Sloth / The Culture of Making It Easy for Oneself
In “The Culture of Making it Easy for Oneself,” Count Hermann Keyserling claims that much of the world’s population actively tries to make everything in their lives as simple and straightforward as possible. Through examples of the popularity of movies, the modification of language, and education, he demonstrates the laziness of Europe, especially as influenced by the United States. The term that Keyserling utilizes is the “liquidation” of people’s brains and functioning, indicating that, “The West is liquidating intellectually to the extent that its most recent cultural will aims at one thing above all: to make it easy for oneself” (Kaes et al. 1994, 361). By emphasizing the “liquidation” of the intellectual, the author points out that the actions, or lack thereof, resulting from people’s overall laziness have caused their brains to melt like ice, lessening their intelligence and capacity to learn.
To Keyserling, three main things have changed in society that display the presence of augmented laziness: film, the easier version of a book, and the way that people“nearly completely [switch] off the activation of the self” (Kaes et al. 1994, 361). A person can watch a film without thinking hardly at all, but when one reads a book, they have to engage to comprehend the text. Keyserling feels that the English language of the United States is particularly lazy, and criticizes the normalization of its use worldwide. Additionally, he highlights that the masses of people that society now expects to educate demand lower standards of teaching and “pull the teachers down to their level,” generally creating educational expectations that pale in comparison to prior standards (Kaes et al. 1994, 362). As a whole, Keyserling’s explanation of European and American speaks to a feelings that people have a new “right to a mood of failure” that manifests as laziness (Kaes et al. 1994, 361). Unlike Georg Simmel’s opinion that sloth manifested cities through overstimulation, Keyserling argues that people in modern cities fall prey to the appeal of easy living, another form of sloth.
Bibliography:
Keyserling, Count Hermann, “The Culture of Making It Easy for Oneself.” In The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, edited by Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, 360-362. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.