there is nothing inherently virtuous about getting up early for work

“Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a coloured pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.” This is the beginning of ‘On Lying in Bed’, a lighthearted, yet no less substantial essay on the creative and moral benefits of idleness, written in 1909. In it, G.K. Chesterton praises the virtues of idleness, while deploring the fixed working routine imposed by society.

There is nothing inherently virtuous about getting up early for work in the morning but on the contrary, having carefree time to think is what strengthens our moral principles. ‘Misers get up early in the morning’ he quips, ‘and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before. It is the great peril of our society that all its mechanisms may grow more fixed while its spirit grows more fickle.’

More than a century later, neuroscience gives flesh to Chesterton’s metaphors, as it turns out that a state of idleness indeed benefits the creative abilities of our brain, as well as potentially improving our moral judgement. In his book “Autopilot: The Art and Science of Doing Nothing”, author Andrew Smart explains how the areas of our brain responsible for connecting seemingly disparate ideas & creating new ones are in fact more active when your brain doesn’t do anything than when it does.

when we don’t worry about work, these areas connected with creativity, introspection and abstract thought flare up

The so-called default mode network (responsible for ‘idle’, introspective thought), the central executive network (the brain system that solves math problems and cognitive tasks) and the salience network (responsible for switching between the two) have been shown on an fMRI to be more active when we don’t have to solve a specific problem. When we’re not trying to carry out cognitive tasks, or when we don’t worry about work, these areas connected with creativity, introspection and abstract thought flare up.

As a consequence, there seems to be a connection between the ‘incubation period’ of a creative idea and our brain’s default mode processing, or ‘idle’ state. The ‘incubation’ period is a stage in the development of creative insight, the second of a set of four key stages in the creative process, where the unconscious rearranges random thoughts that we’ve had consciously at one previous point in time. It results in new, original ideas at a later point, and precedes that ‘a-ha!’ moment, which usually takes place in the shower, when taking a walk, or when you’re staring at the ceiling, drawing colourful lines with an imaginary pencil.

As another study explains, in our ‘idle’ state, our brain is involved in “self-awareness and reflection, recalling personal memories, imagining the future, feeling emotions about the psychological impact of social situations on other people, and constructing moral judgments.” This idle state seems to be, in short, responsible for making us better, happier, more creative human beings.

Happiness, however, seems highly underrated in our current times. We seem to focus on work and productivity now more than ever, and work often gets in the way of happiness, with anecdotal evidence ranking ‘I wish I hadn’t worked so hard’ as the second most popular regret among the dying.

this idle state seems to be, in short, responsible for making us better, happier, more creative human beings

As another 19th century essayist puts it, the only thing we need to learn is what makes us happy, as “there is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.” In his ‘Apology for Idlers’, R. L. Stevenson commends skiving, laziness, the virtues of truancy, and warns against the perils of wasting one’s life in search of career goals and other overly delayed gratifications. “If you look back on your own education”, he writes, “I am sure it will not be the full, vivid, instructive hours of truantry that you regret; you would rather cancel some lack-lustre periods in the class”.

If idleness is so good for us, then why do we work so much? The answer comes from none other than Bertrand Russell, philosopher and idleness enthusiast. In 1932 he wrote an essay making the case for a 20 hour work week. ‘A great deal of harm’, he writes, ‘is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work . . . the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organised diminution of work.’

This prosperity, as we have seen, means not only personal happiness, but also a stronger chance that we behave morally towards each other, as our brain’s default mode processes inter-personal relations and the socio-emotional impact of our actions. However, religious thinking has sometimes had us believe the opposite. Russell himself was brought up on the saying ‘Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do’, only to reject it in his writings as an adult. To this day, the saying encapsulates the protestant work ethic that still pervades much of the English-speaking world.

our brain’s default mode processes inter-personal relations and the socio-emotional impact of our actions

Decades later, British writer Will Self makes this ethos responsible for what he calls a ‘taboo against thinking’ in England. If people have time to think, they might come up with ideas that challenge the established order.

The world of work is, after all, divided into those that do, and those who tell others what to do, as Russell writes. Historically, those who have extolled the virtues of work (e.g. clerics) have never been in the former category, but the latter. Practising the opposite of what they preach, the idle class keep the others into submission through a rhetoric that sanctifies work and demonises idleness. The oppressed work for the oppressor in the faint hope of a future reward, which grows forever more distant.

This practice is a historical relic that must be done away with immediately, for “the morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery . . . to this day, 99 per cent of British wage-earners would be genuinely shocked if it were proposed that the King should not have a larger income than a working man.” Russell’s ‘day’ was of course 1932, but his observations hold true in 2015.

Another observation that proves perplexing for our 21st century, (post) social-media minds is this. “Modern technique has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community.’’ Russell was referring of course to the Industrial Revolution and the technological advancements of early 20th century.

the world of work is, after all, divided into those that do, and those who tell others what to do

More than 80 years later, after 8 decades of ever developing ‘technique’, we still cannot say that leisure is ‘evenly distributed’. Google and Amazon are investing billions in robotics, and yet in some countries (paradoxically, some of the most developed ones) more than two thirds of the working population hate their jobs.

Russell was confident that ‘if the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody and no unemployment’. In 1930, economist J.M Keynes predicted that by the start of the 21st century, we would work only 15 to 21 hours a week, and our greatest challenge would be how to use our freedom from economic cares. Later, in the 70s, futurist and philosopher Buckminster Fuller famously put forth the idea that ‘one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest’ and thus urged us to do away with the ‘absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living’. A report in 2011 put the UK average working week at 42.7 hours compared with 41.6 across the EU.

How is it possible, Russell was asking, that when given the wonderful opportunity of producing twice as much in the same number of hours with the help of modern machinery, instead of deciding to work half the time, we’ve decided to work just as hard, overproduce and thus devalue our own work? In his thought experiment:

“Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?”

The argument of course echoes a similar marxist line of thinking, and some of Russell’s comments even seem to be a precursor to later anarchist trends. For instance, having divided work into two categories, Russell says of the latter (telling other people what to do) that “it is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given.”

instead of deciding to work half the time, we’ve decided to work just as hard, overproduce and thus devalue our own work

Thinker & activist David Graeber spoke of the similar ‘phenomenon of bullshit jobs’. ‘In technological terms’, Graeber says, ‘we are quite capable of [a 15 to 21 hour work week]. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. Huge swaths of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they believe to be unnecessary.” How many of us in large corporations haven’t had managers of managers who don’t appear to be doing much or whose role isn’t quite clear? This situation is profoundly damaging, says Graeber, on both a “moral and spiritual” level.

So, can we work less? Regardless of our political affiliations, we might easily agree that shorter working hours will benefit us on a human level. It might seem easy (and easily justifiable) to demand lower hours and higher pay, or casually denounce the greedy nature of capitalism and extol the fundamental sameness of all human beings. The real challenge however lies in providing the right practical framework for its implementation, without repeating the mistakes of the past. The question ‘can we work less?’ cannot be divorced from the social-economic framework that would provide it with a positive answer, or from the political worldview that would turn it into a reality. These are challenges that can form the subject of entire treatises, and cannot be disregarded as mere details.

the 40-hour work week should not be accepted as an inevitable status quo

The New Economics Foundation has so far been the only organisation to come up with a real plan of action. NEF insists that the 40-hour work week should not be accepted as an inevitable status quo, and the self-titled ‘think-and-do tank’ has opened a discussion on the possibility of reducing the working week, by inviting a panel of experts to weigh in on their Time on Our Side project. NEF have also come up with a strategy for gradually introducing the 21 hour work week. The full report on how this can be practically achieved is available here.

Until we figure out how to create the economic & political conditions for having more idleness and less work in our lives, it might be worth remembering that at least from a moral perspective, there is nothing particularly virtuous about work, nor anything ‘natural or inevitable‘.

When it comes to gender equality there’s an emerging technology that might be the key to many of our social dilemmas

Kantian ethics tells us never to treat another person as means to an end, yet women have it inscribed in their biology to serve as means towards another human being. We all know childbearing involves sacrifices, but we rarely contemplate just how secondary a woman’s self becomes. For 9 months, women turn into fragile vessels whose purpose is to carry another human being, and by having their bodies, habits, and emotions fundamentally altered—they give up a lot of their very personhood for someone else’s sake. There’s a reason why mothers keep telling us how much they’ve sacrificed to have us.

We’ve never questioned the morality or fairness of this fact of life. As if to disguise its agonising pains and life-stopping inconveniences, we’ve glorified and exalted pregnancy to an almost religious degree. The ‘miracle‘ of giving birth is supposed to be the best thing that ever happened to a woman. In that one moment when you hold your baby for the first time, your life is said to finally gain meaning.

Conversely, of course, we’ve criticised women who are afraid of giving birth, choose not to have children, or just dare speak of pregnancy as anything short of awe-inspiring.

Technology often creates moral issues rather than solving them, but when it comes to gender equality there’s an emerging technology that might be the key to many of our social dilemmas: artificial wombs.

The technology of artificial wombs would allow for ectogenesis to take place. Ectogenesis is a somewhat cold, clinical name for the wonderful possibility of having a baby grow outside one’s body. This could well be the ultimate step in women’s liberation. By removing this biological, fundamental impediment, women might finally function in and for themselves, as autonomous individuals just as focussed on their own personal fulfillment as men have always been.

It’s understandable that people would form an ‘un-natural’, Brave New World-ish picture in their minds and resist it. With any futuristic technology, there’s always the danger of mishandling it terribly once it becomes a reality. But as I hope to show, many of the arguments against ectogenesis (including those of some renowned feminists) are factually unsustainable or have more to do with prejudice and fear.

What is ectogenesis & how is it possible?

In short, ectogenesis is the possibility of birth (genesis, in Greek) outside (ecto) of one’s body. It has been the focus of at least two scientists:  Yoshinori Kuwabara, chairman of the Obstetrics and Gynaecology Department at Juntendo University, and Dr. Helen Liu, a researcher at Cornell University’s Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility. Kuwabara’s focus was saving premature babies, and in the process he’s grown a goat fetus inside an incubator that reproduced the uterus and placenta, together with amniotic fluid and blood supply. The goat fetus developed for 21 days, and although it had to be stopped due to some technical faults, the baby goat was successfully ‘delivered’ four days shy of full term. Equally impressive is Dr. Liu’s achievement of growing a human embryo for 10 days in a wholly artificial womb.

By removing this biological, fundamental impediment, women might finally function in and for themselves

Dr. Liu pioneered a technique called ‘co-culture’, where she grew an embryo and uterine tissue together, and developed an artificial human uterus using endometrial cells grown over a uterus-shaped scaffolding. She had to cease the experiments because of the 14-day regulation on human embryo research, but she carried on experimenting with mice, which she too carried in a fully artificial womb 4 days before a full term. Dr. Liu unapologetically makes developing an embryo and then a human being in an artificial womb ―her “final goal“. In her own words, “I want to see whether I can develop an actual external device with this endometrium cell and then probably with a computer system simulate the feed in medium, feed out medium . . . and also have a chip controlling the hormone level.”

For a more detailed overview of the technicalities involved in building an artificial uterus, here’s a very informative read.

The fears

Probably the most pervasive counter-argument is this: artificial wombs would sever the connection between mother and fetus, thus compromising the future baby’s physical health and/or psychological wellbeing.

As prominent ethicists Peter Singer and Deane Wells argue, we’re confronted with the same issue that IVF technology faced in its beginnings. The success of animal experiments were the only and sufficient reason why IVF was okayed for humans. If baby cattle were healthy, there was no reason to suspect human babies wouldn’t be as well. With ectogenesis, if a baby goat was successfully delivered and continued to live healthily, shouldn’t we accept the idea that human babies would be healthy as well?

Of course, even if we were certain that an ectogenetic child would be physically healthy, we still couldn’t be sure it will develop normally from a psychological viewpoint as well. Animal studies, unfortunately, aren’t of much help here. We simply cannot know with certainty, and experimenting with someone’s psychological wellness is unethical.

Does not knowing for sure mean we shouldn’t try to find out? If we need to be certain before we make any further experiments, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of experimenting? Singer and Wells suggest we break this circle by doing a sort of ‘gradual’ experimenting. We have already started to save premature babies by incubating them at a gradually earlier stage. We need to back this up with mental and psychological testing of the prematurely born babies at a relevant age – perhaps 6 years. If these tests turn out fine, we can move the incubating time even earlier in the pregnancy, and so on. This way we avoid unethical experimentation and we might have achieved full ectogenesis in a few decades.

The mother-child bond

While it’s true that a healthy, loving connection with one’s child is crucial for their mental and emotional development, we should also be aware that we’ve idealised the mother-child bond and formed a mental picture of motherhood that’s ridden with gender stereotypes. We need to make sure our biases don’t stand in the way of critical enquiry and moral progress.

The Internet is rife with advice and imperatives telling expecting mothers what they’re supposed to feel for their baby and what they can do to fix whatever’s wrong with them if they fall short of the expectations.

In reality, a good 20% of women do not feel any emotional connection with their baby. This means to one in five women their baby feels like a complete stranger. And that’s when they hold it in their arms and it looks like a human being; books like What to Expect insist you should feel immense love and great familiarity even since before your baby is born. (For a poignant and honest account of some of the less happy thoughts a pregnant woman can experience, this blog post is a reassuring read.)

The mother-child bond is a far less ‘natural’ feeling than what our social constructs would have us believe, in the sense that it’s not nearly as effortless or instantaneous. As one mother puts it, for some women the love they later develop for their children “doesn’t happen in the womb, no matter what any Fertility Goddess friends or exuberant pregnancy books say about the bond between a pregnant woman and the unborn or newborn child.”

Most of what has been written on the almost mythical subject of mother-child connection regards, in fact, the post-natal care the baby receives. The affectionate parent-child communication, the face-to-face interaction, touching, lullaby singing & storytelling – all shape the future adult’s sense of security, their ability to cope with stress, anxiety and generally how they’ll manage relationships and attachment. This period of bonding happens however after birth, with an established body of research defining it from the first minutes of an infant’s birth and continuing throughout their first week of life (Klaus and Kennel 1976, Feldman 1978). Other research acknowledges this period as starting around birth and continuing for up to two months in the child’s development as the most significant (Leckman et al. 1999).

As for the pre-natal period, there are indeed studies that suggest elements of the intrauterine environment might influence an infant’s later development. However, these elements were studied in conjunction with the post-natal environment, and their precise nature or how they influence behaviour is still to be determined. But this obviously goes for real wombs too. Shouldn’t we let mothers carry babies anymore because, well, we don’t know precisely how their intrauterine environment affects the fetus?

Perhaps we shouldn’t. Given women’s (still precarious) emancipation, a lot of mothers-to-be work until their water breaks. If the child’s optimum psychological wellbeing is our ultimate goal, then surely we should be concerned with the wide range of stressors a fetus is subjected to when inside a working woman’s womb.

We’re subjecting technology to much harsher, scrutinising looks, because it’s not ‘natural’. Technology is man-made and humans are prone to error. Though it’s reasonable to be wary of human fallibility, we must remember that nature is not “perfect” either. The pain women are subjected to when giving birth is just one of countless examples of nature’s imperfections.

External wombs would help parents love their children for ‘their own sake’

Pregnancy in its entirety is far from a perfect process. Stress, of course, is not only caused by deadlines and excel reports, it can also come from a mother’s general emotional state, if she’s unhappy or worried or feels emotionally neglected, there’s a strong chance high levels of cortisol will impact the baby, and that’s far from ideal. These are, evidently, some of the reasons we’ve treated women differently in the first place. But rather than perceiving women as frail creatures and denying them access to work or a normal lifestyle, wouldn’t it be better to liberate them from the burden of pregnancy altogether? As for the baby, wouldn’t it be better for it to develop in a supervised, caring environment, freed of day-to-day stress and optimised for its maximum wellbeing?

 Mothers, anxiety, and a-wombs

In 1956, D.W. Winnicott came up with the concept of “primary maternal preoccupations”. It was used to describe a state of alertness and hyper-sensitivity that a woman experiences throughout and especially towards the end of her pregnancy. Winnicott referred to this state as almost an illness, in fact he literally wrote it would be considered an illness ‘were it not for the fact of pregnancy’. However he still recognises the evolutionary value of such a state, the mother’s acute sensitivity to her baby’s needs allowing her to create the perfect environment for her offspring’s development.

Whether such a syndrome in fact exists is as disputable as any other psychiatric claim, but many would argue that it’s in the nature of motherhood to be hyper-alert to their child’s every movement. Many mothers continue to feel this way throughout their child’s teenage and even adult years. Many of us have had the experience of overbearing mothers, who still want to protect us by controlling our actions even as adults.

Feminists such as Shulamith Firestone wrote about this, and embraced artificial wombs more than 40 years ago. To her, external wombs were the solution for what she considered to be possessive mothering. “A mother who undergoes a nine-month pregnancy is likely to feel that the product of all that pain and discomfort ‘belongs’ to her (To think of what I went through to have you!).” Firestone believed that external wombs would help parents love their children for ‘their own sake’.

As many feminists have pointed out, there’s a lot of social pressure on the mother to be close to the child, and this is likely to impact a mother’s mental wellbeing. In the words of R. Kukla, “over-valuing proximity produces an unbalanced insistence that women stay near their children and induces guilt in them when they do not.” In this regard, external wombs might bring some beneficial distance.

I think the ability to have children with fewer sacrifices can only bring health and balance to the parent-child relationship. Coupled with the possibility to plan a child much later in life, ectogenesis could drastically lower feelings of frustration otherwise widely reported by new parents.

Artificial wombs and feminism

Firestone is a feminist who embraced artificial wombs well before goat fetuses or human embryo experiments. But ‘feminists’, on the whole, are far from being unanimously in favour of it. Andrea Dworkin, Robyn Rowland or Janice Raymond think ectogenesis will lead to the complete obliteration of women. The womb is women’s main “currency” for these theorists, and embracing this technology would mean giving away their unique privilege. Even in the most woman-hating cultures, the argument goes, women are at least spared in the promise that they will give birth to a son.

By reasoning this way however, the only thing we’re achieving is to adopt the oppressor’s way of thinking. I suggest that this logic perpetuates the very women-hating culture it vows to eradicate.

We could replace ‘the privilege of pregnancy’ with the ‘privilege’ of being seen as a sex object. If oppressive tyrants wouldn’t kill women simply for the fact that they enjoy their sexual favours, certainly we wouldn’t deduce that being treated as a sex object is okay.

Gestation should not be women’s ultimate privilege, it should not be the sole thing that makes them valuable – in fact, it should not make them valuable at all. Gestation is nothing more than a biological function, it doesn’t make us better or worse people. Pregnancy just happens, a lot of the times against our will, and although we can aid it in various ways, it’s rarely a chance for the mothers to showcase their unique abilities, talents or skills. Unlike parenting, pregnancy, in itself, cannot be an art.

Despite its numerous dissenting nuances, feminism, at its core, has been fighting for women to be recognised as human beings, to give them back autonomy, dignity, and the fundamental human right to pursue their happiness without impediments. However, many mothers still don’t find it easy to build a self-sufficient identity separate from their infant. ‘Social pressures on pregnant women and new mothers undermine their sense of agency altogether, preventing them from having any interests of their own.’

Men are routinely discriminated against in custody matters; external wombs could mean the chance to split parenthood equally

By rejecting a technology that could liberate women from this, on the grounds that there are cultures where women are only considered valuable as means towards another (usually male) human being – we’re essentially saying we can keep oppressing women because society oppresses women. We’re saying we shouldn’t change the appalling status quo because the status quo is appalling. This circular bit of logic seems to put stagnancy where progress should be, and feminists who support it adamantly cling to the status of woman as victim rather than choosing to be active, dynamic agents of change.

I don’t intend, by any means, to diminish the complex political issues a-wombs will raise. We should definitely be concerned with who will get their hands on this extremely powerful instrument, and whether they will use it as a tool for liberation or oppression. As Soraya Chemaly argues, we still live in a man’s world, and we must make sure that those in power will empathise with women’s concerns, so that a Handmaide’s Tale scenario is successfully dodged. But I’d also like to point out ectogenesis could be a unique opportunity for equality and cooperation between genders.

Sexism and heteronormativity hurt straight fathers, gay couples and transgender people as much as women. As a result of the toxic, biology-infused moral half-judgement that mothers are essential to child rearing whereas fathers are disposable, men are routinely discriminated against in custody matters. External wombs could mean the chance to split parenthood equally, from both a practical and legal perspective. The wombs might at first be found in dedicated medical units, but it’s easy to imagine a near future where wombs are kept at home, equally tended to by men and women, cisgender or of a non-binary gender, either in heterosexual or gay relationships.

A-wombs might be the opportunity to finally eradicate the toxic myth that women are inseparable from their babies—which is why they should stay at home and renounce their own ambitions—while fathers are useless when it comes to loving and caring for another being, which is why they can orbit vagrantly around the household, with providing financially as their sole duty.

Despite my overt enthusiasm for artificial wombs, it’s difficult to flatly say they will be ‘good for women’. ‘Women’ are not uniform, and neither will be the distribution of new technology. As long as there are gaps between poor women and rich women, racially discriminated women and white privileged women, straight, gay or transgender women—there will be disparity in the way a-wombs are owned and administered.

These, however, are not reasons for rejecting artificial wombs, but for having a discussion about them before they become a reality.

In lieu of a conclusion

We need to make sure we’ve started a debate. We’re evidently free to reject ectogenesis, but we need to make sure that we’re not doing so on the wrong grounds; that we’re not passing up an auspicious moment for gender equality because of half-baked ethical judgements, moral superstitions, ancient myths of hubris, or internalised oppression. External wombs could be liberating, but freedom can be frightening, so it’s completely understandable to view this novelty with apprehension, and desirable to treat it with caution. But we need not, and should not, just passively accept our limits, be they social or biological. That’s simply not how progress is made.