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英语二完形填空源文地址：
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/06/would-a-world-without-work-be-so-bad/488711/
Would a Work-Free World Be So Bad?
Fears of civilization-wide idleness are based too much on the downsides of
being unemployed in a society premised on the concept of employment.
230_161224165213FryGliD7WVhu9SRe51.png
A 1567 painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder depicts a mythical land of
plenty, where people grow idle in the absence of work. Wikimedia
Ilana E. Strauss
Jun 28, 2016
People have speculated for centuries about a future without work, and today
is no different, with academics, writers, and activists once again warning that
technology is replacing human workers. Some imagine that the coming work-free
world will be defined by inequality: A few wealthy people will own all the
capital, and the masses will struggle in an impoverished wasteland.
A different, less paranoid, and not mutually exclusive prediction holds
that the future will be a wasteland of a different sort, one characterized by
purposelessness: Without jobs to give their lives meaning, people will simply
become lazy and depressed. Indeed, today’s unemployed don’t seem to be having a
great time. One Gallup poll found that 20 percent of Americans who have been
unemployed for at least a year report having depression, double the rate for
working Americans. Also, some research suggests that the explanation for rising
rates of mortality, mental-health problems, and addiction among poorly-educated,
middle-aged people is a shortage of well-paid jobs. Another study shows that
people are often happier at work than in their free time. Perhaps this is why many worry about the agonizing dullness of a jobless future.
But it doesn’t necessarily follow from findings like these that a world
without work would be filled with malaise. Such visions are based on the
downsides 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 yield
strikingly 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 lecturer
at the National University of Ireland in Galway who has written about a world
without work. “Global surveys find that the vast majority of people are unhappy
at work.”
These days, because leisure time is relatively scarce for most workers,
people use their free time to counterbalance the intellectual and emotional
demands of their jobs. “When I come home from a hard day’s work, I often feel
tired,” Danaher says, adding, “In a world in which I don’t have to work, I might
feel rather different”—perhaps different enough to throw himself into a hobby or
a passion project with the intensity usually reserved for professional
matters.
Having a job can provide a measure of financial stability, but in addition
to stressing over how to cover life’s necessities, today’s jobless are
frequently made to feel like social outcasts. “People who avoid work are viewed
as parasites and leeches,” Danaher says. Perhaps as a result of this cultural
attitude, for most people, self-esteem and identity are tied up intricately with
their job, or lack of job.
Plus, in many modern-day societies, unemployment can also be downright
boring. 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 there
aren’t many places without entry fees where adults can meet new people or come
up with ways to entertain one another.
The roots of this boredom may run even deeper. Peter Gray, a professor of
psychology at Boston College who studies the concept of play, thinks that if
work disappeared tomorrow, people might be at a loss for things to do, growing
bored and depressed because they have forgotten how to play. “We teach children
a distinction between play and work,” Gray explains. “Work is something that you
don’t want to do but you have to do.” He says this training, which starts in
school, eventually “drills the play” out of many children, who grow up to be
adults 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 a
problem that never seems to plague young children. “There are no three-year-olds
that are going to be lazy and depressed because they don’t have a structured
activity,” he says.
But need it be this way? Work-free societies are more than just a thought
experiment—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, an
anthropologist at Bentley University, in Massachusetts, studied a group of
hunter-gathers in the Amazon called the Pirahã 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 way
we do.”
“It’s a pretty laid-back life most of the time,” Everett says. He described
a typical day for the Pirahã: A man might get up, spend a few hours canoeing and
fishing, have a barbecue, go for a swim, bring fish back to his family, and play
until the evening. Such subsistence living is surely not without its own set of
worries, but the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins argued in a 1968 essay that hunter-gathers belonged to “the original affluent society,” seeing as they only
“worked” a few hours a day; Everett estimates that Pirahã adults on average work
about 20 hours a week (not to mention without bosses peering over their
shoulders). Meanwhile, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average
employed American with children works about nine hours a day.
Does this leisurely life lead to the depression and purposelessness seen
among so many of today’s unemployed? “I’ve never seen anything remotely like
depression there, except people who are physically ill,” Everett says. “They
have a blast. They play all the time.” While many may consider work a staple of
human life, work as it exists today is a relatively new invention in the course
of thousands of years of human culture. “We think it’s bad to just sit around
with nothing to do,” says Everett. “For the Pirahã, it’s quite a desirable
state.”
Gray likens these aspects of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to the carefree
adventures of many children in developed countries, who at some point in life
are 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, free
time 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 that
time—mixed work and play in their daily lives. There were no managers or
overseers, so they would switch fluidly between working, taking breaks, joining
in neighborhood games, playing pranks, and spending time with family and
friends. 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 or
so days a year.
This all changed, writes Cross, during the Industrial Revolution, which
replaced farms with factories and farmers with employees. Factory owners created
a more rigidly scheduled environment that clearly divided work from play.
Meanwhile, clocks—which were becoming widespread at that time—began to give life
a quicker pace, and religious leaders, who traditionally endorsed most
festivities, started associating leisure with sin and tried to replace rowdy
festivals with sermons.
As workers started moving into cities, families no longer spent their days
together on the farm. Instead, men worked in factories, women stayed home or
worked in factories, and children went to school, stayed home, or worked in
factories too. During the workday, families became physically separated, which
affected the way people entertained themselves: Adults stopped playing
“childish” games and sports, and the streets were mostly wiped clean of fun, as
middle- and upper-class families found working-class activities like
cockfighting and dice games distasteful. Many such diversions were soon
outlawed.
With workers’ old outlets for play having disappeared in a haze of factory
smoke, many of them turned to new, more urban ones. Bars became a refuge where
tired workers drank and watched live shows with singing and dancing. If free
time means beer and TV to a lot of Americans, this might be why.
At times, developed societies have, for a privileged few, produced
lifestyles that were nearly as play-filled as hunter-gatherers’. Throughout
history, aristocrats who earned their income simply by owning land spent only a
tiny portion of their time minding financial exigencies. According to Randolph
Trumbach, a professor of history at Baruch College, 18th-century English
aristocrats spent their days visiting friends, eating elaborate meals, hosting
salons, hunting, writing letters, fishing, and going to church. They also spent
a good deal of time participating in politics, without pay. Their children would
learn to dance, play instruments, speak foreign languages, and read Latin.
Russian nobles frequently became intellectuals, writers, and artists. “As a
17th-century aristocrat said, ‘We sit down to eat and rise up to play, for what
is a gentleman but his pleasure?’” Trumbach says.
It’s unlikely that a world without work would be abundant enough to provide
everyone with such lavish lifestyles. But Gray insists that injecting any amount
of additional play into people’s lives would be a good thing, because, contrary
to that 17th-century aristocrat, play is about more than pleasure. Through play,
Gray says, children (as well as adults) learn how to strategize, create new
mental connections, express their creativity, cooperate, overcome narcissism,
and get along with other people. “Male mammals typically have difficulty living
in close proximity to each other,” he says, and play’s harmony-promoting
properties may explain why it came to be so central to hunter-gatherer
societies. While most of today’s adults may have forgotten how to play, Gray
doesn’t believe it’s an unrecoverable skill: It’s not uncommon, he says, for
grandparents to re-learn the concept of play after spending time with their
young grandchildren.
When people ponder the nature of a world without work, they often transpose
present-day assumptions about labor and leisure onto a future where they might
no longer apply; if automation does end up rendering a good portion of human
labor unnecessary, such a society might exist on completely different terms than
societies do today.
So what might a work-free U.S. look like? Gray has some ideas. School, for
one thing, would be very different. “I think our system of schooling would
completely fall by the wayside,” says Gray. “The primary purpose of the
educational system is to teach people to work. I don’t think anybody would want
to put our kids through what we put our kids through now.” Instead, Gray
suggests that teachers could build lessons around what students are most curious
about. Or, perhaps, formal schooling would disappear altogether.
Trumbach, meanwhile, wonders if schooling would become more about teaching
children to be leaders, rather than workers, through subjects like philosophy
and rhetoric. He also thinks that people might participate in political and
public life more, like aristocrats of yore. “If greater numbers of people were
using their leisure to run the country, that would give people a sense of
purpose,” says Trumbach.
Social life might look a lot different too. Since the Industrial
Revolution, mothers, fathers, and children have spent most of their waking hours
apart. 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 a
little optimistically. “When a mom is having a baby, everybody in the
neighborhood would want to help that mom.” Researchers have found that having
close relationships is the number-one predictor of happiness, and the social
connections that a work-free world might enable could well displace the
aimlessness that so many futurists predict.
In general, without work, Gray thinks people would be more likely to pursue
their passions, get involved in the arts, and visit friends. Perhaps leisure
would cease to be about unwinding after a period of hard work, and would instead
become a more colorful, varied thing. “We wouldn’t have to be as self-oriented
as we think we have to be now,” he says. “I believe we would become more
human.”
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发表于 2016-12-24 19:53:04