The Playboy Panel: Uses and Abuses of the New Leisure

PANELISTS

Steve Allen is an entertainment institution. Television star, actor on stage and screen, lyricist, pianist, composer and comedian, he is also the author of eight books, ranging from an autobiography to a collection of poems.

Cleveland Amory, chronicler of high society, café society and the jet set, is a writer, lecturer, columnist, satirist and a television and radio essayist. He is among the country's most widely and regularly published writers, known not only for his books, but also for his "First of the Month" column in the Saturday Review, his weekly critiques in TV Guide and his humorous articles in a score of other magazines and newspapers.

John Diebold, who shares credit for having coined the term "automation," is, at 38, one of the world's leading authorities on the technology of the future. His consulting firm, The Diebold Group, advises hundreds of companies, organizations and many governments on how to cope with the onrushing age of the computer.

Paul Goodman is a writer by occupation, a Utopian by conviction. His prescriptions for righting the wrongs of contemporary civilization include banning autos from Manhattan, closing down the present-day school system, decentralizing the administration of cities and the mass media. Blunt and provocative, he is the author of Growing Up Absurd, Community of Scholars, Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals and many articles for major publications--including The Deadly Halls of Ivy, for Playboy (September 1964). His next book, People or Personnel, will be published next month by Random House.

Walter Kerr may well be the most influential drama critic in the United States today. A brisk and businesslike former professor at Catholic University, he is married to hit playwright Jean Kerr, with whom he co-authored Goldilocks and Touch and Go. In addition to his first-nighter stint as drama critic for the New York Herald Tribune, he has directed the aforementioned and two other Broadway shows, has written for television, and authored five books on such subjects as the theater, censorship and The Decline of Pleasure, his most recent work.

Norman Podhoretz, whose gentle manner belies his contentious views, is an articulate and outspoken social critic. His controversial essays on the race issue, the Eichmann trial and contemporary literature have won him increasing national attention. A crewcut New Yorker, he is the author of Doings and Undoings and editor of Commentary, one of the country's most respected journals of opinion. He has also been a member of the Seminar in American Civilization at Columbia University.

Jean Shepherd's brilliantly funny and unorthodox insights into American society enlighten and entertain a sizable radio audience of night people. A man of many unexpected parts, he has worked in the steel mills of Indiana, performed in plays both on and off Broadway and will be appearing in The Light Fantastic, a new movie to be released this year. He has written three hilarious boyhood reminiscences and conducted an interview (with the Beatles) for Playboy; his first book, Hairy Gertz and the 47 Crappies, and Other Horrors, is soon to be published by Doubleday. His radio commentary, once heard only in New York, is now syndicated in nearly 300 cities.

Terry Southern, author of Flash and Filigree and The Magic Christian and celebrated co-author of Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, has been called everything from a "social anarchist" and a "hip iconoclast" to a "comic pornographer with a profound moral sense." The latter was a reference to the sensational best-selling erotic novel Candy, written by Southern and Mason Hoffenberg. Recently, he has also become a contributor to Playboy (his first piece: Seeing Is Believing, in our January issue).

Playboy: Americans today have more time to spare than ever before in history, and they are going to have still more. At the turn of the century, the average work week was 70 hours; since then it has been sliced almost in half. Life expectancy has lengthened. Retirements come earlier. Coffee breaks punctuate the workday. Holidays multiply. Paid vacations lengthen: In Pittsburgh and Gary, some steelworkers already receive three-month paid sabbatical holidays. Economist Marion Clawson, eying the spread of automation, has estimated that by the year 2000, Americans will have 600 billion more leisure hours to dispose of than they had in 1950. This estimate of off-the-job hours has been challenged by other experts as being hopelessly conservative.

Signs of the new leisure, meanwhile, are everywhere. Tens of millions of Americans are scuba divers, water skiers, bowlers, boatmen and bird watchers. Millions more have become amateur painters and musicians. Beaches and ball parks are jammed, as are theaters, museums and concert halls. It's been estimated that Americans spend 50 billion dollars a year on leisure alone--15 billion more than they spend on medical care, for example. Anxious to keep their employees content, many companies are even constructing "recreation parks" for them. One such installation, owned by the Minneapolis-Honeywell Regulator Company, boasts, besides the more conventional facilities, a casting pond for fishermen, a ski tow and a 36-hole golf course.

Yet the leisure-loaded American has become an object of controversy. Sociologists warn of a coming age of "barren boredom." Life magazine recently headlined a special series: "The Emptiness Of Too Much Leisure." Some authorities argue that Americans, the first modern people to know the luxury of leisure, are the least equipped to enjoy it, because of their Puritan past. Psychiatrists report a rising incidence of "weekend neurosis"--a curious new ailment afflicting busy young executives; confronted with weekends of workless freedom, many succumb to boredom, irritability, restlessness, even desperation. Social scientists warn that unless Americans learn to cope more effectively with their free time, the steady accumulation of off-hours will have an explosive impact on society.

Mr. Diebold, as one of the nation's leading experts on automation, do you believe that increased leisure will really pose this serious a problem for us?

Diebold: Yes, leisure will be a very serious problem, but not just in the obvious ways. It isn't just a matter of not knowing what to do with a few extra hours of freedom. It isn't just a matter of weekend neurosis. Leisure is going to test man's conception of himself. It forces us to think about the proper role of mankind, about what our nature is, about what we really want to concern ourselves with. The problem today is that work is at the center of our culture. Our entire heritage puts a premium on work. It's been the center of life. But as the work week declines and leisure increases, the situation is beginning to reverse itself. Work is becoming the fringe and leisure is moving to the center. This is unquestionably the way it's going to be. But we are totally unprepared for this. Therein lies the problem. This transformation probably won't be complete until the early part or the middle of the next century. It will be postponed by the fact that the bulk of the world is still living on the edge of starvation. So there is still plenty of work to do. But considering the fact that what we face is a complete cultural transformation, the time span for the United States is not so very long. We certainly need many years. 30 or 40 at least, to prepare for that new kind of culture, to begin to understand it. But we're going to have to make a great many changes in the way we live and think if leisure is to be a blessing and not a curse.

Southern: If you're talking about right now, I'd say it's more curse than blessing. I agree with the psychiatrists that people aren't prepared to cope with it. Leisure is a frightening thing unless you're ready for a confrontation with yourself--and most people simply aren't.

Amory: I'm afraid I agree. The trouble with the shorter work week is that it's inclined to be shorter for those who don't need it, rather than for those who could use it. By this I'm not implying that I'm against shorter work weeks for the hard-working laborer, but I do feel that our education to use leisure meaningfully has failed to keep pace with the increase in free time. There are few men, Josh Billings once said, who have character enough to lead a life of idleness.

Shepherd: Well, I think many of the social critics who lament the new leisure are out of touch with reality. I don't think most Americans are the least bit afraid of having more leisure. I think they'll cope with it just fine. I think this is one of those great imaginary problems --like the theory of phlogiston or the old debate over how many angels are dancing on the head of a pin. It's the social critic who is the true puritan. He's the one who is all bound up with the gospel of work. He sees a man down the street who works, let's say, at the tire company. He sees him come home, look at his television show, sit on the porch for four hours. The critics deplore this. They think it's a terrible thing. They think this tire worker should be out there getting a play written, or something. You know, putting in an eight-hour day at the tire plant is a pain in the rump. I wonder how many social critics have that kind of pain to contend with--and to recuperate from during their free hours.

Podhoretz: I'm not quite so sanguine about it, but I do find it hard to believe that leisure is really going to be a curse. Greater leisure has been one of the dreams of mankind from the beginning of recorded time. The fact that many people seem to have difficulty in making the best possible use of it still doesn't make it a curse, in my view. From what I've seen at first hand, most people don't seem particularly miserable with time on their hands.

Kerr: I agree. I don't see how you can have too much leisure time. The idea, the ideal of leisure is a kind of race memory from our childhood, and we want to cling to it; we look back to it with longing. I think we would all like once more to feel as we felt when we were children--when there were no great pressures on us. No, it's not that we have too much time. To me the whole problem is that what we do have is corrupted.

[Q] Playboy: How do you mean?

[A] Kerr: As soon as a man runs away from work at five, he goes right home and has something to eat and drink, and then goes down to the basement and straight back to work again--only now with his power saw, or paneling a room, or building a new terrace. He's working for himself this time, but it's not really leisure.

[A] Southern: I just visited one of those retirement cities in California. The whole idea is that these people are retired and it's supposed to be straight leisure, but my God, they're the most peripatetic people in the world. They're all 65 and over, and it's a second childhood for them, but very highly organized. They do beadwork, and finger painting, and modern dance--you know, sort of high school things, all over again. Christ, they're putting in a ten-hour clay out there.

[A] Goodman: Work, leisure--I doubt that it makes much difference. Having more time away from work hasn't made people any less foolish or base than working hard. It's not whether we call it work or leisure that counts. What counts is the degree of personal involvement. Given the lack of involvement most people have on their jobs, their frivolity during the leisure hours doesn't make much difference. They aren't really doing anything anyway. They're just fooling around. Suppose a man's job is to make a useless product, next year's model change. Do you call that work?

[A] Allen: Hardly. But there's another kind of involvement, too. Not just involvement with the job, but social involvement. The increase in technical know-how--in the numbers and kinds of fertilizers and automatic machines, computers and that sort of thing--hasn't turned the world into heaven on earth. There are still millions of people starving. What is required is more men with a sense of commitment and responsibility to society. In that sense, I agree with Mr. Diebold. What to do with leisure time is a profoundly important question, because it requires man to ask himself what the hell he's doing here, and why he has a right to eat and drink, if he isn't going to leave his corner of the earth very much better than he found it.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel that leisure must be purposeful, either altruistically or creatively?

[A] Kerr: Absolutely not--and that's the key to the whole thing: We are all committed to endless utilitarianism. Function, function, function. We think everything we do has to have some functional utility. Before we do something that has no function, no special utility, we face some kind of inner crisis. It's a terrible wrench, almost a physiological one, I'd say. There's a moment of near illness. We have to get over that. We will never be able to enjoy leisure until we realize that all the things we do for a purpose, for some form of profit, are not and cannot be leisure. True leisure is action that seems truly useless. There is no utility in it. Therefore, we are free, we are truly playful in the sense that an animal is playful. You might call it allowing yourself to run through existence barefoot. The real compulsion we operate under is the compulsion toward utility. To free ourselves of that is difficult, and the more free time we have, the tougher it's going to be.

[A] Podhoretz: Oh, no, no, absolutely not. I take just the opposite view. I don't believe there really is any such thing as a nonutilitarian act. Everything we do is done to serve some purpose, conscious or otherwise. In that sense, even leisure can't be nonutilitarian. In fact, it has to be utilitarian, although that isn't exactly the word I'd use. The word I'd use is serious. The activity has to be serious in intent. Even play, even the play of very small children, has to be serious. Children play at being somewhere else, being someone else: It's a kind of acting out of real life. The idea is not so much to escape from the here and now as to enlarge the possibilities of the immediate world. But the point of reference is always the real world. This is what I mean when I say that leisure has to be serious. You can't just tell somebody to be an amateur painter if he has no real talent, no real impulse, no real possibility of painting a picture that is worth something, at least to some-one. I've never been able to take up a sport just because someone told me it would be good for me. I find if I'm not good at it, I can't enjoy it. Doing it has to fill some need for me. In this context, what's important about an activity is not whether it seems to be utilitarian or not, but rather how much self there is in it, as against how much transcendence of self.

[Q] Playboy: Would you elaborate?

[A] Podhoretz: People who run off to the country whenever they can--and we all do, if we can afford to--are obeying an instinct to commune with something that isn't man-made. I can sit and stare at the ocean for hours at a time, empty-headed. It does something to me. Other people have the same thing with mountains. Nature bespeaks something larger than the human will and indifferent to the human will; it inspires feelings of a quasi-religious character. Now that is certainly one kind of leisure--the kind I suppose Mr. Kerr was talking about-- but it's hardly the only kind. In other words, I would argue against the idea that leisure isn't leisure unless it has a mystical or religious character of sorts, and I would argue against the idea that it must be nonpurposive.

We have no reason to assume that man is anything but a homo faber--a maker--someone in whose nature the impulse to make is very powerful. Not only does the impulse to work exist in us, but work has always been a necessity. Yet today there are Utopian prophets who tell us that work won't be a necessity for all time. A writer like Robert Theobald envisages a situation in which the right to a basic annual wage without work will be guaranteed to all. I suppose it's theoretically conceivable. But even so, it strikes me that it would be very hard for human nature, as we know it now, and as we know it from the literature of past ages, to be satisfied with such a condition. In fact, so little do we seem to be able to do without work that the prospect of a society in which work is no longer a matter of survival begins, ironically, to assume the proportions of a crisis--one of the great crises of human history. If such a workless world should ever really come into being, we would have to undergo huge spiritual transformations in order to learn how to cope with it.

[A] Southern: We've already opened up an abyss of leisure. In one sense, today there's really nothing but leisure. It's work that's phony or false for most people--because everyone knows that all he has to do is lie down on the sidewalk and somebody is going to come along and take care of him. He's not going to starve to death. In other words, the motivation for work no longer relates to survival. This really lays it on the line in terms of how to spend your day. Once you're aware of the actual situation, then the question becomes: What is there that's worth doing?

[A] Allen: I don't want to harp on the same note, but isn't this another way of saying you need involvement? Commitment? When you're in love, for example, you're never bored, never at a loss about what to do with yourself. Every moment seems precious and important. Nor are scholars bored, nor men gripped with a philosophical passion. Communists are not bored. Fascists are not bored. Saints are not bored. Wouldn't you agree that it is the person who has difficulty feeling a sense of commitment to anything larger than himself--that it is this sort of person who regards great chunks of time with apprehension?

[A] Goodman: Right. Without real involvement it doesn't matter whether you're working or playing. Work is something imposed on you from the outside, so let's lay that aside. It's something you're forced to do. Fooling around is what you force yourself to do. It's trying to have a good time, to pass the time, to kill time. Both work and leisure should be ways of giving yourself to a task that is somehow part of your justification for living. It can be a conversation at a merchant seamen's bar; it can be teaching a Ph.D. seminar, or playing a game of sheepshead in the university lounge--so long as you want to do it, so long as you care about the outcome, so long as the thing is not trivial to you. Lack of involvement is a vacuum. Emptiness is horribly painful, and when you're faced with this vacuum, it's unlivable. Then you're reduced to the simplest possible philosophy of "let's have pleasure," and you just don't get pleasure that way.

[A] Podhoretz: What we come back to, I suppose, is that you can't derive any kind of satisfaction from living unless there is a truly serious intention behind what you are doing--at work or play--and unless there is a potentially serious result.

[A] Kerr: Well, I can remember a time when we didn't worry about such things. It's futile to daydream about the bucolic past, of course, but I recall with unalloyed pleasure the times I used to visit my grandparents as a child--which was very frequently. I spent an inordinate amount of time there playing ball and going to picnics and spending entire evenings around the piano. That is my earliest memory of Sunday evening, from the time dinner was over until we went home, which was probably ten or eleven o'clock. I mean three or four hours simply singing, people just standing around, one of them playing the piano and everyone else singing. Nothing could have been less serious, less purposeful--or more enjoyable. But that kind of group, coming together on an easy, unplanned and unorganized basis, has tended to vanish. Today--even at what we like to call play--everyone seems to set himself a goal, often an artificial one: We can make such and such a place by noon; we can get in 18 holes by four; then we can eat; and so forth and so on. It's so much more regimented: In effect, we're working at it more but enjoying it less.

[A] Shepherd: You're so right. A lot of the good old nonfunctional ways of spending leisure have begun to disappear: ham radio, for example--my own hobby. By far the largest percentage of amateur radio operators when I was a boy and got my license had built all their own equipment. It was just as automatic as putting on your shoes. But this sort of thing has practically disappeared. In its place has come the hi-fi kit. And that's not at all the same thing, of course. It's packaged and prefabricated--and it's no fun.

[A] Amory: What I don't like about the way people spend their leisure today is that it seems to be conformist as well as packaged. People collect contemporary art because the fellow down the street is collecting art. I think that over the last generation or two, hobbies have become much more depersonalized and conformist than they used to be. That's an important and unfortunate shift in our approach to leisure.

[A] Southern: If you want a positive change, the great new hobby, of course, is sex--mostly straight physical sex, where the psychological and emotional elements are pure gravy. That's the scene, and the trend is up. It all has to do with a profound change in the notion of possessiveness. There's a new awareness that physical "purity" for a woman is a con, an illusion, and that physical "exclusiveness," in a man's attitude toward a woman, has nothing to do with any sort of real relationship between two people. This is very much on the increase, and I would put this, and its contingencies, under the heading of groovy new leisure-time activities.

[A] Shepherd: Well, forgive me for saying so, but it seems to me that promiscuity is not particularly new as a leisure-time activity; in fact, it may be our oldest leisure-time activity. I seem to remember there was even a commandment that referred to it. Perhaps Mr. Southern himself has just discovered this fascinating new hobby. Every teenager believes that sex was invented sometime during his 12th year, and he is dumfounded to find out later that even his old man had heard of it some time earlier. No, sex is not new.

[A] Goodman: As far as sex as a leisure-time hobby is concerned--new or old--my observation has been that people are at their worst when they are on vacation. They are like pigs.

[Q] Playboy: In what way?

[A] Goodman: People have so little ability to structure their lives when the structure isn't given to them by some external command, that when they are freed from it on vacation there is every sign of breakdown. They engage in sexual activity when they don't seriously mean to let themselves get involved. This must mean that the orgasm will be no good. They don't notice one another as persons, and that makes the sex no good. An important reason for this is, as I say, that in their own work they are unable to structure their lives. It is structured for them. If we look at the economic system itself, we'll see that it does not allow most of the people involved in it to build structures of their own. Almost all the decision-making is from the top down. Therefore, even at work, their values tend to be rather slavish. So in their leisure what you get is a spectacle of slaves on a holiday. This isn't very ennobling. But their work life is a little better than their vacations. It's a little less unpleasant. I don't have to watch it.

[A] Allen: I can't agree that everyone is that way. But that does remind me of a scene from Mondo Cane--a very important motion picture. This was the scene in which the American tourists in Hawaii are shown "enjoying themselves." These poor people, many of them at quite advanced years, wearing these bright shirts and being hustled by the souvenir peddlers and herded around like cattle--I found that a rather saddening and depressing scene.

[A] Playboy: It is frequently charged that Americans are becoming too passive in their leisure-time pursuits. Do you feel this is true? And if so, is too much passive leisure making us soft, physically and mentally?

[A] Podhoretz: I don't know whether Americans are more passive than any other people would be in an industrial culture as advanced as ours. I don't think this has anything to do, intrinsically, with the American character. But it certainly does seem to be true that we spend a great deal of our leisure time as spectators rather than as participants. Mr. Kerr is right about people not getting together around the piano and singing as they once did. Now they listen to records. Listening to records isn't a totally passive experience, but it's certainly more passive than singing. The same goes for watching a baseball game. If you're really interested in baseball and know all about it, watching a game is not exactly a passive experience. It involves something like aesthetic connoisseurship. People get excited and they yell and they jump and drink a lot of beer, and so on. It's not a narcotic, but certainly it's not like playing baseball. As for Americans being soft, that seems observably true. Everybody is too fat.

[A] Amory: Yes, the spectator way of life is a pretty grim business, and I think that you will see that the decline of ancient Rome had something to do with the spectator sports, and the Chinese mandarin society fell when the mandarins started hiring coolies to play tennis for them while they watched. I think that civilization is on its way out when we all get to be spectators, particularly nowadays when most of us aren't even actual spectators of sports, we're TV spectators--which is really twice removed from actual participation.

Allen: I don't agree that we are any more passive than we were in the past. Most people have never played football. Most people have simply watched football from the stands or listened on their radios before TV. Most people have never been actors. They have gone to the theater and sat and watched other people act. Most people have never been musicians. They have gone to concert halls and sat and listened to musicians perform. So there is nothing really new about being spectators.

On the other hand, I think there is clear-cut evidence that we're growing soft. The book Pork Chop Hill by S. L. A. Marshall, the military historian, points out that the American soldier in the Korean War was the equal of the soldiers from the many other nations in all respects but one--leg power. The Americans were not able to march as far or as fast as the enemy. Our leg muscles are weak. This is one way in which we can see we are definitely getting soft, softer than we were. And this would seem to be because we are a nation on wheels. Also, people seem to be working less hard now. Fewer people are doing hard physical labor. Fewer people are laboring in the coal mines. Fewer people are chopping down trees. Fewer people are shoveling snow and that sort of thing. In the long run this must inevitably have a softening effect.

[A] Kerr: When there is so much comfort and indulgence available, you are going to have some fat on you. Television, which has allowed itself to fall down into sludge, encourages the viewer to fall down into sludge, too. That he has become increasingly passive is clear to me from his tolerance of, say, commercial interruptions. But even more than that there is the artificiality of what is accepted as human speech in the commercial itself. That, to me, is the most passive of all things. I myself don't know how people can sit there and listen to these dialog exchanges in commercials which are so utterly unreal at every conceivable level, and remain in the room. I have to leave the room. I can't stay there. And it is not an aesthetic stylization, such as you might sometimes see in the theater or in a film. Transparently, it is a fraudulent reality. That people will sit still for even a moment suggests to me an abnormal passivity, and a very dangerous one.

[A] Southern: I don't know that people are hooked on TV any more than they used to be on radio. I do know that you have to make a different kind of movie now to get them out of the house, but I would doubt the passivity. I mean just forgetting about the crime rate and freedom marches, what about thought? What about listening? What about music?

[A] Kerr: Granted. Your mind is engaged and kept active by listening to Bach. The mind is engaged at a tremendous level of activity. I don't mean you are thinking, but it is certainly an intellectual engagement. The act is called contemplation. But that isn't the same as television. TV doesn't have to be intellectually passive, but it has allowed itself to become so. It doesn't attempt in any way to engage the viewer's mind at a really complex level so that his mind is truly active while contemplating it.

[A] Shepherd: You know, here we are beating people on the head about their being passive. What's so terrible about it? I think this is a prime example of our being detached from reality. We get these sweeping generalizations about the American people not getting enough exercise. God! You can't even get a boat into the water in Lake Michigan anymore, the boats are so thick. Golf courses all over the country are stacked six deep with people. Who the hell are all these people--Chinese? They are out bowling, and water-skiing, and being amateur musicians and actors, and flying and doing a hell of a lot of other things--including all the do-it-yourself stuff. I'm not saying it's necessarily good or bad, but it sure as hell isn't passive! Furthermore, I've never found anything wrong with being passive. I kind of enjoy just sitting around on my butt. Why should we place a moral judgment on it?

[A] Kerr: I don't think we mean--at least I don't mean--that everything has to be muscular or it's no good. I remember with pleasure, when I was a kid, that there was an easygoing quality about life. Sitting on the porch for a whole afternoon or standing around the piano for an evening, as I said. This is passive in the sense that it is not physically agitated. But on the other hand, we were talking to one another all afternoon or exercising ourselves vocally. It wasn't like turning into a blob. Also, there was a kind of pleasant human interaction. What disturbs me more than growing passivity is the decline of group activity. We are not as interested in our neighbors or as willing to do things with them or for them as we used to be. The group camaraderie is gone. Everything is more isolated.

[A] Podhoretz: I'm forced to disagree. The problem is on the other foot in America. The areas of privacy available to us continually shrink. I regard privacy as an important value, and from what I have observed, it is very hard for people to get much of it. There are invasions of our privacy on every side--from crude ones, like the sort of thing Vance Packard was recently exposing, to the continual assault on you through the media. We live in the midst of an enormous din. Given this, I would think that anything that makes for greater privacy in individual life is to be welcomed and is highly desirable.

[A] Goodman: Yes, but we must get rid of the notion that the individual matters so much, because in almost any activity--not every activity, but in most activities which are worth while--authentic individuality is not helped any by being an individual. When you once get down to worrying about yourself as an individual, then it becomes almost impossible to engage in any worth-while activity. Again, it's not whether you're doing it alone or with someone, and it's not whether it's "passive" or "active." What matters is whether you're genuinely involved in what you're doing, whatever it is. Do you lose yourself in it?

[Q] Playboy: The inability to "lose" oneself in leisure is a peculiarly American deficiency, according to some critics. For example, describing a businessman on vacation, Louis Kronenberger has written that "even as he lies prone upon the sand, or sits mindless in the dory, his brain--with a joyful sense of guilt--will dart cityward to the deals, the conferences, the agenda ahead." Is it true that many of us suffer from this sort of guilt, that because we can't lose ourselves in play we tend to view our time away from work almost as a form of deprivation?

[A] Podhoretz: I know of no one who regards a vacation as a deprivation. It's true that there are a great many people who find it difficult to relax. I happen to be one of them. But I don't think that's anything to complain about, particularly, and in any case it isn't a culturally determined condition. It's a matter of temperament. How does Louis Kronenberger know that this businessman lying on the sand is mindless? And if the businessman on vacation finds himself more interested in something going on in his office, rather than in what is going on in the surf or in the mountains, well, I don't see how any moral or cultural inferences can be drawn from that fact alone.

[A] Diebold: I agree. Then, too, it seems undeniable that there are some forms of work so pleasurable that the worker simply doesn't want to leave them for leisure. Maybe that explains why many businessmen just don't enjoy a holiday.

[A] Shepherd: Right. But why pick on the businessman, particularly? Let me describe a playwright friend of mine. He is working in New York, like 25 hours a day. He has three phone lines coming into his home. He is afraid the town is going to recede from him. So after five or six years, something like that, his wife decides they've got to take a vacation. So they go on a Caribbean cruise. It was one of these package cruises. They were supposed to be gone for two weeks. Well, they weren't more than 24 hours out and he was already breaking out in a rash. He was pacing the deck. He couldn't eat--this is an actual fact. He missed phoning his agent. Well, they finally got down to the first island, and he got off and said to hell with the boat and got the first plane back, and less than 24 hours after he had left was back in New York on the phones--one at each ear. It's true that some people can work hard but not play hard. But it's not just businessmen who are hung up on work.

[A] Amory: Let's not make fun of this compulsion to work. There is one characteristic I have noticed in every single successful man I've ever written about, and that is that he gets up early in the morning and works long hours. I think the successful man is perfectly willing to let other people work short hours and have what they call leisure. But I don't think the successful man has time for leisure or an inclination for it, in the sense we are talking about. It's a pity, perhaps, that he doesn't, but the more successful you are, the more demands there are on you, and literally the only way you can escape is on something like a boat where there is no telephone, or an island in the Caribbean where the telephone service is lousy.

[Q] Playboy: Bernard De Voto once said that there is "no sadder sight than that of an American trying to have a good time." Do you agree?

[A] Shepherd: To an extent, yes. I think the compulsion to work is a factor. We already mentioned that. But there's also a concomitant compulsion to play. The schoolbooks tell us how good work is: "Get out there and work hard!" But at the same time we have the headshrinkers telling us to go out and have a good time: "Loosen up. Forget your worries." So you get it coming and going, and you wind up with a guilty feeling no matter what you do. It all becomes compulsive.

[A] Kerr: You don't even have to delve into psychology to find the source of that compulsion. It's not just psychiatrists; our doctors are always telling us to go out and have a good time, too. And if our doctor doesn't tell us, we have a friend who's had a heart attack whose doctor told him. Everybody thinks he is about to have a coronary immediately if he doesn't rush out and have fun. It is fascinating how often the heart attack comes on the golf course, while you are straining to have the good time to keep the heart attack from coming. I suppose there is also some residual feeling since Freud, since the loosening of inhibitions that, "God, there must be more fun than all this and I'm not having it. Maybe I should try harder."

[A] Allen: Americans do seem to be less able to deal with pleasure than other nationalities. There are differences among nations. Among Catholic nations, you'll find that the Irish, for example, are considerably less able to enjoy life than the Italians or the French or the Spanish, even though they share the same religion. I'd guess that the Irish Catholic influence probably has something to do with it in this country--with our inability to have pleasure without guilt. But so does the Protestant puritanical influence.

[A] Diebold: I don't see how we can expect to understand the American's attitude toward his leisure without discussing his attitude toward work. The way a man works shapes his whole life and his personality, and that affects the way he is going to react to leisure. Millions of people today are employed as robots. Can you imagine a robot having a good time--on or off the job? But things are beginning to change. Automation is changing them, and, as has been pointed out earlier, elements of leisure are beginning to creep into the workday itself. Work for many people is becoming far more interesting and pleasant than it ever was, and this will improve their ability to enjoy themselves.

[Q] Playboy: David Riesman has written about this fusion of work and leisure in business and professional life. Activities formerly sharply distinguishable from work, such as expense-account entertainment, have become an important part of the work life. Do you welcome this trend, gentlemen?

[A] Amory: Well, whenever I see a group of businessmen making their bets before a golf game and going out to deduct one another and try to win some money from one another, I'm always rather depressed by it.

[A] Shepherd: This is true for a lot of people, I suppose, but I happen to know too many friends of mine who work in bagel bakeries and button factories: their work is not even remotely related to their leisure, nor do I believe it ever will be. We keep thinking in terms of executives and creative people. Stop and think for a minute that out of 190,000,000 people in this country, how many are in the executive world? How many are in the creative world?

[A] Podhoretz: Exactly. But I doubt that we'll ever arrive at a future in which work and play are indistinguishable--even for executives and creative people. Such a future could only be produced by a series of very radical revolutions not only in our economic structure but in human nature. It seems to me that the problem we're faced with in the here and now can be defined in the following way: The number of jobs that are demonstrably important to the people performing them seems to be declining proportionately--I mean work that is immediately meaningful, at the end of which something worth having gets produced, or done, or made. Many, many people perform work that is not, in itself, meaningful or satisfying to them. And when work is not experienced as fully meaningful, then play, which is nonwork, also becomes meaningless. It seems that you can relax fully only if you've been working fully. The two conditions are interdependent.

[A] Diebold: This is true, but I don't think it's necessarily true that fewer and fewer people do satisfying work. It is true that there are fewer jobs in which the end results are immediately and physically apparent; there are more jobs involving paper and ideas and abstractions. Automation is going to greatly increase the number of such jobs. But it is also going to do away with many of the jobs that are meaningless, boring and repetitive. People talk of the coming robot age. Well, it seems to me that the robot age has been with us since the industrial revolution. People have been made into automatons in the sense of Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. But many of the sociologists and psychologists who are drawing conclusions regarding the implications of automation are making the mistake of thinking there will be much more of this as time goes on--whereas in reality, precisely the opposite is occurring. It's no longer Charlie Chaplin on the assembly line. The whole situation, both physically and psychologically, is entirely different, but very few people are bothering to observe the phenomenon. For example, instead of crowding people together on the assembly line, we give them "lonesome pay" nowadays--premium pay for being away from other people. It's like hazard pay, but it's for a psychological hazard, in a sense. These people spend their workdays alone at a control console, say, and because of this they get extra pay in some factories. This could hardly be called unpleasant. Now, I'm not holding out the picture of some kind of utopia, but automation is changing the basic situation, and changing it rapidly. We have to throw away all our old stereotyped ideas about the nature of work. This will also force us to change our ideas about leisure.

[A] Southern: Yes, the idea that people hate work and love leisure is pretty suspect, I think. The crucial test would be if somebody were given $10,000 a year and he didn't have to do anything except press a button once every four hours. What would he do? Would he take off? I have an idea that he wouldn't--not because he considered his work such an essential and groovy thing, but because the alternative of self would be too frightening.

[A] Amory: I think that the number who find joy and fulfillment in their work probably remains about constant. I don't think that the machine has changed this very much--not yet, anyway. To be honest about it, the world's work is basically pretty dull, and an awful lot of people have to spend their lives at what are pretty dull jobs--and this is likely to be true of the future as well. But a lot of people make it worse than it is. I've never understood, for example, why the New York bus driver can't be a happier guy, or the New York taxi driver.

One Saturday evening, I remember, just before theater time, there were no cabs at all. It was just before Christmas, and everybody seemed to want a cab. So I just suddenly decided to be a cab for one night, and I had a very interesting time. I got my car out and took people wherever they wanted to go, and talked with them en route. As we drove to our destination, I'd tell them I wasn't a cabbie, just somebody who had offered them a lift, and who happens to be a director of the Humane Society of the United States, and who would very much appreciate a small donation for the Humane Society. I ended up with a very sizable donation for the Society, and I had a very pleasant evening. I don't think it is necessary to be the way most bus drivers and taxi drivers are. They just don't have the right approach to their jobs.

[Q] Playboy: What about our approach to leisure in the years ahead? How will we be spending our free time at, say, the turn of the century?

[A] Diebold: Well, for one thing, the computer will be changing a lot of our leisure-time habits--and not only by releasing us from drudgery. The computer itself will be used for leisure. It already is, to an extent. At the World's Fair, for example, there are half a dozen computers that are, essentially, playing games of one kind or another. They may be dressed up, but they're just there for amusement's sake. In connection with this, every home will eventually have some form of facsimile machine. If you want to pass the time with a magazine or newspaper, it will print it out for you on the spot. If you want a hunting or fishing license, you'll be able to dial a number and have it printed out for you then and there. No waiting. We also have computers that are now capable of playing chess. I see no reason why this cannot be extended in the future so that we will play games against the machines.

[Q] Playboy: Could you spell this out a bit more?

[A] Diebold: Of course. Using machines for play sounds Buck Rogersish, but it's not that startling an idea. After all, the auto is a machine and we use it for pleasure as well as business. We fly planes for fun. So there is really nothing so strange about the idea that more complicated machines may someday be used for fun.

On the opposite side of the coin, I think there will be a great increase in handicraft activities of various kinds. Since so many products will be machine-made and standardized, there will be a great premium placed on uniqueness and the individual qualities of handcrafted articles, many of which we will make for ourselves, just for the fun of it.

There will also be a phenomenal increase in all forms of education. We never used to think of education as a leisure-time activity. Yet today one of the most interesting developments is the fantastic growth of adult education. People are going back to school voluntarily, and often to study things for which they have no great need. They're doing it for fun. This sort of thing will double and redouble in the years to come.

[A] Shepherd: If we're thinking of unusual new ways of spending our leisure--at new hobbies, for example--there'll be a really novel one called "work." Do you know there are camps that are now being advertised in The New York Times where you can send your child for two weeks of work? Where he has to make trails, where he has to cut down trees, and he's given a real job. They even have little canning factories where the kid has to work the machines. I think this is the coming thing. I think eventually there will be places outside New York where you'll spend three dollars an hour to go and grind the valves on a '37 Chevy, or do some coal mining with a pick and a headlamp. Do you know that in Florida there are already certain orange groves that are grown for the very purpose of having people come and pay for the privilege of picking oranges--and they don't even get to keep them? Then they go home and sing folk songs about itinerant fruit pickers. Things are getting weird. But they're going to get weirder.

[A] Amory: Whether we call it work or play, I have a feeling we will be doing it more actively than passively. I think that the coming years will see a big thrust in this area--from do-it-yourself stuff to skiing to the golf craze, which, incidentally, has to be seen to be believed. There are people on these courses waiting to tee off in the pitch-black dark. Waiting to tee off at four o'clock in the morning. We'll see even more of that. I think spectator sports like pro football have seen their heyday. And we are going to see a travel business such as we have not even imagined. It's going to be as simple to go 2000 miles away to an island as it is now to go through city traffic someplace close at hand. If along with all this comes adequate education to help us use our leisure profitably--as Mr. Diebold predicts--then it will be a wonderful world. If it doesn't, it'll be ancient Rome all over again: circuses, and then barbarism.

[A] Diebold: Well, I don't think that will necessarily happen even without education; for looking into the distant future, I think we may perfect some human equivalent of the experiments that have been done with pleasure centers in animals--in rats, for example. They are trained to push a pedal which triggers an electric impulse in the pleasure centers of their brains; the sensation is so ecstatic that they'll keep doing it until they all but drop from exhaustion or starvation. They'll stop only long enough to maintain the barest minimum of water and food input. You can't tear them away.

[A] Amory: May I break in to say to the good Doctor Diebold that those experiments don't sound that pleasurable. In fact, they sound like the kind that the Humane Society would very much like to investigate.

[A] Diebold: I didn't conduct them; I'm just commenting on them.

[A] Shepherd: There are experiments going ahead in the LSD department that might have some bearing on this. In this area, there seem to be ecstatic experiences available that make a return to reality no less intolerable--only for people instead of rats. How about siccing the Humane Society onto that?

[A] Southern: No, let them look out for mistreated animals and we'll look out for ourselves. I foresee a widespread use of drugs of every kind for kicks; the serious leisure-time pursuit of the future will be adventures of the mind, occurring in solitude. Ultimately the most exciting--or to keep it on the level of this discussion--the most "fun" thing will not be parachute jumping, masturbation or group identification, but getting blasted out of your mind--which is to say transcendence.

[A] Shepherd: I agree. More and more people will be studying themselves--and their navels. Related to this will be still another hobby: getting analyzed. Analysis is already a great hobby, but it promises to get even more popular. So the big new hobbies will be introspection and neurosis.

[A] Goodman: Introspection as a hobby? Introspection is like bad masturbation.

[Q] Playboy: In what way?

[A] Goodman: Well, if it's good masturbation you're just kind of enjoying your self and helping yourself along, but in bad masturbation you're raping yourself, what they call "looking into yourself"; introspection is like that. It's already one of the big leisure activities of our time. And you can have it.

[A] Southern: An introspective faculty has got to be encouraged so that when people come face to face with themselves for the first time they won't be frightened away. Introspection, in a more serious sense than you seem to appreciate, is leisure in its highest form. And it is very important that the emancipation experience--which will come through drugs--be a wholly positive one.

[A] Podhoretz: Well, I think too much introspection, narcotic or otherwise, can be terrible. D. H. Lawrence said that too much self-consciousness was like falling from the hands of God, falling down into a bottomless well of the self, and anyone who has taken the plunge knows what Lawrence meant. Self-preoccupation is one of the great diseases of our time, and people who run away from themselves may be following a healthy instinct. But are people running away from themselves these days? I suppose some are. Some selves are so boring that they ought to be run away from. Anyway, you don't confront yourself--or discover your identity, to use the fashionable phrase--by looking in the mirror. The confrontation takes place in behavior, in the act of living. The kind of track a man leaves in his life is the kind of self he is. An endless preoccupation with one's inner needs and conflicts is a form of madness, not of leisure.

[A] Southern: Of course you don't confront yourself by looking in the mirror; that's only an image. You have to do like the Indians who eat peyote and sit staring at their reflections in a pool--until they enter them. Naturally there's always the chance of getting a little wet. As for the "kind of track a man leaves in his life," any awareness of that on his part suggests that his concept of life, and his concern, are on the level of something like: "Is my fly open?"

[A] Shepherd: Well, I don't know if navel contemplation over inner conflicts is going to be the big thing or not, but I suspect we are liable to see bigger and bigger artificial conflict. We like to think that we want the Cold War to go out of existence. But is that really true? If all the conflict in the world suddenly disappeared overnight, what then? Where would we go from there? Most of us would be robbed of purpose. Boredom would set in. And when work goes out, too, there is going to be one hell of a big vacuum, and it won't be filled for long by movies, or art, or playing golf. Did you ever talk to a man who has retired at a comparatively early age? You'll find almost without exception, he'll tell you, "My God, I thought I could never get enough fishing. I could never get enough golf and travel." Well, he finds out damn well soon, when that's all he's got in his life, that he can get a surfeit of it in an amazingly short time--like in six months. So this, then, takes us back to how we are going to spend all this excess time. Maybe in war and strife. That's grim, but it's my honest opinion. Have you noticed that, in America, as things get better for all racial groups, strife increases? It's a fascinating byproduct of wealth and leisure. Bread we have; circuses will eventually bore us; but conflict will not. I think everyone is searching for conflict. Trouble will become a desirable thing, and we'll contrive to provide it.

[Q] Playboy: Do you mean we'll actually search for pretexts to start wars?

[A] Shepherd: Not overtly, perhaps. But take the Russian-American race to the moon, for instance. Well, I suspect that the race to Venus and Mars and the other planets will be even more of a race. On a vast scale, it'll serve the same psychological purpose as a horse race. Who really cares whether the green horse beats the blue one? But it's symbolic, you see; it provides a terrific release to everybody who has put his money on it. So now we are involved in a giant race to the heavens, and everyone is talking about the terrific money it's costing. Well, we wouldn't like it unless it did. It wouldn't provide us any conflict unless there was cost. Who goes to race tracks without money?

[A] Kerr: That's a rather gloomy outlook. But there does seem to be some relationship between boredom and violence or conflict. Juvenile delinquency probably has something to do with being bored. Of course, there's also the fear the young people now are born under, because of the atomic age. They see their elders apparently unequal to cope with the atomic age, and so respect for authority begins to disappear. But it seems to me that when you add the leisure problem to this, you've really got a major dilemma.

[Q] Playboy: How can we solve it?

[A] Allen: It seems to me that there is only one way to cope with this problem, and that is by educating people to understand just how much remains to be done in this world, how they ought to be using their leisure to improve society. If we are able to do this, we might be able to avoid this problem, or at least put it off indefinitely. With the world about to go up in flames at any moment, this is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the human race.

I'm certainly not saying that there's anything wrong with mah-jongg or girl watching or golfing or just goofing off, or any of the harmless diversions we've talked about. A certain degree of variety is apparently essential to good mental and physical health. But, by God, I can't understand why there are millions of Americans at a loss for what to do with their free time while most of the rest of the world continues to exist on the edge of starvation--and even here at home, millions of our fellow citizens desperately need help because they are alcoholics or narcotic addicts or criminals or cancer patients or just poor or unemployed; that I can't understand. The schools should be training us for ways of serving the community during our leisure time. That's what the Greeks did. Public service was a respected form of leisure. We need to get that idea across again.

[A] Goodman: Another thing that needs to be done is a decentralization of power in society. If the average man had some say over his own destiny, he'd be involved with things that matter, and he wouldn't be at a loss. Take entertainment. It's altogether unnecessary for entertainment services like television or radio to be so totally centralized. Why not decentralize them? Open up new stations and channels by the hundreds--try to get the FCC to license so that every neighborhood can have ten independent television outlets. Just imagine if that took place. To simply fill the air time, practically everybody in the community would be on TV, preparing to be on TV, or having just finished being on TV. Now, this might be an absurd situation, but all kinds of ideas would get aired, and there would be participation, and the programs would make more sense than something cooked up by Madison Avenue.

I would decentralize education, too. If you want to train for leisure, you're going to have to revolutionize the whole school system. One way of doing this is to try out a kind of GI Bill for high school-age kids. It would cost $1000 a year, say, to keep a kid in high school in New York City. Well, you tell the parents, "Work out with your children some educational program for the next year that seems plausible. Here's the $1000--do it!" You could send them, for example, to Mexico to learn Spanish or to do something else there that's worth while. The effect of this, as it was under the GI Bill, would be to produce a new kind of educational system where people are doing something that meets their needs, rather than doing lessons that are predetermined according to somebody else's needs.

The children and adolescents of our society are the most exploited class; as far as they're concerned, instead of substituting leisure for work, what we are doing is substituting for the work even harder work. We are not training for leisure in our school system. What we are doing is the exact opposite. We are brainwashing, we are training to do lessons, to drudge at courses you don't care about, to compete for grades. All of this grew up out of the scarcity economy. It is just the opposite of what we need in a leisure society.

[A] Diebold: I'm not sure I agree with this prescription, but I do agree that our whole educational machine is reactionary and terribly slow to change, to accept new realities as they emerge. The issue, it seems to me, is that some way must be found to educate our young people out of the old Calvinist idea that work is noble and essential, while leisure, play and self-cultivation are ignoble. This is the philosophical issue. How do you begin to wipe out that idea that's been with us now for so many centuries, all these long centuries of hunger and scarcity?

[A] Southern: I would certainly support the kind of educational program Mr. Goodman suggests, but I think a more ambitious and dynamic approach would be in the use of mass psychoanalysis, at a very early level of a person's development--the earlier the better, but certainly before he hits the street. You have got to get them before they get hooked on the idea or habit of work. In my view, there ought to be a form of basic analysis, given the same obligatory priority as, say, that given to math and English, starting at the first year of high school, or slightly earlier. Another approach, as I suggested before, is the use of drugs--that is, for people who are already hooked on the blind-work habit. The use of introspective or transcendence drugs, under proper conditions, and entered into without anxiety, would produce an enlightened attitude, an insight, into the nature of work and everything else.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think it would be wise to institutionalize the use of artificial aids to help people cope with reality?

[A] Southern: Why not? In Western culture there is already an almost total reliance on drugs--alcohol and sedatives. And these are strictly painkillers and escape drugs. What do you think is going to happen when these people wise up, when they start moving the other way from pain and escapism? Eventually it has got to come to that; it's an inevitable extension of what's happening now, and it's becoming more and more difficult for these people to rationalize against it, because all their other values and security techniques have collapsed.

[A] Podhoretz: This goes back to Huxley's idea in Brave New World--a society run on Soma. Dope, of course, is widely used now. Not only alcohol and tranquilizers, but cigarettes, aspirins and sleeping pills, which are also forms of dope, if you extend the definition slightly. I see nothing wrong with this--unless it wrecks your health, which is exactly what it does to many people. But even if they do no harm, drugs solve nothing; they're only palliatives. And as for mass analysis, I'm totally skeptical of its ability to cope with any kind of real crisis.

[A] Southern: You're talking about sedation; I'm talking about awareness. And what I mean by "mass analysis" would be toward the same end. There is a body of elementary psychoanalytic knowledge which is shared by even the most divergent schools of thinking--an understanding of jealousy, envy, rivalry, hate, irrational fear. If this knowledge were imparted to the very young, it would bring about a profound change in, a profound enhancement of, their lives and of the culture itself.

[A] Amory: I'm afraid I see something morally objectionable about the use of mass drug therapy. I don't think I'd like to live in a society stabilized by anything even remotely like Huxley's Soma. We had better find some other ways to cope with the future, or it won't be worth coping with. Is that what we want to be? Do we want to live in some kind of opium dream? Is that what we were put on earth for?

[A] Playboy: Mr. Amory's question brings us back to Mr. Diebold's statement, early in this discussion, that leisure will compel man to question and re-evaluate his reason for being, that it will test his conception of himself. Can we conclude by asking you to elaborate on this prediction, Mr. Diebold?

[A] Diebold: Well, every great scientific advance, every great forward leap in invention, has forced man to change his concept of himself. Professor Herbert A. Simon of the Carnegie Institute of Technology has reminded us that with Copernicus and Galileo, man ceased to see himself as the species located at the center of the universe. Then came Darwin, and he could no longer see himself as the species uniquely endowed by God with soul and reason. Now that machines are exhibiting intelligent behavior, it seems to me that once more we face a fundamental question about man's place in the universe. Machines can already learn and improve their performance; given a goal, they can reach it by their own route. Man is no longer the only intelligent organism on earth. As of now, imagination, volition, purposeful-ness--these remain uniquely human characteristics. But in the future? It may turn out, as machines come more closely to imitate man's way of working, that only his way of playing, only his leisure pursuits, will distinguish him from the machine. In short, we now must ask again, "What makes man uniquely human?" Leisure, and how we spend it, may provide the answer.

[Q] Playboy: Thank you, gentlemen.