The Futility of Utility

...This is rather like a hearty father clapping his psychotic son on the shoulder and saying, "Get hold of yourself there, boy...

...In Jevons' formula that "value depends entirely on utility," Kerr finds the source of our peculiar detachment from things and our absorption in their abstract, or instrumental, meaning...

...Hardly, for Kerr's audience, by virtue of its greater involvement in the instrumentalities of this world, is least likely to be affected by what he says...

...To whom is Kerr addressing himself...

...Utilitarianism is the source of an instrumental approach to the world which emasculates the ability to take a guiltless delight in things for their own sake...

...Walter Kerr's book is a superior representative of the genre, however...

...It seems much more likely that their flight from pleasure, and the desperate search of others for it, are both rooted in an impoverished work life, in the gnawing suspicion that what one does for a living is absurd-a suspicion generated by the inability of our traditional value system to confer honor on many of the occupational roles which our economic structure requires...

...In the end, the function of this book (regardless of its intentions) is to comfort us in our failure to find happiness by transforming the private agony into a social problem...

...The psychology of work thus eats its way into the capacity for play and devours the sources of pleasure...

...Because there is no criticism of specific persons, offices or institutions, the trouble turns out to be-well, Zeitgeist...

...He comments: "If it is just true enough to stir recognition and so nudge our funny bones, it is not so true that we feel compelled to abandon our practices instantly...

...But Kerr's analysis seems colossally irrelevant to that enormous group of lower-middle and working-class people to whom work means little or nothing, and to whom the search for fun through the institutions of "mass leisure" means a great deal indeed...

...He is, as everybody says, witty, charming, learned and urbane, and his book is replete with incidental evidence of the accuracy of these judgments...

...Their funny bones will be touched, but they will not abandon their practices...

...Certainly in a Trappist monastery...

...Nor am I convinced that the failure of Kerr's audience to find pleasure in their leisure is due to their absorption in the ethics of work or to their commitment to career...

...Toward the middle of his book, Kerr cites an article from the New York Times on some of the pathetic measures men have taken to escape the pressures of having to be happy during the Christmas season...

...The ultimate irrelevance of Kerr's diagnosis of the decline of pleasure becomes clear when one tries to imagine where in the modern world might be found the kind of people who are not in the grip of the utilitarian ethic, and where Kerr might find the qualities he misses most...

...But if The Decline of Pleasure fails to be "compelling," it is due less to its author's failures as a cultural observer than to the kind of book he has chosen to write...

...probably among some of the Zen Beatniks...

...Kerr's work is another in that popular genre called "social criticism," in which nobody gets criticized except "us" or dead philosophers-that is, only those who can't fight back...

...The twentieth century," he writes, "has relieved us of labor without at the same time relieving us of the conviction that only labor is meaningful...

...The neglected half is the domain of feeling, meditation, intuition, contemplation-the ability, that is, to concentrate on the concrete uniqueness of individual things and, regardless of their instrumental value, to find a consummate pleasure in them...

...And to the triumph of this psychology Kerr attributes the manifold evidence of the decline of pleasure in the modern world-everything from the portrayal in contemporary drama and painting of a nightmare world bereft of meaning and joy to the meekness with which we accept ersatz ice cream for the real thing...

...Like Love in a Paddy Chayevsky play, it palliates what it cannot cure: that poor little rich boy, the unhappy American...

...who work hard at play, and consequently feel harried, anxious and "vaguely wretched" when confronted by a stretch of time which cannot be put to some obviously practical use...

...which is precisely what Aristotle meant by "leisure...

...Thus, if Kerr's diagnosis is correct, then his exhortations seem cynical or meretricious...

...Kerr has looked around his upper-middle-class world and found that "we are leading half-lives, halfheartedly, and with only one half of our minds actively engaged in making contact with the universe...

...It is therefore at least as plausible to interpret the do-it-yourself movement as an attempt by abstracted, alienated workers to find some pleasure in the fruit of their hands, as it is to interpret it, in Kerr's fashion, as the anxious, desperate response of men to escape the prospect of useless play...

...Reviewed by BENNETT M. BERGER Professor of Sociology, University of Illinois The topic of Walter Kerr's new book is the apparent inability of Americans to enjoy their leisure...

...The pathology is "in the cultural air" which, of course, is another way of saying there is nothing to be done...

...perhaps among Spanish and Mexican peasants...

...The Decline of Pleasure is a pleasure to read, but -to invoke Kerr's own distinction between pleasure and utility-it is not really of much use...

...Such books diagnose a collective ill by finding its deep cultural roots, and, after presenting a body of observation and evidence illustrating how deep it is in the marrow of our cultural bones, conclude with an exhortation that each of us make a supreme effort to overcome it...

...To Kerr, the villain that has brought us to this state is, of all things, that philosophy of little contemporary prestige called Utilitarianism, invented by Jeremy Bentham, explicated by James and John Stuart Mill, and given its clearest statement in the writings of the economist William Jevons...

...perhaps, too, among certain foppish, independently wealthy, professional connoisseurs...

...who "consume" culture instead of giving themselves to it...

...What Kerr says about the response to Christmas pressures is in fact an apt comment about his own book...

...And if he is wrong, then his winning and incisive observations on taste, sex, esthetics and the theater are merely sweet icing on a stale and heavy cake...

...Granted the ill is as deeply rooted as Kerr suggests, does he really expect his exhortations to result in the rehabilitation of pleasure...

...His "we" is obviously oriented toward his Westchester County neighbors and others like them: the early middle-aged professionals and executives who "use" art instead of enjoying it...