We are watching the final episode of the West Wing tonight. Since last year we’ve ploughed through all seven seasons on DVD rentals, the plot low point of Zoe’s kidnapping, the pleasure of watching guest appearances from the likes of John Goodman and Alan Alda. It’s been an enjoyable diversion, and yet there we go, amusing ourselves to death.

When Keynes wrote Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, ten years after the end of the Great War, he predicted that increasing affluence would result in greatly increased leisure:

…for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem-how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.

But leisure for what? To consider the productive uses of leisure, you would have to return to the Enlightenment, and figures like Boyle or Lavoisier. And there I let slip my prejudice, because productive means the pursuit of knowledge. Of course, you only have to look at the history of the leisured classes – the British aristocracy for example (called by Keynes, with some irony, “our advance guard”) to see that productive leisure has not characterized their diversions.

The racetracks of England, the casinos of Monte Carlo and hunting have all filled the time of the British aristocracy. So too has politics – the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham was twice British Prime Minister, but is perhaps best remembered as the owner of Whistlejacket, a racehorse he paid George Stubbs to immortalise.

Leisure, as the pursuit of knowledge – scientific knowledge – has a dismal history.

As I sit down with my DVD, unable to explain to my children laws that Newton or Archimedes could figure out, I wonder if it has a dismal future too.