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I often end posts about the state of affairs in our nation and on the world stage (and, BTW, that topic probably merits revisiting soon; it’s pretty tense out there.) by mentioning post-Americans’ penchant for distraction.
This morning, the subject has me thinking about the relationship between distraction and entertainment.
The place to start such a thought process would be with a clear definition of entertainment, would it not? So let’s consult Merriam-Webster:
1
a
: amusement or diversion provided especially by performers
hired a band to provide entertainment
b
: something diverting or engaging: such as
(1)
: a public performance
(2)
: a usually light comic or adventure novel
2
: the act of entertaining
Well, I know what diversion means, and that provides some clues to the relationship. But just what is amusement? Well, M-W bounces you back to the terminology in the definition above:
1
: a means of amusing or entertaining
what are her favorite amusements
2
: the condition of being amused
could not hide his amusement
3
: pleasurable diversion : ENTERTAINMENT
plays the piano for amusement
I get the sense that to be entertained is to obtain some kind of relief, as if life is primarily a burdensome exercise. And maybe it is. The material realm is sometimes referred to as a vail of tears.
It’s probably also an apt moment for looking at the definition of art:
1
: skill acquired by experience, study, or observation
the art of making friends
2
a
: a branch of learning:
(1)
: one of the humanities
(2)
arts plural : LIBERAL ARTS
b
archaic : LEARNING, SCHOLARSHIP
3
: an occupation requiring knowledge or skill
the art of organ building
4
a
: the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects
the art of painting landscapes
also : works so produced
a gallery for modern art
b(1)
(2)
: one of the fine arts
(3)
: one of the graphic arts
5
a
archaic : a skillful plan
b
: the quality or state of being artful (see ARTFUL sense 2a)
6
: decorative or illustrative elements in printed matter
Art seems like it’s a more serious activity, doesn’t it? That it enhances our humanity.
It invites us to think about the true role of beauty:
Contact with an environment permeated by beauty not only offers real protection against impurity, baseness, every kind of letting oneself go, brutality, and untruthfulness; it has also the positive effect of raising us up in a moral sense. It does not draw us into a self-centered pleasure where our only wish is to indulge ourselves. On the contrary, it opens our hearts, inviting us to transcendence and leading us in conspectu Dei (“before the face of God”), before the face of God. Naturally, this last point applies above all to the high, exalted beauty which Kant calls the “sublime” [das Erhabene] and which he contrasts with the “beautiful.” But even in little things that are charming and graceful, even in the more modest beautiful things, one can find a trace of the pure and the noble. This may perhaps not lead us in conspectu Dei, but it does fill us with gratitude to God. It frees us from captivity in our egoistic interests and undoes the fetters of our hearts, releasing us (even if only for a short time) from the wild passions that convulse them. – Dietrich von Hildebrand
Because I am a musician and a music historian, my mind gravitates toward music when I’m thinking about culture generally. (Also food!) Hence, I write about it here a fair amount, as well as elsewhere.
Here’s a taste of a piece I wrote for The Freemen Newsletter titled “Taylor Swift and the Purpose of Music”:
Since the advent of the phonograph and the radio, but certainly over the course of the last seventy years, generations beginning with the youth of the time, flush as their pockets were with spending cash, were deferred to and crowned society’s taste setters. The machinery that churns out celebrities was refined to a science. We’ve both asked too much of music and grown ignorant of its real value.
Music was developed as part of our quest for beauty. Plato said that the acknowledgment of beauty in a physical object or scene was essentially a recognition of this a priori condition of the way the universe is constructed.
In The Republic, his conversants, Socrates and Glaucon, feel that musical harmony is such an important matter that they discuss what kinds of scales ought, and ought not, to be taught to the young people of the ideal State they’re constructing. (I personally find their conclusion that kids ought to be kept away from the Ionian (major, do-re-mi) and Lydian (major with a raised fourth) scales and only exposed to the Dorian and Phrygian scales, which are both minor, odd. But then again, I’m running it through a modern filter. I also had to keep that in mind when I encountered Richard M. Weaver’s tirade against jazz in his 1948 work Ideas Have Consequences.)
That Plato would consider musical harmony to be as important as other things participants in his dialogues discuss, such as justice or courage, ought to make us consider the place we’ve assigned in our lives to that which our ancestors ascribed the status of the sacred.
How about sports? It’s only since I’ve entered adulthood that I’ve followed any teams or players in any sport to any degree. But I have come to follow some, and I’ve come to see the art, per the definition 1 above, in, say, a well-executed football pass.
So what are we to make of the folks whose water cooler conversation (or the post-COVID equivalent) is primarily preoccupied with trades and draft picks and league standings?
I’ll venture to say that that is engagement with sport on an entertainment level. Because rarely does any game, match or race give us glimpses into human character. Nothing very significant is at stake.
Yes, there are a lot of people of exceptional character who play professional sports, and they contribute to many good things. But there are also a lot of scoundrels.
Another subject I frequently write about here at Precipice is the examination of just when Western civilization began its drift from a sense of the transcendent. And you may know that a book I find most instruct on that score is The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution by Carl Trueman. He traces the drift back to Rousseau and the we-were-good-in-a-state-of-nature argument.
But one thing that’s pretty obvious now that we’re pretty much secular is that everything is therapeutic. I’m going to except the entirety of the latest post at a great Substack, This Is Foster, because, well, it moves my thought process here along quite effectively:
What passes for Christianity these days is therapeutic nonsense with a gloss of Christian terminology.
For example, It is interesting to see how David Powlison's 2010 summary of the therapeutic mindset has already mutated into something worse.
The five tenets he listed are:
1. I want to feel loved for who I am, to be pitied for what I’ve gone through, to feel intimately understood, to be accepted unconditionally;
2. I want to experience a sense of personal significance and meaningfulness, to be successful in my career, to know my life matters, to have an impact;
3. I want to gain self-esteem, to affirm that I am okay, to be able to assert my opinions and desires;
4. I want to be entertained, to feel pleasure in the endless stream of performances that delight my eyes and tickle my ears;
5. I want a sense of adventure, excitement, action, and passion to experience life as thrilling and moving.
You'd need to rewrite them today. Here’s a quick attempt at an update:
1. I expect to feel loved for who I believe I am, to be pitied for what I imagine I've gone through, to automatically feel intimately understood, to be accepted unconditionally;
2. I expect to be treated and affirmed as a person of significance, to be successful in my career, to know my life matters, and to have an impact irrespective of my real-world skills or competencies;
3. I expect to have my self-esteem protected, to affirm that I am everything I should be, to be able to have my opinions and desires affirmed as good;
4. I expect to be entertained, to feel pleasure in the endless stream of performances designed to delight my eyes, tickle my ears, and affirm my self-concept;
5. I expect to feel safe and shielded from real-world risk and danger while experiencing life through the avatars of video games and influencers.
We search everywhere for what’s going to be “meaningful.” It seems to me that meaning hits one right between the eyes. But maybe you have to be tethered to a lodestar for that to happen:
Looking into what thousands of great thinkers over the course of thousands of years have done with that sense requires some humility. It requires admitting that perhaps the thought of contemporaries who have come along in our own lifetimes or a few decades back isn’t going to provide adequate answers.
That’s not easy for us to do these days. We are quite - to use a phrase that shows up a few times in Scripture - stiff-necked.
We risk becoming like those described in C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, creatures who can hear the faint strains of the joyful celebration that is going on within the reality that is Heaven, but wistfully resign ourselves to a dark eternal lot instead, because it seems more appealing to have an endless discussion among ourselves about what paradise might be like rather than entering into it.
I don’t know; maybe we need entertainment. Maybe it is somehow essential psychologically. People have been finding ways to amuse themselves for all of recorded history.
But it’s not a right. We must always be careful to distinguish between what is and isn’t a right.
And be careful how much of your attention you think it merits.