Now such “reactions” are simultaneous as well as successive. Resort to artificial stimulation, to alcoholic excess, sexual debauchery, opium and narcotics are examples. Impulses and interests that are not manifested in the regular course of serviceable activity or in recreation demand and secure a special manifestation. And it is interesting to note that there are two opposite forms. Some phenomena are characteristic of persons engaged in a routine monotonous life of toil attended with fatigue and hardship. And others are found in persons who are intellectual and executive, men whose activities are anything but monotonous, but are narrowed through over-specialization. Such men think too much, that is, too much along a particular line. They carry too heavy responsibilities; that is, their offices of service are not adequately shared with others. They seek relief by escape into a more sociable and easygoing world. The imperative demand for companionship not satisfied in ordinary activity is met by convivial indulgence. The other class has recourse to excess because its members have in ordinary occupations next to no opportunity for imagination. They make a foray into a more highly colored world as a substitute for a normal exercise of invention, planning and judgment. Having no regular responsibilities, they seek to recover an illusion of potency and of social recognition by an artificial exaltation of their submerged and humiliated selves.
Hence the love of pleasure against which moralists issue so many warnings. Not that love of pleasures is in itself in any way demoralizing. Love of the pleasures of cheerfulness, of companionship is one of the steadying influences in conduct. But pleasure has often become identified with special thrills, excitations, ticklings of sense, stirrings of appetite for the express purpose of enjoying the immediate stimulation irrespective of results. Such pleasures are signs of dissipation, dissoluteness, in the literal sense. An activity which is deprived of regular stimulation and normal function is piqued into isolated activity, and the result is division, disassociation. A life of routine and of over-specialization in non-routine lines seek occasions in which to arouse by abnormal means a feeling of satisfaction without any accompanying objective fulfilment. Hence, as moralists have pointed out, the insatiable character of such appetites. Activities are not really satisfied, that is fulfilled in objects. They continue to seek for gratification in more intensified stimulations. Orgies of pleasure-seeking, varying from saturnalia to mild sprees, result.
It does not follow however that the sole alternative is satisfaction by means of objectively serviceable action, that is by action which effects useful changes in the environment. There is an optimistic theory of nature according to which wherever there is natural law there is also natural harmony. Since man as well as the world is included in the scope of natural law, it is inferred that there is natural harmony between human activities and surroundings, a harmony which is disturbed only when man indulges in “artificial” departures from nature. According to this view, all man has to do is to keep his occupations in balance with the energies of the environment and he will be both happy and efficient. Rest, recuperation, relief can be found in a proper alternation of forms of useful work. Do the things which surroundings indicate need doing, and success, content, restoration of powers will take care of themselves.
This benevolent view of nature falls in with a Puritanic devotion to work for its own sake and creates distrust of amusement, play and recreation. They are felt to be unnecessary, and worse, dangerous diversions from the path of useful action which is also the path of duty. Social conditions certainly impart to occupations as they are now carried on an undue element of fatigue, strain and drudgery. Consequently useful occupations which are so ordered socially as to engage thought, feed imagination and equalize the impact of stress would surely introduce a tranquillity and recreation which are now lacking. But there is good reason to think that even in the best conditions there is enough maladjustment between the necessities of the environment and the activities “natural” to man, so that constraint and fatigue would always accompany activity, and special forms of action be needed—forms that are significantly called re-creation.
Hence the immense moral importance of play and of fine, or make-believe, art—of activity, that is, which is make-believe from the standpoint of the useful arts enforced by the demands of the environment. When moralists have not regarded play and art with a censorious eye, they often have thought themselves carrying matters to the pitch of generosity by conceding that they may be morally indifferent or innocent. But in truth they are moral necessities. They are required to take care of the margin that exists between the total stock of impulses that demand outlet and the amount expended in regular action. They keep the balance which work cannot indefinitely maintain. They are required to introduce variety, flexibility and sensitiveness into disposition. Yet upon the whole the humanizing capabilities of sport in its varied forms, drama, fiction, music, poetry, newspapers have been neglected. They have been left in a kind of a moral no-man’s territory. They have accomplished part of their function but they have not done what they are capable of doing. In many cases they have operated merely as reactions like those artificial and isolated stimulations already mentioned.
The suggestion that play and art have an indispensable moral function
