Leisure: Only For The Elites

That is what I get out of Charles Murray's musings:

In a world where people of all ages die often and unexpectedly, there’s a palpable urgency to getting on with whatever you’re going to do with your life. If you don’t leave your mark now, you may never get the chance. If you live in a world where you’re sure you’re going to live until at least eighty, do you have the same compulsion to leave your mark now? Or do you figure that there’s still plenty of time left, and you’ll get to it pretty soon? To what extent does enjoying life—since you can be sure there’s going to be so much to enjoy—start to take precedence over maniacal efforts to leave a mark?

I raise the issue because it fits so neatly with the problems associated with increased secularism and the increased material security provided by the advanced welfare state. In a world when death can come at any time, there is also a clear and present motivation to think about spiritual matters even when you are young. Who knows when you’re going to meet your Maker? It could easily be tomorrow. If you’re going to live to be at least eighty, it’s a lot easier not to think about the prospect of non-existence. The world before the welfare state didn’t give you the option of just passing the time pleasantly. Your main resources for living a comfortable life—or even for surviving at all—were hard work and family (especially, having children to support you in your old age). In the advanced welfare state, neither of those is necessary. The state will make sure you have a job, and one that doesn’t require you to work too hard, and will support you in your old age.

Put all three conditions together—no urgency to make your mark, no promptings to think about your place in the cosmos, no difficulty in living a comfortable life—and what you seem to get, based on the experience of Western and Northern Europe, is what I have elsewhere called the Europe Syndrome.

I wouldn't see 19th century farm life as some golden age we ought to pine for.  Folks worked from dawn to dusk their entire lives just to survive.  So Murray is saying we don't strive to make an impact artistically because we can expect to live a long time, and that gives us a chance to realize that life is pretty good, and being dead might just be that, and not eternal bliss and vacation from the life of unending labor on this earth?  Does anybody else find this to be pretty perverse, especially coming from a member of society's elite?  Why is Murray sitting around writing books bemoaning the moral failures of the poor and pushing to eliminate the social safety net, and not going out with migrant workers and harvesting fruit and vegetables in the Central Valley?  Is great art worth living a miserable existance?  Back in the Renaissance, wealthy patrons supported the arts partly as a way to buy their way into Heaven.  I can't see where those elites were living difficult lives.  It has always been, and will continue to be the poor who live the toughest lives.  Murray seems to believe that society would be better off if more people were struggling, and if  death was a much better option than life here.