Chapter 4
Making a Choice
Everything said up to this point implies that we can
choose our recreation as freely as we choose our clothes. But there is a
strong strain of contrary opinion that is rarely made explicit in debate
over the national parks. Recreation fills needs created by the style of
our daily lives, this view holds; and one need only know how someone
works to know how he will play. The much-discussed problem of elitism
arises from this perspective. For if certain styles of recreation are
inevitably the preserve of a certain class of people in the
societyfly-fishing for the professional and business executive,
for example, and snowmobiling for the blue-collar factory
workerthen to embody one style of recreation in public policy, and
to commit our parklands significantly to it, is to yield a valuable and
significant public resource to a very limited segment of the population
(limited not just by numbers, but by class as well).
The determinist view has been stated most strongly by
those whose interest is in humanizing work. "What are we to expect?" the
psychiatrist Erich Fromm asks "If a man works without genuine
relatedness to what he is doing . . . how can he make use of his leisure
time in an active and meaningful way? He always remains the passive and
alienated consumer." [1] Sometimes the point
has been put even more strongly: A certain kind of leisure activity is
not only to be expected from the alienated worker, but is
psychologically necessary for him.
Mass culture reinforces those emotional attitudes
that seem inseparable from existence in modern society . . . passivity
and boredom. . . . What is supposed to deflect us from the reduction of
our personalities actually reinforces it. . . . So, as the audience
feels that it must continue to live as it does, it has little desire to
see its passivity and deep-seated though hardly conscious boredom upset;
it wants to be titillated and amused, but not disturbed. [2]
These observations are a warning to recreational
idealists, implying that no effort to encourage more challenging and
"disturbing" leisure activity can hope to succeed unless and until the
workplace is reformed. The idea is that we observe in present
recreational choices a reflection of profound needs that no mere change
of attitude or public policy can affect: that those who already have
power in the society (like successful professionals) are attracted to
recreation that demonstrates to them that they are above needing power;
while those who are powerless need nothing so much as to demonstrate
(however pitifully) that they are capable of dominion. Thus the
distinguished New York lawyer and fly-fisherman lies by the side of a
stream contemplating the bubbles, while the factory worker roars across
the California desert on a motorcycle.
Though all stereotypes about recreational use are
exaggerated, there is some indisputable data. Studies demonstrate very
strong correlations between wilderness use and both occupation and
education. Blue-collar workers account for only 5 percent of all
wilderness visits. One study revealed that two-thirds of wilderness
users were college graduates and one-fourth of them had done graduate
work. [3]
There is a real irony here. To nineteenth-century
thinkers like Olmsted, it was a question of willing our aspirations into
existence; and therefore the denial to the ordinary citizen of
opportunities for contemplative recreation reflected a decision by those
in power to write him off as a hopeless drudge. The modern psychological
observers, and the statistics, suggest not only that he writes himself
offbut indeed that he cannot help but do so.
While there is wide agreement that the recreation of
"the passive and alienated consumer" is to be deplored (recognizing that
not all recreation other than the contemplative should be so
characterized), it is by no means obvious how one breaks out of the
observed work-recreation circle. If alienating work is an important
constraint on recreational choice, that only adds one more reason to
desire that the workplace be reformed. Does the difficulty in reforming
work, however, suggest that it is fruitless to encourage contemplative
recreation until there is a social revolution in the factory and the
office?
The dilemma cannot be resolved by data, however
carefully gathered. The public has to decide how much overt tension it
is willing to generate. Edward Abbey, blunt as usual, put it this way in
his book Desert Solitaire:
They will complain of physical hardship, these sons
of the pioneers. [But] once they rediscover the pleasures of actually
operating their own limbs and senses in a varied, spontaneous, voluntary
style, they will complain instead of crawling back into a car; they may
even object to returning to desk and office and that dry-wall box on
Mossy Brook Circle. The fires of revolt may be kindledwhich means
hope for us all. [4]
A rather less hopeful, but equally provocative, view
is presented by Paul Shepard in The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred
Game. Shepard is describing his childhood in the Missouri Ozarks,
and his admiration of the country boys whose hunting was filled with an
exuberant "independent, alert confidence" of the sort that Thoreau and
Faulkner celebrated as wildness not yet tamed out of men. Yet on
returning to see these children as grown men, he finds, sadly, much of
the vitality he had known drained out of them:
The childhood training of hunters is not so much
practical training as the opening of spiritual doors by leisured and
generous people. . . . Years later, after working in the local factories
or on the farm they became dull-eyed and defeated. After they could
afford guns they could still get excited about hunting but in a sad way,
turned in on themselves, puzzled and querulous.
This is not the defeat of innocence and enthusiasm by
age and knowledge. It is because drudgery and toil has blunted them and,
worse, their life style had failed them. Hunting had put a premium on
physical good health, on sensitivity to environment and to the nuances
and clues in a delicate and beautiful world, on independence,
confidence, persistence, generosity, and had given them a powerful sense
of the non-human creation. In their adult lives only one of
thesepersistencewas rewarded; the others were destroyed. [5]
Perspectives such as these reveal strong parallels
between the thinking of the modern preservationist and the views that
Olmsted expressed more than a century ago. Olmsted saw the average
citizen as a victim of aristocratic condescension, and the contemporary
park symbolist-preservationist sees him as a victim of industrial
alienation. Of course there is a condescension of its own kind in all
this, though it must have been perceived quite differently a century
ago. The nineteenth-century citizen was told he was being helped to
throw off the shackles imposed by a contemptuous upper class. The
contemporary citizenfar more committed to a belief in his own
autonomysees himself characterized by preservationist rhetoric as
the prisoner of his own ignorance. Certainly the average park visitor
today does not think of himself either as a manipulated puppet or as an
externally determined victim. And he does not take kindly to suggestions
that his choice of leisure time activity is unworthy. The inability of
the preservationist to win a sympathetic majority for his pleas rests on
an unwillingness to come to terms with the full implications of his
views.
Though the preservationist sometimes appears as yet
another critic of mass culture, speaking the language of alienation, he
shies away from the more generaland seemingly
radicalpolitics that posture implies. Unlike most mass-culture
critics he seems quite uninterested in social reform. Indeed, most of
the time he doesn't appear much interested in people at all. His
vocabulary is principally directed to the land and to physical
resources, and when he objects to off-road vehicle use or to plans for
an urban-style resort in the mountains, his complaint is routinely
phrased in terms of adverse impacts on soil, water resources, or
wildlife. These are certainly authentic concerns, but they are often
viewed as a disingenuous, politically neutral way of objecting to the
kind of recreation other people prefer.
As noted earlier, the presence of motorboats in the
Grand Canyon is not really an ecological issue, though it was regularly
put in those terms. Nor is ecological disruption the soleor even
the principalreason there has been so much objection to
snowmobiles or ORVs. While one element of preservationist advocacy is
scientific and truly based on principles of land management,
anotherand it is very clear in national park controversiesis
dominated by value judgments, by attaching symbolic importance to the
way people relate to nature. When preservationists are condemned
for being more interested in trees than in people, there is an edge to
the criticism even sharper than it seems. For the impression often given
by preservationist rhetoric is that some people are less
important than treesthe people who enjoy snowmobiles and auto
touring and other types of so-called urbanizing recreation.
The criticism is misdirected, but it is an
understandable response to the naive and uncandid way in which
preservationists often state their position. A more plainspoken
statement would be this: The preservationist is an elitist, at least in
one sense. He seeks to persuade the majority to be distrustful of their
own instincts and inclinations, which he believes are reinforced by
alienating work and the dictates of mass culture. To the social reformer
his message is that he can help generate incentives that will lead
toward reform of the workplace. To those who say "let's look at demand,"
he says that people need to pay attention to what they ought to want as
well as to what they now want. [6] To those
who ask how anyone else can purport to know what another citizen should
want, he responds that complacent acceptance of things as they are is
not the hallmark of a democratic society.
The preservationists call for a willingness to be
skeptical about our own inclinations raises a problem of
self-determination that is particularly disquieting in a society deeply
committed to ideas of democracy and equality. The concern has been
particularly agitating in the context of "elitist-popular" battles over
the national parks, but it is actually nothing more than a familiar
issue of self-paternalism. [7] A common
example is provided by the vacationer who annually brings along a
serious book he has long intended to read, only to slip into reading
popular mysteries. Similar rituals are familiar in registrations for
music lessons or adult education courses, buoyed by the hope that the
investment intuition will be a discipline not to give up, or in the
acquisition of sports paraphernalia that collect dust in the attic.
Aspiration and conventional behavior are in a continual battle. We are
willing to impose coercion on ourselves to some degree (as in paying for
lessons that we know we may never pursue) precisely because we recognize
that left wholly to pursuit of our routine preferences we are not likely
to do and be all that we want. A mixture of autonomy and self-imposed
discipline is something we know very well.
Individual behavior patterns have counterparts in
public action. Public television is perhaps the most obvious example. We
have been willing to coerce (that is, to tax) ourselves to some degree
to be induced to view it, even though we know we will probably resist
the temptation most of the time. If public broadcasting gave us only
what we already knew would be popular, it would simply add one
additional outlet to the functions served by the existing plenitude of
commercial stations. If, conversely, it was giving us something we knew
we didn't want, it would be plainly unworthy of our support. Moreover,
public broadcasting cannot be explained simply as a service to the wide
diversity of public preferences, for we would never think of offering
ordinary public services (like the subway) to as few people as those who
constitute the audience for most public television. The most plausible
explanation is that we are institutionalizing temptation to pursue some
things we have been persuaded we ought to want. At the same time, the
pressures we simultaneously generate to make institutions like public
broadcasting or the public art museum less highbrow and more popular,
demonstrate that there is a tension between self-paternalism and
unbridled autonomy that is never fully resolved. [8]
To yield autonomy in this fashion does not undermine
commitment to a democratic political philosophy. [9] For if one pursued a philosophy that entirely
rejected a willingness to defer to others in giving content to our
general aspirations, a very heavy price would have to be paid for that
decision. Each individual would have to stand ready to specify his
desires exactly. Consider the contrast between the patient who comes to
a doctor and orders removal of his appendix, and the patient who asks
the physician to help him become healthy again. In the first instance
the individual maintains greater control over his own destiny, but at
the risk of having to identify for himself exactly what he wants. If one
knows what he wants only in aspirational terms (he wants to feel
better), then to pursue that aspiration he must give up some of his
autonomy. He must let someone else decide in the particular what is good
for him, though only in response to something he in general has decided
he wants. The problem is even more complicated when aspirations include
a desire for opportunities to modify the sorts of things one wants. If
avoiding fixity in desires is itself an aspiration, the individual's
ability to specify his wants is especially limited. To say "I would like
to be a more independent or cultured person," for example, requires even
more deference to others than to say "I want to be a healthy
person."
In this respect, the traditional question, am I
getting what I want, or what someone else thinks I ought to want, may be
seen as excessively simplistic. We get both, and the degree to which one
or the other dominates depends upon a willingness to accept the
possibility that others may know what is good for us better than we do
ourselves, on our ability to prescribe for ourselves, and on our
willingness to give up some autonomy in pursuit of those needs.
The problem is created not only by lack of knowledge,
but by a willingness to confine life within the limits of one's own
experience and knowledge. In the simple medical example, the difficulty
is merely that the patient lacks certain information or experience. Even
there, if he were willing to risk his life by the limits of his own
knowledge, he would never have to put himself in the hands of a
doctor.
Similarly, in the public context, if the individual
were willing to eschew all self-imposed coercion, he could retain a very
high degree of autonomy. He could say that libraries should stock only
the books he was familiar with, even specifying the titles, or he could
establish a university and direct the teachers to teach only what
students already knew they wanted to learn.
It is precisely because we have not taken so
constricted a view of autonomy that we establish institutions like
public broadcasting, or public libraries and universities, and give up
some autonomy to librarians and professors. The long-accepted
presence of such institutions is evidence of our willingness to adopt a
political philosophy that yields to others some power to decide what is
good for us.
To those who ask the preservationist why he thinks
he should be the recipient of such deference, rather than any
other individual who seeks to lead, he responds that he rests his case
on the evidence presented by Olmsted and Thoreau, Cotton and Ortega,
Faulkner, Hemingway, Leopold, and the myriad others for whose view of
man's relationship to nature he claims to speak. To the extent they are
persuasive in stating a general philosophy, he asks the public to accept
him as a spokesman before the Congress and the administrative officials
who will give these views official status. He recognizes that he has no
formal standing. He is at most a member of a loose coalition of people
called a movement, and he does not have institutions, certificates, or
even an accepted professional or scholarly literature behind him. No
doubt this is why there has been a special uneasiness about the
aspirations of the preservationist for leadership. But, for better or
worse, the preservationist is the only spokesman we have for the
tradition of man-in-nature.
Just as the professor of history, or the museum
director, speaks for his or her profession, the preservationist boldly
asks the public to vest similar power in himto the extent that he
remains within the bounds of his tradition. [10] He asks for something akin to the academic
freedom we give a teacher in the classroom, which is not at all a
freedom to do whatever he wants. [11] A
teacher who assigns a controversial book for his students to read, or a
librarian who buys such a book for his collection, will rarely defend
that judgment in personal terms. It will instead be urged that the book
has attained the status of a classic, that it has been widely reviewed
in serious critical literature, or that it is routinely used in college
or high school classes around the country. Our response to such
controversies is powerfully shaped by precisely such evidence. We may,
to be sure, reject every such justification and insist upon the
implementation of popular judgment. But if we are willing to give any
authority to teachers, as we routinely are, what we give is a freedom to
operate within a professional tradition, recognizing that the bounds of
that tradition are themselves a significant protection against purely
personal or capricious judgments.
As the next chapter will make clear, the
preservationist does not have to ask the public to eschew opportunities
for conventional recreation except to a quite limited extent. His agenda
accommodates to a substantial continuation of ordinary tourism as the
routine recreation of most people most of the time. Indeed, more than
anything else, he seeks a policy that encourages contemplative
recreation as one publicly provided choice, separates it from ordinary
leisure time activity, and requires a conscious decision either to
accept or reject it.
In these limited, but by no means insignificant, ways
the preservationist asks that the public let him lead it. In resting his
case on the "evidence" presented by the nature writers, he believes he
has a persuasive basis for the deference he asks, and though the
tradition is testimonial, rather than scientific, he can at least add to
it a range of other documentation that supports the coherence of the
philosophy for which he claims to speak.
In a book entitled Beyond Boredom and Anxiety,
Mahalyi Csikszentmihalyi made a study of activities that generally
require much energy but yield no conventional rewards. [12] Csikszentmihalyi's interest was in making
the workplace more attractive to employees, and the thesis he set out to
test was whether external rewardssuch as money and social
statusare the only determinants of the incentive to work and of
the satisfactions work produces. Pursuing the hypothesis that work could
be made more satisfying without the enlargement of external rewards, he
set out to discover what induces people to work hard at things they set
out to do. He sought out mountain climbers, chess players, dancers,
basketball players, composers, and surgeons, and he found some
remarkable similarities of response among the participants in these
seemingly disparate activities.
Csikszentmihalyi coined the word autotelic to
describe the common elements he found among the activities studied,
joining the Greek words for self, and for goal or purpose. He found that
people who feel they are engaged in an enterprise where the goals are
self-justifying, in the sense that ultimately the participants set out
to satisfy themselves, are able to experience extraordinary levels of
satisfaction. The activities he examined are not necessarily autotelic,
nor are they necessarily abstracted from conventional rewards. Surgery,
for example, has both an external measure of success and an external
reward structure. The same is true of certain games, like basketball.
The peculiar interest of Csikszentmihalyi's study was the finding that
what makes these activities especially satisfying is their capacity to
reward the participant according to his own internalized standard. The
surgeon self-evaluates a complex operation without regard to the fact
that the patient survives, and that he is paid, and he alone knows when
he has performed brilliantly, rather than "merely" successfully. In
exactly the same way, the serious climber or basketball player has more
at stakein his own mindthan simply attaining the summit or
being on the winning side.
The conclusion the author draws from his study is
that there are certain kinds of activity that give participants a sense
of discovery, exploration, and problem solving, a feeling of novelty and
challenge, of opportunity to explore and expand the limits of their
ability, that open the way to feelings of profound satisfaction.
Csikszentmihalyi identifies three main elements that
underlie the common responses of his subjects. First, a feeling by the
actor that he has willingly undertaken the enterprise rather than being
induced into it by external incentives or constraints. This, the author
suggests, invites a sense of freedom that may be an essential feature of
a deeply satisfying activity.
There is also a feeling of being in control in a
special sense that makes taking considerable risks acceptable and even
comfortable. Csikszentmihalyi was struck by the distinction climbers
made between their voluntary assumption of the risk on the mountain and
the risks of driving an automobile. On the highway, they reported, one
is vulnerable to the mistakes and recklessness of others; on the
mountain one is capable of getting in control of his own destiny. The
risks he takes are measured by his own competence and discipline. He is
not a passive object of fate determined by others.
Finally, each of the activities has a level of
complexity that calls for total engagement, analogous to what was
described previously as intensity. The author calls this quality an
"infinite ceiling" which heightens concentration and calls for a depth
of engagement and a power of perception that is lacking in ordinary
activities.
The common element found in all autotelic activities
was a range of physical or symbolic opportunities for action that
represent important challenges to the individual. Satisfying
experiences, the author finds, do not fundamentally involve merely "a
passive adaptation to social demands, a normative adjustment to the
status quo," [13] but opportunity for the
internalization of satisfaction, based on personal knowledge, individual
style and expression, autonomy, and a setting rich enough in its
complexity to elicit distinctive personal responses. These conclusions
echo strongly the private reflections considered in previous chapters.
They suggest the distinction for which Olmsted was reaching in his
effort to explain the difference between a visit to old Niagara and the
experience of prepared entertainment and mass recreation enterprises
that had subsequently overtaken it. The emphasis on personal style and
challenge resembles strongly the technique/technology distinction that
is central to the recreational literature. And certainly there is a
parallel to the contrast Thoreau etched between life at Walden and life
in the constrained and constraining atmosphere of Concord.
Csikszentmihalyi's findings and the literature of
reflective recreation are affirmed by a major current of psychological
literature. Carl B. Rogers, one of the preeminent figures of modern
psychology, developed the theory that our most deeply felt (and often
deeply buried) need isin his terms"to become ourselves." [14] Rogers's observations were drawn from some
thirty years of experience as a therapist in which he sought to elicit
from his patients an expression of the patient's profoundest feelings
about himselfwhat he is, and what he wants to be.
Rogers's conclusion is that our daily lives are
generally bounded by expectations others set for us. Have we behaved as
a good parent should? Are we satisfying our employers? Are we dressing,
or acting, fashionably? While his patients were eminently responsive to
conventional fashions and expectations, Rogers found, they were also
often deeply unsatisfied precisely be cause their behavior failed to
answer the question, "who am I, and how can I get in touch with
this real self underlying all my surface behavior?" He found that his
patients began to change and to experience profound satisfaction only as
they turned to activity that was founded on their own personalities and
their inner resources, rather than on standards set for them externally.
People who are able to make this break with convention and to carry it
through at the deepest level of their own behavior (people whom the
psychologist A. H. Maslow calls "self-actualizing" [15]) come to feel a stronger sense of
self-esteem and self-confidence. They have come to terms with their own
strengths and weaknesses, and they are less dependent on others for
their satisfactions or their sense of self-worth.
At least one familiar strain in the recreational
literature, and in Csikszentmihalyi's study, is also found in modern
philosophical writing. Professor John Rawls, in his book A Theory of
Justice, [16] observes that
human beings enjoy the exercise of their realized
capacities (their innate or trained abilities), and this enjoyment
increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its
complexity. . . . Presumably, complex activities are more enjoyable
because they satisfy the desire for variety and novelty of experience,
and leave room for feats of ingenuity and invention. . . . Simpler
activities exclude the possibility of personal style and personal
expression which complex activities permit or even require, for how
could everyone do them in the same way? [17]
Certainly it would be erroneous to suggest that Rawls
and Rogers, Olmsted, Thoreau, and Csikszentmihalyi are all saying
precisely the same things; that all their observations are proven
theorems of human behavior; or that taken together they can serve as the
basis for confident public decision making. In fact, the existing
literature leaves numerous questions quite unsettled. Both Rawls and
Csikszentmihalyi, for example, use chess as an example of a complex or
autotelic activity; yet chess is the perfect example of the game of
conquest and dominance, and in that respect differs sharply from the
activities most central to the recreational literature. Indeed, the
literature on chess masters is a veritable playground of psychological
aberration, with obsessions of dominance and conquest one of its focal
points. The great chess players seem to be anything but
"self-actualizing personalities." [18]
Perhaps analyses of recreation so far have
insufficiently distinguished between those activities that turn on
conquest, with inescapable winners and losers, and those that have the
capacity to transcend mastery. [19] While
there are many important similaritiessuch as complexity,
challenge, independence, and skill developmentthere seem also to
be important differences, not unlike the difference noted earlier
between motorcycling and fly-fishing.
Plainly our knowledge about differing recreational
activities the extent to which they are good for us, and whether we
ought to want to give them a distinctive place in public policy, is
anything but an exact science. And plainly the preservationist has less
claim as an authority than does the scientist, the museum director, or
the university professor. They put something before us and say, "this is
what you ought to want to know," as the preservationist would like to
shape a park and say "this is what you oughtif not exclusively, at
least importantlyto want of your leisure." But that is the claim
he makes, and whether he succeeds or fails in persuading others that he
should be followed depends on the strength of the evidence he has. Right
or wrong, persuasive or nor, his claim is that he knows something about
what other people ought to want and how they can go about getting
it, and he should not back away from, or conceal, that claim.
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