Virginia Woolf (credit: Wikipedia) 

Yes, Virginia, There Is A War

I read some of Virginia Woolf’s works, as a young man in my 20’s and re-visited the same works in my 50’s. They were being touted at my university as genius works, literary art from arguably the finest stylist of the twentieth century.

For the life of me, I could not see what the fuss was about. She did handle the technique called ‘stream of consciousness’ with amazing skill. But her novels were about the trivial. For example, in Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway has a party. Several very "interesting" people are coming. We skip through the protagonist’s mind and into the minds of several of those guests as lightly and easily as if we were metaphorical swallows or wrens. Quick, smooth, gentle, even delicate. It is all handled with amazing skill on the part of the author.

But I know what I thought, in my twenties, at the end: boring. Boring past belief. Who cares if one spoiled upper-middle-class woman has a party to which a slough of other boring people come, and think and talk about boring, trivial things? I might as well have daydreamed about a hundred things and sat and stared out the window for five hours. Catatonic. A waste of skin and breath and hair.

It is only now that I’m past sixty that I am beginning to see something more.

In Mrs. Dalloway, one of the characters whose consciousness we pass through briefly is a soldier returned just a few years before from World War One. He is haunted by what he saw and did there. We feel his anguish, but only briefly. Then, we skip into another mind and dance delicately on into Triviatown. We find out later in the novel that, oh dear, he has committed suicide. Jumped off a high place, I think it was.

I know when I first read the novel, I felt a stab of real anger and sorrow that this woman, Clarissa Dalloway, and her trivial friends could treat as trivial the one person in the novel that maybe had a truly important, compelling story to tell.

But to me today, at 69, the whole novel speaks differently. What I see in it now is that Woolf was well-aware of how callous her 1920’s society had become. The Roaring 20’s. All were doing well, returned to their pre-war games and trivia. 

What had just transpired, 1914 to 1918, they did not have the depth of character to cognize, let alone empathize. All of this she saw, a woman who had lost men she loved in that war, including one of her own brothers. I now believe that Woolf subtly constructed the novel for people of sensibilities similar to her own.

   

                                                  At the front in World War I

                                                      (credit: dailymail.co.uk) 

How I wish I’d had better teachers when I first read Woolf.

But today, I think I see further. The author not only made me painfully aware of what that poor fellow and his comrades went through and then had to carry in their heads - if they were lucky enough to survive. She made the horror of war implant and then evolve in my imagination on its own. As a result, I did research and learned what the reality had been. She did not need to have the soldier tell of what he'd been through. And then, he killed himself - in the midst of a society that to all appearances didn’t “get” him and didn’t care to try. I ache for him as I write these lines.

I know now of the young officers on all sides from the upper middle class. Educated, sensitive, full of idealism and patriotism, which they had been programmed to think were the same thing. England, Germany, France, Belgium, Austria, Italy, Russia, Canada, the U.S., Turkey, Australia, New Zealand …the list could go on. Over 100,000 casualties in sub-Saharan Africa, a “theater” of that war that most people today know nothing about. Millions of fine young men, near to boys really. Squandered like found money. And more in the wars since, of course. How bravely they charged. Into machine guns.

Woolf was, it seems to me today, also trying to do what Thornton Wilder in his way did in “Our Town”: place a value beyond all measure on the small dignities in everyday life as shown in the decencies of ordinary people just interacting with other ordinary people. She felt instinctively that we don’t need to read any more about, and for sure don’t need to glamorize or celebrate, the horrors of war. She knew that there had been way more than enough of that particular form of madness. World War One only took it to a previously unimaginable, undeniable extreme. All illusions of “patriotism” and “idealism” got swept away in trenches full of rats, shit, mud, and exploding, gangrenous corpses.

I keep hoping some work of literature or film may tell it all and get the people of the world to give it up. But I believe I see now what Woolf was trying to do. 

Her effort to try to push her society’s consciousness in another direction came to little in the end, of course. Fellow authors could have told her as much. Vergil may have celebrated “arms and the man”, but Homer knew better, as did Thackeray, Mann, Hesse, Tolstoy, and many others. They wrote sensitively and changed nothing. Woolf was simply trying to tell that same message in a new way, one that might actually get results at the level of public consciousness. Or so I think now. Reading authors’ minds is one more trivial pastime, I suppose.

But I know because it is a matter of open public record that Virginia Woolf was deeply distressed when, in spite of the best efforts of herself and many others, another World War came, even larger and more terrible.

She really was a soul too sensitive for this world. She was likely what we now call “bipolar”. She had many mental breakdowns and had to retreat to total rest many times.  Many times, she tried to kill herself. Finally, while staying with friends in 1941, nearly two years into WWII, she succeeded. She walked into a river and drowned. Death by suicide, like the poor soldier in Mrs. Dalloway.

In the preceding months, she had seen the German bombers over London and the new generation of maimed young men coming back from the fronts. She had been to patriotic rallies in England where the rabid shouting of crowds whipped into patriotic frenzy had made her physically ill.

Was she trying unsuccessfully to repress her true lesbian self all those years? Was she born with other genes that made her bouts with madness inevitable? I believe these questions are not what we need to focus on in our assessment of Woolf.

I think I get her now. No wonder she seemed crazy. She saw with her eyes and felt with her heart and her whole self the cruelty and stupidity of this world.

Oh, no, Virginia. How I wish you had chosen to live. You weren’t crazy. No. It’s the world that’s crazy. You were the sanest person in the England of your time. 

Rest in peace, gentle lady.


   

                     German SS troops being executed by U.S. troops in a coal yard 
                                                   (Dachau, April 29, 1945) 
                                  (credit: Arland B. Musser, via Wikimedia Commons)

                

                                                       hydrogen bomb exploding 
              (credit: United States Department of Energy, via Wikimedia Commons)

The Autumn Of Grade Nine

I started grade nine at thirteen years old. I didn’t turn fourteen until late October, so I was younger than almost everyone else in my grade. I had started grade one at five, which, for me, had been no sweat. I took to academic things.

Or at least the school work was no sweat. But by the time I was entering my teens, fitting in with guys who were bigger and more mature was becoming difficult. And like many a smart kid, I tried so hard to compensate and make myself cool that I frequently became an irritation to my peers and teachers alike. Trying too hard. How that phrase resonates with me now.

But grade nine changed me in deep ways, partly because it was in grade nine that I had Svend Hansen as my Science and home room teacher. He would have been in his early thirties then. Handsome in the eyes of my female peers. I heard them say so. Athletic in a stocky, solid way, with close-cropped brown hair, blue eyes, and Viking features, slightly hooked nose, crystal blue eyes, and all.

He had a big influence on me.

He belonged to the service club called the “Kinsmen”, so he took part in their big fundraiser in late September. They sold Planter’s peanuts door to door over the whole of Edmonton and the funds raised, because all the help was volunteer, “helped the Kinsmen to help the kids”. It went to fund summer camps for handicapped kids, I think. I can’t remember for sure now.

So, he asked four young guys from his grade nine homeroom to do the selling door to door as he drove his car slowly up and down the streets of one of the Northside neighborhoods. I can’t remember exactly where now. But we did well. Each of the four of us sold about one hundred fifty cans of peanuts in around three hours at a dollar a can. Planter’s peanuts. About seven hundred dollars worth of fund raising from one team, and there must have been a hundred teams working the city that night. Nineteen sixty-three dollars. With inflation, about ten times that value here in two thousand eighteen.    

It was a vivid night, partly because I’d never done anything like “fundraising” before, but more because that night held the most spectacular display of northern lights I'd ever seen. To this day, I’ve never seen the northern lights so vivid and enthusiastic. Greens and yellows, common enough, but even blues and violets. Dripping down the bowl of the night sky like syrup.

Hansen bought a can of peanuts for the guys and we got cokes on the way home. Grade nine boys, helping the world and having fun. It was a good night.

My mind was more open to him than to most teachers when he told us in Science Nine about the scientific method. I got it, the idea of forming hypotheses and testing them and gradually, in teams of researchers all supporting and feeding off each other, closing in on the truths of the universe. As we humans found more of those truths, we were soaring past the speed of sound, into space, curing diseases, building thinking machines, and …bombs.

You see a smart kid not only can grasp what the atom bomb that had dropped on Hiroshima did, he can grasp – even at thirteen – how it works and what the building of ever bigger ones could mean. The end of civilization, of all order, of ninety percent of humanity in an afternoon. Hansen had got me curious, scared – no, terrified – not intending to – but I was a thinking kid and a worrier anyway. 

Then, like a fool, I read the nonfiction book called “Hiroshima” by John Hersey just a few weeks after the Science Nine lesson about the atom. Got about half way, and then I could stand no more. Bug-eyed as I grasped the full horror.  

To this day, I have never gotten over it. I don’t fault Svend Hansen. I had kept pressing him for more answers that day of learning about the atom in class, and he had given them. He knew his Science. More than any grade nine boy needed to know. But he was only telling me about reality. Nuclear weapons are real. They aren't a Dracula horror movie or space aliens or something equally ridiculous. They are real and they are much worse.

The burnt, mangled, mutilated thousands in Hiroshima that Hersey describes in that book, the women with breasts ripped off by flying glass, burned babies like roasted Easter hams – all described from the points of view of medical staff in the city who had survived. 

I never got over the autumn of my grade nine year.

My junior high school, that same school, had had an air raid siren on our roof – the roof of a junior high school – go off the year before. An air raid siren is made so that it will be loud enough to be heard for miles. Its sound is pitched to be distressing to human senses. It must not be ignored. And me a sensitive kid. We never got an explanation for why that air raid siren went off in sixty-two. We just sat and stared at each other for ten minutes or so – God, it was loud! – and then it stopped. Must have been a mistake. Go on with the day. 


 

                              air raid siren (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

I used to lie awake and listen to the sirens in my city through the night, and try to judge whether they were police, ambulances, fire trucks or …the unthinkable horror show. It came to me that there was nothing anyone was doing anywhere that took up even a little of the shadow of this mushroom cloud glowering down on our planet. Over all of us. This was the issue of my era in History. As Kennedy said to the U.N. General Assembly, we must end war or it will end us. 

And then they killed President Kennedy.

I saw some of my teachers cry that day, November twenty-second, nineteen sixty-three. Mrs. Barbara Page. Hansen’s eyes were red-rimmed when I saw him in the hall. (Shock. Men don’t cry, do they?) We went to class, but no one studied much.

In stunned disbelief, I watched two days later when the purported assassin was himself shot. At close range. In the police station. In the guts. On camera.

These are harsh things for a grade nine boy. We have fire crackers that can take out a city in one pop. Thousands of such bombs. The leaders who are supposed to keep us from using them are crazy.

I never got over the autumn of my grade nine year.

                                       

                                                            Stephanie Gregory (aka Stormy Daniels) 
                                                                    high school yearbook photo 1997





                                      

                                                                        Stormy Daniels (2017) 
                                                                  (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

                            Of Porn Stars And Presidents

The photos above tell a tale of woe, especially as one gets to know more about the life of the woman in them. In the top picture, she was 18 when the photo for her high-school yearbook was taken. The lower pic was taken when she was 38. She is one of the leading porn film stars of this era and is also the center of one scandal currently plaguing the sitting president of the U.S., Donald Trump.

Questions swirl around this woman. How intimate was she with Trump? How perverse were their encounters? According to Daniel’s latest book, due out in a couple of weeks, he is only a small "p" pervert, but she describes it all and even goes into lurid detail about the odd appearance of his penis.

Now we still are faced with the question of how much to believe of her story, but on the other hand, it has stayed consistent for months running into years now. In addition, no one who might challenge her story is doing so. Always a bad sign for those accused, in this case, Donald Trump. He is a multi-billionaire and he is in the most powerful office in the world, but he has had little to nothing to say on this case in months. 

Unfortunately, the very sad thing for her is that while most of Trump’s supporters are indifferent to her revelations (according to polls), the liberals of the American public, who one would think might celebrate his being publicly shamed, have also apparently lost their sympathy for her. To them, she now looks like a hectoring, vindictive harlot trying to spin what she knows about a wealthy man into more and more money. The fickle sympathies of the masses.  

Concern for the democracy of her country and how it's being misled by its sitting president is not what comes through in either the substance or the tone of what the book has to say. No higher motives. Just hurt, anger, and revenge. And greed.  

But I feel there’s another way to see her actions, and it’s distressing to me that no reporters in the media are following this other line of interpretation.

In the background to all of this ranting on every side about this scandal, one of the facts described in the book, a fact that has been mentioned in the media, but then glossed over, is the fact that this woman was repeatedly raped and saw her friend being raped. She was thus both victim and witness, and it all took place when she was a little girl. Nine years old. Nine.  

Does she look hard in the 2017 picture? A manipulator? Breasts enhanced with implants in order to thereby "enhance" her charms? Determined to play this moment of notoriety for every dime she can get?

Cynics who answer "yes" to such questions simply aren’t getting what’s going on here, in my view, anyway.

She was a little girl when the abuse at the hands of unprincipled men began. Nine years old. For me, as a man who has women in his life that he loves, the ensuing discussion fades to inaudible at this point.

She was 9.

And now, at 39? With a long career as a porn star and prostitute behind her - a career that studies have shown was far more done to her than chosen by her - is she hard? Cynical? Manipulative? Mercenary?

The amazing thing is that she survived at all. Many don't. 

My bet is that not one of those who have raged, smirked, or jeered at her image on their televisions over the past few months, if they had undergone what she underwent, would have done any better. Most not as well. At least she has made some money.

Whether the case against Trump, alleging that he directed money illegally toward paying her off and shutting her up, results in a conviction or not, I wish her luck. 

If all she has alleged about Trump and the other abusers in her life stands as the truth in the coming months - as it appears very likely to do - then, in my view, she has suffered enough. Likely years of anxiety and fear. She got hard. She had to or go mad.

The rest of us, men and women – black and white, Asian, native, gay, straight, bi, trans – we could all do well to pause and reflect on Stormy Daniels. She did not deserve what happened to her, but she found a way, nevertheless, to survive. 

And finally, in the bigger picture, if Stormy winning her case will aid women all over in finding their voices and stopping the madness that has been done to them for so long, then I hope fervently for her victory in an open court.

I'm very wary of false accusations. I know manipulators are out there. But I also know that the real rapists who walk away unscathed from their acts outnumber by far the falsely accused whose lives are ruined by a liar. Complex realities are why the law is as nuanced as it is. And why we must keep working to improve it and make it fairer. If anyone ever tells you life is easy, spin that person around and kick her/his butt. 

In the meantime, I shall watch Stormy's case - no, Stephanie's case, because that is who she really is - Stephanie from Louisiana - with interest. So many levels, so much being revealed about all parties involved right up to the level of the whole of American society. 

Let the games about games about games begin.

In the shadow of the larger mushroom cloud, and the shadow of this smaller, but still important, cloud, you have a great day anyway.

(She was 9 years old.)      

The passing of John McCain 

I have to post this. Those times were crucial to me.

John McCain was a decent man. But he was an iconic American hawk in foreign policy.

Like too many Americans, he believed in American "exceptionalism", that the U.S. is somehow outside of, or above, or better than, the rules that govern other nations and their histories. And in spite of the fact that he was a brave man, and a devoted American patriot - no one can question those traits in his character - he was sometimes still wrong.

What we need to keep in mind as he is being honored today is that a person can be sincere and brave and smart and kind and still be wrong. The person's read of the facts and her/his chosen response to those facts can be mistaken.

McCain too often was.

America never should have gotten involved in the Vietnam War. No matter how brave, heroic, and patriotic many of the young men who fought there were, their country was in the wrong. They ought to be able to say that by now.

America never should have attacked Iraq in 2003. The attack on Afghanistan almost all civilized nations supported. The ruling Taliban in Afghanistan had given shelter and succor to Bin Laden. He had engineered the 911 attacks. Getting to him seemed only just to the big majority of the world's nations. But such was not the case in Iraq. The Iraqis had had nothing to do with 911. Full stop.

McCain supported all the hawkish foreign policies, including the U.S. attack on Iraq. One can somewhat understand why he had these hawkish inclinations. He'd been tortured horribly by the North Vietnamese during his POW years.

But a blanket policy of "my country, right or wrong" simply does not work. It leads to one's making bad mistakes. John McCain is a clear example of a man who made those kinds of mistakes. Too many times.

But still he was a decent man. And that's the larger point here.

Democracy is supposed to allow a nation of people to see past the errors of any one person to the larger truths. McCain was shiningly civil and decent when he ran against Obama in 2008. McCain also kept repeating how he longed to see a return to civility in American politics. Hear, hear.

So I wept for his passing when I heard of it this morning. I disagreed with him bitterly many times. But he was a clear example for me of how democracy is supposed to work. Honorable men can honorably disagree. Eventually, the people see whose judgement is more accurate and just.

Both sides of the current political scene in the U.S. now need to learn from his example, and enact what they learn, if democracy there and worldwide is to survive at all.

Democracy is much bigger than any one of us.

RIP John Sidney McCain (1936 - 2018)

                                               

                                                                       Michelangelo's "David" 

  (Note the musculature, the leaning of his weight on one hip, the relaxed posture) 

                              (David is a warrior/athlete) (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

             

                                            The Beauty of Sport

The last branch of Philosophy is Aesthetics, and in this area of human thought, sports also have a great deal to teach us. 

What makes beauty? To athletes, coaches, and fans, this is usually fairly clear.

                                                

                                                                        bodybuilders, 2008 

                                             (credit: petechons, via Wikimedia Commons)

First, in sport we see the beauty of the individual human body when it is in really fine condition. And different sports require different kinds of training and so lead participants to develop different kinds of physiques. But this is good. In the variety, and our discussions of which body forms we find more pleasing and why, each of us can learn a good deal about others and ourselves. Art serves this function, and other functions, in society. 

        

                                       Australian swimming star, Emma McKeon 

                        (credit: JD Lasica/Cruiseable.com, via Wikimedia Commons)

The bodybuilders are in the business of making their musculature as large as they can. And many people find this attractive. There is also no question that the building of one of those bodies is hard work. 

Bodybuilding competitions are also hard. The posing that these athletes do may look like mere narcissistic display to those who don’t know the sport, but even those who have spent ten or fifteen minutes in what used to be called “isometric” exercise know that straining one muscle against its opposing muscle can be very tiring. 

In any case, the point here is that training and competing in sports gives serious athletes physiques that other people admire and find aesthetic. Long distance runners and swimmers, long and lean; bodybuilders, heavy and powerful. Other athletes’ bodies ranged in between.

                                 

                                              British heptathlon star, Louise Hazel 

                                     (credit: Kent Capture, via Wikimedia Commons)

                                                             

But the beauty of sport does not end with beautiful bodies posing for photos.

In the second and far more gratifying place, as athletes engage in competition, they show viewers the beauty of the human body in motion. It is the grace and coordination and timing and flexibility of the whole body that is more likely to elicit “oohs” and “ahhs” from fans. A really well-executed overhead kick in soccer or a pass well-caught in football or a roundhouse kick well-delivered in martial arts – these are a joy for fans to watch. The beauty of the body in motion is what pulls fans to their favorite sport in the first place.

   

                                   Ruben Mendoza performing an overhead kick

                                       (credit: Weechie, via Wikimedia Commons)

Then, in the third place, we can see in a sport the beauty of humans exercising a series of moves not only with grace, but with evident larger strategy in mind as they do the moves. When a boxer can feint so skilfully that he causes his opponent to reach out to deflect a blow that is not actually coming, and to drop his guard in a way that allows the more skillful boxer to deliver a knock out blow, that can be very fascinating and uplifting for a fan to watch. 

Or if boxing is too brutal a sport for you, you may find a similar sense of aesthetic satisfaction when a skilful tennis player sweeps her racket around to deliver a crushing topspin smash and at the last possible moment, pulls the sweeping stroke and barely touches the ball enough to get it over the net. It bounces once in the opponent’s court and dribbles into a second bounce long before the hapless opponent can recover and return the shot. 

   

                                          Boris Becker delivering a drop shot 

                                     (credit: James Phelps, via Wikimedia Commons)

There is a mind at work behind that drop shot. A clever mind expressing itself in the graceful movements of a fit, well-trained body. Beautiful to watch.

 

                                                      Team play in soccer 
                                 (credit: Sarah Jones, via Wikimedia Commons)

Then, fourth in team sports, there is the beauty of several bodies and minds working together. This factor may be what makes team sports so satisfying for so many fans. 

The defender stops an attack with a skillful tackle and recovers the ball. She almost instantly drives it up the field, along the sideline to where she knows one of her midfield companions waits. The mid-fielder traps the ball, then turns and chips it in a well-placed arc to a striker who is running down the field, staying just barely onside until the pass comes in just over her head. If the striker then completes the play with a hard, precise shot that the opposing goalkeeper simply cannot block in time, and scores a goal, the crowd will erupt in cheers. 

The individual bodies look nice; the coordinated precise movements of each body in motion look nice; the clever planning that goes into each player’s movements is pleasing to the eyes of fans whose familiarity with the game enables them to see each mind expressing itself; but the most pleasing of all is the way that three different human beings, so quickly and so skilfully, can strike and handle a ball from one end of a hundred meter field to the other and end the sequence of all of their movements with the scoring of a goal.

Yes, it’s exciting. And it’s beautiful. And so it is that sports, in any society that has some wealth and time to spend as it pleases, will flourish. Watching all that beauty just feels good. Aesthetic. 

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, enjoy the game.

   

                      Pankration fighters (from a copy of an ancient Greek statue) 

                                       (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

The Ethical View Implicit In Sport

Sports have a great deal to teach us about all aspects of our philosophy of life, not our claims about our philosophy, but our real philosophy of life, the one that is implicit in the actions we do every day. And of all the components of our philosophy, sports reveal our moral philosophy the most deeply.

At first glance, the whole idea of a 'sport' sounds impractical. If I can win acclaim from my family, my village, etc. by directing a ball into a goal, why not pick up the ball and run with it until I am in front of the opposing team’s goal, then throw it in? The joy of being applauded by my family and friends, perhaps even my whole town, is appealing. We humans are a social species. We like praise. So why not get that praise in any way I can? Why worry about whether I touch that ball with my hands or not? Why care about the rules of this game?  

But no one will applaud if I score by cheating. In fact, I will bring dishonor to my family and my village. Cheating, breaking the rules of the game, is said to be 'unfair'. Clearly, sports activities are programmed by complex social norms. How we play a game is controlled by what we have been taught about how the game is supposed to be played. In short, sports show our moral values in action. 

                     

                               Lance Armstrong, disgraced cyclist and proven cheater 

                                           (credit: McSmit, via Wikimedia Commons) 

What is this idea of 'fairness'? Why does it matter to us? We want to score goals and win races, but only in prescribed ways, it seems. Something deep in our natures is being revealed here.

So let’s begin by taking a long, careful look at what all sports have in common. What makes a sport a sport.

A sport is an activity that involves competition between two human individuals or groups who are striving, within a set of rules, to achieve opposing objectives. They want to score goals on us, while preventing us from scoring on them. We want the opposite.

Each player or team seeks to achieve their objective, i.e. to win the game, by exercising greater control over material things than their opponents. Handle the ball or the puck or the raquet or whatever objects the game involves with greater skill than their opponents and so score more goals, ace more serves, land better jumps, etc. than the opposition does, within a fixed span of time.

In many sports, the physical 'thing' being controlled is a ball of some sort, but it can be an object of some other kind (e.g. a puck in hockey), and it can even be one’s body as in boxing or gymnastics or synchronized swimming. The two parties in the competition must compete within a set of rules of the game made available in written form to all involved long before the competition begins.

Thus, it is competition that is not wide-open, but rather competition within a set of guidelines dictated by the rules of the game, that makes a sport a sport.

   

                                         Sergio Ramos performing a bicycle kick 

                                  (credit: Alejandro Ramos, via Wikimedia Commons)

If a competitor is playing a sport and acting all the while within the rules, and she/he is able to demonstrate a greater degree of mastery over things than that being shown by her/his opponents, by scoring more goals or cleanly landed blows or triple axels or whatever is the object of the sport, then she/he will receive the applause of fellow players and fans. Often, a great deal of applause.

   

                            statue of Pheidippides, purported runner who carried news 

                                 of Athenian victory on Marathon plain back to Athens 

                              (credit: Hammer of the Gods27, via Wikimedia Commons)

In fact, very proficient athletes have been raised to hero status since ancient times. Thousands of years ago, winners of Olympic competitions in ancient Greece were welcomed as they returned to their home cities with parades and cheering crowds. Sometimes, a section of the city wall was even knocked down so they could stride in through the gap like conquerors. (Is sport a substitute for war? What does the evidence say?)

In addition, it is worth noting here that athletes who show, by word and action, respect for other players, coaches, fans, and the customs, morés, and traditions of the game bring further praise to themselves. This praise – if an athlete exhibits a personal style that is “sportsmanlike” – will come from her or his teammates and fans, but also from opposing fans and even opposing players. Thus, even boxers who knock an opponent unconscious for several seconds or minutes, can embrace their opponents after the fight. Soccer players, tennis players, baseball players, etc. also gain praise for themselves and their team by showing sportsmanship. The greatest of athlete-heroes draw thousands of fans to the venues where they compete and, from the money gained by ticket sales, are paid annual salaries ten, twenty, fifty, even a hundred times the salary of the average fan attending the games. Clearly, people all over the world love this idea of physical competition within a set of rules. Sport.  

     

                                18 yr. old Canadian soccer star Alphonso Davies 
                (whose playing rights have been sold for $29 million to Bayern Munich) 

                                            (credit: Robyn Beck, via the Globe and Mail) 

And all these monies are paid so that fans may watch for an hour or so as humans perform what is essentially a frivolous activity. At the end of the game, no food has been planted or harvested by the athletes, no clothes sewn, no shelters built, no diseases cured, no injuries healed. In fact, athletes regularly come out of contests injured far more than they were when the contest began.

And still fans applaud. Why? Because they are entertained by a demonstration, under a set of rules, of mastery over things. Seeing mind dominating matter is exhilarating to watch.  

Now, what does sport tell us about our moral values?

First, let’s repeat some points made in earlier posts. They can bear repetition. 

All sports assume the truth of some profound philosophical claims, the first of these being that the reality we see is mostly as we see it. Thus, how humans play sports reveals our ontology, our philosophy of what reality is. The ball is real. My body is real. The two can interact in the real, physical world. That object coming toward me is not an illusion induced by my own wishes or fears.   

Secondly, sport assumes that humans have free will. An athlete can control her body and can, for example, strike a ball with her foot in such a way that she impels the ball to fly rapidly toward the opposing team’s goal. So rapidly, in fact, that the opposing team’s goalkeeper cannot reach out in time to stop the ball from flying into the goal. Sports let us demonstrate our free will.

            

                                     Canadian soccer star, Christine Sinclair 

                                    (credit: Noah Salzman, via Wikimedia Commons)

Every person watching believes in human free will. Every viewer believes that the mind inside that human controlled her foot and, via her foot, the soccer ball. The ball did not fly into the netting because of the background physical forces in the universe. The goal was not scored by entropy or quantum probability. She did it. The 'she' that is most truly herself. She is responsible. And good for her. Hooray for our team!!

In the third place, we now arrive at the moral insight of sport. If we can see a mind at work in a great play, which we can, then we can also see a mind in any action that willfully causes injury to another player. We can judge – and more especially, trained officials can judge – when a player intended to injure another. We admit we can’t tell perfectly. Dirty players can make an elbow hitting an opponent’s nose look accidental. Sometimes. But the majority of the time, because we know so well how human bodies move, we know when we see a dirty tackle.

In other words, we can tell when someone is responsible for an entertaining, graceful action, and when she is responsible for a mean, vicious action, and we can then mete out praise or blame, reward or punishment, appropriately. Reward skill, cooperation, and respect. Punish cheating and viciousness, which are demonstrated in attempts to surreptitiously violate the rules or to injure or both.

This is moral philosophy in action.

Thus, we see that sports reveal our implicit belief in human free will, and also that attached inescapably to free will comes responsibility for our actions. Freedom and responsibility are two sides of the same coin, and both are assumed in sports.

Actions in sport that demonstrate physical skill combined with keen, winning attitude all balanced with respect for the rules of the game and sportsmanlike play – these are the actions we praise most highly. These are the actions that inspire us to cheer so loudly. Humans demonstrating mastery over stuff while still respecting the rights and dignity of other humans.  

 

                                Benatio tripping Aguera in Munich vs. Man City game 

                          (credit: Landov/Press Association Images, via the Daily Mail) 

Thus, in sports, actions have consequences. Particularly sportsmanlike players are paid huge salaries, but also given praise and trophies for the character shown in their play. 

“Fifty goals in fifty games this hockey season. And the fewest penalty minutes of any player active in the past year. He doubly deserves all this credit and praise. He has demonstrated for us all, that, for a while, to an exciting degree, a human mind, via the body it is attached to, can control ‘things’.”

And that’s the fascination of sport. For a little while, through our sports heroes, we rise up and defy gravity, space, matter, energy, time … and even death.

When we play the game hard, fight a clean fight, give our all for the whole hour, we celebrate and exult in our sometime mastery over things. And we do it while cooperating with fellow humans, some from races, creeds, sexual orientations, and so on, very different from our own. That is moral philosophy in action. Sports reveal that humans really do have this capacity. We can live together and interact and still get along.

Sports so closely mirror the human condition that they can even evolve. Coaching philosophies, skills, styles of play, sometimes even rules – all of these change as morés and technologies change. For example, soccer balls today are better made and are much lighter than they were fifty years ago. Why would the governing bodies that control how the sport is played ever allow these new kinds of balls to come into the game? Where was their respect for the traditions of soccer?

The new balls were taken up by the governing body of the game simply because they made the playing of the game more exciting. The degree of mastery over ‘things’ that players can show with the lighter ball is very gratifying for fans to watch. FIFA officials could see that, so they chose to make the change. And it worked. Today, soccer is far and away the world’s most popular sport.  

Finally, then to sum up, I will repeat that I find it entirely reasonable to believe that humans have free will, that they can be held responsible for their actions, that it is feasible for other humans to hold them accountable for those actions, and reward and praise them for skilful and moral actions and punish them for immoral ones. And then mete out the reward or blame appropriately nearly every time. Why do I believe these claims? Because evidence from sport supports them.

The ‘realness’ of the reality we see. Our high degree of control over that reality, at least at our level of resolution. Our resulting capacity to be held responsible for our actions in the real world. The idea that observed details can reveal to an outside observer whether an action is moral or immoral. All of these beliefs are affirmed every time the players take the field.

Sports don’t prove beyond all possible logical challenge that any of these philosophical claims are true. But in sports, all these claims are assumed, provisionally, every day. Then, those who assume them act on the assumptions. 

And they work.

What makes 'right'? Playing by the rules that you agreed to play by before the contest began. Accepting the outcome, win or lose, gracefully, then moving on. 

What makes 'wrong'? Violating the rules by trying to cheat, trying to win by kinds of action that the rules forbid, especially when the violation shows to the large majority of neutral observers that an intent to injure another person, in ways that the rules forbid, was guiding that action. 


 

                            Ali knocking out Foreman in Zaire, Oct. 30, 1974 

                                   (credit: Associated Press, via the Guardian) 

Even boxers, intent on knocking each other senseless, striking each other with all the force they can muster, fight under a set of rules. 

And that is what makes 'good'. 

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, enjoy the game.