Entertainment—Part 2 of 4

Both recreation and entertainment are means for expanding ones experience and enjoyment of life. The are closely related and the exact difference between recreation and entertainment is not very important. For purposes of this discussion I’ll describe recreation is primarily an activity (like a sport) that is enjoyed for its own sake and entertainment is an experience that is enjoyed, whether provided by oneself (reading) or others (an opera) for example.

This section is primarily about classes of entertainment.

Active Verses Passive

To some degree all entertainment is passive, meaning some part of our experience is provided by someone else, and it is the degree of passivity that determines whether an entertainment is active or passive.

Reading is the most active of all entertainment. The passive aspect of reading is provided by the author of a work and it is passive in the sense that when reading we allow the author to guide our thinking to some degree. Reading is active in the sense that we must actively (mostly automatically) turn the printed matter into ideas and must use our minds and imaginations to understand, interpret, judge, “see,” (imagine) and enjoy whatever is provided by the author. At every moment we are in control of what and how much of what the author has provided we choose to “consume.”

Audio entertainment, (radio and recordings for example), are less active and more passive than reading, because we allow the sounds and spoken words of that entertainment to guide our thoughts and experience passively and do not have to actively “create” the experience, except to use our minds and imagination to “add” possible visual content. We also have no control over the flow of the experience and must either pay attention to what is being presented, or loose it. While we are listening, there is little opportunity to exercise judgment about what we are hearing. Audio entertainment does leave us free to do other things while it is being enjoyed.

Audio/visual entertainment, (movies and television for example), is the least active and most passive of all, because it is totally consuming of our consciousness. While we are always free to focus and think or not, the point of audio/visual entertainment is to allow the presented material to provide a total conscious experience, just as though it were real life. (It lacks the sensory experience of touch, taste, and smell, of course, but those “senses”are easily swamped by the audio and visual experience.)

The Virtues Of Entertainment

All entertainment broadens the scope of possible experience. We could never in a lifetime experience all that we can by means of reading, how much more is the experience expanded by what is presented to us on radio, television, and recorded media of all kinds.

Like all experience entertainment allows us to learn, to have a much wider perspective on all aspects of life, and possibly develop insights into things that, without it, we might never be conscious of. In that sense, entertainment broadens our life.

But the main purpose of entertainment is our enjoyment and it provides enjoyment that, without it, would be impossible. It is that enjoyment, the pleasure, both intellectual and visceral it is able to provide, that is also it’s danger. The virtue of all pleasure is as a reward that we’ve earned by living right and according to the truth, but pleasure as an end in itself, becomes a vice, and enjoyment of that which we have not earned and do not deserve. It is a kind of cheating of reality.

In general, the enjoyment of entertainment is a good thing, so long as it requires no compromise of an individual’s values and has no negative consequences on any aspect of one’s life. It is when one chooses to enjoy entertainment that requires the compromise of one’s own principles or does have negative consequences that entertainment becomes a vice and a danger.

The Dangers Of Entertainment

It is because entertainment is such a powerful element of human life that it can be such a great danger, because it is both subtle and destructive. It is easy to say, “it is only entertainment, what harm can it do?” There are many dangers in entertainment which I’ll discuss, but here I want to mention a most subtle one.

From the same 1966 Ford Hall lecture, “Our Cultural Value-Deprivation,“mentioned in the first section, there is a description by Ayn Rand of how men abuse their minds.

Man’s consciousness is his least known and most abused vital organ. Most people believe that consciousness as such is some sort of indeterminate faculty which has no nature, no specific identity and, therefore, no requirements, no needs, no rules for being properly or improperly used. The simplest example of this belief is people’s willingness to lie or cheat, to fake reality on the premise that “I’m the only one who’ll know” or “It’s only in my mind”—without any concern for what this does to one’s mind, what complex, untraceable, disastrous impairments it produces, what crippling damage may result.

The loss of control over one’s consciousness is the most terrifying of human experiences: a consciousness that doubts its own efficacy is in a monstrously intolerable state. Yet men abuse, subvert and starve their consciousness in a manner they would not dream of applying to their hair, toenails or stomachs. They know that these things have a specific identity and specific requirements, and if one wishes to preserve them, one must comb one’s hair, trim one’s toenails and refrain from swallowing rat poison. But one’s mind? Aw, it needs nothing and can swallow anything. Or so most people believe. And they go on believing it while they toss in agony on a psychologist’s couch, screaming that their mind keeps them in a state of chronic terror for no reason whatever.

Notice the similarity between the expression, “it’s only entertainment, what harm can it do,” and the expressions Rand used, “I’m the only one who’ll know”or “It’s only in my mind.” This is the subtlety of entertainment that is one of it’s greatest dangers. People will allow their minds to filled with ideas and their consciousness with experiences thinking “it’s only entertainment,“without ever asking what those ideas and those experiences might be doing to their minds.

There is a widely held idea, that the experience of entertainment has little or no influence on what people think or choose to do. Of course, every advertisement you read, hear, or see is proof of the lie in that idea. If people were not influenced by what they read, hear, and see, businesses would not waste the millions of dollars they spend on advertisement.

When enjoying any kind of entertainment we are likely to be less critical in judging what we are conscious of, and some kinds of entertainment require an almost complete suspension of judgment at some level (certain kind of science fiction, for example) in order be enjoyed. There is nothing wrong with that suspension so long as it is done consciously and everything is kept in that context.

The more passive the entertainment being enjoyed, the more likely it will be experienced uncritically, and simply “taken in” without being judged in any way. So long as the content of such entertainment is not in conflict with one’s own principles and values, there is no danger in that, but in this day and age, more often than not, both the ideas and the audio and visual content will contain material that is in direct contradiction of the values and principles of a moral independent individualist.

The very fact that one allows such contradictions to exist in their consciousness is itself psychologically damaging, but beyond that there are many separate dangers that will addressed in the next section.