Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 116
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Popular Culture Review
Nietzschean hermeneutics of twenty-first century Western culture: I suffer, therefore
I am. Add to ail this the recent phenomenon of extreme sports—dangerous mountain
biking, daredevil parachuting, brutal triathlons—and it becomes clear that for many
young Americans p la y is work: for them, the postmodern American fun ethic is
deadly serious business. Unfortunately, it also famishes the soul. Like all unhealthy
addictions, play as a ding an sich constitutes what Nietzsche called imaginary
food. One of the best known catchphrases of our era. Are we having f un yet?,
speaks for itself.
But in order to fully understand the dynamics of postmodern leisure, it should
be kept in mind that (1) a C atholic work ethic preceded the advent of Protestantism
and its secular spinoffs and that (2) until the dawn of the modern era no cultural
theory of work could be seriously considered without also taking into account the
theological “uses” of suffering as defined by the Roman Church. Such a use, for
example, involved penance. From the S e r m o d e do c tr in a in S e p tu a g of an
anonymous 15th century preacher:
For this ye may understand that it is the will of God that every
man and woman should labour busily. For if Adam and Eve
had been occupied with labour, the serpent had not overcome
them: for idleness is the devil’s desire. Wherefore ye may know
well it is the will of God that we should labour and put our
body to penance for to flee sin. Thus did Adam and Eve, to
example of all those that should come after them.
Penance has long fallen out of fashion in Judeo-Christian culture. And yet, the
sense that “idleness is the devil’s desire”—that idleness is fundamentally wrong—
is perhaps a stubbornest of all legacies of Old World Catholicism. Without penance
human beings cannot be absolved of guilt feelings caused by the seven deadly
sins. Included among these sins, of course, is idleness or sloth.
In a secular era that privileges the health of the body over the health of the
soul sloth is the pre-eminent postmodern “sin,” with gluttony running a close second
(we still speak of “sinful” and “tempting” desserts). What’s changed since the
heyday of Christianity is that the guilt trips once placed upon us by religion we
now place upon ourselves. We’re culturally conditioned to be feel contempt for the
obese, the flabby, the out of shape, the couch potatoes among us. When we happen
to be couch potatoes, we feel contempt for ourselves. And when this self-loathing
becomes unbearable, we make a beeline for the 24-hour gym and its array of
stairmasters, treadmills, and exer-cycles.
In our time, penance as a Christian value has been uprooted from its religious
origins in work and transplanted, as it were, to the shallower soil of leisure. If this