Aristotle and the Stoics argued that the essential characteristic of humanity is our ability to reason. “Man is a rational animal” is an oft quoted maxim. But I would argue that our ratioality, such as it is, lies downstream from an even more essential quality we share: laziness. Man is a lazy animal. And rationality is the servant and facilitator of our laziness.
Technological progress has allowed us to step away from the constant grind of hunting and gathering. Of course, our innovations often backfire on us, as new technology can give us more work than we bargained for. Life on an ancient farm, for example, arguably involved more toil than a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in a relatively plentiful biome. But the march of technological innovation has undeniably made things easier overall in the long run, even if the distribution of the fruits of this progress have been shared in a comically unjust fashion.
This is not an apologia for laziness. That we hold laziness as a vice shows that we have long been aware that the source of our greatest strength also contains the seeds of our undoing. By way of anecdotal evidence, when I looked up the Latin word for ‘lazy’ to use in the title of this entry, I found a large handful of pejorative synonyms. Clearly we have always had to push back against this tendency in ourselves to avoid difficult effort. If rationality is born of laziness, it still requires motivation, determination and self discipline to apply reason to the fullest.
In our current moment of cognitive offloading, it becomes singularly critical to seek out the difficult path here and there. To keep ourselves sharp and not succumb to the temptation to let the machines do our thinking for us. To value our own mental labor and not delude ourselves that the machines’ output is our work. As Spinoza said, “All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”
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