag.com/ https://littlewordbooks.com/ https://theopolisinstitute.com/te-deum-music-fellows-program/ Follow my Substack, the Anchored Argosy at https://argosy.substack.com/. See my latest podcasts at https://adversariapodcast.com/. If you have enjoyed my videos and podcasts, please tell your friends. If you are interested in supporting my videos and podcasts and my research more generally, please consider supporting my work on Patreon (www.patreon.com/zugzwanged), using my PayPal account (bit.ly/2RLaUcB), or by buying books for my research on Amazon (www.amazon.co.uk/hz/wishlist/ls/3…3O?ref_=wl_share). You can also listen to the audio of these episodes on iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/alastairs-adversaria/id1416351035.

Hello and welcome. I'm joined today by two good friends, Christian Lightheart and John Ahern, to discuss a book that has been, I think, influential for each one of us, directly and indirectly through other authors that it has influenced. The book is Leisure the Basis of Culture by Joseph Piper, and I thought we could begin by a brief synopsis of the book and its argument. John, do you have any thoughts on how we should frame the book and its argument? Yes. So, I mean, if you wanted to say that there was a thesis of the book, it would be that leisure is the basis of culture. And I oftentimes point to this as one of the best essays, I mean, essays in the 20th century, that really captures that old sense of the word essay that, you know,

Montaigne or Emerson or somebody might use in the sense that he is he's sort of sallying through all sorts of different thoughts in different areas. Culture is definitely one of them. Education is one of them. Religion is one of them. Even just large-scale social economic issues. And each step of the way, he's talking about leisure. So in a way, the thesis is ridiculously simple.

Leisure is the basis of culture. but actually the difficult thing about the essay is to figure out what he means by leisure. And that is, in fact, the tricky thing. I mean, he starts with, as memory serves, he starts with the question of labor. And, you know, there's a certain amount of marks in the background of his discourse. There's a certain amount of maybe Max Weber in the background of the discourse. But he notes that in the scholarly and intellectual world, the philosophical task, the philosophical task, of pursuing knowledge, pursuing knowledge in the Academy has become a matter of intellectual labor.

We've tried to say, hey, look, here are some intellectuals over here in the Academy. They're doing labor just like the plumber and the merchant and everyone else. We need to think about the Academy as a kind of labor because everyone in society is ultimately a worker. And PEPA is objecting to this on the basis that this kind of makes, into the proletarian and that this is, he thinks the real problem with Marxist and similar kind of ideologies is that rather than fixing the problem of proletarianism, which is what we ought to be trying to do, we're just to be making everyone equally proletariat. And so he thinks that the way to solve the kind of Marxist problems of alienation of labor and so forth is, in fact,

ushering everyone into some kind of leisure. I think that in a way, the essay is difficult for modern conservative Christians because he buries the lead at the very end. At the end, he mentions that really ultimately leisure is the Lord's Day. And I think that that's a great way to write an essay, but it might be helpful for new readers who aren't sure what they're getting into to understand that really he's invoking the Christian notion of Sabbath, and he's showing all sorts of different ways in which religion and education and culture are ushering everyone, no matter what their job in life is, no matter what their relationship with labor is, it's ushering everyone into Sabbath rest at certain punctuated intervals in their life.

And this relates also to his theme of conviviality as a kind of leisure. He doesn't mean leisure as a cessation from work, but he means leisure as the end of work, the goal of work, you're working for six days, you're gathering wood for six days to burn the fire on the seventh day. That's the goal of it all. And there's a bit of Hebrews 4 in there in the sense that ultimately reality is kind of ushering us into the ultimate active leisure in heaven. He thinks that's the beatific vision ultimately is what we're doing. And that religion, education, society, these are all ways of helping people through offering them little bits of leisure in the now as little foretastes of the leisure to come.

How did that do for it? That is extreme. That was a lot. Yeah, we could just stop there. No, I suppose this comment may be more perfect for the end of the conversation. But as I was discussing this book with a friend recently, he expressed that he felt like there was a need for a sort of modern version of this, where perhaps the lead that you mentioned that's buried at the end is brought. brought to the beginning and a person living in the 2020s could more easily grasp what it is he's talking about. Have either of you come across a book like that? I've read a couple that are

sort of trying to recover this idea of Sabbath and found them fairly shallow, sort of like unplug your phone for two hours. That kind of like, it's just not doing any real like needy stuff. But have either you come across? On a more theological level, perhaps something like, the end of work by John Hughes would meet that criterion. I think his work is dealing more initially with some of the different ways that people have understood work in relationship to rest, theologically and otherwise. So he's getting into Bart, but then also into Max Weber

and various people within the broader tradition of thought, Marx and then Eric Gill and other people within a more British context. And he's engaging with them and presenting some of the ways in which this relationship between work and rest plays out within the Christian tradition and the danger of trying to reduce everything to a certain form of rest, but also to try and the danger of the sort of total work vision that is described within people's work. And so it's very helpful as a more theoretical exploration and more theological exploration as well of some of the themes that people's getting into, not just a single essay, but very much a whole book. Do you think it would

be helpful at this point to define leisure the way that we're going to use it in the rest of the conversation? Yes. Even in John's explanation, I'm not sure. that paper that we've really nailed down a definition of what was talking about. And I think this is part of the success of the success of the essay for the reader is that he starts off by really unsettling your sense of what leisure is. And so, for instance, he points to the etymological relationship between school in Latin and in Greek and the concept of leisure. and of course any of us who grew up going to school every day that is just antithetical to the way that we understood it presumably

at least in my experience and so at the very outset there is a sense of what exactly is being spoken of here and how exactly are we to fit this with our common conceptions of what work is what leisure is ultimately he arrives at a fuller definition, but I think the stage at the outset where he's unsettling our initial sense is a very important one. And I think it would be helpful maybe at this point to consider some of the ways in which that unsettling takes place, in particular, something like the relationship between school and leisure. The terms that would often grow up opposing are actually terms that relate and belong together?

I do. Early on, he discusses acedia, right? And, you know, our modern version of the word sloth, it kind of, we associate with indolence and lack of effort and movement. And he points out that that's not, it's not everything that's captured in the word acedia. Acedia can actually look like frantic activity. which was definitely a shifting of categories to someone who, well, I mean, my first thought is someone who's spending a lot of time online and there's a frenetic activity that's not really going anywhere or accomplishing anything can be a form of sloth.

But you could also think of someone, you know, a workaholic, someone who never stops. So that was definitely a place where the categories really changed. He's not talking about, leisure as in kicking back in a chair with a lemonade or something. There's something richer and fuller he's describing. So that was one way in which the category, he intentionally shifted the categories away from our kind of our normal understanding of leisure rest. Right. And I think that going back to the Scola thing, the Scola as the Latin and Greek word for leisure, he does talk a lot about the notion of intellection as the end goal of education. And I think this is something that I remain unclear on exactly how the intellection

and the beatific vision relate to one another. But they're sort of analogous concepts for him. But the goal of the religious life is the beatific vision of God in heaven. And the goal of the intellectual life is intellection. And that's this medieval concept. And I think it goes back to book six and seven of, or is the seven and eight of Plato's Republic and a few other places in Aristotle. But both of those thinkers have the idea that the end goal of philosophy is that you're there observing the forms or observing the truth. and that is completely passive, passive activity, if I could employ such a paradox.

It's a passive activity. I think Hugh of St. Victor compares it to looking at a landscape. And that's ultimately what you're doing in philosophy. You're there. You look at a landscape and it impresses itself on you. But the great paradox of life is that in order to get to that place where you are just observing the truth and the truth is happening to you, you have to work immensely hard. You have to sort of do all this work

from a platonist perspective. You're sort of clearing away the detritus of the material world and so that you can have direct access to the forms. Piper is more of a Thomist, so it's a bit more inflected by, I think, Christian and Aristotelian ideas. But if I can read a quote that synopsizes this perfectly from Piper.

He says this, the highest forms of knowledge may well be perceived, by a great effort of thought, and perhaps must be so, but in any case, the effort is not the cause, it is the condition. It is equally true that the efforts so effortlessly produced by love presuppose, no doubt, a heroic moral struggle of the will, but the decisive thing is that virtue means the realization of the good. It may imply a previous moral effort, but it cannot be equated with the moral effort.

And similarly, to know means to reach the reality of existing things, knowledge is not not confined to the effort of thought. It is more than intellectual work. And he goes on to say that it's completely grace. It's completely gift. So like, you know, the moment in education when it clicks and when you experience that intellection, it is gift entirely from God. It's gift. It is not a cause of all your hard work, your ratiocination work of education as toil. But ultimately, you do need the education as toil in order to achieve the education as leisure. It's the kid, it's the kind of not the cause. I want to push back on just this, like getting, waiting into the Greek a little bit.

I was very pleasantly surprised when Pupor gets to the end and he says, this is all the, he doesn't say that leisure is like floating in goop, staring at truth. but that it is a feat. And that struck me as a like a uniquely Christian idea. Because like you're talking about, a Buddhist may go through all these spiritual exercises in order to pass

will be received truth. And a Christian may go through many efforts, but at the end, what actually counts of leisure is not the sort of passive floating. It's a participation in a feat. So the, So the, I mean, that's, I think we need to save space in our definition of leisure for that.

That it's not just sitting back. If you mean a gift, I buy that because I think a gift offered suggests a gift received, which means there's some sort of activity. It's an activity that is entirely dependent on the graciousness of the giver. just like the wedding feast is entirely, as a guest, you're entirely different on the host. But I don't like the idea of you're just passively sitting there, staring at a landscape of truth.

And I think that's maybe, I mean, that's maybe some of the big problems with trying to get across to, say, student or really anyone, to convince them that all this work is so that they can sit back and just let truth wash over this. I just don't think how that would be appealing to anybody. I think this is certainly, it's certainly something to which,

at certain earlier stages in the essay, he leaves himself maybe a bit open to that misinterpretation. I think as you go further into the essay, he pushes back against some of the directions that that might lead to. I think there's also related to that. You give the example of the sort of Buddhist, Buddhist contemplation as one example,

there is a sort of heroic vision of knowledge, whether through the effort of someone who's really engaging all their mental faculties and getting into the minutiae of philosophy or someone who's engaging in some heroic spiritual activity to achieve some metaphysical or mystical insight. both of those raise something of the social and class questions that he gets into later on about proletarianism. And at that point, I think it becomes clearer that what he has in mind is not something that is restricted to a specialist or a privileged, exalted class, but something to which all can truly become participants. And then you begin to see the more Christian vision coming to the foreground

and the Sabbath themes really, at the end, that's where it leads, rather than to some more pagan understanding of a very restricted philosophical school and the vast majority of the population held outside of it, or of some enlightened spiritual caste with the rest. the majority just being left in a lack of enlightenment. And so I think those concerns are important ones that will naturally arise over the course of the essay that he does have to allay towards the end. But there needs to be a response to that.

I don't think that the Greek tradition is maybe positioned to provide in the same way as the Christian tradition. That's not to say there's no resources within the festivals and feast days that would be present within that context. But the Christian tradition is really where he leans at that stage. Right. And I agree. And that was what made me so delighted with the book

because it just felt like it would have been easy to stay safely within the kind of high intellectual. But anyone can go to a feat. Like that was what was so pleasant about his solution. I was like, oh, yeah. I mean, you can literally have anyone over and feed them. for him would be kind of the basis of where leisure comes to. And I think that you're, I think we, it'd be perfect if you could define that passive thing that you mentioned, not as the floating in a goop of intellection, but that sort of

passivity that one feels as a guest in somebody's home, which is to say there is a participatory, a participatory element that is essential to the kind of, the right, the hospitality of the code of conduct for being a guest and so forth. And I do think that you can even see elements of that in the Greek pagan tradition. I mean, I think that both are there in Plato. There's that kind of depressing vision of the intellection washing over, truth washing over you. There's also the symposium, right?

I mean, there's that is even there in, you know, maybe in a slightly creepy and drunken form in the symposium, but nevertheless, I think that goal is there even in the Greek tradition, but ultimately realize more properly in the Christian notion of the feast and so forth. I think there's an element of leisure that could be captured in the idea of activity done for its own state, where that, and I mentioned this to Alastair a few weeks ago, that a leisure activity is one that does not need to be made more efficient. In fact, to make it more efficient would be to lose something. If you said, what if we had this, what if we had the Lord's supper in a more efficient way? What if we had people over and we were able to get them in and out

quicker than we, than before? What if we ended this podcast faster and we save time with it? So that kind of question is appropriate for necessary work or labor, perhaps we could use the word labor, that you actually would want certain activities to happen more efficiently. Whereas, I mean, like Alistair's hobby of knitting, you don't have to do that. You could go out and buy knitted clothes, but it's the act of putting it together with your hands that you don't necessarily want it to be more efficient. Otherwise, you would do it a different way. And so I think that leisure as activity done for its own sake, I think that when you mentioned the BAS civic vision and being in the presence of God, you do not need to, there's no more intermediary. There's no more

effort to get in the presence of God. And you are there with him. and that activity is done for its own sake. So the idea of a, you know, you mentioned the passive activity where you are examining truth. And I actually, I don't disagree that that's something leisurely, that there's an element of leisure that is pursuing truth and attaining to a sort of, like, I guess, intellectual peace. But I still think that there's an activity element to it. And it's just because of like going back to the first week of creation where God is doing these activities. He rests. But then even looking towards the eschatological end of time, I don't think there's any reason to think activity ceases at that moment.

It just ceases to be activity done for the sake of some other necessary ends. were actually able to do it for its own day. I'm reminded of, yeah. I'm reminded of Caroline Bingley's remark in Pride and Prejudice. I should like balls infinitely better, she replied, if they were carried on in a different manner. But there is something insufferably tedious in the usual process of such a meeting.

It would surely be much more rational if conversation instead of dancing were made the order of the day. Much more rational, my dear Caroline, I dare say, but it would not be near so much like a ball. And there's something about the inefficiency of a ball that makes it, that makes it what it is. And if it were just an efficient means of breezing the wheels of society and connecting people, it would not be what it is.

And likewise, I think there is a way in which even core, Christian practices can be reduced to the end, utilitarian ends, I think, of the ways that many people approach the Bible. They think about reading of the Bible has something that's there to be useful towards the end of informing religious practice, informing our theological notions, or giving us something to chew over devotionally. And those do, those are worthy ends in some senses. But at many points, what gets lost is the end in itself of just spending time contemplating things of God. And that can be something that when approached with that utilitarian mindset, we're not receptive to the text. We have a posture of activity towards it where we're interrogating

it, working it towards the ends that we think are useful. And as a result, we lose much of the treasure of and the blessing of the activity. Now, I think that's just one example among several, but you can think about many forms of Christian practice that have downstream benefits. It's beneficial to spend one day and seven where we're not working and we spend time with people in the act of worship when we're considering the things of God, etc. All of those things have downstream benefits. But we're not primarily engaging in, because it makes us better workers or because it makes us have more happy and enjoyable family life. Those are benefits, but the activity is an end in itself.

I just wanted to, I'm glad you brought up an example from literature. I read this really short little book called In the House of Tom Bombadil, trying to investigate what Bombadil, what his role is in the Lord of the Rings. And the author essentially arrived. He also varies the lead. The last chapter is the most interesting. But he essentially identifies Bombadil as a picture of rest of the end. Once you have defeated Zauron, what do you do?

What do you do next? And you help the flowers grow. You feet in your house. you explore creation, all of these things that Bombavila. And I think that's one, you know, I recently reread the Lord of the Rings, and I was struck by all the activities that happened in Elran's house. If you watch the movies, it's just elves drifting between trees, like staring off the stars. It's impressive.

And in the books, it's like they're singing songs, they're, you know, it's jolly. and it just it really strikes me that the the the L and you know if you're familiar with the Rings the elves have their own problems but there's a awareness of what a leisurely existence when you have all the time in the world you know like the elves do you can get really good at poetry and you don't mind that a poetry is it takes hours and hours one thing that I think is helpful in the discussion of the concept of leisure in the book is, as you said, when you have a lot of time, you can get very good at poetry. But the fact that you have a lot of time is not in itself constitutive of leisure. There has to be something more than just an absence of external

pressures and demands upon you. And so merely having time of vacation or having the end of your workday does not in itself constitute leisure. He argues that leisure is a mental and spiritual attitude and not just the absence of those external conditions. And so we need to think about what is it about the elves that within the times in which they do not have pressures and demands to fulfill immediate social needs that they engage in poetry.

And it's that movement beyond, for instance, the realm of social needs, which we all have, we all have to provide clothing, we all need shelter over our heads, we all need food on our tables, but yet there is something beyond that socially needful. There's the socially good, and the elves recognize this.

What is it about their posture that is ordered towards leisure in a way that our society so often are not, even though we have lots of free time that we could work with. I think one of the themes that Piper comes back to again and again is play, is the element of play and how crucial that is. I mean, I think he might be drawing on his contemporary housing guy, who wrote on the subject.

I don't know exactly what the chronology there is. But Piper points out this verse in proverbs, I can't recall what it is, about how wisdom personified, Yahweh sort of gives her leave to play all throughout creation. And that ultimately what you see in the order of creation, in the rational order of creation, is Yahweh's will in the personification of wisdom playing all throughout creation.

And when you see that, I think it really does unlock a lot of the pieces here. perhaps going back to that scola thing of school and leisure, but also this element that we've even talking about with the ball and the elves and so forth. This is another wonderful thing about the essay. Perhaps I'm changing the subject somewhat, but it really does. It's one of those wonderful essays that unlocks so much of Western civilization

and its humane letters and its culture and its literature to you. Because once you read this essay and internalize it, you'll begin to see this theme showing up all over the place. And as I think about it, more Christian, what you said about how very Christianized people's version of this idea of leisure really is. I just recently read Proarchia by Cicero, which is his defense of poetry. And he does have a version of this whole notion of leisure. Like, I do poetry, it's my leisure activity.

But he does say ultimately it's my leisure activity because I can draw on poetry to then help the state and, you know, defeat the Catalinarian conspiracy and so forth. So even in this pagan world, you still have a sense that ultimately the state is the for its own sake thing and that my enjoyment of poetry is for the sake of that. But I think that it's Christianity which puts the emphasis on the conviviality, the feast, and you two know more about the biblical theology here, but what is that about the Bible and about Christianity, where we care more about the feasts. It's the wedding, the wedding feast, which is the end, the eschatological end of things.

Is it also like the emphasis on the peace sacrifice in Leviticus, where we're actually eating a meal with Yahweh? And I'm sort of curious, what is it about the Christian aspect of it that takes this Hellenistic idea and moves the emphasis in this feast play direction? Yeah, so it's a very good question. I think one aspect of the follow-up essay that he has on the philosophical act that comes to mind here, particularly in the ways that things that should not be ordered narrowly towards political or other ends become very narrowed. This passage he writes, at one point it will be remembered. Socrates asked Protagoras the sophist,

What do you really teach the young who crowd to your lectures? And Protagoras replies, To be well informed, both in their own affairs, namely how best to manage one's house and run one's estate, and in matters concerning the state, how best to be effective in speaking and in acting. That is the classical program of philosophy considered as a profession, as training,

a pseudo philosophy that will never pierce the dome. And the worst of it all is that these spurious forms combine, not indeed to go beyond the workaday world, but on the contrary, to screw down the dome more firmly than ever, to close every window, and then man really is imprisoned in the world of work. And so within that essay, he's discussing the way in which art, poetry, philosophy, religion, can all become adulterated when they become, engaged in merely in the service of political or social or whatever ends.

They're socially useful. Now, of course, we recognize that if you have full commitment to churchgoing, for instance, in society, to Christian and morality, everything runs better. But if you approach Christianity primarily in terms of its usefulness for social or political ends, it becomes something utterly different from what it truly is, which is the worship of God suspending in many respects the questions of usefulness. And those questions of usefulness have a place, but it is not one that should displace those things that truly ends in themselves.

One thing I wanted to go back to that Christian mentioned earlier was the concept of accedia which comes up earlier within the essay, and I think is a very important one, for breaking with some of the notions that we have about leisure, which tend to be the absence of work or effort, can refer to those times when we're just being idle. Likewise, we have a concept that goes with that, of the opposite of a cedia being this intense work.

And so the workaholic is the opposite of the person who struggles with accedia, but within the more classic understanding of acedia, the workaholic can be a paradigm case of the vice. It's someone who is not truly affirming his being and rising to his full stature as a human being. And so the contrast between sloth and the condition of leisure is one that is very important,

whereas we tend to often relate those things, they're both forms of idleness. And I think one of the aspects that I thought would be helpful to explore here is the way in which cessation of toil and of certain types of effort come into his vision. It's one point that he pushes against earlier on, the concept of difficulty being the measure of true philosophy. How is it that we have misunderstood this concept of accedia and the concepts that surround that idleness, toil, what it means, for instance, in a Christian mode, to redeem the time?

How is it that we should avoid that sin of acedia? And what actually is it? I'm trying to recall. I think his definition of accedia is essentially work in which you are not aware of, or, or work in which you are not actively directing it toward its goal, right? So there's a sort of, I can't remember if it's in the mind of the person doing the work or how it works. Maybe one of you guys can remind me, but there's something to do with that issue of, is this work hierarchically oriented toward a greater goal?

Or is the work being done for its own sake, in which case it becomes that accedia? That's funny because I just, a few minutes ago, defined leisure. as work done for it sounds like. So I don't want to mix category here. I think what I meant was more that you find, like the work is

meaningful in itself. And I was contrasting it not with flaw. Something that's work that's done for something that is an end in itself, not the work itself being, not work itself being an end for everything. Well, I mean, it depends

on how you're using the term work, because it just means activity, then I would say that it is activity done for itself. You know, we don't, like, when John plays a piece on the organ, he doesn't go, man, I really wish I could just go from the first measure to the last measure and not have to play all the ones in between, you know. That would kind of, how much less like a ball, you know. It doesn't, it doesn't, it defeats the whole purpose of the organ piece.

So I just, but I, I, I, um, Alastard, do you have the accedia passage in front of you where what people talk about that? I was just thinking of the, I don't know if this comes from Wendell Berry or maybe Iva Dillage, but the example of like a woman who is ironing cloth napkins and she's doing it for the special dinner that she's about to have versus a woman whose job it is in a hotel to iron all of the cloth napkins. And there's a sort of lack of connection in the latter situation between the joy and leisure of sitting down to that feast with the iron napkins

versus, you know, I'm never going to see the fruits of this labor at all. I'm merely doing this in order to get the paycheck at the end. And there would be maybe the distinction between work which is oriented toward the leisure that you yourself are a participant in versus the acetya. I'm not positive that that's what he meant, but. He has, for instance, this passage.

No, the contrary of acedia is not the spirit of work in the sense of the work of every day, of earning one's living. It is man's happy and cheerful affirmation of his own being, his acquiescence in the world and in God, which is to say love. Love that certainly brings a particular freshness and readiness to work along with it,

but that no one with the least, experience could conceivably confused with the tense activity of the fanatical worker. And part of what he's getting at more generally is the danger of reducing man to the narrow dome of the down of labour. For instance, the sort of person who might consider all of his time off under the rubric of labour. So it becomes a time of, to recharge so that he can enter the next work week more fully energized. Or it might be seen in the other way that he works without any sort of passion for it just to have the weekend.

But the weekend being a time of a certain sort of idleness. It's not truly assenting to his being truly ascending to the worship of God or to a sense of himself in proper relation to. a world, but it's just downtime, it's time when he can just let off steam, whatever it is. But there's no sense of that work being ordered towards something that is greater than itself, or the sense of leisure as something that can be understood as having its own proper place and order to it, and that brings human beings into relationship with a higher existence of the human being that is proper to us as belonging to creation. And that sense of just being submerged constantly within toil or trying to enjoy our freedom from those conditions of toil,

but still being fixated upon avoiding that, rather than actually having a sense of a positive vision of what leisure is. Both of those are, I think, aspects of what he's getting at. If I could ask John a follow-up question about the woman hiring napkins at the hotel with the restaurant, is it, you wouldn't say that it's the activity, the fact that she doesn't have ownership of what she's doing

doesn't automatically make her activity slothful, right? Because if we go there, then it means anybody, like it really does divide into classes where if somebody has to work for a living, then are we pinpointing every job that, every job that feels like drudgery to the worker is automatically slothful? Because I feel like there's aspects of my job

that I feel like are fairly, onerous and I wish they could be done more quickly but that doesn't necessarily mean that those are lawful activities right there's I agree yeah I agree that that's that's the case I think people would very strongly agree too yeah all right he's not anti-ownerous toil I think that that comes through in the essay and I don't think that it's about the onerousness of the work either. And again, I'm not sure that I'm, that my analogy, that was just sort of off the top of my head and I'm not positive that that really fairly portrays it. But I think that in that situation with the hotel worker, I think that has more to do with the fact that there is no relationship

between the actual toil that she is doing and the kind of convivial life and rest and Sabbath that she's invited into. She goes home and eats off of, eats takeout off of paper napkins, not off of the cloth napkins that she has ironed. And I recognize that that means that there are a lot of people, and that may not itself be the sin of acedia, but maybe let's say that's downstream

a kind of larger cultural acedia in which we have just organized supply change and human capital markets such that there's a lot of people who are constantly never experiencing any relationship, between the toil that they put in and the kind of fruits of their labor in the restful activities. And then I think that there is something in the Christian tradition, which would prioritize that. It wouldn't absolutize that and say that it has to always be the case that every amount of toil that you put in, you know, you see the immediate benefit of that coming back to you.

But yet I think that there is something about the Christian tradition that would prioritize a kind of a localist, maybe that's not even the right word, but some kind of relationship where you can see a lack of alienation between your labor and your rest, that you see how your labor contributes to the conviviality that is the goal of your labor. And I think there's also an important aspect of Christian teaching that takes the most seemingly servile forms of labor and shows their proper dignity that they have when they are related to some higher end. So I think of bond servants, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling with a sincere heart as you would Christ, not by the way of eye service as people pleases, but as bond servants of Christ, doing the will

of God from the heart, rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and not to man, knowing that whatever good anyone does, this he will receive back from the Lord, whether he is a bond servant or is free. There is a sense there that even if you're engaged in this most servile task, if it is ordered towards Christ, it is a free one. And there is a recognition that these situations of society continue to exist. Those situations are none ideal. It's not good for people to be alienated from their labour in the ways that they are within a society of slavery. But yet, even in that condition, it is possible to have dignity in one's labor and in one's identity as a laborer. And it seems that on the one hand, it guards against a certain sort of classism that can come in with this.

But it also maintains something of a standard by which the laborer can be lifted up. There can be a social reformation of conditions of labor, which is one of the things. that he gets at later on in the piece, where he explores what it means to deproletarianize and what exactly is entailed with that, which is not just, it's a recognition, for instance, of the difference between wages and honoraria and a recognition that that does not mean

that there is a special class of persons who live off honoraria, ministers, for instance, and scholars, and then everyone else has to live with wages, there is, in his argument, a reason why every person should receive something with the character of an honor area, even as they're also receiving wages. Right.

You were going to say something, Christian. Oh, I was just going to say that I feel very fortunate to have a job where my customers are right in front of me and I can see immediate feedback. So for the listeners, I'm a teacher, and so I stand in front of those I'm serving, and I tell them things and teach them, show them how to do things,

and there is a immediate personal relationship, a personal connection between me and the fruits of my labor that not everyone has, and I'm fully aware that that's the case. Someone may do back-in, voting for a company and they're just working on one little piece of the puzzle and never really understand the significance of what they're doing. And this just as an aside, my family is in the habit of watching the movie credits all the

way to the end. And I don't know exactly how we got into this. Maybe probably just a reluctance to turn off the movie. And all the way down to the bottom, they include the, like in a Pixar film, for example, they include the security staff, the archivist, the backup programmers, everyone who is even remotely involved in the production of the film gets credit in the film. So there's no one working at Pixar who is seen as unnecessary success of a Pixar film. And that's always, well, actually, our favorite part of the credits, my daughter's favorite part is the production babies, because they always list the names of the children that the employees had during the production of the film.

So there's definitely a holistic family, not just family, but like a whole life, an awareness that life exists outside of work, that the film is a connection to the entire life of the people that work. there just as a side. So what you're saying is that if people want to understand what Peeper it means, they should just look at Pixar, right? These are perfectly embodied. They should watch Wally, honestly. They should watch Wally. I hadn't made that connection until just now, but that's a great,

that would be a great contrast between Wally's work that he does, the meaningless work at the beginning, and the absolute sloth of the people on board the ship. coming together at the end and the sort of, you know, they've returned to Earth, they plant seeds, they work on the farm. And yeah, it's a flourishing, it's a very Adamic story where you have to like return to the return to tilling the earth, go back to this completely abandoned earth and have kids. And anyway, it's a great movie.

Everyone should watch it. There we go. One of the things that he gets at that I think is very helpful is the condition of those who are just entirely submerged within the six days of labor. And there's no sense of that day of rest through which those days of labor have a very different character. And he writes about this in terms of the concept of proletarianism, the condition that is not exclusive to a certain socioeconomic class. It's something that can be shared by people across social economic classes. There are people filling the academy who are proletarianized. Their work has no end beyond economic or the ends of social advancement, whatever it is.

And there's not a sense of the dignity of that work in itself. And that, he argues, serves certain interests of the state. So, for instance, the total work. state needs the spiritually impoverished, one-track mind of the functionary, and he, in his turn, is naturally inclined to find complete satisfaction in his service and thereby achieves the illusion of a life fulfilled, which he acknowledges and willingly accepts. This inner constraint, the inner chains which fetter us to work, prompts a further question. Proletarianism, thus understood, is perhaps a symptomatic state of mind common to all levels of society

and by no means confined to the proletariat, to the worker, a general symptom that is merely found isolated in unusually acute form in the proletariat, so that it might be asked whether we are not all of us proletarians and all of us consequently ripe and ready to fall into the hands of some collective labour state and be at its disposal as functionaries, even though explicitly of the contrary political opinion. And so one of the things that is behind all of this is a deeper vision of the political good of society,

that society, where it lacks, the conditions of Sabbath, and with it, the sort of liberal arts in the full sense of that term liberal, it will tend to move in the, it will be conducive to a certain sort of tyranny, a certain sort of slavery, and the closing in of the dome upon all of us, where there's no horizon beyond the immediate. There's no sense of us belonging to an order greater than our immediate environment. And so the concept of us being creatures and relating to God gets, last. We have festivals that in the place of the old festivals that relate to divine reality, we have festivals that are celebration of labor, for instance, which is a different sort of thing,

or a merely filled with entertainment. And there's not a sense of a horizon that allows us to rise to a stature beyond. I think it's probably a good time to talk about education. John. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead. I was going to quickly say that in so many ways this book is a theopolis book in that he,

if you don't mind me co-opting your podcast for theopolis pitch, Hauster, in so many ways, you look at these socioeconomic ills, the proletarianization, the kind of this intense servility that so many of the lower classes feel in their relationship to their work. And you look at the political ills and the kind of fragmentation and partisanship that he is just talking about there. And he says, look, actually, we can invite all these people into a kind of rest, which is for its own sake, in the cultic act. And, you know, you go to worship. And this is the, this is the act that's going to water and feed this parched land that's around us. And it's going to help the political.

It's going to help the social, the economic. or rather it's going to not help them, it's going to solve these issues if we can orient it toward the act of worship. I think there's something very theopolitan about that. The final paragraph reads, Now our hope is that the true sense of sacramental visibility in the celebration of the Christian cultus should become manifest to the extent needed for drawing the man in us who is born to work out of himself and should draw him out of the toil and moil of every day into the sphere of an ending whole day

and should draw him out of the narrow and confined sphere of work and labour into the heart and centre of creation, which is, as you say, perhaps the most theopolitan argument that you could have. And although at certain points the essay may gesture and directions that would seem to be moving otherwise, that is the final point where it lands. and I think is absolutely correct.

Christian. I wanted to tell just a couple of anecdotes about education. So I graduate of a classical high school, got a liberal arts degree in college. Now I teach at a classical school. And I have had to justify classical education many times. And several of the conversations have had quite a. an impact on me. One in particular, I was having a conversation with some young men at church and basically

I was trying to suss out whether or not they would ever want to do a great books program. You know, like, is this something that there was any interest at all? And I told them, like, give me, what are your best reasons against this idea? Just don't be shy. And an older man at church, I mean, not. older, but he's established in his career. He said that's the total waste of time, complete waste of time. Young men should be developing, they should be growing in their career, they should be improving their job skills so that they can get married and support

a family. And then once they're established, they should, then they can have, they'll have time to do those other frivolous things. He didn't use the word frivolous, but clearly it was lower on his priority list. And I pushed back and said, well, you're only working, you know, a third of the time. What are you going to do with the other? Like, you sleep for a third, you work for a third. What are you going to do with the other third of your day? You have to do something. And he said, no, you should be working. When you're young, you should be 99% of your your waking time should be work. And he was, he was aiming. towards the, what does that say?

The product is an ethic in the spirit of capital, John, he called us a book title. He was just very, just very upfront about like all those, you know, the poetry, the philosophy, that's all well and good, but it's not what men in particular, I think you just think of men in particular, are supposed to do. And what's interesting is that his children are in a classical school. And I think that his, I didn't follow up with him, but I think his understanding is probably that they're getting what they need in their high school years. And then college is for job training so that they can secure a good job and establish, you know, an income and a house and provide for their family. And so there was definitely was this sort of, he wasn't anti, like, poetry and philosophy.

He just thought those are things that young men don't have time for. And I guess I'll just, I can tell that John at least wants to respond to that. So I have a second story that's related, but I'll argue. No, I was excited to your devastating takedown of this position. So go ahead. Well, it really, it, ever since that conversation, it's really, I've just seen confirmation of this over and over and over again, where the, so many of my students, we really struggle at my school to get the students to value anything that we're learning for its own sake.

And there are always exceptions. You know, there's students who take art class and could just draw all day. They don't care whether they get a job as an artist. that maybe they harbor vague dreams of getting a job as an artist so that they can spend all day drawing. But there's just no, for the most part, they are worried about, they're concerned about their grades. And I'm sure it's parental pressure to get a certain, attain a certain standard of living.

And it might not even be conscious pressure, but just this idea that you will be a lawyer, you will be a doctor. You will have more cars than you have adults in your house, in your garage. And so I think so many of the kids just think of we have, we don't have time or we don't have time to take time. And it's just a big struggle because I do think that's something that class school education is built around this idea of learning things for their own sake. I think of my job as partly teaching people how to use their leisure time well. And there's a lot of resistance to that. One of the things he gets into very much within this essay is the concept of the liberal arts as opposed to the servile arts.

Would one of you like to give some sort of definition of these two things and maybe discuss the importance of the liberal arts within. in a Christian vision of education. I mean, I think it's similar to what we've already been talking about, but there are certain arts which are arts, which you learn and which is, you know, art meaning skill in this sense, like the Latin word ours. There are certain skills that you are cultivating in yourself in order to make a living, in order for subsistence,

in order for the kind of continued existence. We might call these vocational trades now, which is a bit of a nicer term than servile arts that maybe is one of the good heritages of Luther that we call them vocational than servile. But the idea being that these are directed toward our subsistence, our continued existence. And then there are liberal arts,

skills which you cultivate for their own sake. That is to say that there's no outside justification for them. Rather, the servile arts are there so that you can do the liberal arts. and furthermore, there are skills which are skills which make you free. And there is a shift that has occurred in the history of the West, I think because of Christianity, where this originally used to be two different people. There were the servile arts people and the liberal arts people.

And you did the liberal arts if you wanted to be a freeman, and you did the servile arts if you were inevitably destined to be a slave. And I think that especially since the early modern period and the Reformation, there's been a sense that actually it doesn't matter what social class you're in. Some cultivation of the liberal arts is important for every Christian who wants to fulfill some of the biblical mandates to know and understand scripture to pursue and work out their own salvation and so forth. And you know, you can then get into the nitty gritty-gritty of what are the liberal arts. And, you know, it actually does turn out Pache, Dorothy Sayers. there are many different definitions of the liberal arts, not just, you know, grammar, logic, and

rhetoric, but, but, you know, anyways, is that fair Christian? You, you teach this stuff as much as I do. I, I'm, yeah, I, I, I would buy your, your explanation there. I, I'm careful, the free, the, the, the, um, the, um, etymology of the liberal art, um, as being the free art, uh, does, you know, you mentioned that there's a kind of destiny element where these people are fit for service and these people are fit for intellectual learning

that I think is dogged the, I mean probably dogged education since the beginning. But I do think that since the Reformation, there's been some corrected to that, but also, you know, we're dealing

with other downstream aspects of that. Like, as these two things, the servile arts and the liberal arts cross over one another, they kind of struggle for dominance. And maybe that's where Keeper's book has a response to that we've gotten to the point where the vocational arts have kind of become dominant. And I think in some ways, classical education is an attempt to balance out that. We've mentioned at various points, the direction the essay finally takes moving towards Sabbath. And it seems to me that many of the problems that might arise as possible shadows along the way

and concerns about, for instance, the social implications of his argument and the distinction between certain areas of education that might lead to a denigration of certain classes of people are resolved within, they've resolved within the Sabbath. I think the Sabbath really provides a way in which these things come into greater clarity. The Sabbath involves a suspension of the realm of calculation of the quotidian and the routine and every day. It involves a suspension of utilitarianism and also of the socially divided, the way in which we divide into our different social classes along socioeconomic lines. We have a society that's characterized appropriately for the service of social needs by the

division of labor. And yet, as we gather together in worship, there is a sort of reverse movement to that division of labor. We are gathering in rest. And so the gathering in rest, the suspension, of labour, the process of contemplating the things of God and our place within the wider creation, all of these things provide the paradigmatic reality of leisure from which these other activities, I think, can take their bearings. And also, in the process, dignifies the labor of all within

the rest of the week. So the labor of the person who's plumbing for, for instance, or the labour of the person who's working in the university, the person who's engaged in some sort of desk job. All of these people find the dignity of their labour ultimately as it's oriented towards the Sabbath, which is a common celebration that is not exclusive to one particular class of persons. And part of its dignity is the fact that it suspends some of the social fracturing that arises from just the natural appropriate division of labour due to work. And it's presenting of the social needs of the society, that those social needs do not become so foregrounded that we lose sight of the social good. And the social good is most seen

at those times when, for instance, the social needs having been addressed, we can show liberality and generosity and include all within the enjoyment of a united good. Yeah, I think that's one of my favorite things about the book that he, again, it was kind of a pleasant surprise that we're, you expect this philosophical treatise on work and you expect to go to, you know, I did not expect him to orient himself around the Sabbath and specifically the Lord's Supper, but even the practice of tithing. There's all of these things that, that the Christian religion, that are part of being a church-going Lord's Supper, celebrating Christians that reorient your whole life. And it's a way of, like you said, the, ideally, the rich man,

the man of means, and then the man who scrapes by every month, can sit one pew away from each and use their gifts to serve a body, which is, I think it's one of the, you know, it is just how it is. It's not, you know, you don't do that for the sake of the political health of a nation, but it does have an impact because these people have lives outside of the church too. And they carry that, the community of saints out into the rest of the world. I did want to talk, I just want to ask you guys a little.

a little bit about practices that can, like modern day practices that can help people improve their ability to have a leisurely life. And before I asked that, I wanted to describe the essay that I read. I think I probably got it, heard about it from Alan Jacobs first. It's called The Acceleration of Tranquility by Mark Helprin, who's one of my favorite short story

writers. And the essay typically of a fiction writer is not very argumentative. He describes these two existences. One is, I think, takes place in the year 2065 or something like that. And it's this guy who's constantly traveling, working. He's got all his devices out. He's constantly answering emails and trying to save his marriage from falling apart while he's also answering work emails and flying to a conference.

Just everything is at his beck and call. And he contrasts that with the guy living in the probably late 1800s in Europe, who has traveled, I think, to Italy for vacation. And this man, he's some kind of politician, like a diplomat or minister of some kind. And so he has to work while. on vacation. He writes a few letters a day to keep correspondence up. But the vast majority of his time, he cannot connect to the outside world. So he has to do other things. He goes boating with his wife in the lake. He's, I think, translating something, because it's like one of the only

books he has with him. He's translating some Greek or something, and he comes to a word he doesn't know. And so he has to wait for the next morning and walk to the local town where there's a library and perhaps the Greek English dictionary and he can look up the word. But there's this delay. And that's the key thing about the essay that you can't immediately act on every necessity and every desire. So in a previous generation, maybe 200 years ago or so, people like waiting was built into your life. You had, and like we talked about, it doesn't have to be leisurely necessarily. But there was a way that technology had not collapsed all of that time.

So you had to find ways to fill that time. There was a gap between when curiosity was aroused and when it was satisfied. There was a delay between when desire was aroused and desire was satisfied. between when you wanted to see your friends and when you actually got to see your friends. And that they're being spaced there, I think, builds up people's capacity to just let the circumstances be and find ways to fill them themselves. Whereas nowadays we're kind of what we just like the idea of remaining with curiosity or a lack of knowledge, a painful lack of knowledge for even more than.

a few seconds is really uncomfortable for us. So anyway, I think that, that essay is really, it's thought provoking because it makes you ask, is there any way that we can recover these? Like the character in the story doesn't think of the benefits to itself. It's just how life is. But of the two options, you find the older one vastly preferable because the man, he seems more human.

He has, because there's space in his life and intellectual activity going on where the first guy is too frenetic to even stop to think about anything. So I guess the question is, are there ways, whether it's education, whether it's personal practices, ways that we can practice or develop the muscles of leisure? Maybe it's kind of a paradox. How do we practice to get better at this? Do you guys have any thoughts about that? I think what you described is a situation where there just is not what we would think of inappropriately as the freedom to be connected to everyone, as the freedom to engage with all this literature online

that would give us the interpretation of a particular term within the Greek. There is, in that, the conditions within which space and time are afforded to contemplate things, to actually be separated from the immediacy and the pressing demands of, of whatever the driving conversation of the day is, the social demands of a situation, the demands of work and constantly being accessible by email, having the constant pull of that sort of leash upon the neck of our attention, just drawing us towards back to the work that we hoped would leave behind when we came home.

there is with those conditions, I think, a constant pressure to squeeze out leisure. And what we need to do often is to create spaces very deliberately, where formerly spaces would have existed naturally. And so that requires, for instance, disconnecting from devices for significant periods of the day, spending time reading in an activity that requires you to withdraw a bit from social activity and presence and just spend some time by yourself in a book. It allows you to withdraw from the pressing immediacy of the immediacy of the spoken word, for instance, or the immediacy of text online, which is generally text that's been written within the last few hours. Whereas when reading a book, it's something that's, it's text that has a bit more of a latency to it. It's not

as immediate, it's inert. And as a result, it gives us the space and the time within which to contemplate and reflect without the sort of pressures we would experience otherwise. So I find a lot of what I need to do is to withdraw myself from those conditions that so easily define our modern lives and give myself space and time that formerly would have been enjoyed. Now, this is even harder, I think for us, because we feel, and I think most of us remember from our childhood, the feeling of boredom of time that just stretches on with nothing to fill it. And the fact that we have devices and activities that will fill that time of boredom with distractions means that we are constantly having recourse to these things in order to avoid the discomfort of not knowing what to do,

of not having something to fill our attention. And so when we find ourselves in the queue for some event or in a supermarket, we fiddle with our devices and our instinctive urge is to take out something to distract ourselves. Whereas formerly, that would be time that it's not necessarily leisure, it's being filled with something that is maybe equipping us for a certain posture towards our time that is conducive to leisure in other contexts. And so we don't have those conditions that are conducive to leisure. And so leisure finds it difficult to arise. And so we need to provide deliberately what would formally have been enjoyed naturally. And there also needs to be a very

considerable reawakening of our understanding of what leisure is so that with the conditions provided we might actually engage in it. The mere presence of those conditions as we should know from our childhood do not naturally produce leisure.

The boredom that we experienced did not necessarily lead us to use our time well but at the same time if we don't experience that sort of time where we do feel that initial discomfort at the very least, we will not have the conditions within which to engage in true leisure. Christian, to answer your question and to piggyback on Alistair, I think the disconnecting from your phone and reading and so forth, but also doing this in company with other people,

I think it's very important, maybe not literally always in company with other people, but in concert with them, like moving heaven and earth to surround yourself with friends who make you not having a smartphone or you disconnecting from your smartphone regularly a normal thing and not a like pathological, antisocial thing. I feel like my family and I have been so blessed

to have a sort of small community around us who are interested in these kinds of intensely transgressive activities. I can tell you how intensely transgressive it feels to not have a smartphone or to insist on disconnecting from smartphones and so forth. And then the other thing is like the wonderful thing about all this is that at the end of the day, after a sort of painful withdrawal period, these older forms of leisure are fun. You know, it's intensely fun to get together with your friends and just feast and drink and converse. and you realize, oh, I see now why this is not in fact detracting from my work.

Rather, I am working precisely so as to enable this. This is the thing that it's all for in a more real sense than the work is for, you know, making money and having a retirement account or whatever. And so, you know, being able to add that sort of social convivial aspect of it to find friends who are willing to do this with you. And inevitably, there's always this awkwardness that you have to push through with your circle of friends where you say, we're going to try this. We're going to actually read a poem after dinner or we're going to have the kids recite a poem or we're going to get together and read 12th night or, you know, whatever. And it's like, it's awkward.

It seems pretentious. Are we larping? And then you just push through it and you realize this is so great. Why aren't we doing this more? And it doesn't have to be any of those highbrow things. they could play board games or whatever it is. But I think if you're doing it in company with other people, I think one important aspects is your kids are going to see it,

and they're going to see it's not just your own weird nuclear family culture. This is a thing that's real, it's possible, and that they are attracted to it. And that, I think, is also a crucial piece. Thank you so much to both of you for coming on. And as we wrap up, I'd love to hear from both of you, how people can find out more about your work and get in contact with some of your writings or projects. And also just one or two ways in which you've found this book,

an inspiration or something that has shaped your own practice. Well, so I have a website that's just my first and last name.com. The, well, I should first of all, mentioned that I have a publishing company called Little Word that makes Bible board books for kids, specifically trying to make a biblical symbolism and typology very natural and just easy to grasp for little kids so that they grow up thinking like there's nothing, there's nothing surprising that one mountain in the Bible, for example, might typologically overlay with another one. That's kind of the long-term goal. We have three books out so far,

one about the symbolism of the Levitical Ordin, priesthood ordination right, one about the forefaces of the cherubim. And there's a third one. It just came out called How to Worship, and it's aimed at slightly older kids. It's a paperback handbook called How to Worship, and it's kind of a kid's guide to the liturgy.

But the project I have that's most specifically connected to this is a print-only zine called GoodWork. And there's so many things about it that make it fit with this particular conversation. I started it for a variety of reasons, but primarily it kind of the – I had the idea a long, long time ago, but it was really 2020, the COVID year that kind of pushed me. forward into it. As I think 2020 did for a lot of people, there was all these back burner projects that people were like, well, now's the time. And just push forward into them. But good work comes out incredibly sporadically as I am able to raise or save money to print it. It goes all over the country. And it is the issues are loosely.

themed around very random topics. And they are intentionally not topical, like, to the present day. It's not intended to be a commentary on current political event. But I do think it's relevant to people that they get some, you know, they spend all day on the computer. They're used to getting their reading material online. And then they get this little tiny magazine in the mail that has some odd little short stories and articles and poems. And there's something about, I've heard from people, something about just getting that in the mail, maybe flipping it open right then, maybe setting it on the bedside table.

But it's just there. It's not going to scroll away, like as more and more content comes in. it doesn't get pushed at the bottom of your timeline. It's just sitting there waiting for you to discover it, you know, in a week and a year. And ideally, the content remains evergreen in that time. So you can subscribe to that at goodworkmag.com. It is free, although donations are appreciated to offset the cost of printing. For me, yes, the article has,

I'm sorry, the essay, leisure-based culture has been profoundly influential on nearly everything that I do in some way or another. Oh, let me mention in passing just on the note that Christian just said, I have a little two-year-old daughter who's obsessed with two of the three little word books that were mentioned and regularly asked to have them read to her in her garbled English. But anyways, and also a big fan of good work. and enjoy whenever it comes. So for my own work, I think probably there's one piece in particular that I wrote that really was attempting to take the PEEPER essay and apply it to the issue of music, music technology,

modern music. That was for the lamp. It was called the alienated man's guide to modern music. And I really wanted to make the claim that actually with modern music, by which I mean, any kind of music which you consume through headphones, through speakers, that that music is a central site, perhaps the central site of acedia, of the kind of the oppressive, what did you say, Alistair, the riveting of the dome on man's experience of the world. It's this oppressive tyranny of work, what I call the beat, and that that is felt in every genre of every

kind of music, and that that is intimately connected with the ways in which we are servile with respect to our work in modern economic contexts. And also, I gestured only a very, it was a very grim, pessimistic, grumpy piece written in my most pessimistic, grumpy mood. And so I only very vaguely gesture at the end of what I think the solution is, which is polyphony and music which you yourself participate in and so forth. But because music is very near and dear to my heart, that's the one that I would point people to. I don't have a website, so I can't point you to that. But that piece, I think if listeners are interested in knowing more about my writing and about this topic,

that one, maybe go to that one. And other than that, yes, I don't have a. any good way of getting in touch with me, but, uh, but, you know, maybe I'll come back on this podcast someday. You also, did you want to be the director of the todayam program. Oh, yes, that's right. Of course. And it seems to me, part of what you're doing is bringing together elements of the

Piper essay and also Johann Huzingers and work on Homo Ludens. The idea there is a certain sort of play at the heart of society. and play is related to freedom. Play is related to the, it needs to have a distinction from ordinary life. And it's very similar to the sorts of things that are being discussed in the leisure article. That's right.

Something about music and worship and your work with Theopolis, I think those elements really come together. Let me quickly pitch your listeners. Yes, I direct the Todayam program at the Theopolis Institute. And if you are interested in music and liturgy at all, I hope that you'll consider check out the website there.

That's a good way of keeping track of my work. Thank you both so much for coming on. I hope to have both back at some point discussed with Brian Motes, having a discussion about little word books. It would be great to hear more about that project and the vision for education that it involves. And John, I've had you on before, and I'm sure I'll have you on several times again. God bless and thank you all for listening.