The Pleasures and Perils of Play

Play is not just an individual choice or psychological path. The permissions for and penalties against various kinds of amusement are cultural and historical. That’s why the way we play and, crucially, how civil and religious authorities react to our ways of playing, reveals much not just about ourselves, but about the societies we live in.

A Bloody Betting Game Half a World Away

Let me begin with an example from halfway around the world that also situates far from the conventional morality that prevails in the West—Balinese cockfighting.

In Bali, as elsewhere, handlers attach daggerlike spurs to the roosters’ feet, and turn them loose to slash away in a pit ringed by shouting, drunken gamblers. The blood sport, a human competition farmed out to animals, survives in similar form in some other traditional cultures, in criminal subcultures in the United States, and even openly in some societies that are more modern: Cuba and Chile, for example. Though authorities on the island of Bali declared the bloody betting game illegal four decades ago, it remains wildly popular in clandestine gaming venues.

It's easy to understand why the spectator sport outrages much of the rest of the world: roosters are often mutilated in training, the birds have no chance to escape, they often suffer pierced eyes and lungs, the combat usually leaves one or both animals tossed in trashcans painfully bleeding out, and so on. For those who grew up in the Western ethical tradition, the moral case against it seems open and shut. The violence violates so many basic tenets of morality and fairness that most modern countries have criminalized the cruel spectacles.

If it is easy to condemn bloodshed as entertainment, explaining the keen (fanatical?) enthusiasm for this blood sport is not. Those anthropologists who tried needed first to decode the complex relationships of masculinity, religion, history, politics, and status and identity that still feeds the game’s popularity in Bali. Researchers called this kind of explanation “thick description.” And this necessity for close analysis holds not only for studies of play on the Indonesian island.

In fact, understanding why any society has endorsed or condemned forms of play requires inspection that is anything but easy and simple.

When It Comes to Play, the Past Is a Foreign Country

We may feel comforted that so much distance separates us from savage Balinese cockfights. But historians live by an axiom: “The past is a foreign country.” And some of the ways we in the West once played and how we found amusement seem entirely outlandish now.

I’ll point to two notorious examples where observers vicariously joined play: gladiatorial contests and bullfights. Audiences in ancient Rome applauded public murder by sword the way modern football fans cheer a touchdown. (These entertainments also often featured similarly bloody “beast shows.”) Two millennia later, in his classic work, Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway described the corrida in Madrid, a remnant of that ancient entertainment, and found the spectacle and its symbolism deeply revealing of Spanish culture and the persistence there of premodern sensibilities.

Endeavoring to be “altogether frank,” the author explained that the role of the bull was “tragic,” because the animal was doomed to a ritual death in a pre-ordained, reenacted sacrificial drama. But the differing role of the horse in the ancient performance was “comic.” That is why, according to Hemingway, Spanish audiences saw a slapstick moment when a bull hooked a horse with its horns and tossed it away, sending the mounted picador sprawling in wounded, clownish pride. And then he described a premodern sentiment that we outsiders will find more disquieting: the signors and signoras laughed even harder when a bull’s horns tore a horse’s underbelly open, obliging the animal to walk amusingly stiff-legged to avoid stepping on its own entrails.

However revealing, that sight certainly disturbed Hemingway, “from a modern moral point of view,” he wrote, “a Christian point of view, the whole bullfight is indefensible; there is certainly much cruelty, there is always danger, either sought or unlooked for, and there is always death…”

Sanctioning Play and Despising the “Other”

We can learn a great deal from popular national recreational pastimes. American football is a corporate enterprise on and off the field, and the game itself unfolds with military precision in urgent bursts of strictly timed action. Contrast the patient game of cricket, played in the U.K. and its former colonies. The gentlemanly game unfolds in a languorous way, lasting eight hours or more. I am not the first to suggest that each game reveals central traits of national character.

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We learn as much or more by considering those forms of play that Western societies at one point and another condemned and sought to prohibit. Civil and religious authorities sought to shore up their own legitimacy by pointing to amusements that drew a sharp line between themselves and those whom they feared, belittled, or despised.

And thus, over the centuries many different societies succumbed to moral panic by denouncing sorts of play as dangerous. They had their reasons, but their judgments now often seem bafflingly out of all proportion to the risks posed.

Plato, and later his follower Augustine, for example, denounced music that deviated from approved, ritualized paths as impious and subversive. In a similar way, medieval churchmen decried certain chord progressions as devilish. Puritans didn’t prohibit dancing, as such, but worried that that kind of enjoyment was slothful (a capital sin), and further, they forbade as lascivious any dance that allowed men and women to touch. Eighteenth-century religious authorities condemned a new literary form, the novel, as “reading lust.” I recently discovered that in the late 19th century, the Buffalo diocese condemned carousel riding as immoral. During World War II, the mayor of New York, Fiorello LaGuardia, denounced “slimy crews of tinhorns living in luxury on petty thievery,” and took a sledgehammer to pinball machines.

The list continued more consequentially over contested issues of race and age. Starting in the 19th century and continuing into the 20th, old stock anti-immigrant groups, for example, prosecuted members of a succession of newcomers—Germans, Irish, Italians, and Blacks—for their differing recreational use of alcohol and other drugs. And likewise, The Blues, Jazz, and Rock-and-Roll, which originated in African American culture, each in its turn became the “devil’s music.”

Alarmed by the rise of post-war youth culture and its fellow travelers—sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll, sure symptoms of delinquency—medical and governmental authorities also targeted comic book reading, an increasingly popular recreation, as a threat to society. Yes, comic books.

Comic Book Crime-Fighters and Superheroes as Threats

In the instance of comic books, psychiatric diagnosticians joined the fray. In a book first serialized in the popular Ladies Home Journal in 1953, the prominent mental hygienist, Fredric Wertham, likened good child-rearing to careful gardening and comic books to invasive weeds. By allowing children to be exposed to crime fighters and superheroes, he wrote, “we act like the bad gardener.” He diagnosed the caped crusaders Batman and Robin as plainly closeted homosexuals. (Remember, homosexuality was not just a psychiatric malady in those bad old days, the orientation was also a criminal offense.) Wertham, who trained in clinical psychiatry in conservative Munich, also found that Wonder Woman, fantastically strong, and independent of male judgment whenever she wielded her Lasso of Truth, was surely only a thinly disguised lesbian.

Now in 2022, we are likely to look upon these mossbacks and killjoys as quaint cranks. Their passionate denunciations seem out of all proportion to any possible threat. But not so fast. Historians live by another rueful adage: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

As the population of this democracy has neared two-fifths non-white, and with some from established groups feeling keenly status-anxious, threatened, and wary, politicians eager to manufacture conspiracy for partisan advantage found demonic purpose even in those entertaining children’s books that teach democratic decency and that gently countered racism.