Back at the end of June Ezra Klein interviewed James Suzman on the subject of work, which prompted me to write a blog post in which I excerpted the interview, Why are we as a culture addicted to work? [Because we have forgotten how to play.] (July 2, 2021). Is anyone thinking about a future in which we work less and play more? Toward the end of July I followed with a post, When did the future become a site for human habitation like, say, crossing the ocean to colonize the New World? (July 29, 2021). The point of that post is that thinking about the future centered on the perfectibility of humankind in the late 18th century and then became co-opted by technological progress in the 19th century. And that’s where mainstream thinking about the future is today.
That’s what the Progress Studies movement is about: How can we ramp up technological progress to fuel economic growth in the future? There’s little thought about what we’re to do with that growth beyond eat, work, and sleep more comfortably.
Earlier this week Klein had another interview that got me thinking about the future. He interviewed Bessel van der Kolk on the nature of trauma, which I excerpted in a post yesterday, The devastating effects of trauma [and the return of Freud, albeit unnamed?] (August 26, 2021). That got me thinking about a future in which we have much more effective means of helping people deal with trauma. Van der Kolk talked about the use of psychotropic drugs in treatment (e.g. MDMA, psilocybin, ayahuasca, and LSD) but other things as well. Thus he said:
And I wish that in every classroom in America they would teach the four Rs: reading, writing, arithmetic and self regulation, from kindergarten through 12th grade, of what can we do to calm ourselves down, to stay focused? What sort of activities can we engage in to feel in control of ourselves?
And so that we get away from this culture of, if you don’t feel right you take a drug, instead of if you don’t feel right you go for a bicycle ride. If you don’t feel right you go to yoga class. If you don’t feel right, you may need to do some body work to help your body to calm, or you need to go to do some tango dancing, or you need to do something to rearrange your relationship to your internal physiological state. [...]
I’m still waiting for the study of comparing tango dancing with cognitive behavioral therapy. I’m a scientist, it’s an empirical question. But I put my money on tango dancing over C.B.T., by and large, for some people. So I think we need to explore much more.
Now we’re getting somewhere. He also talked of the importance of play for children AND adults:
EZRA KLEIN: Moving together with other kids, dancing together with other kids, playing with other kids, exploring the world with other kids, is so at the core of what creates a healthy mind and a healthy brain. That means that there is space, and that people can actually explore things safely. You can actually go out with your friends and try things out, so you don’t live in an environment where there is so much danger outside the door, or inside the door, that you cannot play anymore.
So I would say the most important thing for traumatized kids is to go to places where they can play. And that is, even in some very well known children’s institutions, there are hardly any places to play. Hardly any place to move around. To sing, to play, to dance, to run. So kids are supposed to really move. And move with other kids.
And basically, our systems are made to move in synchrony with the people around us. When you get traumatized, you get out of sync on every most elementary level. What does the military do? They have people move together and march together, to get them back in sync with each other.
EZRA KLEIN: And it sounds to me like you think the same is actually true for adults, that you need space to play, to move, to be in synchronicity with others, to sing, to dance, to have what gets called collective effervescence.
BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: Absolutely. Of course, you get more frozen as we grow older. But cooking with people, serving meals to people, pouring that wine to other people, still that moving together is a terribly important way of feeling our communality with other human beings.
Earlier Klein had remarked:
I had the journalist Anna Sale on the show a couple of months ago for her book about having difficult conversations, and something she says in that book is that we used to have more institutions, and rituals, and conventions, and structures that guided us through the hard conversations, and hard parts of life.
I mean, things like churches and civic organizations. There is a lot of singing in those places, there is a lot of dancing in those places. I mean, you go to a Jewish synagogue, a lot of singing and dancing. And one point she was making is that as some of these institutions have faded in American life, we’ve been left without a template for these conversations.
But reading your book made me think of it on another level, too. I mean, a bunch of the modalities you just talked about, like capoeira or qigong, I don’t want to suggest they don’t have therapeutic roles, but they’re not primarily seen as therapeutic. They’re just a bigger part of those cultures.
And I wonder if you think that one of the issues with trauma in America is that we have lost institutions that were comfortable with ways of being embodied, even if they didn’t frame them in a “the body keeps the score” kind of framework that we used to have. And so they were playing roles that maybe they framed themselves as religious, or civic, or something else, or communal or ritual, but they were also doing things for how we process difficult issues or allowed us to get in touch with our emotions, that they had these side benefits that we didn’t understand and never knew how to measure.
I’m beginning to see a future where both children and adults have more time and opportunity for play, children among themselves, adults among themselves, but also children and adults together.
What’s it going to take to spell how a we can organize a vision of the future around that?
I supposed that’s what I had in mind when I posted Kisangani 2150, or Reconstructing Civilization on a New Model (July 10, 2019). “Kisangani 2150” is a play on the title of Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, a science fiction novel set in New York City in the year 2140. I’m imagining that same world, ten years later, and centered on Kisangani in the Congo. Kisangani 2150 would depict a world in which music, story-telling, and other forms are play were central to everyday life. And everyone is an active participant. Music, dance, acting, story-telling, performing in general, aren’t the exclusive occupation of full-time professionals – though we’d still have those – but are elements in everyone’s behavioral repertoire.
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Posts about the future, about Kisangani 2150.
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