§ 5. Amusement in the Modern World
We have already seen that amusement implies a bifurca-
tion of experience into a ‘real’ part and a ‘make-believe’ part,
and that the make-believe part is called amusement in so
far as the emotions aroused in it are also discharged in it and
are not allowed to overflow into the affairs of ‘real’ life.
{Make-believe is essentially fantasy, "depicting a state of things in which their desires are satisfied" and which are a reflection of a corrupted consciousness (see second link above). E.g., earlier, Collinwood writes:
"Sexual desire is highly adaptable to
these purposes; easily titillated, and easily put off with make-
believe objects. Hence the kind of amusement art which at
its crudest and most brutal is called pornography is very
common and very popular. Not only the representation of
nudity which reappeared in European painting and sculpture
at the Renaissance, when art as magic was replaced by art
as amusement, but the novel, or story based on a sexual
motive, which dates from the same period, is essentially an
appeal to the sexual emotions of the audience, not in order
to stimulate these emotions for actual commerce between
the sexes, but in order to provide them with make-believe
objects and thus divert them from their practical goal in the
interests of amusement. The extent to which this make-
believe sexuality has affected modern life can hardly be
believed until the fact has been tested by appeal to the
circulating libraries, with their flood of love-stories; the
cinema, where it is said to be a principle accepted by almost
every manager that no film can succeed without a love-
interest; and above all the magazine and newspaper, where
cover-designs, news-items, fiction, and advertisement are
steeped in materials of the same kind: erotic stories, pictures
of pretty girls variously dressed and undressed, or (for the
female reader) of attractive young men: pornography
homoeopathically administered in doses too small to shock
the desire for respectability, but quite large enough to
produce the intended effect."
He was writing in the 30s. Just imagine what he'd have to say today!}
This bifurcation is no doubt as ancient as man himself; but
in a healthy society it is so slight as to be negligible. Danger
sets in when by discharging their emotions upon make-
believe situations people come to think of emotion as some-
thing that can be excited and enjoyed for its own sake, without
any necessity to pay for it in practical consequences. Amuse-
ment is not the same thing as enjoyment; it is enjoyment which
is had without paying for it. Or rather, without paying for it
in cash. It is put down in the bill and has to be paid for later
on. For example, I get a certain amount of fun out of writing
this book. But I pay for it as I get it, in wretched drudgery
when the book goes badly, in seeing the long summer days
vanish one by one past my window unused, in knowing that
there will be proofs to correct and index to make, and at the
end black looks from the people whose toes I am treading on.
If I knock off and lie in the garden for a day and read Dorothy
Sayers, I get fun out of that too; but there is nothing to pay.
There is only a bill run up, which is handed in next day when
I get back to my book with that Monday-morning feeling.
Of course, there may be no Monday-morning feeling: I may
get back to the book feeling fresh and energetic, with my
staleness gone. In that base my day off turned out to be not
amusement but recreation. The difference between them
consists in the debit or credit effect they produce on the
emotional energy available for practical life.
Amusement becomes a danger to practical life when the
debt it imposes on these stores of energy is too great to be
paid off in the ordinary course of living. When this reaches
a point of crisis, practical life, or ‘real’ life, becomes emotion-
ally bankrupt; a state of things which we describe by speaking
of its intolerable dullness or calling it a drudgery. A moral
disease has set in, whose symptoms are a constant craving
for amusement and an inability to take any interest in the
affairs of ordinary life, the necessary work of livelihood and
social routine. A person in whom the disease has become
chronic is a person with a more or less settled conviction that
amusement is the only thing that makes life worth living.
A society in which the disease is endemic is one in which
most people feel some such conviction most of the time.
{Again, this seems only to have gotten worse. Just think of the hours per day many spend playing videogames, or watching television...}
A moral (or in modern jargon a psychological) disease
may or may not be fatal to the person suffering from it; he
may be driven to suicide, as the only release from taedium
vitae, or he may try to escape it by going in for crime or
revolution or some other exciting business, or he may take
to drink or drugs, or simply allow himself to be engulfed in
a slough of dullness, a dumbly accepted life in which nothing
interesting ever happens, tolerable only when he does not
think how intolerable it is. But moral diseases have this
peculiarity, that they may be fatal to a society in which they
are endemic without being fatal to any of its members. A
society consists in the common way of life which its members
practise; if they become so bored with this way of life that
they begin to practise a different one, the old society is dead
even if no one noticed its death.
This is perhaps not the only disease from which societies
may die, but it is certainly one of them. It is certainly, for
example, the disease from which Greco-Roman society died.
Societies may die a violent death, like the Inca and Aztec
societies which the Spaniards destroyed with gunpowder in
the sixteenth century; and it is sometimes thought by people
who have been reading historical thrillers that the Roman
Empire died in the same way, at the hands of barbarian
invaders. That theory is amusing but untrue. It died of
disease, not of violence, and the disease was a long-growing
and deep-seated conviction that its own way of life was not
worth preserving.
The same disease is notoriously endemic among ourselves.
Among its symptoms are the unprecedented growth of the
amusement trade, to meet what has become an insatiable
craving; an almost universal agreement that the kinds of
work on which the existence of a civilization like ours most
obviously depends (notably the work of industrial operatives
and the clerical staff in business of every kind, and even that
of the agricultural labourers and other food-winners who
are the prime agents in the maintenance of every civilization
hitherto existing) is an intolerable drudgery; the discovery
that what makes this intolerable is not the pinch of poverty
or bad housing or disease but the nature of the work itself
in the conditions our civilization has created; the demand
arising out of this discovery, and universally accepted as
reasonable, for an increased provision of leisure, which
means opportunity for amusement, and of amusements to
fill it; the use of alcohol, tobacco, and many other drugs, not
for ritual purposes, but to deaden the nerves and distract the
mind from the tedious and irritating concerns of ordinary
life; the almost universal confession that boredom, or lack of
interest in life, is felt as a constant or constantly recurring
state of mind; the feverish attempts to dispel this boredom
either by more amusement or by dangerous or criminal
occupations; and finally (to cut the catalogue short) the
discovery, familiar mutatis mutandis to every bankrupt in the
last stages of his progress, that customary remedies have lost
their bite and that the dose must be increased.
These symptoms are enough to alarm any one who thinks
about the future of the world in which he is living; enough
to alarm even those whose thought for the future goes no
farther than their own lifetime. They suggest that our
civilization has been caught in a vortex, somehow connected
with its attitude towards amusement, and that some disaster
is impending which, unless we prefer to shut our eyes to it
and perish, if we are to perish, in the dark, it concerns
us to understand.
It didn't shy away from deep topics too, although the central morality of the show was pretty simple, downhome decency. I think I'll pick the DVD of this show, thanks for the reminder!
