Get More of Your "Entertainment Calories" From Friendship

0 · Oswald opens the podcast with standard framing: identifies himself, names the series, and previews the primary source material

Welcome to the Providence Podcast. We're continuing our series on friendship. This week. It's all about friendship. My name is Chris Oswald, senior pastor at Providence Community Church. Today I'm going to read to you an essay from Aldous Huxley, written in 1923, entitled Pleasures. Aldous Huxley, Pleasures.

1 · Oswald states the sermon's controlling metaphor: 'empty calories' — recreation that is solitary and passive — can be replaced with socially nutritious leisure

And I want to hopefully show you how to increase the margin, how to increase the margin that you have available to invest in others by. By taking out some of what I would call our kind of empty calories in your day. Those empty calories being the time you spend, whether it's a lot of time or a little time, the time you spend engaged in recreation that is not essentially social in nature.

2 · Oswald extends the empty-calorie metaphor by drawing a detailed analogy to diet and macronutrients

So what I would want to suggest is that we all have. One of the ways to kind of get our life into as wholesome a shape as possible is very similar to how we would get our diet into as clean a shape as possible. We really are wanting to make sure we prioritize the calories we need in the macros that we need. So, you know, for instance, eating a gram per pound of body weight, a gram of protein per pound of body weight, that's a really good thing to try to do. And so the problem with that is, is that if you wait too long in your day and you eat a bunch of calories that are low in protein, well, now you're in a situation where you're either not hungry, certainly not hungry for protein, or even if you were hungry, you'd be eating over the number of calories you need, so on and so forth. So sometimes it's actually just this thing in life where when we want something to get better, we just have to modify things that are already there with a slightly different take.

3 · Oswald reads Huxley's essay nearly in full, pausing twice to offer interpretive commentary

And I read this article by Huxley, written back in 1923, about pleasures, and I thought, well, there's something here I'd like to pass on to my friends. So I've been holding on to this, waiting for Thursday afternoon so that I could get into my office after the homeschool co op left and read this essay to you and make some comments. So let's get into it. Pleasures by Aldous Huxley. We have heard a great deal since 1914 about the things which are a menace to civilization. First it was Prussian militarism, then the Germans at large, then the prolongation of the war, and then the shortening of the same, then after a time, the Treaty of Versailles, then French militarism, with all the while a running accompaniment of such minor menaces. As Prohibition, Lord Norcliffe, Mr. Bryan, Comstockery, etc. Civilization, however, has resisted the combined attacks of these enemies wonderfully well. For still, in 1923, it stands not so very far from where it stood in that giant age before the flood of nine years since. Where in relation to Neanderthal on the one hand, and Athens on the other. Where precisely it stood, then, is a question which each may answer according to his taste. The important fact is that these menaces to our civilization, Such as it is, menaces, including the largest war and the stupidest peace known to history, have confined themselves in most places and up till now to mere threats barking more furiously than they bite. No, the dangers which confront our civilization Are not so much the external dangers, wild men, wars, and the bankruptcy that wars bring after them. The most alarming dangers are those which menace it from within, that threaten the mind rather than the body and estate of contemporary man. Of all the various poisons which modern civilization, by a process of autointoxication, Brews quietly up within its own bowels, few, it seems to me, are more deadly, while none appears more harmless than that curious and appalling thing that is technically known as pleasure. Pleasure. I place the word in inverted commas to show that I mean not real pleasure, but the organized activities officially known by the same name, pleasure. What nightmare visions the word evokes. Like every man of good sense and good feeling, I abominate work. But I would rather put in eight hours a day at a government office Than be condemned to lead a life of pleasure. I would even, I believe, prefer to write a million words of journalism a year. The horrors of modern pleasure arise from the fact that every kind of organized distraction Tends to become progressively more and more imbecile. There was a time. This is where I need you to key in. I know that some of that seemed a little extraneous to the idea. Here's where I need you to hone in. The horrors of modern pleasure arise from the fact that every kind of organized distraction Tends to become progressively more and more imbecile. There was a time when people indulged themselves with distractions Requiring the expense of a certain intellectual effort. In the 17th century, for example, royal personages and their courtiers took a real delight in listening to erudite sermons, Dr. Donne's, for example, and academical disputes on points of theology or metaphysics. Part of the entertainment offered to the prince Palatine on the occasion of his marriage with James I's daughter Was a syllogistic augmentation on I Forget what philosophical theme between the amiable Lord Keeper Williams and a troop of minor Cambridge logicians? Imagine the feelings of a contemporary prince if a loyal university were to offer him a similar entertainment. So let's pause the essay, which is about halfway through, and discuss what he's getting at. He is. He's sounding an alarm bell that suggests that there was a day in which our pleasures were far more nutritious for our whole person than they are today. So this is where I'm getting the idea of empty calories. He is describing a period of time in which when folks wanted to entertain themselves, a certain amount of intellectual effort was required. And he gives some examples. For instance, they would bring a theologian in and he would, you know, give some sort of probably overly complex fancy, schmancy, oratory to the delight of the hearers, as we see this in Acts 17 and, you know, where people are gathered constantly to talk about new things. He gives an example of the marriage of King James's daughter. At that marriage they arranged a syllogistic augmentation, a debate, if you will, between one man and a troop of minor Cambridge logicians. All right, so let's get back to the essay. Royal personages were not the only people who enjoyed intelligent pleasures in Elizabethan times. Every lady and gentleman of ordinary culture could be relied upon at demand to take his or her part in a madrigal or motet. Had to look that one up. It's just a small polyphonic choir, essentially little, you know, little acapella action continuing. Those who know the enormous complexity and subtlety of 16th century music will realize what this means. To indulge in their favorite pastime, our ancestors had to exert their minds to an uncommon degree. Even the uneducated vulgar delighted in pleasures requiring the exercise of a certain intelligence, individuality and personal initiative. They listened, for example, to Othello, King Lear and Hamlet, apparently with enjoyment and comprehension. They sang and made music. And far away in the remote country, the peasants, year by year, went through the traditional rites, the dances of spring and summer, the winter mummings, the ceremonies of the harvest home, appropriate to each successive season. Their pleasures were intelligent and alive. And it was they who by their own efforts entertained themselves. We have changed all that. In place of the old pleasures demanding intelligence and personal initiative, we have vast organizations that provide us with ready made distractions. Distractions which demand from pleasure seekers no personal participation and no intellectual effort of any sort. To the interminable democracies of the world. A million cinemas bring the same stale, balderdash There have always been fourth rate writers and dramatists, but their works in the past quickly died without getting beyond the boundaries of the city or county in which they appeared. Today the inventions of the scenario writer go out from Los Angeles. Across the whole world, countless audiences soak passively in the tepid bath of nonsense. No mental effort is demanded of them, no participation. They need only sit and keep their eyes open. Do the democracies want music? In the old days they would have had to make it themselves. Now they merely turn on the gramophone. Or, if they were a little more up to date, they adjust their wireless to the right wavelength and listen to the fruity contralto at the Macaroni House singing the Gleaner's slumber song. If they want literature, there is the press. Nominally, it is true, the press exists to impart information, but its real function is to provide, like the cinema, a distraction which shall occupy the mind without demanding of it the slightest effort or the fatigue of a single thought. This function, it must be admitted, it fulfills with extraordinary success. It is possible to go on for years and years, reading two papers every working day and one on Sundays, without ever once being called upon to think or to make any effort other than to move the eyes not very attentively down the printed column. Certain sections of the community still practice athletic sports in which individual participation is demanded. Great numbers of the middle and upper classes play golf and tennis in person. Pickleball, if they are sufficiently rich, they shoot birds and pursue the fox and go skiing in the Alps. But the vast mass of the community has now come to sport vicariously, preferring the watching of football to the fatigues and dangers of the actual game. All classes, it is true, still dance, but dance all the world over the same steps to the same tunes. The dance has been scrupulously sterilized of any local or personal individuality. These effortless pleasures, these ready made distractions that are the same for everyone over the face of the whole Western world, are surely a worse menace to our civilization than ever the Germans were. The working hours of the day are already, for the majority of human beings, occupied in the performance of purely mechanical tasks, in which no mental effort, no individuality, no initiative are required. And now, in the hours of leisure, we turn to distractions as mechanically stereotyped and demanding, as little intelligence and initiative as does our work. Add such leisure to such work, and the sum is a perfect day, which it is a blessed relief to come to an end of. Oh, wow. Huxley ended with a preposition last Paragraph. Self poisoned. In this fashion, civilization looks as though it might easily decline in a kind of premature senility, with a mind almost atrophied by lack of use, unable to entertain itself, and grown so wearily uninterested in the ready made distractions offered from without, that nothing but the grossest stimulants of an ever increasing violence and crudidity can move it, the democracy of the future will sicken of a chronic and mortal boredom. It will go perhaps the way the Romans went. The Romans who came at last to lose, precisely as we are doing now, the capacity to distract themselves. The Romans, who like us, lived on ready made entertainments in which they had no participation. Their deadly ennui demanded ever more gladiators, more tightrope walking elephants, more rare and far fetched animals to be slaughtered. Ours would demand no less. But owing to the existence of a few idealists, it doesn't get all it asks for. The most violent forms of entertainment can only be obtained illicitly. Let us not despair, however, we still may live to see blood flowing across the stage of the hippodrome. The Hippodrome, the force of a boredom clamoring to be alleviated, may yet prove too much for the idealist. Well, there's your cranky Huxley for today. And he certainly is cranky and he certainly is engaging in hyperbole. And his point is not necessarily to commend anything related to friendship.

4 · Oswald distills Huxley's historical survey into a theological claim: for most of human history, pleasure and friendship were inseparable

But perhaps you're hearing in the essay what I thought might be useful. And that's simply this. It is helpful to understand through the lens of considering the history of distraction, the history of recreation, the history of pleasure. It's helpful to understand that for the majority of the human existence, those things came through the company of friends. Nearly all of the pastimes he describes are things that are occurring that he describes occurring in the past were things that actually not only could include friends, but really required them.

5 · Oswald applies the historical insight to the listener's calendar

And so this is the idea. You have a certain amount of recreation time in a week. Some of you have more, some of you have less. Let's call that potential macronutrients. You can, you can get a lot of good relationship time within those contexts, or none. So let's say that there are two essential kind of modes of friendship. Well, let me back up. What I'm first suggesting is that a decent percentage of your leisure, fun, pleasure, recreation, however you describe it, really probably should include others. The idea of you sitting alone, or you and your wife sitting alone and just watching a movie is certainly lawful and fine. Is it Ideal? Well, there may be other avenues of pleasure, recreation and enjoyment that would be better for you and better for others.