War not work by Richard Donkin – article in the Idler, spring 2005

I recently saw evidence of my ancestry imprinted in the results of a personality questionnaire. It provided a cultural match with people who live in different parts of the world. My responses placed me among the Scandinavians. This was no surprise since I can trace my family roots back to the north-east coast of England, a part of the world that was first ravaged, then settled by Viking invaders.

At some time in the Donkin family past, before the Venerable Bede was moved to write his history of England, there must have been a violent (or welcome) sexual encounter between an Anglo Saxon maiden and some bearded sea-fairing Kirk Douglas look-alike intent on rape and pillage. Except the Kirk Douglas comparison is unlikely since the dimpled chin is a dominant gene passed down from father to son over the centuries and I don’t have a dimple. Not there anyway.

Not all Vikings were violent marauders but it seems logical to assume that to book your slot in a long boat you would need to demonstrate at least a hint of ferocity when the occasion demanded it. Or maybe supplies of the mushroom Amanita Muscaria (Fly Agaric) were plentiful enough to turn the mildest Nordic into a shield-biting Beserker.

Where I come from a few pints of Tetley Bitter can induce similar effects. Alternatively, modern living has given us road rage, passenger rage and kill-your-neighbour rage. Indeed we can extend this list to other tantrum-inducing stimulus such as plastic wrapping, video recorders, ticket machines and Linda Barker’s voice.

But no matter how angry we become it is difficult to resist the equilibrium of domesticity that has invaded our working lives. So are we living in a natural state or could we be denying a latent preference for lengthy periods of idleness punctuated by brief explosions of aggression?

This, after all, was the behaviour of the Germanic tribesmen observed by Tacitus in Germanica. As Roman society degenerated, the German tribes, north of the Rhine, were biding their time and taking it easy. While the so-called barbarian, apparently, was action personified in battle, once back at home stretched out in front of the hearth he was more of a Ricky Tomlinson playing the idle father figure in The Royle Family.

Tacitus does not record whether the average Visigoth would spend most of the day on his rump, drinking endless cups of tea and muttering “My arse” at intervals. But he would probably have done the Visigoth equivalent. According to Tacitus: “When the state has no war to manage the German mind is sunk in sloth. The chase does not provide sufficient employment. The time is passed in sleep and gluttony. The intrepid warrior, who in the field braved every danger, becomes in time of peace a listless sluggard. The management of his house and lands he leaves to the women, to the old men, and the infirm. He himself lounges in stupid repose, by a wonderful diversity of nature exhibiting in the same man the most inert aversion to labour, and the fiercest principle of action.”

An aversion to work in the warrior code is not confined to the Germanic tribes. It was just as apparent in the age of chivalry when knighthood reflected a status beyond that of the common labourer or tradesman. Chaucer’s “varry parfit gentile knight” in the Cantebury Tales is recognised for his good manners and courage in battle, not for hard work. When Richard I acceded to the throne of England the last thing he wanted to do was administer matters of state. Instead, at the drop of a helmet, he raced off to the Holy Land to get in some fighting.

The division between war and work has a history that goes back to the dawn of humanity. While the earliest implements known to have been used by our ancestors were hand axes – simple cutting tools – it is worth recalling that Stanley Kubrick, the film director, envisaged the original spark of inspiration that divided man and ape as the discovery, not of the tool, but of the weapon.

Leaving aside Arthur C Clarke’s novel suggestion that we might owe our origins to some alien intelligence, the theme that provided a continual source of fascination for Kubrick, was man’s propensity for violence. Hence the scene at the beginning of 2001 A Space Odyssey when those unconvincing screen apes are engaged in aggressive group behaviour before one of them finds a large bone. In a single giant leap of intellectual creativity the bone becomes a club which is used to bludgeon a competitor. The dramatic crescendo of Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra announces the triumphant ape’s conquering gesture as it hurls the bone in to the air before it is transformed majestically in to a rotating space station moving dreamily to the strains of the Blue Danube waltz. Complete bollocks, but great cinema.

There is very little evidence in the fossil record to suggest that the first people displayed such warlike traits. On the contrary most discoveries from the stone age point to a relatively peaceful and co-operative existence among the communities of Neolithic Europe, trading stone tools and banding together to create ambitious megalith structures such as the circles at Stonehenge and Avebury in Wiltshire and the stone-lined avenues at Carnac in Brittany.

But there is evidence that the modern definition of work as something we would rather not be doing was framed at this time. This was the era when nomadic bands had begun to plant crops that created surpluses thanks to the invention of the grindstone. The farm and the grindstone transformed the hunter-gathering life and evolved something less satisfying than tearing around the countryside in pursuit of wild beasts. It created work and domesticity. The biggest beneficiaries were women who no longer had to cart their children on their backs between camps. So it seems logical to assume that women were expected to do much of this new drudge-work.

At least this would have been the case before someone had the idea to profit by making war rather than raising crops, and to spare some captives for a life of slavery. Warfare among men was a natural progression from the hunt since conquest was and remains one of the most effective ways of acquiring wealth, possessions and status.

In fact for Attila the Hun, the acquisition of wealth was a by-product of the conquering which is what he really enjoyed. Attila defied the adage that you can’t take it with you when you die. He was buried with many of his riches and his grave with all its booty remains one of the world’s great hidden treasures.

You can see the same Attila tendencies today in the behaviour of tycoons like Rupert Murdoch and Philip Green. For these corporate warriors their stimulation is not so much work but conquest. Corporate empire building has bred an obsession for deal-making which shares many of the same characteristics found in displays of military aggression.

In fact work has never featured strongly among the world’s elite. The Athenians, who had slaves to do nearly all their chores did not have a specific word for work. They had ergon that referred to farm labour and they used ponos to refer to some painful task. But otherwise they would use the opposite of scholia, the word for leisure. This is ascholia, literally, “not leisure”. At least the Athenians took an interest in administration. The Spartans were focussed primarily on military service to the exclusion of almost everything else since they had subjugated helots to do their slave work.

The modern day Spartan is the gym-obsessed, smart-suited executive who takes working lunches of fruit and water, jogs to the office and looks down on the swarming helots commuting to and from their city-based terminals.

This is hardly the behaviour of the Visigoth and certainly not of the Hun before whom even the Visigoths took to their heels. So where did the reputation for idleness emerge among the Germanic tribes? Tacitus does not single out any particular ethnic group but had he done so he would probably have settled on the Gepids, a Germanic tribe that had originated in Scandinavia.

The Gepids never managed to create their own state, perhaps because they could never be bothered to do so. But they did gain favour with Attila and fought alongside him at the battle of Chalons in 451. Among the Goths, however, they had earned a reputation for being somewhat tardy. In fact when one of the not infrequent tribal migrations was arranged they turned up late for the rendezvous with the other tribes at the mouth of the Vistula. Somehow they managed to get as far as Sirmium (now Sremska Mitrovica) in the Danube valley before what power they had was wiped out by the Avars.

Should we conclude from Tacitus’s observations that both war and leisure have been perceived historically, at least by men, as attractive bedfellows that can prove far more alluring than the prospect of work? The Duke of Wellington’s remark that the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton might have been closer to the truth than even he could have appreciated.

This would explain why there was no shortage of fresh recruits among the belligerents at the outbreak of the First World War. And what did both sides do during their first Christmas in the trenches? They had a game of football in no-man’s land – much more fun than mending the wire.

The Futurists – that group of Italian artists that introduced the cubist painting style into their images of fast cars, aeroplanes and trains – were among the first to sign up for the war before they realised that warfare had an ugly side.

This mutual relationship between excitement and danger must surely explain the growth in dangerous sports among the young. Is there really such a difference between the surfing bum, loafing on the beach, before dashing out to ride a wave and the laid back Germanic warrior resting between campaigns? What did Battle of Britain fighter pilots do between sorties but loaf around in deck chairs? All would agree that serious action demands compensating idleness. As Isaac Newton discovered in his third law of motion, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Few would argue that there is a certain nobility in the dynamism of extreme sports but it cannot replicate the emotional spectrum of shared experience during, say, the Charge of the Light Brigade or among the English bowmen at Agincourt. “We would not die in that man’s company that fears his fellowship to die with us,” says Shakespeare’s Henry V on the eve of battle, addressing those he calls his “band of brothers”. As Shakespeare knew, the depth of friendship to be found in shared adversity is rare and precious.

Of those who have never experienced warfare I doubt if there is a man alive who does not wonder how he would behave under fire. Just as there are those who understand the joy of war. This is not to dignify or celebrate conflict but to place it on a different level of experience than anything that can be found in a steady job other than, perhaps, working for the emergency services. Neither should we think of higher or lower planes, but of the stronger, some might say Nietzschean (well Nietzsche would) sense of living that pulses within our veins the nearer we approach that sharp divide between life and death.

That’s the irony of living life to the full. The closer we step towards the edge of our existence the more we may appreciate the vitality and beauty of life.