Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 113

Are We Having Fun Yet?
According to the Protestant work ethic—more a secular spinoff of the rise of
the European merchant classes during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—
work is work and play is play and never the twain shou ld meet. Counterbalancing
this transatlantic cultural imperative was another impulse, this one uniquely
American, directed at conflating the values of work and leisure. Alert as always to
the fluid vicissitudes of a youth H omo democratis, Alexis de Tocqueville in the
1830s had already taken note of this second American work ethic:
[Americans] prefer those staid and quiet amusements which
are more like business and which do not drive business out of
their minds...[Ajn American may prefer to spend his leisure
time quietly drinking in his own house. Such a man enjoyes
two pleasures at once: he thinks about his business affairs and
gets drunk decently at home.
Transplant Tocqueville to a frou-frou twenty-first century California restaurant at
lunchtime and— J 'a i vous de dit! Allowing for the inevitable culture shock, a
privileged glimpse of contemporary business people making deals on cell phones
while sipping Chardonnay and nibbling Sicilian wraps wouldn’t have surprised
the nimble-witted Frenchman one bit.
Nor would these contemporary American scenarios:
—t-shirt-clad thirtysomething corporate execs riding skateboards and playing
Nintendo games between and sometimes during meetings;
—mid-sized local internet companies providing on-site gymnasium facilities
and massage therapy so that employees may blend leisure time with work, instead
of separating the two;
—untold numbers of men and women accomplishing their professional tasks
on-line in the comfort of their own homes, thus never having to dress up and “go to
work” at all.
Tocqueville w ou ld have been surprised, however—astonished is a better
word—by the most recent transformation in the way twenty-first century Americans
view the interrelationships between work and play. According to this tertiary ethic,
the values of work and play are no longer perceived as oppositional at all. Any
traditional friction between them, whether expressed as contradictory or as
complementary, threatens to become a distant cultural memory.
Like all cultural transformations, that of Homo democratis into American Homo
ludens has taken years, even decades, to evolve, and at the dawn of the new