What’s the point if we can’t have fun?
In the essay What’s the point if we can’t have fun?, David Graeber argues that we’re foolish for focusing only on rational explanations and economic terms in animal behavior, and for undervaluing play.
Why do animals play? Well, why shouldn’t they? The real question is: Why does the existence of action carried out for the sheer pleasure of acting, the exertion of powers for the sheer pleasure of exerting them, strike us as mysterious? What does it tell us about ourselves that we instinctively assume that it is?
We can’t reduce all living beings to rational, market actors. This tendency has been present since the 19th century beginnings of Darwinian science. Darwin, after all, borrowed the term “survival of the fittest” from the sociologist Herbert Spencer, that darling of robber barons—who was struck by how much the forces driving natural selection jibed with his own laissez-faire economic theories.
Competition over resources, rational calculation of advantage, and the gradual extinction of the weak were taken to be the prime directives of the universe. But why?
The origins of consciousness and free will ⚭
Friedrich Schiller had already argued in 1795 that it was precisely in play that we find the origins of self-consciousness, and hence freedom, and hence morality.
in the new full-blown capitalist version of evolution, where the drive for accumulation had no limits, life was no longer an end in itself, but a mere instrument for the propagation of DNA sequences—and so the very existence of play was something of a scandal.
This argument gets ignored, since cooperation for pleasure, as an end in itself, is difficult to recuperate for ideological purposes.
Is emergence enough? ⚭
Emergence is well and good, but is it enough to explain what’s going on? For example, if an electron is acting freely—if it, as Richard Feynman is supposed to have said, “does anything it likes”—it can only be acting freely as an end in itself. Which would mean that at the very foundations of physical reality, we encounter freedom for its own sake—which also means we encounter the most rudimentary form of play.
Stray notes ⚭
- Debunks Richard Dawkins and The Selfish Gene, likewise Dennett
- Jean-Paul Sartre at one point became erotically obsessed with lobsters after taking too much mescaline 🤣
- Physicists are the poets of the scientific world (more playful and less hidebound creatures than, say, biologists—partly, no doubt, because they rarely have to contend with religious fundamentalists challenging the laws of physics)