THE TREADMILL
The non-stop world we inhabit exists not because technology demands it, but because we have lost the values that could tame its relentlessness

Daimler has taken a stand. In 2014 the Stuttgart car-maker gave one hundred thousand of its employees the option of having their emails automatically deleted while on holiday. Senders are informed that their message will not be read and an alternative contact is given instead. Who does not envy these chosen few?

 

All office based workers know the queasy feeling of opening the in-tray on return to find an unfeasible number of emails waiting for them, several of which are buried like landmines amid the terrain, bringing the recipient the anguish of a fortnight’s pain in the course of a few minutes as they are frantically located. To avoid this, some employees access office emails each day on holiday, to ensure there are no nasty surprises for them on return; others feel obliged by over-bearing or hungry employers to keep on top of work even while they are on holiday.

Daimler’s decision shows that we do not need to be hapless subjects of technology and that a set of coherent and kindly values should underpin our use of it. This is in marked contrast to the dominant ideology that human beings should adapt to digital advances rather than vice versa. In forgetting that people make technology and resisting the idea that limits might be placed on its use, the digital revolution mimics a certain brand of free market thinking which assumes that the system lies outside society and should be served rather than shaped to enable human flourishing; as Jesus might have said, in his own resistance of idolatry: ‘technology was made for man, not man for technology’.

 

This is an especially important question in the light of Relate’s recent survey, ‘The Way We Are Now’ (2014), which shows how hard people are finding it to find the right balance between work and family life. More than one in three people say they believe their bosses think the most productive employees put work before family; over a fifth of people think their employers would like them to be available 24/7. The fact that they are now available in a way that was once not true makes this statistic all the more uncomfortable.

 

It is twenty years in 2014 since the Sunday Trading Act was passed, permitting shops to open for six hours every Sunday. There have been many other changes to our use of Sunday, but this remains the most tangible indicator of a different use for what was once the day of rest. This would be a good moment to carry out an audit of the subsequent changes made to our common life by this law but there is not the slightest chance we will get one. The wishes of big business are too important to upset or challenge in this regard.

The day of rest declared that there were more important things to do than work solidly; it afforded space for relationships to flourish. Its abandonment showed we no longer placed any tangible value on relationships if they came into conflict with the needs of employers. The frenetic and precarious world we now inhabit has not evolved because technology demands it; the painful absence of any understanding of Sabbath and its anchor for a humane society means we are cut adrift on powerful currents we cannot control.

 

In a handful of decades, there will be no living memory of the shared day of rest; it will become a museum piece of twentieth century life. The Sabbath was given by God to Israel to celebrate their freedom from the slavery of working seven days a week. Those who abandon its principles ultimately find themselves a slave to something else.