Work hard, play hard." It's the college mantra of which we're all so proud. It's what we say to lure in undecided prospectives, it's what we tell potential employers to justify our absence from the upper Ivies, and its how we redeem our No. 15 spot in the U.S. News and World Report college rankings. Other schools might possess a larger endowment or boast a more star-studded faculty, but Dartmouth students take pride in attending a school that attracts and creates thoroughly balanced, well-rounded, little Renaissance men and women.
But what does our favorite little catch phrase really mean? We think our clever creed adequately conveys how balanced we are-that even though we are quite deserving of an elite education, we're not those overachievers who can't appreciate less academic endeavors. It aptly suggests that we'll spend all of Tuesday night slaving away in the Novack just so we can spend all of Wednesday night circuiting the basements of Webster Avenue.
But since when does extreme behavior of two kinds, instead of merely extreme behavior of one, imply balance? Each of us recognizes the exceptional demands made by a Dartmouth education on our time and on our soul, but we somehow believe we've solved the problem by countering hard work with hard play. We live our Dartmouth lives on a seesaw, striving to offset excessive work time with frenzied playtime. But perhaps we only create more problems for ourselves by maintaining this "admirable" balancing act.
"Man is perfectly human only when he plays," says Friedrich Schiller. For the child, play provides a venue for intellectual and emotional development, but for adults play provides an alternative reality where man can feel "at one" with his ego.
Our egos precariously reside between the impulsive id and the governing superego, constantly balancing the extremes of the two. But at Dartmouth, it often feels as though we upset the balance between the id and superego even more by decisively, alternately, and individually indulging each with excess instead of attempting to integrate the two with self-knowledge and creativity.
In a daring commentary on the American public, Mark Edmundson echoes Freud's belief that "we are not unified beings." Our characters are in constant conflict between accepting society's bid for conformity or our id's quest for gratification. And as a society, Edmundson argues, Americans have chosen conformity. We endure class and work with an armor of refinement and "niceness," and when we're unable to sufficiently cope on our own we enlist the aid of "niceness-enhancing drugs" such as Prozac. Basically, we've become "tranquilized for life."
Edmundson, however, rejects society's new cloak of "niceness" and wonders what happens to the invisible presence of the id in a society that refuses to acknowledge its existence. In deciphering the psychology of the "good child," psychoanalyst Anna Freud addressed a puzzle similar to Edmundson's and discovered that "to bring up the good child is not without its dangers." What parts of ourselves do we give up in aiming only to please our parents and teachers? To Edmundson, America might be a society of "good children;" and in looking for those repressed or forgotten instincts and desires, he turns to the violence and catastrophe of pop culture's film and television programming.
Although most people do criticize the violence projected in movies and video games, few attempt to tackle the chasm --the source of Edmundson's fascination --that exists between our nice society and the fiction that entertains it. In his article he argues that the violence and lust that characterize America's play are as much a part of our society as the "niceness" that pervades our day-to-day work. Instead of eliminating the force of our desires, we've simply managed to sublimate them to the safe, contained realm known as Hollywood. As a result, Americans are able to indulge and satisfy their desires and their fantasies without ever having to claim them as their own.
Edmundson challenges the American public to examine themselves, and to claim as part of their characters the fantasies (yes, even the horrific ones) they relegate to the distance of a silver screen. The nature of our character is one of struggle, and although we can't alter that nature, through recognition we can overcome it. As Edmundson claims, "to know our desires is to be able to exert greater sway over them."
And just as the American public needs to recognize the value of their indulgence in play, so do we at Dartmouth need to recognize the value of our play, and the value of what transpires while we play.
Perhaps at Dartmouth, we're not particularly obsessed, or even impressed, by the violent films that find their way to the Nugget, but we are as equally culpable as the American public in finding an outlet for our less civilized and passionate behavior. While America in general may find release in visualization, Dartmouth students find their release in intoxication. And though the action that takes place while under the influence should be much easier to claim than action that takes place on a far-off screen, how often do we qualify, excuse, and disavow our actions simply because they might have been alcohol induced?
Our "work hard, play hard" mentality is not one of balance, but one of disturbance. We've discovered how to push ourselves in our working world, but when we leave that world, we try to leave ourselves. Whatever we do in "play" we refuse to acknowledge as our own. We recognize that we "play hard," yet simultaneously we casually divorce our playful, weekend, drunken behavior from the selves that we create during the week. Perhaps if we attempted to integrate our two "worlds" we wouldn't waste so many weekdays wondering what kind of devils had taken over the weekend nights before. Even more than the society at large, the Dartmouth population is comprised of "good children" who suppressed and repressed to get where they are. And although we've achieved success in our academic lives, isn't it time that we consider how our "good behavior" has affected the rest of our lives?
