NOTE: This is a tweaked version of a recent essay I submitted for AP English. I thought, considering my blog’s subjects, I may as well keep the trend going. Thanks, Mr. Fatheree!
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Man’s gift is thought, which is never strictly logical. If it were, what pleasure would come from it? Thought is interpersonal: it is humorous, dramatic, and can fall anywhere on an emotional spectrum. People enjoy applying their minds to a subject in a way that is enjoyable for them. This is called “entertainment”. Entertainment is both lauded and condemned for its prominence in a person’s life. Although entertainment is not always rooted in rationalism, it has traced a common thread from ancient history to the modern day and improved society through philosophy, theatre, and its ability to give voices to voiceless peoples or subjects.
Philosophy has existed since the times of the Ancients and has chaped the lens through which we see the world. Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato of the Ancient Greeks, John Locke of the Enlightenment, and Sigmund Freud on a more modern, psychoanalytical level have all given clear examples of how entertainment has shaped rather than shut down society. Socratic Seminars are still a preferred method of discussion in contemporary American classrooms. Scientists have operated on the belief that the Earth travels in orbit around the sun since before NASA began its operation, and have continued in that idea to make significant scientific discoveries in space. John Locke’s “natural rights”, explained in his Two Treatises on Government (1690) during the Enlightenment Age which lauded reason and practicality ignited revolutionary fires within the colonial United States, inciting one of the most successful, fascinating, and enduring revolutions of all time. In turn, that set off many more as a domino to a chain (the French Revolution of 1789 and the Haitian Revolution, the only successful slave revolt in human history, being two notable examples). Freud’s model of psychoanalysis shed light upon a murkier area in people’s understanding of mental health, and is still widely recognized to the day. None of these may seem “entertaining” by today’s standards – entertainment is associated with shallower pleasures, such as watching a film, listening to music, or attending a sports game. However, with different times and different personalities come different methods of keeping oneself entertained. To ancient philosophers such as Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato, thinking was their source of entertainment. There were no televisions or iPhones in Ancient Greece, therefore, their standards of what was entertaining vary greatly from an average 2015 American teenager. This same concept applies to the Enlightenment thinkers and Freud: all are people with drastically different personalities and circumstances than each other or their peers. Entertainment cannot be defined by one standard, when there are infinite ways to keep oneself entertained, based on what one finds interesting.
It is notable that the philosophies of the Ancients and Enlightenment speakers have endured so long. The Allegory of the Cave is utilized today to teach of the adversity that comes with ignorance (especially relevant, considering the upcoming 2016 Presidential elections). It is because these thinkers entertained themselves with abstract thought and contemplation that such in-depth lessons are taught. Had Locke not released the culmination of the hours he spent (quite literally) entertaining his thoughts, the Declaration of Independence would be a wildly different document, and perhaps would not have existed at all. The shaping of society’s thought process stems from entertainment.
The theatre is and has been a vessel for deeper thought and change throughout human history. From Euripides Medea to Lin Manuel-Miranda’s Hamilton, playwrights have used an entertaining platform to disseminate a form of an idea or an incentive to become introspective. Medea is a tale of a woman shafted by her unfaithful husband, and whose psyche deteriorates because of such infidelity. Hamilton is a hip-hop based musical which tells “the story of America then with America now,” in which accessible language and an ethnically diverse cast take the parts of the Founding Fathers and important colonial women, to give a greater understanding of just how those who were part of history felt at the time that it was being written. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream are still read in high school English courses because their themes of love in adversity, tyranny and corruption, and the farcical nature of love, respectively, are universal. Countless analyses have been written about Medea, Hamilton, Romeo and Juliet, and beyond. Theatre is an opportunity to better educate a crowd that may or may not have an opportunity to educate themselves in a way they can understand, similarly to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776), which nearly every colonist in New England read due to its vocabulary tailored to the greater public and just how easy it was to access. At the end of a play, often a character will speak the its message through their dialogue or actions. In Kaufman and Hart’s You Can’t Take it With You, the message itself is spoken in both the title and the grandfather’s line towards the finale in reference to the concept of wealth: “You can’t take it with you.” This forces the audience to reflect on how they spend their time: on physical wealth, or enrichment of their interpersonal lives? Theatre is part of a process that builds a bridge between rational thought and creativity. That is entertainment.
Entertainment gives a vocal platform to peoples who struggle to find them otherwise, and has a culturally significant place in doing so. Entertainment is a concept, not a law that can be regulated – therefore, there are no rules on who can provide it. Age, race, sex, gender identity, sexuality, etc. are not taken into consideration when people are entertained by something (excluding when it is for profit – entertainment is easily subject to prejudice when corporatized, and it would be a false positive to ignore this fact). In the midst of the Civil Rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail” is a piece of writing, which is considered under the umbrella of “entertainment”, that incentivized the entire Civil Rights movement to keep fighting against vicious racial oppression and segregation. It gave King a voice when he would have never had one otherwise in jail. By taking the time to produce the letter, he used a form of entertainment under an unjust arrest as a vital socio-political platform. The National Anthem of the United States is gives a voice to another type of voiceless entity: nationalism. Written by Francis Scott Key as a poem, the National Anthem is sung at the beginning of sports events, military tributes, and most American gatherings to commemorate the nationalism of a people tied together under one nation. Often, singers feel intense loyalty and patriotism when singing the song. It is entertaining because an entire class of people, Americans, know the song by heart and join to sing it altogether. When it was written, it was a form of entertainment as well, done to express yet another voiceless entity: emotion. Entertainment is a vessel for expression, whether it be for people who are unable to do so otherwise, or for concepts and entities that do not have a physical and vocal form themselves.
Society debates the validity of entertainment: does it help or hurt us as a peoples? Although entertainment is rooted in more emotional than rational thinking, its ability to shape an entire species’ way of thinking centuries ahead of time, creative ability to disseminate knowledge, and capability to give a voice to the voiceless prove that it has potential to improve society as a whole, rather than hurt it.
THE GREAT MACKSBY 