The social cost of individual 'benefits.' (leisure experiences)(Column)

"Still, simply and selfishly increasing personal joy isn't the entire saga of healthy pleasure, because people don't really exist as individuals at all. All our lives are bound together. Individuals and society develop and thrive together We're primed to live cooperatively, and to touch and nourish others in many ways." -- Robert Ornstein and David Sobel, Healthy Pleasures, 1989, P. 22

Professionals in our field have never doubted the benefits of leisure. But only recently have we begun to document them. Challenged by stiffer competition for limited resources, and tired of the view that leisure services are not as essential as other human services, the new litany of benefits has become a way of expressing to others, as well as to ourselves, the essential nature of our work. Benefits are an affirmation that there is more to what we do than fun and games.

Celebrating the benefits of leisure is surely worthwhile. Demonstrating that leisure experiences contribute to the health and well being of America's citizenry is important both to a fuller understanding of the significance of leisure in contemporary life and to a stronger justification for the existence of the leisure services profession itself. Nevertheless, at least one dimension to this benefits-based approach to leisure services is ill founded. That is the idea of individual "benefits."

In Benefits of Leisure, Driver, Brown and Peterson defined a benefit as an "improved condition." By this definition, an individual's heightened cardiovascular fitness as a consequence of swimming, walking or running is a benefit. An individual's enhanced self esteem as a consequence of a successful squash match is a benefit. An individual's sense of increased family solidarity as a consequence of a camping trip is a benefit, and so on.

On the surface, there seems to be little to object to in any of this. But why is an individual's improved cardiovascular fitness beneficial? Why is an individual's improved self esteem beneficial? Why is an individual's improved sense of family solidarity beneficial? Why is an improved individual condition a benefit?

In each case, the answers are found not in an individual, but in a social context. Cardiovascular fitness is beneficial to the extent that a healthier, longer-living individual acts in such a way that.... Heightened self esteem is beneficial to the extent that an individual who feels better about herself or himself acts in such a way that.... A greater sense of family solidarity in an individual is beneficial to the extent that the individual acts in such a way that.... In the absence of consequences for others, it makes little sense to call any improved condition, in itself, "beneficial."

It is, in every instance, premature to equate an improved individual condition with a benefit. In every instance the questions must be asked, "How does the individual employ his or her improved condition? is it used to improve the condition of others?" An improved individual condition which has no positive effect on others conveys no benefit. And no great stretch of imagination is required to envision improved individual conditions used to the detriment of others.

This does not mean individuals do not matter. But what individuals do matters more, because that inevitably involves others. Individuals matter most as part of communities. Recognize it or not, the welfare of each one of us is wrapped up in the welfare of all. To proceed as if this were not the case, to treat individual conditions as if they were separable from social consequences inclines our profession toward the commodification and privatization of its services. It inclines the delivery of leisure services toward "benefits" that are not really benefits at all.

Moreover, creating the impression that individuals can "benefit" independent of social consequences, indeed that individual welfare can be achieved independent of collective welfare, is unwise. It denies, as Ornstein and Sobel and many others have shown us, that "our individual bodies share a living social body, and the health of each of us depends on our social connectedness." It denies that each of us is inseparably part of something larger than ourselves -- larger and more important.

It is ironic that our current state of knowledge portends to tell us more about individual "benefits" than social benefits. Because the causal links between individual changes and their social consequences are hard to measure, we talk with greatest certainty about the individual changes themselves. We label such changes "benefits" and champion their occurrence.

The problem with this is that our social science winds up as ammunition for those who would treat leisure and leisure services as merely private concerns. After all, if the "benefits" of which we are most confident are limited to individuals, shouldn't those individuals be required to pay the full cost of service provision?

We have to be very careful here. In our haste to demonstrate the value of leisure services, we must resist identifying ourselves principally with that which is easy to measure. While acknowledging the power of leisure experiences as change agents, we must not dwell on the changes themselves unless or until we can be confident of their positive social consequences. To do otherwise, to focus on individual "benefits' because of their seeming clarity, or to garner public support for what we do, is to contribute to the increasingly inward bent of American fife. It exacts a heavy social cost.

A withdrawal from public life has been characterized by Robert Putnam in his now famous essays, "Bowling Alone" and "The Strange Disappearance of Civic America," as the single most important problem facing America today. The challenge for us all, he argued, is to bring people out of their self absorption and into community life. For it is only a sense of commonweal that ultimately binds us together as a people. Without it, our way of life is in danger of degenerating into an individual free-for-all, a tearing away of the social fabric of trust, mutual aid, common values, and assumptions about life in community.

Our leisure services profession can play an important role in drawing people out of themselves and into the world of others. Especially through our public and quasi-public programs aimed at youth-at-risk, the poor, and other disenfranchised groups, we can help provide the social glue that is necessary to sustain community -- to sustain democracy. We can help foster, in the words of social critic Scott Russell Sanders, "a sense of neighborliness, a commitment to place, a feeling of responsibility for the good of our towns and cities and regions, an affection for the creatures that share the land with us, and a higher regard for spiritual values than for material achievements." But to do this we must resist the forces that pull us apart. The notion of individual "benefits," however subtle, is one of those forces.

Ultimately, the question for each of us to ponder is this. How do we conceive of ourselves? Do we see one another as discrete and separate beings, living our own private lives, independent of, if not oblivious to, the lives of others? If so, then perhaps it is appropriate to speak of individual benefits. In such a world it would make sense to privatize the delivery of leisure services altogether.

If, on the other hand, we see one another as inalterably connected, as being in relationship to the world around us, then the idea of individual "benefits" rings hollow. Benefits only become meaningful in their larger social and environmental contexts. In such a world, leisure services are essential services which remain a matter of public concern for all.

Dr. Dustin is a professor in the Health, Physical Education and Recreation Department at Florida International University. Dr. Goodale is a professor in the Health, Physical Education and Recreation Department at George Mason University in Virginia.