The wisdom of a learned man cometh by opportunity of leisure: and he that hath little business shall become wise.
—Ecclesiasticus 38:24
When nineteenth-century Western colonists and researchers encountered supposedly “primitive” societies like the Samoans in southwest Polynesia, they marveled at how much free time the people seemed to have. “Time is plentiful in the South Seas, and cares are few,” wrote the American ethnologist William Churchill. “Life has no engagement so important that the islander will not cancel it at once on the plea of sport.”11xWilliam Churchill quoted in Hilmi Ibrahim, Leisure and Society: A Comparative Approach (Dubuque, IA: William C. Brown, 1991), 55.
This preference for leisure over work was hardly unique to Pacific Islanders. Urban and rural artisans in preindustrial England also took it as a given that more free time was better than work, even when more work promised greater monetary returns. When the prices they could command for their goods rose, they saw it as an opportunity not to amass wealth but to work less.22xAugustine quoted in Paul Heintzman, Leisure and Spirituality: Biblical, Historical, and Contemporary Perspectives (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015), 66–67.
In this limited respect, they were much like the elites of antiquity and the Middle Ages. In the Athens of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the idea of working beyond what was necessary was abhorrent. Likewise for the Roman elites, though their precise views on leisure differed from those of the Greeks. In both cultures, the word for leisure seems to have come first, with work and business framed as nonleisure—scholé versus aschole in Greek, otium versus negotium in Latin.
Similarly, in later centuries, following the rise of Christendom, religious thinkers generally favored leisure over work (vita contemplativa as opposed to vita activa), because that was how one drew closer to God. Work, after all, was punishment for humankind’s original sin. “The obligations of charity make us undertake righteous business [negotium],” wrote Augustine, but “if no one lays the burden upon us, we should give ourselves up to leisure [otium], to the perception and contemplation of truth.”33xAugustine quoted in Paul Heintzman, Leisure and Spirituality: Biblical, Historical, and Contemporary Perspectives (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015), 66–67.
All were expressing a leisure ethic: a worldview in which a preference for free time and intrinsically motivated pursuits is accompanied by an understanding of how time can best be spent.