Relaxing Exertions

The important work of play

This is the first of a series of posts on the role of play in contemporary American life. Hope you like it. —Jim

Leisure and Labor, by Frank Blackwell Mayer (1858)

If time is money, then leisure is wealth. People in all times and places have found ways to experience a respite from their labors, and in all times and places some people have had more free time than others. (Leisure and Labor, reproduced above, is widely regarded as a commentary on Northern industry and Southern indolence on the eve of the Civil War.) In the ancient world, activities like politics—then, as now, regarded as something of a game—were defined precisely in terms of one’s freedom from the need to make a living. This aristocratic ideal persisted straight through the Middle Ages; it’s central to the conception of ladies and gentlemen, who have time to refine themselves through the pursuit of the Finer Things, and extended into the creation of the United States, where the presence of landed gentry, notably that of Virginia, was central to its founding. Plantation grandees like Thomas Jefferson prided themselves on their detachment from mere moneymaking, typically delegating the tawdry work of managing slaves to overseers. Of course, the free time of the leisured classes was predicated on the labor of the working classes, in a zero-sum equation that lasted until the Industrial Revolution, when mass production changed the variables somewhat, though exploitation and unequal distribution of free time continues to this day. Our modern service economy is predicated more than ever on the idea that you can find someone else to do just about anything that you want done—if you’ve got the cash.

It’s essential to emphasize, however, that even the poorest of people have always found ways to make room for discretionary activity in their lives. Play, broadly construed, is as elemental an expression of humanity as love, faith, and learning. A steady stream of folk culture has animated all societies, which have managed to carve out spaces, and time, to punctuate their working days. One of the profound ironies of American history is that the crucial leavening ingredient in its culture came from enslaved people—that those with the least time to spare contributed art of immense value with the scarcest of resources in their songs, dances, stories, and other expressions of everyday life reborn with the advent of every new medium of mass communication.

In another sense, though, there’s something fitting about that. That’s because the great drama of our history, notwithstanding its roots in slavery, has been the way free time, like other forms of freedom, has gradually democratized over the last four centuries. As with other freedoms, that doesn’t mean the line has been straight, or that everyone has gotten comparable amounts. Actually, to a great extent, the ability of Americans to enjoy themselves has often been a matter not of less time on the job, but rather of new technologies—consider what light bulbs, washing machines, and microwave ovens have done for even the most financially limited Americans—that made leisure activity easier to access. Some of this innovation has been in the realm of electronics that have allowed individuals to access entertainment in their homes (and, most recently, on their phones).

All societies are marked by contradictions of one kind or another, and here’s one of ours: we’re obsessed with work and play. To begin with the former: Americans have long been regarded as among the most notable workaholics on the planet: they put in longer hours, take less vacation time, and retire later than their counterparts in the industrialized world. Some of this reflects the insecurity of our job market relative to our counterparts, where employment tends to be easier to get but less attractive to keep and easier to lose. Some reflects an apparent cultural tendency to choose money over time off. And some reflects an American tendency to believe that they can get ahead on the basis of their exertions. That tendency may in part be the lingering residue of what the Protestant Work Ethic, secularized into a quest to realize the Good Life in this world, not the next one.

Alongside this longstanding obsession with work has been an even more obvious one with play. Cockfighting and horseracing were fixtures of colonial life, as were more utilitarian pursuits like hunting and fishing. Music eased labor in the field, enlivened the hearth, and animated spirits at worship across race, class, gender, religion, and regional lines. Theater was a more elite pastime, especially in the South, where it was often performed in the homes of wealthy people (plays were banned as idolatrous in New England until after the Revolution). Reading, which had its roots in religious devotion, secularized into a pursuit of pleasure by the late seventeenth century, so much so that Harvard devoted its 1805 commencement address to the dangers of novel reading as a cause of depravity for young women.

By the early 19^th century, it was clear even to outsiders that Americans had a notable penchant for colorful displays, literal and figurative, in their cultural life. P.T. Barnum became internationally famous for his museum and his extravagant claims of one kind or another; determining their validity was often half the fun. Circuses, minstrel shows, tall tales: foreign observers were often delighted (and sometimes disgusted) by Americans’ penchant for laughter, excitement, and novelty, which stretched beyond the breaking point of good taste. This playful spirit spilled over into the nation’s penchant for technological innovation; the United States was at the vanguard in the new media of radio, sound recording, and film, achieving global dominance in all of them by the end of the First World War, with television soon to follow by mid-century. By 2000, the only American export of comparable international appeal was the weapons business. The attraction of both American entertainment and weapons are rooted in imperialism, cultural and otherwise, and as such will prove temporary. But long after U.S. armaments have become nothing more than historical curiosities, its treasure trove of song, story, and games will have durable, if inevitably limited, appeal.

The nature of that appeal in the future is necessarily elusive to those of us living in the present. But history affords clues to the peculiarity of the Anglo-American way of play in the past. In his classic 1938 cross-cultural study Homo Ludens (“Man the Player”), the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga notes, “No other modern language known to me has the exact equivalent of the English ‘fun.’” Anglo-American tradition places a great deal of emphasis on the concept of freedom, and it’s not surprising that this emphasis should be reflected in the economy of discretionary time. That said, this tradition of play is not fundamentally different in the United States than it is anywhere else. Huizinga describes it in broadly anthropological terms as “a free activity standing quite outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious,’ but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it.” Huizinga adds that play in all its forms is “a contest for something or a representation of something.” Which indeed it has been at least since the time that the ancient Greeks, who were obsessed with the prestige associated with athletic prowess, first hosted the Olympics.

Like all attempts to describe that which an observer considers universal, there are claims Huizinga makes that one can plausibly contest. Perhaps the most obvious is his description of play as an “activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it,” because there are few arenas of our national life more bound up in material interest than our cultures of play, whether as a matter of the industries that have sprung up to sate our appetites for entertainment to the fantasies so many of us entertain whereby we can become players, literal and figurative, on stages or fields where we can make a living by engaging in activities something we would happily perform for free.

This, then, is the American Dream of play—a dream where seemingly contradictory national obsessions with work and leisure intersect. It’s a fondly imagined scenario where work becomes a form of play and play a form of (joyful) work—where living itself is what you do for a living, and where you imbue that living with a sense of purpose, deliberation, and achievement beyond simply getting through the day. In Huizinga’s terms, it’s a dream of representing something, whether an institution or a form of personal expression (I’m a member of the New York Yankees; I’m a professional dancer) or a dream of winning a contest, whether that contest is against other competitors or some victory over impersonal circumstances (I’m the one who won that part; I set the goal and scaled that height.)

As appealing as this vision is, there’s something problematic about it, too. As Huizinga implies and as many of us would instinctively agree, a great deal of the appeal of play derives from a sense of perceived purity, of freedom from other motives. In fact, of course, the American Dream of play is never as effortless as we like to imagine; we tend not to focus on the countless hours that practice that precede “overnight” success, or the element of calculation that goes into seemingly spontaneous banter at the press conference or the talk show. And complaints about the phoniness, cynicism, grubbiness, or just plain grim duty associated with things we think are supposed to be fun are endemic. Ironically, the Dream corrupts reality here, rather than the other way around. It is our strange cultural burden: to find a way to play a little less seriously. The struggle to make it just a game.

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