Fine wine, roast duck, and contemplation, the highest activity of man

Last week at Thanksgiving dinner the conversation turned to the topic of redundancy. I know, as opposed to football or politics, redundancy is not a usual topic for discussion whilst consuming turkey--or roast duck, as the case would have it (may Wilbur rest in peace)--but bear with me.

Labor vincit omnia, says Virgil in the Georgics. Labor conquers all things.

Redundancy commonly refers to things that are superfluous, or "extra," which, of course, is anathema in a modern society hyper-obsessed with efficiency and streamlining. The question human resource departments are always asking is: "How can we do more with less?"

Obviously there is value in doing more with less; nobody appreciates a bloated bureaucracy except those parasitically living off of it. But last Thursday our conversation took a deeper turn: I was wondering not so much whether it is a good thing to do more with less, but whether an activity might, by its absence, detract from the fully lived human experience?

The two questions are actually quite different, and that's the point. The first asks whether we ought to make the most of the little that we have. I think, for example, of our own tight family budget and the careful choices my wife and I make to stretch every dollar. It's certainly not a bad thing to do as much as you can with the little that you have, either in setting the family budget or in running a business and trying to make a profit.

The second question, however, associates our performance of actions, even obsolete, redundant actions, with that most noble of endeavors, the fully lived human existence. Might it be, I suggested last Thursday, that redundancy is a necessary part of being fully human?

At Thanksgiving dinner one of my interlocutors agreed, bringing up the example of playing the piano. Even as a non-musician, I understood what she was getting at: The pianist can only play expressively, that is, interpretively, when she no longer has to think about where her fingers are to be placed.

Freedom is found, in other words, when one's mundane, everyday actions become so habitual that they are nearly effortless to perform.

Effortlessness in any human endeavor does not occur overnight. Countless laborious hours spent at the piano, spent reading in a foreign language, spent perfecting any craft, skill or art either fine or practical; a whole lifetime of hours consumed in the peeling potatoes and the preparation of meals, in the planting of seedlings, the weeding of rows of plants, and the harvesting crops; hours not wasted, I argued, but instead invested in the making of mundane things so mundane, so everyday, so mindless, that our minds become free to contemplate higher things, which Aristotle says is the highest activity of man.

All of which leads me to militate even against our hyper-efficient, globalized society that takes doing more with less as its guiding principle. At what point, if that is one's guiding principle, does one decide that more has become too much, or that less is now too little? What keeps a company's human resources department, with its mandate to trim the budget and maximize the profit, from squeezing the humanity out of the humans who are, ostensibly, its resource?

It is very difficult to ask questions like these without becoming an irrelevant, backwards-looking curmudgeon because we naturally, and rightly, seek to be as efficient as possible in whatever we do. I am not curmudgeonly enough to call for farmers to abandon their tractors and return to tilling their fields with horses and oxen. Neither am I suggesting that we walk everywhere on foot instead of driving, or that we rely on the pony express for our mail delivery.

But I think we all know that technology has the potential to steal from us the type of mundane activities that truly invite contemplation. What does the dishwasher make redundant except the tedious hand-washing of dishes, which, of course, leaves us free to... watch movies on Netflix. ...browse aimlessly through Facebook. Etc., etc.

You might protest--No, technology frees me not to waste my time, but to accomplish more than I did before. The farmer can plant five times as much with the assistance of his tractor. The office worker can communicate far faster by e-mail than he could by first-class post, let alone by pony express. But really, is this such an unalloyed good as to be unchallenged? Why make more money than less? Why produce more food here in the United States than we can consume or even export, so that we end up converting it, at a terrible price to the environment, into ethanol to burn as fuel?

Yes, it is curmudgeonly and backwards-looking to ask such questions. But seriously, do we live fuller lives than people did 50 years ago, with so many redundancies having been eliminated through time-saving technologies and techniques? Is our lived experience more fully human than that of our great-grandparents one hundred years ago?

Or are we more distracted than ever, less capable of concentration, and farther from the contemplation of higher things that, again, Aristotle said is our highest good, our summum bonum, that is, happiness itself?

Not that technology is going away any time soon. But these questions are worth asking nonetheless. A few glasses of fine wine and a tasty roast duck can lead the conversation into uncharted waters such as these. Thank you, Wilbur.