fans of Japan and Senegal mingle, World Cup 2018

                           (credit: By Wild Child, via Wikimedia Commons)




Political Insights In Sport

In the past few posts, we’ve discussed ways in which sports and the assumptions that underlie them can inform our thinking on questions like whether what we see is real, or just illusion, and whether human beings have free will. The whole worldview that is implicit in sport affirms that, yes, what our senses show us of the world is a fairly reliable representation of what is really there, and yes, we humans do have fairly impressive powers to shape events that are happening around us and events that are yet to happen. Reality is mostly as we see, hear, and touch it, and we are, to a fair degree, free to affect how reality is changing over time. I am confident that the ball is real and that I can kick it and catch it.

But there are more interesting philosophical insights to be gained from a close analysis of sports. For example, the actions we humans take to organize into larger groups like bands, tribes, and nations, are called “political activities”. Sports can give us useful insights into how humans organize into groups.


 

                                        huddle of AFLW Melbourne players 

                                      (credit: Flickerd, via Wikimedia Commons)

To begin with, the whole idea of sport has a democratic tone to it. Players who are forced to play a sport – perhaps because they show an aptitude for the sport, even if they don’t really like it – will never play as well as players who choose to pursue the sport, develop their skills, train hard, pay attention to coaches, etc. All of these are better done by people who choose to play the particular sport in question. 

An athlete may show great aptitude for figure skating, but if she wants to play hockey and she is forced into figure skating, in the long haul, she simply will not match the figure skaters who really want to do double axels. Pressures from her family or nation can’t make up for her personal reluctance. 

Personal autonomy is profoundly important in sport. Personal autonomy is also a key assumption of pluralistic democracy. It is not thought of as an inalienable human right in totalitarian, oligarchic, or theocratic states. 

Real experience of being a member of a successful team also provides evidence that supports the democratic model of human organization in other ways. Once a player has been asked to play for a team, and has accepted the invitation, the coaches of that team immediately begin to plan where and how the player will fit into their overall strategy. 


  
 

                            starting 11, French national team, World Cup 2018

                       (credit: Кирилл Венедиктов, via Wikimedia Commons)
               

No team that asks the same kinds of skills and assigns the same responsibilities to every player is going to be a winning team. Player A may be a natural scorer who can hit the corners of the goal from long range, but he may not have the natural shadowing instincts of a good defender. Player B may be just the opposite: not a great shooter, but skillful at checking other players who are shooters, repeatedly blocking their best shots. And there are the players who head the soccer ball well, and the natural goalkeepers who have lighting quick reflexes, and so on. A winning team almost always is going to have on it a variety of players with a variety of skills filling a variety of roles. Diverse talents and roles are cleverly assigned by the smart coaches so that they complement each other. Then they are keenly pursued by players who have freely chosen to be on this team. This smart coaching is what makes success in sport. In short, pluralistic democracy works in the sporting world.

And yes, there are compromises. No individual, no matter how talented, gets to dictate to others on a winning team. Players frequently must choose to contribute positively to their team by foregoing their own glory and even letting go of their own sport philosophies in order to fit into the team’s overall game plan.

But such is life. Adults know there are always compromises that must be made when one joins a group. The general principles that make participating in a democratic team acceptable to strongly independent individuals include, first, the one that enables individuals to choose to be in the group, and to leave if they see fit. This first principle is balanced with an implicit second principle that allows for each member of the team to have at least some input into how the team will approach each game and season - training, game plans, and so on. Dictator types of coaches are things of the past in most regions of the world where sports are played today. They offend players and fans, but most of all, they also lose. 


  

              Mount Mercy University men's volleyball coach, Mary Kay van Oort

                            (credit: Jim Slosiarek, The Gazette, MMU, Feb. 8, 2018)

A player is still expected to respect the coach, but coaches also are expected to listen to, and show respect for, the opinions of the players. And experience has shown that dictator coaches just aren’t as likely to be winners. Thus, fans and owners of a team tend to favor the more democratic coach in our times. The wrangling on a team, like that in a nation, can become tedious, but in democracy, negotiation and compromise are just life. 

The profound thing to see here is that the democratic model works. It gets results. In sport, it produces winning teams.  

These same democratic principles make a strong nation. Why? Because both teams and nations must deal with the unpredictable, probability-driven real world. The best strategy if one wants to succeed in a stochastic world is to join or create a carefully designed team that maximizes its human resources. For team or nation, the strategy is the same: a number of different players with varied skills, each performing the actions for which she/he is best suited as parts of a well-designed group/community/team that functions smoothly as a unit.

The Americans are fond of saying, “There is no ‘I’ in ‘team’.” What they mean is that to make a successful team, players must learn to put aside their love of personal glory and replace it with a willingness to perform well in the role to which they have been assigned by the team’s coach. It sounds collectivist, not democratic, but the key thing to keep in mind is what was said above: on the best teams, the players choose to be there, and agree freely from their first day with the team that they will respect other team members and especially coaches and will cooperate for the common good of the team.

The element of personal choice is still primary, but personal glory can be consciously set aside by rational people for the good of the larger group, if and when reason dictates that it should be. 

There is always a collective in sport (even athletes in individual sports like boxing or tennis have coaches behind them), but successful athletes and teams preserve that element of individual choice. It pervades all that occurs in democratic sport all the time.

And now the political insights we obtain from sport get even more fascinating.

I love to notice in every sport how there is an unspoken agreement between players on a given team, between members of different teams, between officials, and even between fans that there are rules for this game, we all know them, we agree to abide by them, and anyone – player, ref, fan, coach – who willfully violates those rules, even in principle, is ostracized by all, sometimes even from the sport entirely, anywhere it is played in organized, sanctioned matches.

This understood agreement that everyone involved with the sport will abide by and respect the rules, customs, and traditions of the sport is a kind of social contract. Its ultimate aim is to keep contests played under the auspices of this sport from ever turning into acts of unrestrained violence. Even in the roughest of sports, there are always some acts of violence from which one is expected to refrain. Even in rugby, one does not head butt opponents, or tackle them by surprise when they don’t have the ball. And so on. 

  

                            New Zealand All Blacks rugby team doing haka, 2006

      (credit: Sonya & Jason Hills from London, UK, via Wikimedia Commons)
                       

What is being revealed here is that sports are ritualized forms of war. Sporting contests are not real wars. Winners go home elated, losers leave the field or court dejected, but all live to compete another day. Sports allow humans to release their competitive urges without any competitors using deadly force.

Even the gentler sports like baseball, for example, in which players can play a whole game and never touch an opposing player, have roles in the larger political picture. Most sports drill young people for combat. Japanese soldiers in the South Pacific during World War Two found one aspect of fighting Americans extremely scary. The Japanese soldiers were very frightened by how accurately Americans could throw a grenade. Baseball.

German soldiers in WWI found Canadian soldiers’ skill with the bayonet frightening. The game of hockey, played everywhere by nearly all Canadian boys, leaps to my mind. The connection seems obvious.

Rugby and football train people for hand to hand combat and for throwing grenades. Tennis builds skills and muscles used in handling swords. 

Do other species engage in ritualized forms of combat that establish territorial and breeding rights? Absolutely. In fact, most intraspecies violence is limited so that it rarely if ever results in crippling or deadly damage to one or both combatants. That would be a foolish waste of the herd, pack, pod, or flock’s resources. So the bull elk fence and push with their antlers, but they do not kill each other. 

  

                                                                        bull elk duelling 

                  (credit: http://www.ForestWander.com, via Wikimedia Commons)

There is even a term in Biology for this dominance-setting, controlled aggression. It is called “agonistic” and it is common in the animal world, from insects and shrimp to elephants, but it rarely if ever involves the use of deadly force. Sport is just the human form of the elks' fencing and pushing.

This thought brings us to some related observations. It was George Orwell in an essay called “The Sporting Spirit” who noted that sporting competitions are closely connected to feelings of nationalism, which by the way, is quite a recent political phenomenon in most parts of the world. 

For centuries, people loved their families, then maybe their tribes. But love of ones' country is a recent political invention. It has become a global phenomenon just in the last century or so. As countries rose in importance in people’s lives, and mass media gave governments more power to influence the thoughts of their citizens, feelings of nationalism began to get stoked. 

All of this Orwell noted decades ago.

The fact that we can get so worked up here in Canada over our national hockey team’s games against the Russian or American national squads, and the British can invest so much emotion in their national soccer team’s games, the Iranians in wrestling meets, the Thais in kickboxing, and so on for many other nations, indicates again that there is something deep going on here. The deep emotions stirred by sport have a connection to the larger, political picture: sports are substitutes for war.

Contrary to Orwell, I find the nationalistic hysteria that sometimes surrounds a sporting match to be mostly a hopeful sign for our species. Why? Because even when a contest is called “dirty” and “unfair” by millions of fans, even when officials seem obviously biased, everyone goes home after the match in tired but healthy condition and sleeps in her/his bed. Contrast that picture with the ones we have seen too often of what a battlefield looks like after the battle, and perhaps you will begin to share my affection for sports.

Finally, I shall close with one more philosophical insight: the truth of all of the observations I have presented above also indicates things much deeper and more hopeful for our species.

If we can agree that we will try to put a round ball into our opponents’ goal, a goal that is the exact same size as the one at our end of the field, with any part of the body except our arms, that we will pursue the ball and not the opposing players, and that we will all treat each other and the officials with respect, then it seems obvious to me that we could learn a new moral code.

All of us.

Learning a code under which we all could live together and get along would be hard, but not impossible. Like learning a new sport. How many millions of people around the world have moved to a new place for work-related reasons, or to retire, and discovered that actually, yes, they have begun to really enjoy watching soccer or hockey, or playing tennis, or badminton, or whatever, when they had previously had no experience in their newfound sporting love?



  

                                           seniors playing pickleball, Florida, 2017

                               (credit: The Villages FL , via Wikimedia Commons)

Writing the rules for this new global game is going to be the hard part. If we can get that code down in a form that the big majority of us can agree on, we can then begin to teach it to, even program it into, the children. Hard, but not impossible. And so much better than the alternative of going on with warring. 

Sport is pointing the way. We only need to choose to practice that same spirit of competition under an agreement to play fair, and we’ll have it.

Business. Political campaigning. Sport. The Arts. Science. Every arena of human activity. And an end to war.

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, still, have a hope-filled, sporting day.

   

                                (credit: Biswarup Ganguly, Wikimedia Commons)

                                 How Human Free Will Works 

We can’t prove beyond logical challenge that we have free will. The arguments for and against the claim that we are free run on into infinitely finer subtleties until they, as Keats said, “tease us out of thought.” But we can assume that we have it and then follow that assumption to see what results it produces. That much was shown in our last two posts.

The assumption of human free will leads to fruitful ways of thinking in the sense that the assumption – if we accept it even provisionally – enables us to get good results in the real, material world. It tells us to watch, think, and act. Be daring. All the alternative assumptions get poorer real-world results.

Science outruns superstition in the long races.

Today, for the pleasure of indulging our curiosity for a while, let’s consider a model of how our freedom might be working.

We could have sensors attached to our bodies, many installed from factory (i.e. at birth), that enable our brains to constantly scan incoming data from cameras, microphones, contact sensors, heat sensors, balance and orientation sensors, and aroma and flavor sensors. Our senses, in other words. All of these can be imitated by current technologies. There’s nothing far-fetched here.

Then we might have programs in our brains that constantly scan and sift our sense data, current and stored, to identify data that indicate either something of use for promoting our well-being, or something that might pose a threat to our well-being, is coming at us. The proposed scanning and sifting program may be factory-installed (e.g. little babies fear falling) or alternatively, some programs may be written by the organism itself. (In other words, we have the capacity to learn from our mistakes and avoid making them in future.) Or programs may be socially installed. Much of what and how we think is shaped by our mentors – parents, teachers, coaches, the media, and so on.

                          

                                        (credit: Affebook, via Wikimedia Commons)

The human animal is complex and amazing. We are born fearing falling, but we can learn not to touch the cactus plants in the house. 

Can all human activity be construed under this model? It seems to me that the answer is “yes”. When circumstances are not urgent – i.e. when not afraid or hungry or driven by any other urgent need – humans often pursue either their creativity, making new things out of familiar materials, or curiosity, exploring the edges of what is familiar to discover more about their surroundings.

Why would programs for creativity and curiosity be installed in our computer brains? Because over many trials, failures, and successes – over generations – humans programmed with creativity and curiosity out-survived others who had no such programming. Evolution favors curious and creative tribes.

In English, an old adage says that curiosity killed the cat. But cats never reach the heights humans do. In Jesus’ parable, those who invest their “talents” increase their holdings, and those who hide them under a rock, lose even what they have. In parable form, he’s teaching: get out there in the world, engage with the things in it, take the risks. That way of life works. The alternative of adhering to what seems familiar and safe does not work nearly as well.

                                       robotics engineer, David Hanson, with "Sophia" 

                                      (credit: Sazzad Hossain, via Wikimedia Commons

Existence for any entity (human, robot, or Martian) in a quantum, uncertain, probabilistic universe is more likely to continue if it lives in creative, curious, active, daring ways.

Fire. The wheel. Arrows. Stirrups. Gunpowder. Antibiotics. Cars. These came from people who did not settle for the status quo. When they had the time to pursue something they found interesting, they did the pursuing.  

Once we assume that the universe runs on probabilistic principles, and that the septillions of particles in the universe are crashing into each other all the time, it is reasonable to infer that “life forms” – things that hold their shapes and their internal order – given enough matter, space, and time, are going to emerge. Roll a thousand dice a septillion times and snake eyes on all the dice will come up. (For readers not familiar with this expression in English, "snake eyes" means the dice come up as all ones. A remote possibility, but still a possible one.) 

In our universe, we have a lot of matter, space, and time. Life emerged, and some of its forms became freer and more conscious for statistical reasons. If we live as if we are free to act in ways that improve the odds of future events that will favor our tribe’s expanding and to reduce the odds of future events that may harm or even wipe out our tribe, our tribe will survive. If not, not. 

“Life forms” are more likely to continue to exist against the downhill flow of entropy if they keep becoming more and more sophisticated at defying their own destruction, even becoming capable of reproducing themselves. So we do.

That is the “why” of human freedom.    

But the life forms’ reproducing of themselves is another story. For today, we will settle for accepting that, yes, it is plausible in a quantum universe that something like what we call “life” sooner or later was bound to emerge, and then it will keep getting stronger and more complex as time passes. One of the life forms was bound to reach self-consciousness and the concept of its own free will. The “meaty” computers even became capable of making better versions of themselves. And did. That’s human freedom, how and why it works.

   

                                                    Curious child, smelling flower 

                                             (credit: Flickr, via Wikimedia Commons)

All the technology described above now exists in the software world, which has nothing like the complexity of the living world, though it is growing by the hour. But if how living things, and especially humans, continue to exist against Physics is enormously complex, this should not surprise us.

We have had nearly four billion years of experimenting and refining the basic life idea; we are on the verge of getting it really right. We are on the verge of carrying our planet’s ways to the stars.

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, be fruitful and multiply.

And once in a while, party. You have surely earned it.

   

      Igor Akinfeev, goalkeeper, Russian national team, anticipating a corner kick

                      (credit: Manfred Werner - Tsui, via Wikimedia Commons)

Now to enlighten ourselves, let’s illustrate how the claims about human free will that moral realism is founded on are supported by evidence in the realm of sport.

It is assumed in any sport worthy of the name that the outcome of the match is not predetermined. That for the contestants involved, whether they be teams or individuals, there is some chance from the outset of the match of either of them winning the contest. That is implied by the words “sport” and “sporting”. The athletes on both sides have a "sporting chance". 

Implicit in these terms is the assumption that athletes freely choose their actions. Those actions are not due merely to chains of events that came before this arena and this contest. Freely chosen decisions underlie the athletes' movements, moment by moment. Some actions will be performed better because of superior ability to read the movements of opponents, and to handle a ball, puck, etc. And superior ability to run, dodge, duck, skate, etc. And especially superior skills in deciding and executing movements, second by second, in play. Freely chosen acts on both sides of the contest - interacting - is what makes sport fun. 

                                

                                                                John Barrymore as Hamlet 

                                (credit: By Francis Bergman, via Wikimedia Commons)

When the outcome of a planned set of human actions is already known to a high degree of likelihood, this kind of activity is usually called a “performing art”. Plays, ballets, operas, symphonies, concerts, etc. are in this category. And we attend performing arts presentations with a totally different mindset than we do sporting events. We know that Hamlet is going to die. The fascination lies in watching how his story will unfold and in gaining insights that the actors, if they are good, will give us into human lives and how we may live ours better.

But the intention of a sports match is to entertain viewers with the uncertainty of the events that take place. 

It is the element of uncertainty in the outcome that makes crowds attend and, in fact, makes a sport a "sport". Fans get to watch a test of teamwork, endurance,  skills, etc. in which the individual or team that shows superior levels of each of those traits will likely win the contest. Even then, the outcome, if this is really a sport, can be affected by unforeseen and unforeseeable circumstances. “The rain started to pour down late in the second half and our star fullback broke his ankle four minutes before the buzzer. We lost by one point. But next time, there won’t be any rain to save those undeserving, arrogant clods on that beastly team!!”

It is also interesting to note that only the combative sports pit one human directly against another. In most sports, there is an object that the athletes will be trying to steer and launch, by foot, hand, etc. toward the opponents' goal or court. In short, what the athletes will be testing is their skill at manipulating/controlling some material thing. 

Balls and pucks and badminton birds are objects; they do not have free will. Humans are free. If the object is at about our level of resolution, we can learn to bandy it about in thousands of subtle ways. 

An object is driven here and there only by entropy and quantum uncertainty, the forces of Physics, until it comes under the domain of an animal or a human being. Life forms playing with things - humans with balls, otters with stones, dogs with rubber bones, cats with catnip bags - in each of these pictures, we can see the sharp contrast between the thing, numb and dead, being manipulated, and the being, alive and active, doing the manipulating. 

In short, what is being demonstrated in sport is our mastery of things. Stuff. The matter of the universe. Fascinating for us to watch. We know that frequently, things best us. Avalanches. Tornadoes. Tsunamis. Jacket zippers. But sometimes, in some arenas, we make them do what we want. "Did you see that shot!!" The whole picture makes no sense if we don't assume human freedom is real. 

                

                            soccer officials (referee Szymon Marciniak, center) 

                       (credit: Oleg Bkhambri (Voltmetro), Wikimedia Commons)

The assumption that humans have free will is also present in how officials – refs, umpires, and so on – call the game. Did that defender intend to hurt that opposing player when the defender performed his last tackle? Officials almost always have played the game that they are officiating. Even more importantly, they have experience of seeing how human bodies move. “Look at the replay on the monitor,” says the referee. “That man’s elbow is high. See how he moves that arm. He chose to perform an action intended to injure. He’s out of this game!”

Coaches assume free will. “That number 7 is your check, Hank. Now go out there and shut his scoring down.” "Watch for their trap play, guys. Support!!"  

Players assume free will: “I hate endurance training too, but coach is right. We can’t win if we can’t last the full hour. So we run laps." "Remember how they run their breakout patterns. We want to win, so we prepare. We read their plays and stop them cold.” 

   

                                                   Quarterback, Tom Brady 

                             (credit: Andrew Campbell, via Wikimedia Commons)

Even fans assume free will. “Did you see that check?! They’re trying to injure Harry!!” "Tom is so good at reading defenses. He can pick which receiver will be open in under two seconds. And his short pass is on the numbers every time." 

The assumption of free will underlies sport. As in history, education, the law, politics, and pretty much every realm of human endeavor, that assumption has been absorbed by almost all folk to be a legitimate assumption. 

That assumption is the same one that is followed when we do Science or even just live our everyday lives. Centuries of practice have shown us that the assumption works. Under it, we get things done, plan, assign responsibility and so on. Without it, we would not get anything done. We’d sit and mope and wait for the end.

The bottom line in sport, and in life, is this: we want to get on with it. Assuming that we have free will lets us do so. Then, the evidence of experience confirms more and more that our choice was a good one. Assuming that we have free will is necessary to our survival because the assumption enables us to act, multiply, and flourish. The alternative starting assumption does not.  

That dirty player had free will. He deserved his punishment. We have free will. If we’re decent folk, and if we act as if we do have free will, we reduce the risk that events will harm us and increase the odds that they will turn out well for us. So we pay attention to how our world works, remember, learn, use our knowledge, and act to avoid the world’s pitfalls and find its fruit trees and fresh water springs.  

The assumption that we have no free will leads us to ...stagnation. Sport and life, under that assumption, become absurd. Even my writing and your reading these lines become absurd. 

But they are not. 

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a sportsmanlike day.

   

                       Ronaldo helping injured Cavani off field, World Cup, 2018

                                    (credit: Jorge Silva, Reuters) (https://on.rt.com/98un)