[Reposted from the following discussion thread]
Thinking about this and reading your posts, I am reminded of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which is emerging as sort of the Big Novel of our era. The story takes place in the not too distant future, and the title refers to a film that is so addictive that it kills the people who watch it; and the film, unsurprisingly, is wildly popular.
Wallace was concerned that, in the words of sociologist Neil Postman, we are “amusing ourselves to death”–not literally, of course, but psychologically or spiritually. I find this narrative seductive, but I resist it for that very reason. Part of the problem, I think, is that people just have different dispositions. Humanist folks tend to have a European part of their soul, a melancholic affect, a deep suspicion of the popular, the common, the fashionable, the masses, a reverence for some distant past, a disdain for the practical. But a lot of Americans don’t share this affect or this outlook: they just want to do their work, make their money, and have some fun, however the culture is currently defining and delivering it–”what’s the harm in that? Lighten up?” The Euro-humanist, of course, looks at these people and just cries “false consciousness”–they either don’t know, or won’t admit, their true condition. The Euro-humanist sees most people as trapped in and bespelled by some kind of Cave, and tends to see The Next Big Thing (MOOCs, gamification, Facebook, etc.) as just more distraction, illusion, ideology, etc. As the inimitable Roger Sterling puts it:
So what I think we’re dealing with here, at some level, is just different sensibilities: the can-do, practical, pragmatic, American happiness pursuer just NEVER WILL see the world quite like the intellectual, Europeanish, theory-minded soul will; for that reason, the gamified world is a blast (“awesome!”). This person does not have a problem with just doing their work, whatever it is, and going home and living their life. They don’t see, and they don’t care, that the compulsion to be entertained does any kind of damage to the soul, or makes us less of a human being. Maybe some people can just handle entertainment in a more moderate way. Wallace himself, for instance, had a highly addictive personality, and couldn’t handle fun things because he just found them to be, well, too much fun.
I have grown suspicious over the years of what I’ll call the Office Space Ideology that lots of intellectuals and humanists and liberals adopt: that corporations are evil, that office workers are drones, that it all really is as stupid and wretched and soul-rending as films like Office Space portray it to be. Why? Because most of those people have probably never worked in an office! And yes, they probably would find it to be drudgery. But maybe for people of a different sensibility, that’s not what it is. Maybe they are just better at accepting things for what they are–that, as Matthew Crawford puts it in his thoughtful and important meditation on the value of work, work is necessarily toil and serves someone else’s interests. And so rather than futilely try to fuse work and play, erect a separation of powers: work is the realm of necessity, play is the realm of freedom. And that reminds me of something Wallace said in a different context, when he was interviewing a pro tennis player: “I am almost in awe of his ability to shut down neural pathways that are not to his advantage.” People who are well adjusted are better at adapting to the reality of American life, which in some important ways overlaps with reality itself.
And let’s face it, the American Pragmatist is sometimes spot on about the EuroHumanist’s posturing, pedantry, and pretentiousness:
Maybe one reason that Euro-humanists disdain things like gamification is that their attachments to an idyllic past and an ideal future create such a sense of loss, longing, disappointment, and frustration that the escape and pleasure provided by games et al. is an irresistible narcotic. The crucial question is, whose sense of reality is more warped?
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