Entertainment
On the other side of the work ethic represented by the word workaholic lay what that person was doing when he or she wasn’t working: the oasis of leisure time. No less a workaholic than Henry Ford wrote that “unless we know more about the machines and their use, unless we better understand the mechanical portion of life, we cannot have the time to enjoy the trees, and the birds, and the flowers, and the green fields.” His was a curious vision, as if the human race needed machines to have time to “enjoy” a robin or dandelion.
Ford came from an America that still nurtured a pastoral vision. A good Christian (and thorough anti-Semite) he needed to assure himself that what he had helped create was beneficent in every sense. He did not understand how thoroughly the machine would change the world, not only in the physical sense but in emotional and spiritual senses. Ford believed that somehow the machine would free people. So, in a sense, did that critic of unfettered industrialism, Karl Marx, but Marx was acute enough to note that machinery would lead “to the disintegration of all formerly existing social and family relations.”
People in modern times still had families and still maintained all sorts of social relations but the quality of them changed. Given the planet-wide movement of people from the countryside to the city in search of work, those relations had to change. Increasingly, people had to adapt to the world that machines were creating. Dislocation of one sort or another—traditional family roles, diet, child rearing practices, generational connection, local customs—an enormous portion of the human ethos was redirected.
The very nature of people’s relation to time changed. People clocked in and clocked out of work. People were early or late. People worked overtime, as if time were a substance that could be added onto. People had to produce so much work in so much time. To relax was “time out,” to leave was “time off.” Time was money. Time, as represented by the world of work, was a quiet, implacable tyrant.
The relentless demands of modern time emptied people out in the sense that there was little time for reflection, meditation, or mere daydreaming. People were supposed to be steadily productive; “busy” became a term to describe a sort of relentlessly active well-being, a justification for being human that took its cue from the machine world. And as the factories and myriad enterprises that supported the factories took up a great deal of human time, the machine world gave people new ways to fill the time not devoted to work. In the form of radio, television, movies, and computer games—to name only four manifestations—it gave people entertainment.
Marx and Ford came from the old dispensation, the pre-modern world where time brushed up against both century-old customs and spiritual eternity. They were, for better and for worse, serious men who sought to answer the challenges of the machine world. The notion of sitting down each night before a television and spending one’s time watching whatever novelties that machine purveyed would have been utterly foreign to them. Entertainment for the sake of entertainment was not an acceptable human endeavor. To sit and stare at a screen would have seemed more like a narcotic, something that duped and entranced people, something that turned people away from the urgencies of life, from the pursuit of justice and redemption, to name two.
Neither man had much use for the common enchantments of imagination. As people had less and less time to sustain their own enchantments and were atomized into consumer units, as modest group endeavors such as music making, storytelling, quilting, and shared food preparation lost their traction, people craved other enchantments, ones they could take in with a flick of a switch. In terms of immediacy, the human world shrank, but in terms of opening people up to a breadth of events, the human world expanded. “You know what I saw last night?” “Did you catch so-and-so last night?” These became standard questions. Personal relations evolved from impersonal formats.
A great deal of what was purveyed was banal. Those who wished to raise the tastes of the human race were often appalled. Yet what was offered was not much different from bear-baiting or wrestling matches or Punch and Judy shows or theatrical farces, common entertainments that thrived on blood or foolery. Whether in the seventeenth or the twentieth century, the Puritan impulse was quick to denounce such pastimes, but the Puritan impulse was prone to put more weight on human beings than they could bear. The better world that both Marx and Ford envisioned was, as ideology and industrialization both bore out, not a warmly human one.
The entertainments were comic in the sense of the human comedy, that spectacle of human endeavor that went nowhere and knew nothing yet was deeply affecting. The entertainments offered no answers to anything but instead proposed endless palliatives to the exertion and oppression of the work day. The strange millenarian logic of the Protestant ethic—work hard because the world may end soon—found its just reward in the modern ethos of constantly available entertainment. Were twenty-four-hour mirth, sexual hijinks, criminal adventures, sport, and loud music what the human race was supposed to be about? One hears a minister, many ministers thundering. One also sees the congregation waiting impatiently for the jeremiad to end so they can turn on a machine and amuse themselves.
As the sons and daughters of day and night, human beings are proportional creatures, but ceaseless entertainment knows no proportions. The hours are so many hapless containers begging to be filled. If the demands of the machine driven world were not so overpowering, the need for electronic entertainment would not be so overpowering. The enjoyment of the natural world that Henry Ford believed he foresaw was very wishful thinking in a world devoted to factories. Even as it assuaged alienation, entertainment furthered it.
Great work Baron. I noticed that you ended up doing more essays than planned because your numbering was off, but that's fine by me I love reading your work, almost at the end now, been with you from the start of the year. I loved this project, and hope that you keep writing and keep me appraised of your projects in the future. From your loving former student, Diamanté "Jodeci" Maldonado