The Value of Play
Play, work, and leisure. These are the three states of activity that encompass the act of living.
Because we spend our time engaged in (one of) these three activities, we should consider what these words mean and how they create the scaffolding of human activity, for two reasons: Firstly to demonstrate the distinct roles that the actions of each category play in our lives, and secondly to address certain contemporary cultural confusions regarding both what these activities are, and how we ought to order them in our lives.
I’ve decided to begin with play because, in many ways, play, or relaxation, is the most misunderstood of the three. St. Thomas Aquinas himself even notes, commenting on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, that “those who pass their lives in play do not seem to intend the common advantage, but their individual pleasure.” In this, I will tip my hat to the Angelic Doctor, and acknowledge that he speaks truly: We were made for more than to while away our hours in ephemeral amusements. More starkly, Neil Postman warns in his seminal work Amusing Ourselves to Death,
There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first—the Orwellian—culture becomes a prison. In the second—the Huxleyan—culture becomes a burlesque … When cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments … when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk.
Postman’s critique is specifically focused on the television, while St. Thomas’s addresses amusement more broadly. I believe the two critiques are not out-of-sync in their concern: that man, captivated by the pleasant experience of play, will fail to strive after greater goods—goods of the community or the good (which is man’s highest end) of contemplation.
When put so starkly—as a distraction from man’s highest individual good, and his ordination towards the common good—the reactionary will climb atop his soapbox to denounce the evils of Temptress Relaxation. While I will be the first to admit that binge watching, well, just about anything on Netflix, isn’t the healthiest use of time, nor of particular benefit to the common good; and that watching pornography is downright evil; I think there is a more fundamental problem in our culture’s relationship with relaxation.
According to the 2012 American Time Use Survey, in the time not at work, Americans spent half of their leisure time watching television—roughly three hours a day. Now, I’m not against television, but it does strike me as odd that watching a movie, playing video games, Skyping, etc., are all common uses of our time not spent on work or true leisure. And lest I throw stones in glass houses, my Netflix cue will testify that I am as guilty as anyone. When play devolves further—to drugs, pornography, binge drinking, and hookups (all of which occupy the extreme end of the spectrum of play and have become culturally representative of how we use our free time), I think we have really lost the idea of playing as being an activity in which one engages for the sake of something else: work, and ultimately contemplation. As Aristotle notes, “to amuse oneself in order that one may exert oneself, as Anacharsis puts it, seems right; for amusement is a sort of relaxation, and we need relaxation because we cannot work continuously.” Now, I do think television, general screen time, video games, etc., in moderation can acceptably fall into that category. But when we think about relaxation’s role in the hierarchy of human experience—it is ordered to work, which is ordered to fulfilling our most human ends—we can certainly come up with better options.
Playing allows us to take momentary respite in our daily lives. For relaxation to achieve this respite, we must not run from the real challenges that living presents; relaxation is not escapism.
When done well, playing disposes us neither to manipulate nor conquer reality; to accept it in the particularity of an encounter, not in an abstracted totality. To knit, to jam on an instrument, to play games, (even) to watch movies, to play sports, to cook, to garden, to engage in the numerous hobbies that we can discover while Google searching, is to encounter the real in what is small and accessible. The pleasure associated with relaxation is that we are briefly pulled from our drudgery or the labors of contemplation and, for a moment, revert to the child-like joy to be found in things.
Reality, the causes on which the universe hinges, goes deeper than the things. But without a joy in the things, without remembering the delight of the world we encounter, it becomes difficult to proceed to the sublimity of the causality of that world. The road, plants, views, people, and experience of my body as I run pulls me outside the fluorescent lighting and exhaustion of the job I hold. The sounds, practice of movements, and incorporated rhythm that I create when I play my guitar bring me joy for participating in something beautiful. Spending time in the garden lets me enjoy the sunshine and observe the natural world.
Any number of ideas out there that will bring us reality, if only each in little packets. In something so small, we are less overwhelmed and able to see more of the wonder that surrounds us—to gain back that wonder that is the origin of contemplation and the impulse to work. Play and relaxation are ultimately ordered to reminding us that the world is good, an echo of God’s creative impulse.
