Idea festival exposes a parallel universe

Much of a recent week was lived in a parallel universe.

It was a world of ideas, hope, imagination, dreams, the impossible, concepts beyond the status quo and although exciting in the extreme, it was tiring.

The latter, of course, was not unexpected for once we step beyond what is familiar and embrace the new, we find ourselves entangled with fresh intellectual rigour and through just being different, it induces both physical and mental weariness.

Contemporary society does not encourage us to abandon the familiar rather; the market system prefers us to have a somewhat narrow view of value, worth and the causes of contentment to ensure the mental poverty of most enriches the elite.

Spending much of the week and the University of Melbourne’s biennial Festival of Ideas is an indulgence; gastronomy for the mind, a reminder of how little we understand, how remote we are from wisdom, knowledge and intelligence and how distant we are from having any real grasp of how, what, where and when.

Some would argue such pursuits irrelevant to their lives for they know who won the footy finals, what’s filling the movie theatres, what’s on the television tonight and what they need to do to ensure the pay checks keep rolling in.

But life is more than that, it is more than bread and circuses for human flourishing is about engaging with an idea that is bigger than you, an idea that both expands and demands more of your thinking and it is an idea that at first seems without rationale, but then becomes the solution.

Many things now are humanity’s staples were once ideas resident on the fringes of society or only thought about in moments of lucid madness.

We need more such festivals and maybe that is a project for the new Committee of Shepparton – Shepparton’s own Festival of ideas.

Ideas, no matter how vague, poorly articulated or inadequately thought through were not, according to the founder of Minds at Work, Jason Clarke, to be discounted or allowed to wither for all should be considered and welcomed to the conversation.

Victor Hugo.

Shepparton is in urgent need of a new idea as the 20^th century inspirational drivers of several decades are dying and maybe a universe in which fresh ideas are abundant will be found at our own ideas skirmish.

Melbourne has its Festival of ideas, Sydney its Festival of Dangerous Ideas and we should have our own agora, that ancient Greece marketplace-like concept where people met talked, considered and determined for their community, the best way ahead.

It was Frenchman, Victor Hugo who said: “One can resist the invasion of armies; one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.”

Let’s initiate that “invasion” and find a new idea for Shepparton.

Our sustainable future depends on us differentiating between idleness and leisure

An artist's impression of
the late Betrand Russell.

Most are unable to understand how, can or why we need to work fewer hours, just as most are equally unable to differentiate between idleness and leisure.

Idleness is just that; the human psyche is sleeping, it is in neutral going neither forward or backwards, just maintaining the status quo, which when examined critically is about deterioration.

Leisure, coloured by many connotations, is contrastingly active both physically and, critically, intellectually.

Working fewer hours is not about ensuring easy access to idleness rather, it allows people more time to engage in leisure, enhancing their well-being.

It was in the 1930s the economist John Maynard Keynes came to the conclusion that the work of the capitalist system would largely be done when human wants and needs (terms he wrongly interchanged) were satiated.

Keynes thought that by now those of us in developed nations would have enough to satisfy all our needs without having to work more than three hours a day.

He was both right and wrong: we have more than satisfied our needs, at least in the wealthy developed nations, but he underestimated the skill and talent of the capitalistic demigods that have unlocked humans’ wants, submerging the leisure and pleasure that arises from working fewer hours.

British philosopher, the late Betrand Russell, said, just a few years after Keynes observations about working fewer hours that while leisure is undoubtedly pleasant, “men would not know how to fill out their days if they had only four hours of work out of the twenty-four”.

“In so far as this is true in the modern world, it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true in any earlier period,” he said.

Russell said there had once been a capacity among people for light-heartedness and play, which had been extinguished by the cult of efficiency.

“The pleasures of urban populations,” he said “have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on.

“This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part,” he said.

Writing in the 19^th Century, philosopher, political economist and civil servant John Stuart Mill, said he was not “charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other’s heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human life, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases  of industrial progress”.

That was then, this is now and everything, but nothing has changed.