The Play Ethic

John Carey: What Good Are The Arts?

I shared a panel with John Carey on Wednesday night, tied to his excellent new book What Good Are the Arts?  His presentation was well-organised, and helped the rest of us to grapple with one of the most slippery topics in public

Carey outlined five standard questions we ask about the 'good' that the arts provide. My own private objections and affirmations of each point are in italics afterwards.

Evolution and Religion

I came along to the Evolution and Religion event as a pop-science and theology enthusiast, not as an expert in either field - so forgive the following account for its inaccuracies and imprecisions. But I already have some takes on this debate, which will hopefully be a useful filter on what follows.

The Moral State We're In

Certainly, this is the kind of event I'd want to come to a 'festival of ideas'  for. Four major public intellectuals (an even gender split, gratifyingly), with ground-breaking books behind them, tasked to consider where our vision of the 'good society' is in 2005. I found the discussion so useful in itself that I'll reproduce it in the extended post below. My comments on the discussion are at the end.

Paul Ormerod: Why Things Fail

Note: these won't be full transcripts of each event. I've taken copious notes, but my aim in this blog is to chart the flow of significant ideas as they emerge event by event, filtered through my own players' agenda.

Paul Ormerod is a most unusual kind of business guru: he preaches that company failure is the norm, and that from the right perspective, can even be seen to be healthy. That perspective is very macro (Ormerod confesses that in a previous life, he used to be a 'government planner'). I left the event wondering exactly what impact his message had made on a room that seemed - going by the questions and the after-event chatter - full of micro-level operators, whether in commerce or government.

Welcome to the Festival of Ideas Blog!

Hello to everyone who's come to this blog from the Bristol Evening Post article (excerpted in 'extended post' below) and the programme for Bristol's Festival of Ideas. I'm Pat Kane,the festival's thinker-in-residence, and I'll be blogging to this space everyday, with a digest of what I've encountered throughout my residency this week. There's a comments page below which I invite you to use.

I hope to capture some of the flow of the ideas within and between events, relating them to my own project The Play Ethic, and hopefully catching new syntheses and fusions as they emerge. Look for a post on Monday's events by mid-day on Tuesday. If you want to mail me directly, please do so at patkane@theplayethic.com.

Scholarship vs. Rock

Some interesting pieces appearing recently around the Play Ethic - one a review by Catholic educational thinker Bob Davis in the Journal of Philosophy of Education (download word doc here) and my own proposal for a 'Play Foundation' (download word doc here) in the current issue of the Idler, 'War on Work' (in which I recommend a wonderful interview with Raoul Vanegiem, bon vivant soixante-huitard).

And for those of you with an appetite for agonised post-punk-pop-star narcissism, here's a piece I wrote in the Sunday Herald today about the coming week... Epistemology meets bad dancing (but hopefully, a solid tenor voice will mediate).

Everything Complex Is Ethically Demanding For You

Steven Johnson is picking up a lot of quality coverage for his new book Everything Bad Is Good For You, about how 'popular culture is making us smarter'. I'm grateful for his mention of the Play Ethic in his recommended reading notes, and I'm going through his book now for a full review for the Independent (here's my previous reviews for that paper). I'm struck by the following passage from his extract in the New York Times:

In pointing out some of the ways that popular culture has improved our minds, I am not arguing that parents should stop paying attention to the way their children amuse themselves. What I am arguing for is a change in the criteria we use to determine what really is cognitive junk food and what is genuinely nourishing. Instead of a show's violent or tawdry content, instead of wardrobe malfunctions or the F-word, the true test should be whether a given show engages or sedates the mind. Is it a single thread strung together with predictable punch lines every 30 seconds? Or does it map a complex social network? Is your on-screen character running around shooting everything in sight, or is she trying to solve problems and manage resources? If your kids want to watch reality TV, encourage them to watch ''Survivor'' over ''Fear Factor.'' If they want to watch a mystery show, encourage ''24'' over ''Law and Order.'' If they want to play a violent game, encourage Grand Theft Auto over Quake. Indeed, it might be just as helpful to have a rating system that used mental labor and not obscenity and violence as its classification scheme for the world of mass culture.

Kids and grown-ups each can learn from their increasingly shared obsessions. Too often we imagine the blurring of kid and grown-up cultures as a series of violations: the 9-year-olds who have to have nipple broaches explained to them thanks to Janet Jackson; the middle-aged guy who can't wait to get home to his Xbox. But this demographic blur has a commendable side that we don't acknowledge enough. The kids are forced to think like grown-ups: analyzing complex social networks, managing resources, tracking subtle narrative intertwinings, recognizing long-term patterns. The grown-ups, in turn, get to learn from the kids: decoding each new technological wave, parsing the interfaces and discovering the intellectual rewards of play. Parents should see this as an opportunity, not a crisis. Smart culture is no longer something you force your kids to ingest, like green vegetables. It's something you share.

That's the kidult space which interactive technology opens up, for sure (I've blogged on this consistently). But I think Steven might be being a little sanguine about it (and maybe I've been in the past too).  I've just been sitting with my daughters, as they investigated Black and White on the PC (there's a sequel coming too).

As my girls debate whether they should strike fear into villagers to get them to support their gods, or seduce them with all-day dancing and revelry, and whether cornucopia or torture is the best way to do this, I'm stunned at how far they examplify the old Whole Earth axiom: these kids are playing at "being like gods... and they might as well get good at it". I think they have to "get good" with parents as participants in these incredibly ethical technologies, as Steven suggests (and as I suggested in the Lifestyle Miltants chapter in the book). But I think we'll have to be prepared for a whole-person engagement with our children over these platforms. In my experience, few of us realise how intense it'll have to be.