Play is the only way (paradise theory)
Liber Ludens #2
There was no paradise from which we fell, and there is no utopia we can achieve. Just a long series of problems, solutions, new problems, and new solutions. Nostalgia and utopianism set us up to be perennially dissatisfied, and distract us from the work of incremental progress. (tweet)
— Dr. Alan Levinovitz, Professor of Religion
Liber: book; free, unconstrained
Ludens: one who plays
paradise = problemlessness
the solving of problems = work
paradise = the absence of work
paradise = play
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Mysterium is an unfinished musical work by composer Alexander Scriabin. He started working on the composition in 1903, but left it incomplete when he died in 1915. Scriabin planned that the work would be synesthetic, exploiting the senses of smell and touch as well as hearing. He wrote that…
“There will not be a single spectator. All will be participants. The work requires special people, special artists, and a completely new culture…The cathedral in which it will take place will not be of one single type of stone but will continually change with the atmosphere and motion of the Mysterium. This will be done with the aid of mists and lights, which will modify the architectural contours.”
Scriabin intended the performance to be in the foothills of the Himalayas in India, a week-long event that would be followed by the end of the world and the transformation of the human race into “nobler beings”.
We cannot transform ourselves into nobler beings through grit or through wit. What we can do, however, is simply pretend that we were such beings (we can fake that it were so until we make that it were so).
This is how we must understand Paradise: as nothing more, and nothing less, than a simple game of make-believe.
Language, games, art, dance, poetry, myth: these are the things that point the way toward the eschaton. We humans will be released into a realm of pure self-engineering. We are going to live in the imagination. This is where we came from. This is where we are going. (Terence Mckenna)
Heidegger famously wrote that “only a god can save us.” In one sense, he was certainly right. But how the gods come to dance ranges from the creation of sublime art to a Nuremberg rally. The world without the gods is void, but the world with the gods easily hurtles towards total war. What we need is “a moral equivalent to war,” in William James’ terms, something that brings out all the courage and strength of humanity, but without the bloodshed. Considering that the century following James’ remarks featured the two most catastrophic wars in the history of the world, it is clear the search hasn’t been going well.
Here, at any rate, is a humble suggestion, an indication where future developments might go.
The Middle Ages were, of course, a violent time. Yet there was a common practice that proved advanced in the arts of peace. Guilds in towns and large cities would put on productions known as mystery plays (Everyman being one of the most famous) on Biblical or otherwise religious themes. Entire communities were involved in these productions, which took up a significant amount of time and energy. Everyone had a role to play in the creation of meaningfully significant art on a massive scale.
Now, I’m not suggesting that society could return to producing gigantic Biblical plays on a city-wide scale. There is no shared system of religious iconography that would make such unity possible. New forms, new images, new dreams need to be discovered to motivate such a total act of shared creation. In our context, this wouldn’t necessarily take the form of a play but perhaps of another art form or of a number of art forms combined. This is one path, other than war, that could bring out the vital energies of all the people in an entire city. (Sam Buntz)
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experiences (1902)
Does not, for example, the worship of material luxury and wealth, which constitutes so large a portion of the “spirit” of our age, make somewhat for effeminacy and unmanliness? Is not the exclusively sympathetic and facetious way in which most children are brought up to-day—so different from the education of a hundred years ago, especially in evangelical circles—in danger, in spite of its many advantages, of developing a certain trashiness of fibre? Are there not hereabouts some points of application for a renovated and revised ascetic discipline?
Many of you would recognize such dangers, but would point to athletics, militarism, and individual and national enterprise and adventure as the remedies. These contemporary ideals are quite as remarkable for the energy with which they make for heroic standards of life, as contemporary religion is remarkable for the way in which it neglects them. War and adventure assuredly keep all who engage in them from treating themselves too tenderly. They demand such incredible efforts, depth beyond depth of exertion, both in degree and in duration, that the whole scale of motivation alters. Discomfort and annoyance, hunger and wet, pain and cold, squalor and filth, cease to have any deterrent operation whatever. Death turns into a commonplace matter, and its usual power to check our action vanishes. With the annulling of these customary inhibitions, ranges of new energy are set free, and life seems cast upon a higher plane of power.
The beauty of war in this respect is that it is so congruous with ordinary human nature. Ancestral evolution has made us all potential warriors; so the most insignificant individual, when thrown into an army in the field, is weaned from whatever excess of tenderness towards his precious person he may bring with him, and may easily develop into a monster of insensibility.
[…]
Yet the fact remains that war is a school of strenuous life and heroism; and, being in the line of aboriginal instinct, is the only school that as yet is universally available. But when we gravely ask ourselves whether this wholesale organization of irrationality and crime be our only bulwark against effeminacy, we stand aghast at the thought, and think more kindly of ascetic religion. One hears of the mechanical equivalent of heat. What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible. I have often thought that in the old monkish poverty-worship, in spite of the pedantry which infested it, there might be something like that moral equivalent of war which we are seeking. May not voluntarily accepted poverty be “the strenuous life,” without the need of crushing weaker peoples?
Poverty indeed is the strenuous life—without brass bands or uniforms or hysteric popular applause or lies or circumlocutions; and when one sees the way in which wealth-getting enters as an ideal into the very bone and marrow of our generation, one wonders whether a revival of the belief that poverty is a worthy religious vocation may not be “the transformation of military courage,” and the spiritual reform which our time stands most in need of.
Among us English-speaking peoples especially do the praises of poverty need once more to be boldly sung. We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition. We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are or do and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly—the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape. When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.
It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to ideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen. But wealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases. Elsewhere the desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption. There are thousands of conjunctures in which a wealth-bound man must be a slave, whilst a man for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman. Think of the strength which personal indifference to poverty would give us if we were devoted to unpopular causes. We need no longer hold our tongues or fear to vote the revolutionary or reformatory ticket. Our stocks might fall, our hopes of promotion vanish, our salaries stop, our club doors close in our faces; yet, while we lived, we would imperturbably bear witness to the spirit, and our example would help to set free our generation. The cause would need its funds, but we its servants would be potent in proportion as we personally were contented with our poverty.
I recommend this matter to your serious pondering, for it is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.
money = the root of all evil
money = work
paradise = no evil
paradise = no money
paradise = no work
paradise = play
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Buntz and James discuss this “moral equivalent to war” in what appear to be very different terms. For Buntz, the idea is to channel our courage and strength into into a grand ethical-aesthetical project, something like Scriabin’s Mysterium perhaps. For James, the goal is heroic self-sacrifice (the acceptance of poverty or some other asceticism) for some worthy cause, the rectifying of a grave injustice. The two notions come together, I believe, when we consider what it is that inspires men and women to engage in sacrificial moral combat.
In James’ view, we have lost our moral fighting shape because of our obsession with material gain and worldly achievement, an obsession (an addiction) borne of our mounting irreligiosity. Simply put, when the secular game is the only game you know how to play—when there is only this world and this life and whatever is attained in it—it is nigh impossible to sacrifice the material for the moral. The way to regain this fighting shape, it would seem then, is to resume our play of spiritual games, i.e. those collective aesthetic projects we call religions.
Transmitted orally over the course of centuries before being systematized in writing, the Vedas provided a complex array of rituals and meditations on the function of sacrifice, as the means through which living beings can at each moment re-establish the contours of a world over the dark abyss of meaninglessness.
Buntz is correct then in thinking of moral warfare as a kind of grand aesthetic project, yet it is not only that art can provide an outlet for those energies which so often manifest as mass violence. It is the engagement with such projects—the playing of games which are also dramas which are also worlds—which readies us for mor(t)al combat.
But when we peer even farther back into its origins, we discover that play’s original meaning was quite different, something altogether more urgent and abstract. In Indo-European, plegan meant to risk, chance, expose oneself to hazard. A pledge was integral to the act of play, as was danger (cognate words are peril and plight). Play’s original purpose was to make a pledge to someone or something by risking one’s life. Who or what might that someone or something be? Possibilities abound, including a relative, a tribal leader, a god, or a moral trait such as honor or courage. At its heart, plegan reverberated with ethical or religious values.
Perhaps religion seems an unlikely example of playing, but if you look at religious rites and festivals, you’ll see all the play elements, and also how deep that play can become. Religious rituals usually include dance, worship, music, and decoration. They swallow time. They are ecstatic, absorbing, rejuvenating. The word “prayer” derives from the Latin precarius, and contains the idea of uncertainty and risk. Will the entreaty be answered? Life or death may depend on the outcome.
Because a system of sacrificial rites is essentially the same the world over, Huizinga concludes:
Such customs must be rooted in a very fundamental, an aboriginal layer of the human mind…The concept of play merges quite naturally with that of holiness...archaic ritual is thus sacred play, indispensable for the community, fecund of cosmic insight and social development but always play in the sense Plato gave to it—an action accomplishing itself outside and above the necessities and seriousness of everyday life. In this sphere of sacred play the child and the poet are at home with the savage.
Jesus is, after all, a human sacrifice: our salvation depends on one man being publicly tortured and killed. Jesus is also a god—but so were the victims on the pyramids. The Nahuatl word is ixiptla, or image: the sacrifice becomes a representation of the deity. Sometimes victims would be worshipped as gods before having their hearts torn out; sometimes Aztecs engaged in ritual cannibalism, eating human flesh to commune with the gods. Just as every Sunday Christians consume the body and blood of Christ. The Aztecs’ communion was a stew of human flesh and squash blossoms.
The basic recurring theme in Hindu mythology is the creation of the world by the self-sacrifice of God, whereby God becomes the world which, in the end, again becomes God.
To say that play is the only way is not to say that it is an easy way. The road to Paradise is fraught with danger because games are perpetually at risk of being perverted into their shadow form: jobs. What is uplifting and vivifying when freely played very quickly becomes tedious and soul-crushing when one is compelled to do so. As our games become bigger and better, it will become increasingly difficult for us to avoid becoming trapped in dead-end “jobs” (stagnant, decadent cultures; archaic, outmoded religions, oppressive, stultifying socio-political regimes), and it will require ever greater sacrifice—more and more intense moral warfare—in order to establish ever greater games.
Our odyssey will end, finally, with the establishment of the Paradise Game (“nothing more, and nothing less, than a simple game of make-believe”). Though the promised land will be so near, the final step will be the most difficult and most treacherous of the entire journey. To establish the Paradise Game, we will have to risk everything—to win Heaven, we must risk Hell—and sacrifice everything. We will have to sacrifice reality itself.
James Carse: One who _must_ play cannot _play_.
Sounds fun!