Kurt Weill and Bertholt Brecht's Berlin

Sloth / The Culture of Making It Easy for Oneself

“Much of what is referred to as progress in truth means liquidation.  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. Many still feel themselves obligated to complain about the cinema, but when it comes to attending film presentations nearly all dod and do so fondly. Psychologists and aestheticians have investigated the causes of its triumphal rise and discovered in the process that the moving light pictures truly and absolutely relax the viewers.  Reading the stupidest book one must think just a little big; every picture show draws the participant into its three dimensional force field. The cinema nearly completely switches off the activation of the self; one’s experience there does not differ greatly from a dream…. Every book requires that one bring something of oneself to it. But no film does. A company recently asked me whether I wanted to have a film made of my travel diary. I was tempted to say yes, being curious as to how such an intention could be realized.  The sense of it enlightened me in an instant: the point was to make the absorption of this book, which interests many, easier.”

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.
 

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