Joseph Cardinal Höffner CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ... - Ordo Socialis

§ 3 Work and Leisure
1. The Problem of Free Time.
Industrial development has not only provided people ever more richly with goods and services,
but has constantly shortened working time simultaneously, so that one often speaks of
the 'coming age of free time'. Both the daily and weekly working time and the length of one's
entire working life have become shorter. Nevertheless, free time is not without its problems.
a) More Free Time or more Consumption ?
If placed before the dilemma 'more free time or more consumption „ many will wish both at
the same time. The modem economy's increased productivity does in fact render it possible
for both to be attained simultaneously in a certain measure. Others will resolve to forego an
increase of free time in order to be able by this means to raise their living standard even more
(i.e. disproportionately) -a disturbing approach that springs from an overvaluation of the living
standard. Seldom in history have people worked so much and so doggedly as in the age of
industrialism, an attitude that would have been considered insane in other periods. In the preindustrial
West, there were for centuries around fifty holidays besides Sundays, so that the
'five day week' was operative, since on the average a holiday fell in almost every week. As is
generally known, this was one of the most serious objections raised against the Church in the
work-crazed nineteenth century, to which it must still be added that the religious character of
the holidays led people to use their leisure in a meaningful way. Today, the over- emphasis on
living standards closes off access to meaningful free time for many people. The widespread
readiness to work overtime and on Sundays points in the same direction. Not a few seek to
shift the focal point of their lives to a constantly increasing free time devoted to amusement,
but complain at the same time that the pursuit of pleasure leads, not to joy, but to disgust in
the long run, in accord with the cynical and shocking words of Charles Baudelaire: „One has
to work, if not from a taste for it, then out of despair. For, in the final analysis, work is less
boring than having fun.“ 96 The ethos of work and the ethos of free time condition one another.
b) The Free Time Powers
Also fraught with problems is the growing influence of the so-called 'free time powers' to
which the entertainment industry and the 'culture consumption industry' especially belong.
Their advocates point to the fact that they are dependent on the taste and will of the 'masses'
as the new Maecenas and that they must 'go along' with mass taste purely for reasons of profitability.
The moviegoer, for example, does not want to see any exalted work of art, but to flee
from everyday life into the dream and magic of the white screen where he or she can laugh
and cry, love and hate, and satisfy his or her curiosity at the same time. The free time milieu
has become an important new market. Many people are susceptible to the suggestive methods
of the modem free time powers, so that the inner freedom of free time is being threatened.
Even if it is wrong to generalize what is most conspicuous on the streets and to present it as
the way of life of the whole, free time has nevertheless become an important social problem in
the developed industrial society.
2. Free Time as Task.
Even if all of man's time, his work time and his free time, must be characterized by freedom,
leisure is nevertheless related to freedom in a particular way. For in leisure there lies a double
freedom: first of all, freedom from work in the narrower sense. Man needs the break, the evening,
the Sunday, the holidays, the vacation. There is also a second one: resting is supposed to
give man the resilience to use the remaining free time as life-enhancing leisure, i.e. as leisure
96 Baudelaires intime Tagebücher; Bildnisse und Zeichnungen (Munich, 1920), 42.
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