In chapters ten, eleven and twelve of Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class the great sociologist has a good deal to say about sport--seeing the attraction, inclination, "addiction" (his word) to sport, especially that sort of sport which evokes and involves physical combat, as one of the many survivals of the "predatory" and "barbarian" temperament to which he devoted his book. Some of what he had to say about it may seem fairly obvious to those who have encountered critiques of the values that the supposedly character-building, discipline, teamwork and "leadership"-teaching activity of playing or even just cheering on sports really impart to those who get involved with them--like a valorization of the display of physical aggression and cunning against human opponents in invidious contests of personal prowess making for gloating winners and shamefaced losers, and the tribalistic behavior of fans as well as players, extending to relations of dominance and subordination and status hierarchy between the victorious winners and the conquered and defeated. Thus do many see, for example, football and its surrounding hoopla as a training in militaristic and nationalistic values (even before one gets into the explicitly patriotic ceremony that is so often part of the ritual, such as everyone rising for the playing of the national anthem before the game, and fly-overs by the armed forces' fighter jets).
Of course, as might be expected of him Veblen goes further still. He notes the aspect of conspicuous leisure in sports that require lots of practice time and lots of costly specialized equipment, and the tendency to "make-believe" (all too evident in the characterization of football players as warriors, I should think). However, there is also what is bound up more subtly with that predatory, barbarian schema of life, not least the stress on personal prowess and invidiousness and status, namely an "animistic" conception of the world, with the former interacting significantly with the latter. Those whose mental horizons are shaped by the predatory scheme of life define themselves by their struggle against and triumph over active opponents, as against the merely passive things of this world--the animate which they live by dominating, as when hunting big game, or preying or dominating on other humans (the farmers whose villages they raid, the serfs over which they are lords), as against the inert and passive with which those that they dominate interact (like the grass the buffalo they hunt eat, the soil that those farmers they lord it over till). This has them conceiving of not just living things but "striking natural phenomen[a]" such "as a storm, a disease, a waterfall . . . as 'animate,'" with these things, if not "living" in the biological sense, having wills of their own, acting towards ends of their own, effectively personifying them in line with that view of life as a struggle between animate forces. At the same time, in line with their bent to hierarchy, they think of those things which they cannot compel to submit to their will as higher powers to which they must in their turn submit--and placate. All of this, moreover, extends beyond concrete things of the natural world like storms and diseases and waterfalls to a belief in "luck," "the barbarian imputing a quasi-personal character to factors" with cause and effect linked not in a rationally comprehensible fashion but rather "a preternatural interposition" that can readily be identified with "the arbitrary habits of the" higher powers. Going with that belief is "an instinctive shaping of conduct to conform with the surmised requirements of the lucky chance on the one hand, and a more or less devout submission to the inscrutable decrees of the divinity on the other hand"--the propitiation of the higher powers that interfere with them. Thus do barbarians, and the latterday barbarians who are sportsmen, have their rituals and their talismans--for instance, the athlete who always goes into the game wearing a pair of "lucky socks" they never wash. The result is that participation in sport, and its habituation of those who participate in it to predatory ways and predatory thinking, goes hand in hand with the predatory individuals' superstition--including that type of superstition often dignified with the name religion, such that (especially as Veblen held all this to be part of a common package) those who are inclined to sport are more likely to be inclined than others to "devoutness" in relation to "higher powers," and the devout more inclined than those who are not to sport (with a team together praying for victory before the game--praying for it as if they were warriors actually defending their people from enemies meaning them harm--seeming to both bespeak and reinforce that tendency). The result is that sports is not just an inculcator of militarism and nationalism, but, if in the more obscure manner described here, religiosity as well.
Veblen noted that many thought sports' encouragement of militaristic, nationalistic, religious attitudes in individuals salutary--that, indeed, organizations which sought to promulgate religion, if perhaps having only a vague grasp of the relation between sportsmanship and religiosity, nevertheless made deliberate use of the former to promote the latter. However others, not least Veblen himself, were more inclined to see these attitudes less positively, to regard them as (at best) out of step with the practical needs, or even the natural tendencies, of an increasingly technological and integrated world economy with requirements better met by cause-and-effect rationalism, cosmopolitanism and peaceful, "industrial" values; and indeed even regarded the prominence of athletics in college life with dismay.
As with so many other divisions evident in Veblen's time, the division would seem to endure today, though unevenly. It seems significant that today those who divide America between the "Red" and the "Blue" tend to think of the culture of sport, and especially the higher-profile sorts of team sport, as stronger in the martial, nationalistic, religious--"conservative"--"Red" states than in the more pacific, cosmopolitan, secular-skeptical "Blue" states, and in said states' rural spaces rather than their more Blue-skewing metro areas (such that Friday Night Lights is set in small town north Texas rather than metropolitan San Antonio). Yet it also seems significant that even in the Blue states one hears little in the way of the old critiques of the values that team sports inculcate, anyone likely to have a mainstream platform likely to treat claims for sports as a "character-building," discipline, teamwork and leadership-teaching activity with total respect. Rather what dissent we hear regarding the place of sport in contemporary life has to do with its "inclusiveness," the dissenters arguing not against the unsalutary influence of sport, but that the organization and playing of sports fall short of their standard of "inclusiveness" as these demand equal moral and material private and public support for sports for young women as well as for young men, from kindergarten all the way up to the professional level--all as this, in turn, has interacted with the question of just who counts as a "young woman."
Altogether the situation is a reminder of the effective exclusion of leftist thinking from the mainstream and centrist accommodation of the right; the extremely big business sports has become and the media's fear of offending against that business, the more in as it is so invested in it; and the identity politics factoring into every issue as it pours gasoline on the fires of the culture war. Indeed, consider just a little of what you may have noticed just attending to what the press did report --and how it reported it. Where the gore-chasing Nightcrawlers of our press ordinarily love nothing better than a mass shooting, they showed little interest in a major one in Manhattan out of apparent fear that attention to it might revive the controversy over the connection between football and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. There was the series of vile incidents entailing the tossing of "marital aids" at Women's National Basketball Association games (to promote crypto , wouldn't you know it). And of course, the swift ascent of Riley Gaines as an activist, such that the venerable Leadership Institute named a center after this very, very new and junior figure on the political scene in testament to both the extreme fashionability of the cause of excluding the transgendered from women's sports in this quarter--and, it must be admitted, Ms. Gaines' merits as a spokesperson for their causes. Altogether that seems to pretty well sum up the discourse about sports today--and everything else as well in this benighted era.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment