too much time -- a royal solution

We’re heading for a crisis, it’s a coming. Pretty soon there’ll be no work for humans, machines will do it all. Ditch diggers, the proverbial bottom rung, are gone already, one guy pulls levers while a digger made of iron does the work of several. Robots move up the ladder fixing food, performing surgery, doing the taxes. Before long they’ll be driving cars and trucks, and that’s when it becomes seriously awkward. Way more than half the jobs for men in america involve driving something, and what are all those guys going to do? 

We’ve had experience supporting people who don’t work, who aren’t productive, and it hasn’t been pretty. Warehoused people don’t excel. Back home they have a tendency to sit up in the government housing, front brains flickering out on prescription medicinals, watching sit-coms from the fifties, it’s all fuzzy, they don’t care. What happens to rest of us when there are no jobs? The old ball and chain that earns our bread helps us maintain focus, organizes the week, and presents us with achievable goals to work toward. One day some sleepless plastic and metal bot bumps you out of your job, and it will be there ahead of you by the time you retrain. What’s the incentive to rise in the morning, comb the hair, exercise, without work? It’s a fierce problem, socially as big as global warming, and solutions haven’t even been proposed.

Prince Charles, a lovely fella, hosted a documentary about painters among the royal family, ‘royal paintbox’, pbs archive, the useless people at the other end of the spectrum. They’ve seen what happens, over generations, to people who never have to make their bed, wash a dish, or saddle their own horse, and they search for meaning, for mission, anything to avoid the rot of the indulgent, unproductive life. Some, it seems, turned to art. As Charles leaves through a portfolio, you might catch yourself thinking some of these people, both sexes, where really good, like it’s a surprise. Charles explains the ability to sketch made it possible for the royals to recall the exotic landscapes, cities, and peoples they’d seen visiting the global empire, and it got serious from there. Not likely to lead the cavalry charge, subdue an uprising, or even bully their neighbors, anymore, the royals found in art a way to develop and demonstrate character, and to match themselves against the finest painters among the commoners whose hard-won accomplishments they admired and respected.

Their biographies are there in the notebook sketches, apart from the words. Here is a watercolor impression of perhaps north africa, palms in quick sure strokes, confident and deft, domes, people, camels. The person who made this painting was not meek, wasn’t hesitant or nitpicking careful. They were, in fact, totally spontaneous, in command of their medium, and sure of themselves. Their sketch also probably looks pretty much like the place when they made it, the atmosphere, time of day. It doesn’t look that way anymore, but the character, discipline, and wit of the artist remains, their mark as a serious person in the face of privilege and infinite leisure. If the serfdom of machines leaves us with too much time on our hands, what will we do? Chances are in days to come we’ll know a lot more, think a lot more, and some of us will even spend their time making art.