Much of the scholarly literature on play shows how play can help people—both children and adults—to adapt to the challenges of the real world. Through play we can engage in battle with others without real-world consequences. Or we can experience strong feelings without putting ourselves in dangerous situations. Play happens in an imaginary world, a world that doesn’t count.

That’s true, but it’s also false. Here’s an account of a match—a game—of a sport called “rough and tumble” played on the American frontier about 250 years ago. A man from Virginia is taking on a man from Kentucky:

“The contestants were asked if they wished to ‘fight fair’ or ‘rough and tumble.’ When they chose ‘rough and tumble,’ a roar arose from the multitude. The two men entered the ring, and a few ordinary blows were exchanged in a tentative manner. Then suddenly the Virginian ‘contracted his whole form, drew his arms to his face,” and ‘pitched himself into the bosom of his opponent,’ sinking his sharpened fingernails into the Kentuckian’s head. ‘The Virginian,’ we are told, ‘never lost his hold…fixing his claws in his hair and his thumbs on his eyes, [he] gave them a start from the sockets. The sufferer roared aloud, but he uttered no complaint.’ Even after the eyes were gouged out, the struggle continued. The Virginian fastened his teeth on the Kentuckian’s nose and bit it in two pieces. Then he tore off the Kentuckian’s ears. At last, the ‘Kentuckian, deprived of eyes, ears, and nose, gave in.’ The victor, himself maimed and bleeding, was ‘chaired round the grounds,’ to the cheers of the crowd.” (page 737, Albion’s Seed, David Hackett Fischer)

So, as the Kentuckian will tell you, the imaginary world of play is also the real world, and has real consequences. These men weren’t fighting—at the outset of the match they had no problem with one another—they were playing at fighting. But at the end, that’s sort of an abstract fact for the man from Kentucky.

Furthermore, that’s not the most important conclusion to draw from this breathtakingly violent game. The thing that’s almost impossible to grasp here is that the Kentuckian, as he is getting his eyes torn from their sockets, and even after that, wants to keep “playing.” He is so caught up in the match that some part of him decides to keep going.

If you think about it, many people have a milder version of this experience: Video game players who find it difficult to pull away from the game. Gamblers who can’t stop. Those who neglect friends and family for role-playing games. In fact, almost any form of play can beckon people away from the world, can eventually become painful and destructive. We wouldn’t be human beings without our love for play, but our love for play can lead us into a world from which we never return.

Photo by Polina Sergeeva.

I’ve recently been reading Forces of Habit by David Courtwright, a fascinating history of drug use in the modern world. The book has not only helped me to understand the genesis of today’s terrible drug problems, it has also given me some new insight into the character of contemporary entertainment culture. Here are some highlights:

You may be surprised to learn that in the early years of the drug trade—the 16th through the 19th centuries—psychoactive substances were often not only tolerated but promoted by Western powers such as the United States and Great Britain. In fact, the latter nation fought two wars in China during the 19th century in order to prevent China from enforcing its own laws against opium trade and use. Why? Because—to put the matter in the starkest terms—Great Britain made a lot of money from the opium trade.

Profit—and taxing that profit—was not the only reason the colonial powers encouraged the use of drugs. Many people found it easier to tolerate monotonous and physically demanding labor if they were taking, say, opium. So those who oversaw labor in activities such as laying railroad track allowed or even encouraged opium use. In fact, workers were sometimes partially paid in opium, a practice that more or less ensured that laborers remained trapped in their positions.

Thus today’s networks and institutions for the production and distribution of drugs are built upon the foundations laid by the government policies of earlier centuries. It has proved very difficult to dismantle the capacity for production and consumption of drugs that was built over several centuries. This raises the question of why Western powers changed course and began, about a century ago, to enact laws restricting and prohibiting the production and consumption of psychoactive substances.

There were a number of reasons for this reversal, but probably the most powerful of them were again economic. As the nature of work shifted from agricultural production and construction to manufacturing and white-collar work in bureaucracies, the usefulness of drugs for labor control diminished. You don’t want the worker who is operating machinery–or your accountant–to be taking opium. Even more basic was the fact that the new economy that was taking shape in the early 20th century offered consumers a wide range of stimulating pleasures that were enjoyable but not nearly as potentially dangerous as drugs. There was much more money to be made by providing such products as movies, music, and consumer goods than by providing drugs. And in fact, drugs get in the way of the consumer economy. People who are high much of the time are neither dependable workers nor dependable consumers, despite the fact that some drugs may give them the munchies.

What this means, if you think about it, is that our entertainment-based economy competes with drugs because the two forms of pleasure are in some ways similar. Courtwright quotes a passage from the Catholic mystic Thomas Merton (page 110): “We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.”

Merton wrote that in 1948, and the situation he describes is to say the least much more extreme today. Little wonder, when people are brought up this way, that some proportion of them reject the path of entertainment and follow instead the more potent, and less challenging, path of stimulating themselves with chemicals.

Photo available on Flickr from the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library.

Photo by Lecates

It is sometimes said that America’s leading export to the rest of the world is its entertainment. If we take a broad view of entertainment—movies, television, popular music and food products (yes, food can be entertaining)—this is undoubtedly true. Why is America such a leader in the production of entertainment?

The answer to this question is linked to a topic I’ve been writing about lately, the American concept of person. As far back as the time of the Puritans, many Americans have been focused on examining and perfecting their lives and themselves. The Puritans had good reasons for such activities: they were concerned about their state of grace (saved or damned?) and they scrutinized their lives for signs that they were among the few destined for glory. As generations passed, this focus on the qualities of the self gradually became a broadly-based cultural conviction that with effort and time, persons can perfect themselves. In contrast to virtues like forbearance and humility, Americans have tended to cultivate virtues like self-examination, social mobility, and fame.

When, in the 19th century, our contemporary institutions of entertainment and advertising began to take shape, producers quickly learned about the American fascination with stories about how a person’s life was transformed into something more meaningful. These stories were first of all fictions—tales of how a young couple found happiness, a detective solved a murder and returned order to the world, or superhero staved off an alien invasion. But these fictions could also be presented as real possibilities: If you have no friends, it’s probably because you need our mouthwash. If you have no fun, it’s probably because you need our car.

Americans have been the world’s leaders in developing entertainment and advertising because entertainment and advertising fit so perfectly with our culture’s ideas about the world and the people who live in it. Entertainment turns our dreams into realities. This is also what we try and do with ourselves, it is what we call the American dream. We love entertainment because it is fun, of course, but it is fun in part because the stories we engage through books and films and TV are little moral fables about one of our most basic beliefs, the possibility of realizing our fondest wishes. When we export our entertainment to the rest of the world we are at the same time exporting something of our view of the world and of persons, our conviction that our dreams can be turned into realities.

As those who have read this blog in the past know, I consider entertainment to be very important in our culture. It’s important because much of what people want to do comes down to being entertained—watching TV, movies, and sports, playing games, amusing themselves online, going out to eat, drink, and party, etc., etc. In that sense, although we are unlikely to put it in this way, entertainment seems to operate for many of us as the very purpose of life.

Entertainment is also important because our lust to be entertained infects many areas of life that aren’t in themselves entertaining—we want our food and our cars and our politicians and our classes and our friends to be entertaining, just for starters. The result is that certain kinds of products and activities—for example, an honest and competent, but ugly and boring politician—tend to disappear.

In a number of recent posts, I have been trying to point out another aspect of the importance of entertainment—entertainment can only flourish in a particular sort of cultural environment. Whether it’s a strange coincidence or not, the mass entertainments of the turn of the 20th century (motion pictures, followed by radio and TV) were accompanied by new ways of thinking about people and values. At this time there was a growing emphasis on the importance of people being amusing and being able to create a good first impression, and there emerged a new flexibility about moral values. Above all, this is the period when it began to be widely accepted that the possibilities of fulfillment and self-realization opened up life’s most important quests. And what better way to find fulfillment than in entertaining activities and the acquisition of the flood of consumer goods that was starting to appear around this time?

I don’t claim that entertainment caused all these things, but I do claim that they all emerged in our culture at roughly the same time—around the turn of the 20th century. As I pointed out last time, that’s also the time period in which an increasingly vocal protest started to emerge against this culture of entertainment, a protest that usually took the form of religious fundamentalism.

So, what’s the point? Is entertainment good or bad? The point has nothing to do with entertainment being good or bad. Sure, there are social problems that are associated with entertainment; here are a few possibilities that come immediately to mind: childhood obesity, addiction, political polarization, widespread boredom. I’ve discussed all of these in this space.

But there are lots of good things associated with entertainment as well: tolerance of diversity, effective communication, and–can’t forget this–it’s fun. In the end, the point isn’t to pass judgment on our culture of entertainment, it’s to better understand that culture. Because we are more likely to be able to control what we understand. And what we don’t understand is more likely to control us.

I’m not sure what “modern” means. I’m not sure anyone knows what it means, because the term is so broad that it gets used in a lot of different ways. But that is not to say that the term is meaningless. There are some consistencies in the way the word is used. One of those consistencies has to do with secularity: modernity entails a viewpoint that understands basic questions about the universe from a secular perspective. What causes the events in a person’s life? What is the origin of the universe? Where do human beings come from? If your understanding of these issues does not assign primary significance to divine beings or forces, then in this respect you have a modern world view. This does not mean that people with a modern world view don’t believe in God, but it does mean that they accommodate that belief to what they understand to be scientific and secular explanations.

Lots of people, even in the contemporary West, do not have a modern world view. In most of the world, this is not because they have not heard about modernity, it is rather because they know about it and they reject it. I am probably not the person to explain their objections, since I do not share them, but it is not difficult to see that indeed one could argue there are some downsides to secular modernity (For example: the collapse of communal values, a pervasive sense of anxiety and meaninglessness, loosening of restraints on consumption and sexual behavior, and so on).

What we call “fundamentalism”—whether based in Christianity, Islam, or some other religion– is a system of thought that rejects the modern world view. But at the same time, fundamentalism could not exist without the modern world, because it is a reaction against the modern world. There were no fundamentalists in the 12th century.

Fundamentalism is not going to go away, and the clash between fundamentalists (of different sorts) and the modern world view is undeniably one of the most important political conflicts of our time. But for the most part people on the different sides of this conflict don’t talk to one another. As a result misunderstandings and suspicions grow, and so does the level of conflict. It is up to people on both sides to try and change this. But it won’t be easy. For example, those who consider themselves scientists—who are probably also modernists—typically consider discussion with fundamentalists futile, because the scientists know they are right and their opponents are wrong. Funny thing is, typically the fundamentalists feel the same way.

Photo by Global X.

Photo provided by Tara Hunt

The novelist Virginia Woolf once said, “on or about December 1910, human character changed.” (see Jackson Lears). She was kidding about the specificity of the date but in earnest about the change. Roughly speaking, the change in human character to which she referred had to do with the shift from an emphasis on duty, respectability, and moral uprightness to a concern with enjoyment, popularity, and personal fulfillment.

Lately I’ve been writing about how, along with this change, modern institutions such as entertainment, advertising, and psychotherapy started to develop. These things all fit together in some uncanny way. The new ideas about the importance of personal enjoyment and fulfillment encouraged consumption because they made people especially interested in the steady supply of consumer goods being turned out on assembly lines. Advertising stepped in to help enhance the message that consumer goods and services could bring fulfillment and address one’s personal ills. Psychotherapy came from another direction, of course, but it too was based on the new idea that personal happiness and self-realization should be an expected right for everyone.

A society that emphasizes the right of everyone to pursue their own desires and inclinations is going to have to be willing to tolerate a wide range of beliefs, values, and behaviors. Thus it is not surprising that this period was also characterized by a growing flexibility about values.

The good news about this flexibility—often called cultural relativism–is first of all that it is adaptive in an economy based on high levels of consumption. In a climate of cultural relativism, people are willing to try new things; they are on a quest to discover themselves and are receptive to arguments that this or that is just what they need.

Second, cultural relativism tends to encourage tolerance of different ways of life and beliefs, and is an important part of the foundation for the diverse society that began to take shape. But cultural relativism also creates some significant problems. For example, what are its limits? Are there no final standards of right and wrong?

This may all seem somewhat philosophical and academic, but in fact it is one of the most important questions of our time. The political climate in America today is becoming increasingly polarized, and one of the reasons for this is that people have different moral standards and are losing their faith that these differences can be reconciled. In recent decades the strongest backlash against cultural relativism has taken the form of religious fundamentalism. This battle over cultural relativism has been and will continue to be one of the defining conflicts of our time.

Freud in 1939, provided by Cesar Blanco

In my most recent post, I argued that two institutions that today seem utterly unconnected—psychotherapy and advertising—in fact share some intriguing historical connections. And none of these connections is more intriguing than the life of the American who is often known as “the father of public relations,” Edward Bernays. The place where it starts getting interesting is when you realize that Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud.

Bernays is known for inventing a number of the public relations and advertising techniques that revolutionized marketing in the early decades of the 20th century. For example, Bernays was a pioneer in creating what Daniel Boorstin would later call “pseudo-events:” staged happenings that were covered as news. One of his most famous stunts was to hire a number of young women to march in New York’s Easter Parade in 1929 while smoking cigarettes—at that time public smoking by women was still widely regarded as taboo. He made sure photographers and reporters were on hand, and had encouraged the women to refer to the cigarettes as “torches of freedom.” The women were thus depicted as fashionable rebels against the discrimination that forbade public smoking by women.

The event was front page news in papers all across the country on the following day, and in many cities women took to the streets with their cigarettes to show their support. What didn’t come out until much later was the fact that Bernays had been under contract to the American Tobacco Company to expand the market for cigarettes among women.

In everything he did, Bernays began with the basic principles of the psychology of his time, and not only his uncle’s. He felt that it was not reason but emotion and instinct that moved the common man, and throughout his long life he held onto the elitist view that those who understood this could and should control the masses. As he said in the first paragraph of his influential book Propaganda. “Those who manipulate [the habits and opinions of the masses]…constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

In saying that there is an important relationship between psychotherapy and such institutions as public relations and advertising I am, of course, neglecting one very important fact. This is that the goal of psychotherapies, very broadly, is not to control people but in some way to free them. Whereas the goal of advertising and public relations is to persuade people to behave in a particular way or–if you want to put it in the way Bernays would have–to control them.

Nevertheless, both endeavors strive to harness what we know about human mental processes, cognition and emotion, to change people’s lives. And it is interesting and important to understand that this attempt to effectively manipulate human minds is one of the fundamental building blocks of our way of life.

Psychotherapy is such an important part of our way of life that one can forget that it’s a recent innovation. You will never see a character in a Jane Austen or Charles Dickens novel heading off for therapy, because therapy didn’t exist before the very late 19th century. Why not?

Some psychologists will argue that psychotherapy (like, say, chemistry) could only get going after some key scientific discoveries, but this is at best only part of the story. Psychotherapy emerged because of some important moral shifts in the late 19th century, shifts that also had something to do with the emergence of contemporary consumer society, advertising, and entertainment. When I say moral shifts, I am referring to matters like how people think about themselves and what they value in life.

The historian T.J. Jackson Lears sums up these matters by saying that around this time people began to develop a “therapeutic ethos.” By this he means that—compared to earlier ages–at this time people began to be very concerned about their physical and mental health, their well-being. In earlier, more religious, periods, questions like “are you getting all you can out of life?” and “are you happy?” were considered less important than questions about your state of salvation and your obligations to others. In fact, the idea that one should be maximizing one’s enjoyment and potential would have been absurd most people of 17th century.

However, throughout the 19th century the idea started to take hold that individual happiness and satisfaction was not only important, but in some ways the very purpose of life. People began to resonate with the notion that what was meaningful was not doing what society or God demanded, but rather finding and realizing the potential of their own unique selves. And as this inner self became important, taking care of it through various kinds of therapies became more important as well.

Why did these changes happen around this time? A full answer to that question would probably require a book, but notice that this is the period in which mass production techniques and other innovations began to create today’s consumer economy. The new moral attitudes encouraged consumption, because they stressed the importance of the individual’s happiness and fulfillment. It is especially important that this period also saw the spectacular growth of advertising and entertainments such as motion pictures.

Historians have pointed out that one of the most effective promoters of consumption was a new kind of advertising started to appear in this period: instead of providing information about the product, the new ads told the potential buyer that the product could transform his or her life. Strange, isn’t it: In a way, the ads were offering the same promises as the new science of psychotherapy, the possibility of personal transformation and a new level of satisfaction and happiness.

In pointing out this relationship between entertainment, advertising, and psychotherapy, am I saying that psychotherapy is unscientific? Absolutely not: a century of research has led to enormous advances and refinements in therapeutic techniques. But it’s best to remember where you came from, and back in the nursery it was a little more obvious who psychotherapy’s siblings and cousins were.

Photo by Michael Tracey

Again and again, throughout human history, the following events have played out: Step One: A group of people faces a threat of some kind. Perhaps a powerful army is advancing toward its borders, or perhaps a severe economic crisis portends uncertainty and privation. Or perhaps it is just that the group is being left behind as others successfully pursue wealth and status.

Step Two: Despair begins to spread. Some respond with apathy, others with violence. Suicide rates may increase, along with rates of mental disorders such as depression and anxiety disorders. Hopelessness and apathy are rampant; many turn to heavy use of alcohol or other available drugs.

Step Three: A powerful leader arises, typically a person who has him or herself suffered as a result of the society’s troubles. Usually—although not always—the leader’s power stems from a claim to speak for God. The leader’s message is: Follow me, I know the way out of our dilemma. The leader specifies what people must do—engage in a holy war, perform certain rituals, give up alcohol, etc.—and promises that a realm of paradise awaits his or her disciples. But those who hear the message and reject it will be punished not only by exclusion from the coming paradise, but by death and damnation.

Possibly these steps sound familiar to you. They outline the basic structure of what scholars of religion call millenarian movements (so named for a Biblical prophecy that Christ will reign over the Kingdom of God for a thousand years). You may be able to name several of the religions that have started in this way and have changed the course of human history: Christianity, Islam, Mormonism. And of course, smaller movements of this sort continue to arise today, and sometimes become the focus of media attention, especially when their clashes with the larger society lead to violence (Jim Jones in Guyana, the Branch Davidians in Waco).

Starting around the turn of the 20th century, there was a frightening development in the long history of millenarianism: It began to take secular (non-religious) forms. Powerful leaders emerged in the chaos of Europe during and after the first world war who promised utopias based on the principles of their political systems—communism and the Thousand Year Reich. As we all know, the chain of events set in motion by these social movements led to unprecedented horrors.

Although there have been many millenarian movements in America, no such movement has ever taken the reigns of the government. However, it’s interesting to think about whether we have created—and are living in—our own distinctive, and relatively benign, form of millenarianism. At roughly the same time as the rise of millenarian-tinged totalitarianism in Europe, Americans began to develop extraordinarily effective techniques of advertising and entertainment. The new innovation that built these institutions was nothing other than the basic premise of millenarianism, promises of a world of enormous pleasure and satisfaction if you will just buy this product—whether it be a car or a movie or a soft drink.

Today our society is plagued by high rates of boredom and apathy, of depression and anxiety, and an intractable drug addiction problem. No wonder that people are happy to retreat into the utopian fantasies of the romance novel, the blockbuster movie, the dream of a new iPhone. It’s millenarianism lite: no eternal damnation, no death camps, all utopia all the time. Could be worse, I suppose.

Photo by Jason Scragz

Historians and anthropologists who have studied boredom have often concluded that it is not a universal affliction, but is instead a problem that is largely confined to contemporary society.  Perhaps this seems counter-intuitive: I mean, what could be more boring than hunting and (especially) gathering, the ecological adaptation that has been the means of support throughout most of the time humans have been on the planet?  Every day you get up and look around your territory for stuff to eat, no TV, no internet, not even a book to read. We might expect that foraging groups would have an extensive vocabulary of boredom, but as far as I know that has never been reported in the anthropological literature.

In fact, it seems as though nobody in the English speaking world complained of boredom until the mid to late 18^th century.  Why might this be?  No one knows for sure, but it is probably relevant that this is roughly the same time that modern novels started to appear.  More broadly, the first stirrings of the contemporary culture of entertainment date from around this time, and as opportunities for entertainment proliferated, people began to compare their daily experience to the adventure and romance and glamour of the worlds they could experience through entertainment.

Today, we expect or at least hope for more or less continuous entertainment.  Teachers and campaigning politicians need to be entertaining if they expect an audience, we expect our food to be full of stimulating tastes, we carry music with us wherever we go—obviously, this is a list that could go on and on.  We live in a world where those who develop more entertaining options for anything are going to get rich, and as a result more and more of our experience is entertaining.  Except when it isn’t.  Think about it—the moments when you are bored are those when you are not being entertained. What do you do to address your boredom?  Try to find something entertaining, of course.

What I’m saying is this:  We live in a society that sets us up to be bored.  Everyone who has something entertaining or stimulating to sell has an interest in our being bored, and an enormous amount of resources go into making sure that if we try to step back from the world of entertainment, we will be.  In our society, the opposite of bored is entertained; and more to the point, if we aren’t entertained, we’re bored.