Playing For Time - importance of recreation in society

Ecologist, The, May, 2001 by Jay Griffiths

The majority of work done today, even more so than when Bertrand Russell wrote, is destructive, profiting big business and harming both nature and social justice. Arguably, it benefits few enough people even in the north, as the cycle of overwork, overspend, overmortgage, overconsume and overwork all over again is acknowledged to be destructive. The protestant work ethic has been countered in part by a protesters' play ethic; from the hippy 'dropouts' of the 1960s onwards to today's downshifters who, in the US, comprise between 5 and 10 per cent of the workforce. The politics of carnival, meanwhile, has been richly dramatised by the May Days of recent years; confronting the industrial with a ludic revolution.

Nature is 'the Player', Shiva commented. Today, though, nature must be put to work: the free, wild and self-willed inter-play of nature is managed at best, exploited at worst. The effervescent shimmer of the rainforest gives way to the dull thud of logging as the Amazon must pay its way to finance South America's external debt and money from the south goes to countries of the north whose sons and daughters, enleisured by neoliberalism, wreak cultural and environmental havoc going out to play 'global tourism'. Having stolen the real childhood of real children in sweatshops of the world, grownups now try to recreate for themselves the fake confectionery-childhood of tourism, fatuous adults playing in the artificial playgrounds of the world.

At the heart of play are ideas of autonomy, spontaneity and freedom above all. At the heart of modern work are ideas of subjection, clockwork time-discipline and unfreedom -- to the point of slavery. The psychology of work is that by enslaving someone's time, you enslave their minds, for free-thinking demands unfettered time, it demands the integrity of hour on hour untouched by the hands of someone else's clock. Play, lively, light-hearted and free, has been colonised all over the world, which is, if you don't mind my saying, a deadly serious business.

Play's freedom is connected to ineffable diversity. The worst of work is connected to ineluctable monoism, the assembly line, factories, sweatshops, work camps and concentration camps. But the dominant political systems of today reverse these truths, offering instead the lie that through work -- not play -- is liberation. The liberation of working to buy vacations; the liberation of labouring to buy labour-saving devices. These systems silently define all time as work time, so people are encouraged to work to 'buy' back some of their own 'free' time (and to work to buy the commodities that will fill that free time).

And then the lie is exported, through TV, tourism and consumerism, to persuade people of the 'Third World' that they too can earn a similar (vacant) liberation if they will only work hard enough. That they can liberate themselves from the yoke of the 'Third World debt' -- if they only work hard enough. The liberating power of work has been written, metaphorically, over the gates of Downing Street, at the White House, at every G8 meeting, it is on the letterheads of the World Bank and the IMF; an idea testament to the inherently fascistic tendencies of big business and neoliberalism: Work Makes You Free -- 'Arbeit macht freI' -- as the gates of Auschwitz proclaimed.