Great minds require more idleness, anthropologist tells graduands

Social anthropologist Mark-Anthony Falzon mounted a defence of "idleness" in one of the more entertaining of orations to 2013's batch of graduands at the University of Malta.

"My proposal to you today is that there is some argument to be made for actively seeking a work-life imbalance, with the scales tipped firmly in favour of the second," Prof. Falzon, head of the sociology department, started off in his speech, instantly warning objectors that he was "dead serious" about his proposition to students and graduates to "invest in idle leisure at the expense of work".

Not hedonism, not "pointless lazing about", Falzon said. "The type of idleness I have in mind is both active and productive. Active, because it posits idleness as a deliberate set of choices, a carefully-planned and cultivated life project if you will. Productive, because it is an essential component of a scholarly and creative mindset."

In one of the most acute observations on university stipends - although one which will see economists wince at - Falzon suggested that generous student stipends allowed the Maltese to stay "in the lap of comfort and idle leisure. Generous stipends mean that students don't have to work for a living... and dedicate their lives to other things" - such as, he goes on to remark, intellectual development.

To many Greek and Roman thinkers, Falzon remarked, leisure went hand in hand with scholarship and artistic creativity. He cites the Greek word sckholē - leisure - that from it the word 'school' is derived from.

"Idling and leisure ought to be enthusiastically cultivated since they lead to just the sort of things our Faculty values. The news, you see, keeps getting better and better."

Falzon also rued what he felt was the lack of free time for children to simply do nothing. "Idling, that short-lived and rare privilege of our own misspent childhood, is in danger of extinction as waking time is crammed into an ever tighter straitjacket of structures.

"'Extra-curricular' is no longer a loose byword for freedom. Rather it is something that goes on a kind of CV as part of the school-leaving certificate, provided it is spent within structures that are formally recognised by the state."

"I met one parent the other day who told me she was livid that her son's talent for painting won't go anywhere near the blessed school-leaving certificate. That's because he spends his evenings painting at home but refuses to go to art school to have his talent stamped and signed for. The best reply I could come up with was Francis Bacon's advice to young painters never to go to art school. Art school was for him a kind of slaughterhouse of creativity and individuality. Bacon was no wastrel by the way. He was a prolific painter whose works now sell for tens of millions (there, that number again)."     

So how does one go about pursuing idleness in life, and maximizing its benefits? Falzon offered two ways. The first, obvious proposition is to work less - not at the expense of say, actually carrying out heart operations or teaching kids - but work less on "writing reports about heart operations that go to gather dust in a filing cabinet" or doing "too much teaching."

The second involves finding a specialised space for it. Not the TV room, however. "Every home should have its dolittle corners where one can read, talk, write or simply sit around - preferably not while zapping away pointlessly at a television set."