Philosophers do not often write about their fathers. Perhaps this is because the fathers of philosophers are not typically attuned to philosophy. Philosophy is nothing if it is not critical, and critique often serves as an escape from paternal principles and values. Conversely, the virtue of open-mindedness is not usually associated with fatherhood. More often, fatherhood is associated with the laying down of law. This made my father a kind of anomaly.

Conversations with my father were philosophically engaged. He was the commanding father of the law who could not stand to be contradicted, but he was also the open-minded critic who absorbed the world around him and wanted to make it better. His way was the way of critique, but one was required to follow his path and grasp his reasoning. This did not always make him easy to get along with.

So many conversations with my father happened in the car—and later, the black Ford Ranger pickup truck that I effectively inherited when he passed away. This was almost two years after the diagnosis of a rare melanoma, which caused the brain hemorrhage that ended his life. Our last conversations were often directed by the practical matter of planning for his death. However, my father refused to let the disease limit or define him. In a single day, he could be found writing at his desk, seeing doctors, doing yardwork, and hauling garbage to the dump. True to his spirit, he was active to the very end.

Throughout his life, he accomplished many things. He lectured internationally, wrote screenplays, ran marathons, rode horses, developed skill in carpentry, and received multiple domestic and international patents for inventions that had nothing to do with his academic career. As a longtime professor and chair in the School of Education at Boston University, he was distinguished by his leadership of a program in leisure studies. Its core teaching was found in the understanding that leisure is the basis of civil society. Without leisure, creativity and happiness are impossible. The ceaseless demand for productive labor leads to burnout. Eventually, this causes a society to collapse. In everything he did, the question of leisure was not far from his mind.

This means, of course, that my own mind has never been far from the question of leisure and its importance to individuals and societies. Ultimately, these conversations led me to pursue (and finally abandon) a career in academic philosophy, with the understanding of my father, who knew the teaching of Aristotle: that leisure is required for contemplation—and the life of contemplation is the highest form of human flourishing. Today, the academy is a poor defender of leisure.

There are several reasons for this. Mainly, the university is overrun by a system of prestige production, where prestige is quantified by such things as number of publications, number of citations, number of research grants, and number of national and international speeches. Teaching is largely relegated to wide-eyed graduate students and the expendable adjuncts who volunteer to be exploited by a system that aims to run them down and retire them. At the same time, the liberal arts are on the wane, while investments in computer science grow exponentially. No amount of collective action will change the labor dynamics of the university system until society at large demands different values—or the universities themselves are replaced by the ubiquitous AI agents their students are busy building.

Among our last conversations in the truck, my father proposed an idea for an essay he wished to write (or wanted me to write) in advance of the US presidential election in November. He was deeply concerned about the metastasis of right-wing extremism in American society, and he understood how widening social divisions were conducive to authoritarianism. Returning to the importance of leisure, he recognized the threat that authoritarianism poses to human freedom and what he liked to call “the optimization of human potential.” The assault on women’s reproductive rights, gerrymandering of voting districts, education gaps, food deserts, technological unemployment, manipulation of the courts, extremes of identity politics, and rampant policing of thought and speech are all concrete examples that cause people to feel powerless against a system they cannot control, despite the American ideal that regards democratic action as the best safeguard of human freedom. Today, democratic agency often gives way to pessimism and complacency. Distrust of government leads to the destruction of government and its replacement by concentrations of capital.

Evidently, Frank Zappa was on the right track when he called politics “the entertainment branch of industry.”[1] For the industrialists, like the masses, politics serves as a useful distraction from the expansion of technological servitude in the age of automation. It was urgent to my father that people understand that leisure is on the ballot. Directly put, the rise of authoritarianism in the age of automation is a direct threat to our discretionary use of time and money—that is, our liberty. One need only look at China’s social credit system that monitors and scores citizens’ behavior, mass surveillance programs like the UK’s TEMPORA and the US’s PRISM that undermine civil liberties by indiscriminately collecting vast troves of communications data, or Russia’s crackdown on dissent, which led to the imprisonment and death of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Moreover, it is a paradox of capitalist economy that increases in discretionary time and income are no less dangerous when people fail to grasp the distinction between freedom from productive labor and the correct understanding of leisure.

According to my father, the meaning of leisure is discovered in the moral meaning of our choices. In the context of democratic capitalist society, the meaning of leisure is discovered in our choices about the discretionary use of time and money. To illustrate this, he recalled an old experiment in which a monkey is given a jar full of nuts. Motivated by appetite alone, the monkey finds its hand trapped in the narrow opening of the jar when it tries to grasp the nuts all at once. This suggests that freedom requires reason and moderation. Like the monkey, we trap ourselves when we mistake the delights of consumption for the real meaning of freedom. In reflecting on the moral meaning of our choices, we discover the meaning of freedom in the choices we make about how to live. Deliberation and reflection are likewise essential to the health of democratic society, which requires citizens to reflect on public and private goods. It follows that leisure is the basis of democracy. Without leisure, democratic society is destined to fail.

This understanding of leisure is inspired by Aristotle. The Greek word is scholē, from which the English language derives the words scholar and school. This is likely due to how Aristotle viewed leisure as an opportunity for contemplation and invention, exemplified by the invention of mathematics in ancient Egypt, where the priestly class was allowed time for intellectual pursuits. From the Latin verb licēre, “to be permitted,” leisure permits time for study. The connection between scholē and licēre stems from their shared emphasis on freedom and contemplation, the conditions of invention, free from the need to procure the necessities of life. This is why my father coined the term moral leisure, as something distinct from vacant time or the type of freedom that indulges in amusements. When we confuse amusements engineered by the culture industry with the real meaning of leisure, leisure itself is turned into a commodity and our liberty becomes the plaything of industry. The kind of rest that merely restores one’s ability to work cannot count as leisure. It rather functions as an extension of the labor economy. Ultimately, to safeguard democratic liberty we require the invention of democratic leisure.

This was one of my father’s big ideas: the need to make leisure available to everyone regardless of age, aptitude, ability, or social status. This idea could be expressed as a right to inutility, a right not to be useful. I’m sure he would object to the association of leisure with uselessness. He valued active participation over passive spectating, purpose over idleness, constant questioning over the flight from ideas. Over years, we had running conversations about the problems of mass culture, the economic juggernaut of sports entertainment, and the intrinsic value of various team and individual sports. He disliked how competitive team sports tend to encourage cultures of conflict, sometimes leading to violence involving athletes and spectators alike. Combat sports were (and are) uniquely problematic because they aim precisely at incapacitating an opponent.

By contrast, moral leisure aims at the optimization of human potential. It does not make someone useless in the way that watching race cars zoom around a track makes a person useless. However thrilling we may find the intoxicating mixture of speed, sound, and automotive smells, does the quality of enjoyment merit the unfettered combustion of fossil fuels and related risks to environmental safety? What values are revealed by the sport itself and the culture that surrounds it? These are the kinds of questions my father liked to ask. Because moral leisure presupposes reflection on how we use our time and money, it reveals the value of our values. It thereby opens up the possibility for more mindful ways of living.

Today, the specter of authoritarianism haunts democratic societies across the liberal West. From the enemies of freedom in the East to the domestic leaders who flaunt the rule of law, our liberties are under assault in a multitude of ways, not least by the machinery of consumer capitalism, which seeks to steer our thoughts through the algorithmic administration of our lives. Again, this is why my father thought leisure is on the ballot. In a deliberative democracy, the best defense of freedom is the power of deliberation—and this requires leisure, not doomscrolling or mindless entertainment. That is to say, leisure itself is the best defense of freedom. But leisure is precisely under threat when the practice of deliberation gives way to ceaseless work and fatal impulses that trade the time of critical reflection for illusory freedoms and instant gratification.

My father accomplished many things in his life because he was a man of leisure—because he took leisure seriously. He did this because he knew a better world is possible. Through his habits and activities, he wanted to show how the world could be a better place. But this future is only possible if we take leisure seriously. Safeguarding our liberty requires we do the same. If we desire the freedom to use our time and money as we wish, to choose how we wish to live, we require the invention of democratic leisure. The choice is on the ballot. This was the wisdom of my father.

 

Gerald Sterling Fain: In Memoriam (1947–2024)

Notes:

[1] Frank Zappa, The Real Frank Zappa Book, New York 1990, p. 322.