Are We Having Fun Yet?

[Americans] prefer those staid and quiet amusements which are more like business and which do not drive business out of their minds…[A]n American may prefer to spend his leisure time quietly drinking in his own house. Such a man enjoyes two pleasures at once: he thinks about his business affairs and gets drunk decently at home. Transplant Tocqueville to a frou-frou twenty-first century California restaurant at lunchtime and—J'ai vous de dit! Allowing for the inevitable culture shock, a privileged glimpse of contemporary business people making deals on cell phones while sipping Chardonnay and nibbling Sicilian wraps wouldn't have surprised the nimble-witted Frenchman one bit. Tocqueville would have been surprised, however—astonished is a better word—by the most recent transformation in the way twenty-first century Americans view the interrelationships between work and play. According to this tertiary ethic, the values of work and play are no longer perceived as oppositional at all. Any traditional friction between them, whether expressed as contradictory or as complementary, threatens to become a distant cultural memory. When I graduated from high school in '36, a farmhand made two dollars a day, so I went out to Idaho, working the potato harvest and topping beets. Hard hours, but I made five dollars a day. I come back with seventy bucks in my pocket… In ‘39 and ‘40, before I went overseas, I helped build highway one fifty. It was all shovel and wheelbarrow work for thirty cents an hour. I made two-forty a day, and I'd take my road money and help the folks out: buy a sack of apples or a case of pork and beans. While not every child of the Depression shared Soyez's experiences, most lower- and middle-class Americans who came of age during the nineteen-thirties will bring a measure of empathy to his plain-spoken reminiscences. Countless American urban children also knew what it was like to work for two dollars a day and help support the family in tough times. For most young people of today, of course, work is no longer a matter of physical survival. As veterans of the Great Depression like Lloyd Soyez never tire of reminding us, very few contemporary kids know the meaning of hard, sustained, manual labor. In fact, in a world defined by what Marshall McLuhan familiarly called the extensions of man—TV, the telephone, the automobile, the Internet—the ontological relationship between work and the human body itself has changed, perhaps for all time. When the French religious philosopher Simone Weil toiled in Renault automobile factories in France during the 1930's she recorded a memorable phrase often spoken by her co-workers: The trade is entering the body. She interpreted this to mean that under certain circumstances work constitutes a form of physical sacrifice, the human equivalent of Christ's spiritual sacrifice when, on the day of His Passion, thorns and nails entered His body. Weil was no sentimental, starry-eyed liberal. Like George Orwell, she made an heroic attempt to “de-class” herself by becoming a working person and sharing the Dickensian on-the-job conditions in French factories during the bleak and bitter thirties. And like Orwell, who chronicled the struggles of the French and English working class in books like Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier, Weil understood that sustained labor under poor working conditions also crushes the spirits of human beings, transforming many into drug addicts and alcoholics, violent abusers of each other and of families—even suicides. And yet, allowing for the dark side of unremitting toil as it was often manifested in French auto plants, English coal mines, and Idaho beet fields, it can't be denied that manual laborers felt something, felt it deeply, authentically, and existentially, in a fashion that American young people born after 1970, say, are commonly bereft of. For today's youth and young adults live in a virtual world not only of electronic media, of CD-ROMs and Internet chat rooms, but of work. We take for granted what would have seemed incredible to a young Lloyd Soyez just two generations ago—namely that millions of middle-class Americans now in their teens, twenties, and thirties will live out their professional lives in the disembodied realms of cyberspace as date processors, software designers, software engineers, network engineers, television rewrite specialists, marketing researchers, marketing production assistants, on-line editors, publicity directors, directors of knowledge management, advertising media buyers, media production consultants, public information specialists, systems analysts, web developers, web masters, spam masters, help desk administrators, junior and senior technical analysts, LAN (local area network) administrators, junior and senior administrative analysts, chief information officers, junior and senior database administrators, rank and file telecommunications workers, telecommunications executives, and so on ad infinitum. Say what you will about manual labor, it never distances the self from the body. This distancing is the essence of postmodern work: a divorce of human sense of self from its center of being, its corporeal seat. No wonder the Canadian cultural theorists Arthur and Marilouise Kroker chose to label the last decade of the twentieth century the flesh-eating nineties. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that so many American young people in the postmodern era have become addicted to fun, not as a counterbalancing escape from, but as a substitute for, the self-actualization of work. Now it is fun, not work, that “enters the body” in the form of nose-, tongue-nipple-, and belly-button rings, tattoos, branding, and other forms of physical mutilation. Anyone who has witnessed the bumping and bashing that goes on in the mosh pits of contemporary rock concerts from coast to coast readily understands the frantic, unspoken need of young people to literally get in touch with their own bodies, even if it means suffering cuts, bruises, even broken bones in the process. Why do so many youths enjoy punishing themselves in this bizarre and disturbing fashion? As Nietzsche once observed, faced with the choice between feeling pain and feeling nothing at all human beings will opt for pain every time. Along with so many other things contemporary, the “mosh pit syndrome” also confirms a Nietzschean hermeneutics of twenty-first century Western culture: I suffer, therefore I am. Add to all this the recent phenomenon of extreme sports—dangerous mountain biking, daredevil parachuting, brutal triathlons—and it becomes clear that for many young Americans play is work: for them, the postmodern American fun ethic is deadly serious business. Unfortunately, it also famishes the soul. Like all unhealthy addictions, play as a ding an sich constitutes what Nietzsche called imaginary food. One of the best known catchphrases of our era, Are we having fun yet?, speaks for itself. For this ye may understand that it is the will of God that every man and woman should labour busily. For if Adam and Eve had been occupied with labour, the serpent had not overcome them: for idleness is the devil's desire. Wherefore ye may know well it is the will of God that we should labour and put our body to penance for to flee sin. Thus did Adam and Eve, to example of all those that should come after them. Penance has long fallen out of fashion in Judeo-Christian culture. And yet, the sense that “idleness is the devil's desire”—that idleness is fundamentally wrong—is perhaps a stubbornest of all legacies of Old World Catholicism. Without penance human beings cannot be absolved of guilt feelings caused by the seven deadly sins. Included among these sins, of course, is idleness or sloth. In a secular era that privileges the health of the body over the health of the soul sloth is the pre-eminent postmodern “sin,” with gluttony running a close second (we still speak of “sinful” and “tempting” desserts). What's changed since the heyday of Christianity is that the guilt trips once placed upon us by religion we now place upon ourselves. We're culturally conditioned to be feel contempt for the obese, the flabby, the out of shape, the couch potatoes among us. When we happen to be couch potatoes, we feel contempt for ourselves. And when this self-loathing becomes unbearable, we make a beeline for the 24-hour gym and its array of stairmasters, treadmills, and exer-cycles. Raymond H— has been working on his body for the past three years, ever since he got his last promotion. He is hoping to achieve the body he always wanted…If the body ideal he seeks is lean, devoid of fatty tissue, it is also hard. ‘Soft flesh,‘ once a standard phrase in the American erotic lexicon, is now—within the competitive, upscale world he inhabits—a sign of failure or sloth. Raymond H— spends his work days as an investment firm middle-manager staring glassy-eyed at a computer monitor. Like innumerable other inhabitants of twenty-first century cyberspace Raymond feels out of touch with his body. So what does he do? In his leisure time he goes back to work. Raymond's work out consists of multiple exercises on Nautilus machines—“twelve stations in all,” Ewen informs us. Beginning with the hip abduction machine, Raymond moves on to the compound leg machine, then the leg curl machine, then the pullover/torso arm machine, then the double chest machine, then the four-way neck machine, and so on. No pain, no gain. In a grotesque postmodern parody of the stations of the Cross, Raymond's “steps” become progressively more difficult until, exhausted, sweaty, and sore at the end of the workout he feels better about himself than he did at the beginning. Like that of a medieval flagellant, Raymond's ultimate goal is self-improvement through self-denial. But unlike the medieval flagellant, Raymond has internalized the otherness of penance. A thinly-disguised form of narcissism, Raymond's “penance” is all about self-aggrandizement. There's a Russian word that describes what Raymond is actually up to: nadry'v, loosely translated as “a pleasurable self-hurt.” Nadry'v shouldn't be confused with masochism, or the purposeful suffering of pain for sexual gratification. As opposed to masochism, nadiy'v is a power trip. Raymond hopes his hardbody image will give him a well-toned leg up on his fellows at work and help him to achieve further promotions in order to succeed in the New York City rat race. Men and women have always been willing to suffer, to offer themselves up for sacrifice in the service of a spiritual ideal. In traditional Christian theology work itself has served as a medium or catalyst for such self-sacrifice. Hence the traditional folk concept of work as a daily crucifixion. Spiritual ideals, as we know, are notoriously hard to come by in a post-Enlightenment era. And yet, corrupted as they are, such ideals manage to hang on—in the contemporary professional athlete's pride in “playing through pain,” for instance. If Raymond H—— qualifies as the last penitent, the brave athlete who is willing to take one for the team qualifies as the last martyr. Why do sports fans still admire Dick Butkus, the great Chicago Bears linebacker of the nineteen-sixties? Because he was willing to play with a broken arm when his team needed him. Why do Los Angeles Rams (now the St. Louis Rams) fans cherish the memory of defensive end Jack Youngblood? Because he insisted on staying in a crucial game in spite of a broken leg. And while true believers will cringe at the thought of what happens in the 24-hour gym as penance or in a football game as martyrdom, they may take some comfort in knowing that in a strange and stubborn way the human need to believe in the power of redemptive suffering still persists, even for narcissists and NFL linebackers.

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