Doing Nothing Right

In high school, my friend (and sometimes rival) was a big Bertrand Russell fan. One might think more red-blooded sixteen-year-old boys would be down with a spunky moral philosopher who died in 1970, but no. I think he was the only one. Despite his best efforts to share Russell’s work with me, I never got into him — probably because my friend (and sometimes rival) was mostly enthusiastic about Russell’s atheism and, in those days, I was the opposite of an atheist.

Had my friend led with Russell’s “In Praise of Idleness,” which appeared in Harper’s Magazine in 1932, I might have had a different reaction. “I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached,” Russell wrote. “I hope that after reading the following pages the leaders of the Y.M.C.A. will start a campaign to...