This essay was written in the spirit of encouraging self-care and rest, not to retreat from society but to keep the calm disposition and clear-sightedness we need to act effectively in the world. It’s appropriate that it was written on the International Day of the Girl, for reasons you’ll see. Enjoy!
Thank you, Ruth, for reminding us we still have several sources of respite from the battles we must face against tyranny, autocrats, and unchecked greed as we propel our democratic institutions and visions forward. Perhaps the fall season is also a reminder of the need to store things away for the winter months, a necessary diversion from a headlong assault on political disinformation, lest we become too fanatical in the fight for truth.
One of RBG’s finest and wisest pieces—eloquent, dense, finely detailed, and gently moving.
If I may add an observation—
The most highly sublimated form of play is art—whether we are creating, performing, hearing, observing, watching, reading, living in, talking about, or interpreting it. As RBG observes of play, art exists not to accomplish anything, but simply for its own sake. Its classic characterization, repeated in various formulations over the centuries, is that it simultaneously delights and instructs: we simultaneously enjoy or have fun with it, and learn from it (a unique and truly remarkable characteristic). Art is infinite in its variety, and is available, if we make the effort to look for them, in forms that suit virtually any mental or external conditions we may be in at a particular moment.
Properly understood, art is not an object of commerce, nor a marker of social, cultural, or intellectual status, though it is commonly perverted into these forms. Rather, it is the common living possession of an ideal egalitarian commonwealth, one that does not exist in reality but that we can and need to bring into mental existence, individually and collectively, so that ultimately we may bring it into existence in reality. In such a world, work and its products would be transformed from their present condition of drudgery, want, and misery for the many, and mindless luxury for the few, into the means and products of individual self-development for all, while at the same time being labor and goods of genuine social usefulness. For in the broadest sense, art is simply everything that is worth doing and is done well, and it remains based on the child’s delight in play, make-believe, and even nonsense.
The inhumane, immoral, and ultimately nihilistic form of work and production to which the world has been enslaving itself during the past half-century (often referred to as “neo-liberal capitalism”) perverts both the worker and the products of work into commodities. This is precisely the negation of true art. The hideous and meretricious nature of this economic order has become manifest in its abysmal failure to live up to any of his promises; in the flagrant dysfunctionality of the social, educational, political, and economic order around the world; and in the global paroxysms of primitive emotions, and their concomitant psychotic withdrawal from reality, that are currently terrifying us. This economic order annihilates the human significance of work, of the products of work, and of everything meaningful in human life, for the sake of replacing it not with anything that is real, but with the measure of money, money being a thing that, understood even in the terms of the field of economics itself, does not exist, but is merely an abstraction.
Thus the system to which we are enslaved, regardless of what it thinks or persuades us it is doing, and regardless of the endlessly proliferating hall of mirrors into which it is remaking the world, in reality annihilates everything in life that is humanly meaningful, in order to replace it with—a void. Its hall of mirrors comprises the false arts of propaganda, advertising, and commercial entertainment, whose purpose is to indoctrinate us in the further false arts of our monstrous over-production and over-consumption of useless and often destructive goods and services, whose production in reality impoverishes us while immiserating most of the human race, and will before long destroy the planet. This is the triumph of nihilism, of the death instinct that endures at the lowest depth of the psyche in all of us, and that rules in many or most of those who rule over us. It is the perennial adversary of the human imagination that delights in the divine play that we call art.
We do not need to live this way.
Thank you, Professor Ben-Ghiat, for once again helping me to remain sane.
Thank you! So needful. And playing with a granddaughter daily, connecting with others, enjoying the sunshine and nature’s sounds in a park, calling a friend, engaging with the owner of a small art or antique shop, going to the beach, so much joy and connecting possible in these times! A reprieve of the awfulness we see in the news. A regeneration badly needed time and again in this day and age to forge forth in time with whatever talents and fortuitous exchanges needed to preserve what matters most to us and the future of our loved ones, our children and grandchildren. 💕
What a wonderful story. Thank you for posting.
Absolutely wonderful essay! Thank you!
Thank you, Ruth, for reminding us we still have several sources of respite from the battles we must face against tyranny, autocrats, and unchecked greed as we propel our democratic institutions and visions forward. Perhaps the fall season is also a reminder of the need to store things away for the winter months, a necessary diversion from a headlong assault on political disinformation, lest we become too fanatical in the fight for truth.
One of RBG’s finest and wisest pieces—eloquent, dense, finely detailed, and gently moving.
If I may add an observation—
The most highly sublimated form of play is art—whether we are creating, performing, hearing, observing, watching, reading, living in, talking about, or interpreting it. As RBG observes of play, art exists not to accomplish anything, but simply for its own sake. Its classic characterization, repeated in various formulations over the centuries, is that it simultaneously delights and instructs: we simultaneously enjoy or have fun with it, and learn from it (a unique and truly remarkable characteristic). Art is infinite in its variety, and is available, if we make the effort to look for them, in forms that suit virtually any mental or external conditions we may be in at a particular moment.
Properly understood, art is not an object of commerce, nor a marker of social, cultural, or intellectual status, though it is commonly perverted into these forms. Rather, it is the common living possession of an ideal egalitarian commonwealth, one that does not exist in reality but that we can and need to bring into mental existence, individually and collectively, so that ultimately we may bring it into existence in reality. In such a world, work and its products would be transformed from their present condition of drudgery, want, and misery for the many, and mindless luxury for the few, into the means and products of individual self-development for all, while at the same time being labor and goods of genuine social usefulness. For in the broadest sense, art is simply everything that is worth doing and is done well, and it remains based on the child’s delight in play, make-believe, and even nonsense.
The inhumane, immoral, and ultimately nihilistic form of work and production to which the world has been enslaving itself during the past half-century (often referred to as “neo-liberal capitalism”) perverts both the worker and the products of work into commodities. This is precisely the negation of true art. The hideous and meretricious nature of this economic order has become manifest in its abysmal failure to live up to any of his promises; in the flagrant dysfunctionality of the social, educational, political, and economic order around the world; and in the global paroxysms of primitive emotions, and their concomitant psychotic withdrawal from reality, that are currently terrifying us. This economic order annihilates the human significance of work, of the products of work, and of everything meaningful in human life, for the sake of replacing it not with anything that is real, but with the measure of money, money being a thing that, understood even in the terms of the field of economics itself, does not exist, but is merely an abstraction.
Thus the system to which we are enslaved, regardless of what it thinks or persuades us it is doing, and regardless of the endlessly proliferating hall of mirrors into which it is remaking the world, in reality annihilates everything in life that is humanly meaningful, in order to replace it with—a void. Its hall of mirrors comprises the false arts of propaganda, advertising, and commercial entertainment, whose purpose is to indoctrinate us in the further false arts of our monstrous over-production and over-consumption of useless and often destructive goods and services, whose production in reality impoverishes us while immiserating most of the human race, and will before long destroy the planet. This is the triumph of nihilism, of the death instinct that endures at the lowest depth of the psyche in all of us, and that rules in many or most of those who rule over us. It is the perennial adversary of the human imagination that delights in the divine play that we call art.
We do not need to live this way.
Thank you, Professor Ben-Ghiat, for once again helping me to remain sane.
Thank you! So needful. And playing with a granddaughter daily, connecting with others, enjoying the sunshine and nature’s sounds in a park, calling a friend, engaging with the owner of a small art or antique shop, going to the beach, so much joy and connecting possible in these times! A reprieve of the awfulness we see in the news. A regeneration badly needed time and again in this day and age to forge forth in time with whatever talents and fortuitous exchanges needed to preserve what matters most to us and the future of our loved ones, our children and grandchildren. 💕
Thank you for the enchanting story. A bit of magical realism in real life.
Great essay. Thanks for the reminder!
Thank you.
What a great way to start my week - thank you for sharing this - how fortunate that little girl in the Hilton was to have asked you her question!
Thank you, it's just what I needed to read this morning.
Thanks Ruth for reminding us that play affirms our humanity and humanity is what authoritarians fear!
Wow, what a great little essay reminding us of the importance of play and idleness!
Thank you. I forget how important play is in life’s recovery of just about everything.