11/25/2022
I
I’m actually watching the US play England in the World Cup (took that photo later) even though I don’t know the rules or understand the strategies—“counter-pressing” is the big thing, hello?—or care about the outcome of this or any other soccer game, er, match. Why would anyone in his right mind do this on Black Friday? Shouldn’t I be peering at the business press, looking for clues as to the market’s future, or combing the op-eds, finding reasons to shriek about the idiocy of the mainstream media (the execrable George Will comes to mind), or mourning the dead from three “mass shootings” in the last week, discovering new ways to loath the gun-totin’ Republicans in Congress?
Why not watch American football if I’m going to waste an afternoon staring at this 42-inch screen surrounded by books I ought to re-read, or rethink, or rewrite? Having played that game for eight years, having studied its strategic evolution as if it mattered, and having discussed its intricacies with my brother, who got paid to coach high school, college, and professional teams, I ought to be parked in front of, say, the Chicago Bears and the New York Giants, except that they played yesterday, I think. I haven’t seen any football games for five years now, since I decided it’s too painful to watch these giants at their desperate work.
Football is the only trans-national sport that emphasizes, in fact rewards, collisions, the fiercer the better. Soccer and basketball penalize them, hockey and rugby treat them as incidental moments or occasional interruptions of the game, baseball ritually avoids them—think of those infielders suspended in air over second base on the double play—unless the catcher blocks home plate and the runner from third base has no choice. Almost every play in football ends with a collision, even in the goal (the endzone), and this not in violation but according to the rules. So concussions and other disabling injuries are “features, not bugs,” crucial dimensions of the game rather than deviations from its essentials: the violence and the physical risks involved are precisely what make it fun to play and watch, also profitable to broadcast.**
Football is also the only trans-national sport in which “time of possession” has great value, and yet in which clock time has no fixed value once the game begins, as if it’s the stock offering of an IPO; even in soccer, where “added time” is a commonplace, the 90 minutes of regular play never expands to the three hours of a typical 60-minute NFL game. So there’s no fluidity or flow in football, as there is in soccer or hockey or basketball, three other extremely strenuous sports: it’s all stops and starts, highs and lows, ups and downs. Unlike basketball, the most kinetic of games, nothing happens in football for 80 percent of the time you spend watching a game—assuming that the average duration of a play is 5 seconds (it’s less), and the average number of plays per NFL game is 120, at least fifty minutes of the scheduled sixty are down time.
The allocation of time in football matters because it produces and distributes players’ emotions and spectators’ attention accordingly. A baseball player gets to rest only while he’s in the dugout waiting to bat, but the regular season is 162 games long, and reaches across three quarters of the calendar year. He has to conserve, even hoard his emotions, because, quite apart from the fact that he will fail more often than not at bat, the season is a long, hard grind. A soccer player is on full alert every second of every match, but he can’t go full speed except at moments of attack on goal, and even then he’d better contain himself because control of the ball requires precision and restraint. A basketball player is always shifting gears, adjusting to the flow of the game at full court or half, and, like a soccer player, he has to “read” the alignment of the opposing team in its entirety at every second if he is to make the appropriate move or pass. His season is 82 games long with just days of rest between them, so he, too, occupies an emotional steady state or burns out.
The football season is 16 games with a week’s rest between each. Practices are perfunctory, mostly a matter of adjusting defensive formations and scripting a game plan: full pads and full speed are invitations to unnecessary injury and exhaustion. So the ratio of down time to actual playing time—those 10 minutes out of the 60 scheduled—is roughly 850 to 1. Five seconds at a time, a football player is expected to go all out, and if he doesn’t, he “gets beat,” as the saying goes. He can’t spare his emotions in those intense bursts of energy: no play is “routine,” like a ground ball fielded by the shortstop, for every play in a football game requires the utmost effort of mind and body, and it is summoned by an emotional apparatus whose commitments can’t be held in reserve. The violence of the game is the normal product of these brief, uncontrolled expenditures—it’s to be expected, not lamented or even noticed, unless, of course, it results in an injury, and then the commentary begins to sound like what the talking heads dispense after a mass shooting, rote words punctuated by solemn “thoughts and prayers,” as if we’re witness to an accident rather than a perfectly predictable incident. In football, as in the remaining American public spaces, it is the absence of spastic violence that would be remarkable.
II
So why do we watch football, and sports more generally, anyway? Why do I sit here looking at a game I don’t even understand (the offside rule in soccer, and in hockey, for example, has been explained to me many times by people who’ve played the sports, and I still don’t get it; I certainly don’t see it as it happens on the field [pitch?] or the ice)? What’s the point of this inane way of “passing” the time, almost literally wasting it, letting it “count” for nothing? My good friend Bruce Robbins, a distinguished literary critic, is as close to a fanatic Mets fan as you’ll ever get—I mean, the guy watches their games all season long, no matter how good or bad they are, and reports on them, then scolds himself for doing so and praises me for my much more mature sports-viewing habits (a small dose of basketball in March, otherwise nothing except the hieroglyphics of incomprehensible games like those being played in Qatar). Why does he watch obsessively and feel guilty about the obsession? Why does he think I’m using my time more wisely and productively?
He suffers from the same syndrome, I think, whose symptoms are displayed gladly by most of our comrades on the Left. (I am by no means immune, but I vaccinate myself from time to time by writing against its grain.) Chief among these symptoms is the belief that the leisurely consumption of superfluous goods—those beyond the basics of food, clothing, shelter—is a passive, effeminate enterprise, or the insignia of unearned aristocratic privilege, or a clear instance of gluttony, in short, a waste of time and energy better spent producing durable goods, whether material or intellectual. In these terms, which are the common sense of modernity as such, consumption is justified, that is, made generally acceptable, by prior acts of production, by contributions to the sum of value created by social labor, to the stock of goods available in the market. Otherwise your income and expenditures represent unjustifiable deductions from that sum of value and its corresponding stock of goods.
Those suffering from this syndrome typically treat fashion and style—not to mention religion, the ultimate excess—as inexplicable, unnecessary, ridiculous, or reprehensible distractions from what is useful, rational, and true. They also eschew, and often enough criticize, identity politics on the grounds that it, too, is mere ornament, a diversion from the real thing, which would be class-based politics centered on “bread and butter” economic issues that people of every color, sexual orientation, and gender bent can agree on. The same “producerist” ethic is at work here, finding the permanent residence of every identity by plotting its position within the social relations of goods production—in other words, within the world of work.
These are residual symptoms of the Protestant Ethic, and the distant, fading echo of its bourgeois extremity in the puritanical origins of Yankee American culture. That they show up in totally secularized precincts of the American Left isn’t a mystery, though, it’s instead an inevitable intellectual correlate of the Hegelian-Marxist tradition that still animates most of the Left’s thinking about politics: “He grasps labour as the essence of Man,” as Marx exclaimed in trying (and failing) to extricate himself from the gravitational pull of Hegel’s more or less religious philosophy. Everything else follows, including the suspicion of those exempt from the daily rigors (and rewards) of work, and the appointment of the working class to the office of revolutionary vanguard.
Against this tradition, which confirms our guilt about the time we waste on watching pointless ball games, we might find comfort in what William James—another philosopher who, like Marx, vowed to “fight Hegel”—had to say about the claims of necessary labor on the imagination of modernity. On Friday, July 24th, 1896, he gave a lecture at the Chautauqua Assembly in upstate New York (the same venue where Salman Rushdie was recently assaulted) on the topic of “Psychology and Relaxation.” He went in curiosity for the day, but stayed for a week, he later told audiences of teachers and students in New England who had invited him to speak on subjects related to his Principles of Psychology, published in 1890.***
James was pretty much appalled by what he found in this “middle-class paradise,” which he called a “serious and studious picnic on a gigantic scale.” He longed for “the big outside worldly wilderness with all its sins and sufferings,” and wondered why.
“I asked myself what the thing was that was so lacking in this Sabbatical city. . . . And I soon recognized that it was the element that gives to the wicked outer world all its moral style, expressiveness and picturesquesness,—the element of precipitousness, so to call it, of strength and strenuousnness, intensity and danger.” At first, upon escaping this boring bourgeois enclosure, he mourned the prospect of a rationalized world in thrall to “just those ideals that are to make of it in the end a mere Chautauqua Assembly on an enormous scale.” And then, on the train to Buffalo, he experienced the epiphany that would resound through everything he would write thereafter, including the very last essay, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” published the year he died, in 1910.
“I was speeding with the train to Buffalo when, near that city, the sight of a workman doing something on the dizzy edge of a sky-scaling iron construction brought me to my senses very suddenly. . . . Wishing for heroism and the spectacle of human nature on the rack, I had never noticed the great fields of heroism lying round about me, I had failed to see it present and alive. . . . And yet there it was before me in the daily lives of the laboring classes. . . . These are our soldiers, thought I, these our sustainers, these the very parents of our lives.”
Now you might interpret these remarks as a validation of the Protestant Ethic, not a departure from its cultural confines. But when James returned to those soldiers in “The Moral Equivalent of War,” it was to mark the advent of a world in which neither work nor war could cultivate the “masculine virtues”: soon there wouldn’t enough work to go around, and any new war would be global in scale. And in the companion adventure to the escape from Chautauqua, James called Walt Whitman both a “contemporary prophet” and a”worthless, unproductive being”—an “ideal tramp,” that is, a poet uniquely equipped to teach us by example how to live a useless life, one given over to idle observation and aimless conversation, not the production of “commercial value.”
Even earlier, in a talk to Unitarian ministers published in 1882 as “Reflex Action and Theism,” James had announced the renunciation of his Puritan heritage:
“Man’s chief difference from the brutes lies in in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities,—his pre-eminence over them simply and solely in the number and in the fantastic and unnecessary character of his wants, physical, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual. Had his whole life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have established himself as inexpungably as he has done in [the realm of] the necessary. . . . Prune down his extravagance, sober him, and you undo him.”
The sheer extravagance of religious worship—the thoroughly unproductive use of land and labor in building temples, cathedrals, or mosques, in burying the dead and buying up real estate on their behalf, in celebrating a Sabbath day off work, in striving for redemption on the slaughter-bench of human history—is what fascinated James, what made him a phenomenologist of religion. and inspired his counterpart, Emile Durkheim, the French sociologist, to write a reply to The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). For these men, who between them profoundly shaped an entire generation of French intellectuals, God was “the normal object of the mind’s belief” and the totem of social life as such, not some kind of “cultural baggage” that could be checked at the door of modernity.****
Do I mean to say that watching sports on TV is a form of religious observance, that is, a perfectly predictable (mis)use of time, a new branch on the family tree we call human nature? Not exactly. But it is at least analogous to art and dreams, two other pointless projects that punctuate, indeed characterize all of human history. We are built to believe in the evidence of things unseen and unspeakable, to remake the world in their image, as their inhabitable edifice. Science itself is organized and animated by this irrational urge to embody what we grasp intuitively, to build a world on the faint hope of mere equations and simple diagrams. All football is fantasy.
Of course mass sports, as Lewis Mumford called them, are inexplicable, unnecessary, ridiculous, and reprehensible distractions from what is useful, rational, and true. That is why we need as well as want them—because we’ve never been satisfied with what is, and never will be. Not even the accomplished Buddhist can sustain his abstention from all externality, from his own embodiment; for in the stillness of his meditation, he presupposes his own body, and, on that fragile but palpable supposition, he conjures a world elsewhere.
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**The “national pasttimes” of the US, baseball and football, are made for broadcast commercial breaks, between innings, during pitching changes, and when the clock is stopped. The most popular sport in the world, soccer, is not. Televised news in the US, and now the world, follows the format of American sports: bursts of visualized physical extremity or violence—on the playing field, in the combat zone, at the Walmart, or on the flattened and flooded plane of natural disasters—which are anesthetized and sutured by advertisements for unnecessary but desirable goods.
***I refer here to Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (1900), which collected James’s informal lectures of the 1890s and chapters from The Principles of Psychology. Until the 1930s, this was the most-read required text in normal schools and/or teachers’ colleges. “The Moral Equivalent of War” is reprinted in Henry James, Jr., ed., Memories and Studies (1911). See my Pragmatism and Political Economy (1994), chap. 7, for a more detailed reading of the Talks to Teachers, and Against Thrift (2011), chap. 5, for a reading of “The Moral Equivalent” that addresses its recapitulation in J. M. Keynes’s “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (1930), reprinted in Essays in Persuasion (1963).
****See Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912, trans. 1915), and Pragmatism and Sociology (1914; trans. 1983). Henri Bergson, Durkheim’s contemporary, was no less interested in James and pragmatism; he wrote the introduction to the French translation of Pragmatism (1911). Among their self-designated heirs in the next generation of French intellectuals were Gabriel Marcel, Marcel Mauss, Jean Wahl, Paul Ricoeur, Denis de Rougemont, Georges Bataille, Roger Leiris. Alexandre Koyre (nee Koyra) and Alexandre Kojeve (nee Kojevnikov) were Russian emigres who taught at the College de France; as philosophers who studied Edmund Husserl, V.S. Soloviev and G.W.F. Hegel, they, too, were concerned if not obsessed with the phenomenology of religion as James and Durkheim had rendered it.
Nice how you've positioned "Male Fantasies" above the TV set.