Spirit of the game

Though I was not a natural sportsman, forces associated with school and family pushed me into various sporting activities which (as I see even more clearly in retrospect than I did at the time) I endured rather than enjoyed.

Back then I pooh-poohed the idea that sports, especially team sports, were character-building. Quite the opposite, I thought. Observing the behavior of teammates and opponents alike, I came to believe that playing sports only serves to bring out our worst qualities. I have come to modify this point of view however.

One positive thing which can be said for traditional games and sports is that, because they reflect (at least to some extent) the harsh and intractable realities of a wider world, they serve to counter Walter Mitty-like tendencies. And this could be seen to be ever more important as gaming and virtual reality technologies extend the possibilities of personalized escapist fantasies in ways that Thurber could never have imagined.

Sporting contests can also teach you to lose – and to win – with grace and equanimity. This may be more about manners than morals but it is no less important for that.

As I see it, the only strictly moral benefit of an initiation into traditional sporting culture relates to the idea of fair play: of playing by the rules – and the spirit of the rules. I don’t want to go on about this. I could elaborate and give examples etc., but I am wary of moralizing. Besides, I am inclined to think that if these concepts are not real to you already, nothing I say will make them so.

I don’t want to claim that there is this special way of looking at human interactions – i.e. in terms of fair play and abiding by the spirit of agreed-upon rules or laws – which is accessible only to those who have had the benefit of certain experiences in childhood or adolescence, though it's possible that this is the case.

Some experience with sports or games may (conceivably at least) represent a necessary condition for seeing things in the way I describe, but it is certainly not a sufficient condition. For there are and always will be those natural thugs who bring their thuggishness to everything they do, including sport. In the realm of sports and games these people are often feared, but they are (or at least were in my experience) generally despised by players and sophisticated spectators alike.

The failing or failed sportsman is often a devoted sports fan, and (from about the age of ten) I was definitely that. I have autographs of many of the cricketing greats to prove it. But as I grew older I gradually lost interest. Moreover, changes in the general culture of the game were making it progressively less attractive. Now sports exist for me only to the extent that my exposure to them helped to form me and to the extent that they feature in my personal memories (two quite different things).

Technical and aesthetic factors are important but it is ultimately the human side of things which give sports an abiding interest to players and spectators alike. It helps that the conflicts and dramas usually stop short of anything too distressing. In wars, you have death in battle; in politics moral dilemmas, all sorts of unpleasantness and very little in the way of style or grace or beauty.

Sports and games occupy a protected space. In this and in other ways adult sports – at their best, at any rate – can be seen to represent, like the arts, a kind of benign hangover, an extension of certain aspects of childhood.

What prompted these reflections was coming across, by chance, an old cricketing story from the early 20th century. The story is quite moving, actually, and worth retelling. But, though it probably has some emblematic significance, my original idea – to see it as underscoring "the massive gulf which lies between the sporting culture which characterized the British Empire and the professional sporting culture which dominates today's world" – was clearly overblown. So scratch that. I’ll just tell the story. Make of it what you will.

First a bit of background to set the scene. Victor Trumper was born in 1877 in the British colony of New South Wales. A natural sportsman and brilliant cricketer, he was much loved and revered, both for his playing and for his natural humility. He is probably best remembered today as the subject of a photograph by George Beldam, taken when the batsman was in full flight at The Oval in London. This image is probably the most famous in the game's history. Dancing down the pitch, with a huge backswing, Trumper is poised – perfectly balanced – to execute a straight drive.

Trumper was one of the most gifted strokeplayers of all time. The writer A.A. Thomson recorded recollections of one of his great innings: "It was glory, it was wonder. Old men who saw it recall it with tears…" Trumper died of Bright's disease in 1915, at the age of 37.

As a very young man, leg-spin bowler Arthur Mailey encountered Trumper – his idol – in a club game in Sydney.

"This meeting had been nervously anticipated by Mailey," writes Chris Waters in an historical piece for the Yorkshire Post. "[M]ight something happen to prevent his hero from playing in the match (“a war, an earthquake, Trumper might fall sick”), or might Mailey’s captain not bring him on to bowl against the maestro, fearing that the youngster might take a terrible pounding?"

But Trumper played and Mailey was indeed brought on to bowl to him. And Mailey achieved something beyond his wildest dreams – he had Trumper stumped off a perfect googly.

As Trumper walked past Mailey on his way back to the pavilion, he smiled, patted the back of his bat and said, "It was too good for me."

Mailey recalls in his autobiography that he felt no sense of triumph as he watched the receding figure.

"I felt like a boy who had killed a dove," he wrote.

[This piece was published earlier in the year at The Electric Agora.]

Sentimental education

Perhaps it has got something to do with having a father who was considerably older than my mother – and who himself was regularly mistaken for someone of an even earlier generation than the one he in fact belonged to – but I have always felt more culturally connected to times previous to my own. I am drawn, for example, to the intellectual culture of the early-to-mid 20th century, and to the latter part of that period for popular culture.

As a young undergraduate, I always used to prefer the late-in-the-day tutorials scheduled for the benefit of part-time, 'mature aged' students. They came on their way home from work in the city, the men in suits, the women smartly dressed and smelling of perfume. They knew stuff I didn't know and had strong opinions about things I had never really thought or even heard about.

There was a woman in her late twenties perhaps whom I used to talk to a lot when I was in my second year. She seemed slightly old-fashioned, out of her time somehow. And it turned out that she had quite – unusual – ideas.

For she had something of an obsession with someone I had only vaguely heard of, someone who was obviously a hero for her and who represented an apparently lost but (in her eyes) glorious cause – the fascist leader, Oswald Mosley. But politics (or political history) was not something I had strong opinions about at the time, and I just took her views as one aspect of a slightly odd and intriguing personality.

Not only the student population but also the academic staff (in stark contrast to today's equivalents) reflected a variety of political and social views, from left to right to totally apolitical.

I took a course on W.B. Yeats which influenced me quite deeply. It was taught by a Hungarian who had written a dissertation at Cambridge on 18th-century English gardens and who was very much in sympathy with Yeats's fin de siècle aestheticism as well as his general political tendencies and social views.

As a young student, I was – like the typical student character in a 19th-century novel – almost drowning in Romanticism. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Emily Brontë, Gérard de Nerval, Baudelaire.

Two French novels I read around that time, Adolphe by Benjamin Constant and L'Education sentimentale by Gustave Flaubert, were each centred on a relationship between a younger man and an older woman: dark unpleasant books both of them, but strangely alluring. They and other Romantic texts coloured all my interactions and relationships (or non-relationships!) at the time.

Everything – especially everything female – was seen by me through a kind of literary lens which in retrospect I could have really done without. All that Romantic and pre-Raphaelite baggage made me quite as blind to immediate reality as (in a rather different way) the Mosleyite woman was.

In subsequent years I have come to reject just about everything associated with the Romantic movement. Except one thing, its one true – and overwhelmingly important – insight into the nature of reality: that, morally speaking, the natural world is value-free – there are no values in nature.*

The 18th-century philosophes saw themselves as science-driven and enlightened thinkers, but their deism perpetuated classical notions of a divinely guided universe. Ironically, it took the radical (and often self-consciously emotional) upheaval of the Romantic period to clear the way for a truly scientific and secular view of the world.



* Of course, I don't mean to deny that living beings have values and human beings have moral values, and that we constitute part of the natural world. But since the Romantic period it has been much harder to maintain the view that human values are somehow reflected in – or derive from – non-human realities, whether natural or supernatural. (This point – or one very like it – was made by Isaiah Berlin.)

Different drum

A comment from a school report on academic progress (the high point in fact) for a ten-year-old boy of my acquaintance:

David is an enthusiastic and creative percussionist.

David was diagnosed as autistic some years ago, but he attends a mainstream school.

Thinking back to my own school days, I must say that the more creative and percussive types tended, for better or for worse, not to get a lot of positive recognition or encouragement.

Clearly, a balance must be struck, but I am inclined to think that the fashionable emphasis on creativity is unfortunate, and often represents a cop-out by educators as well as contributing to giving students a somewhat problematic value hierarchy.

Whether you look at creativity in the arts or the sciences, significant creative achievement has always been based on self-discipline and a long and hard apprenticeship.

That said, some people do have a much greater potential for original and creative work than others. But too much early and easy praise can undermine the development of any innate gift or talent.

Because he is (mildly) autistic, David's case raises other issues. I can't help feeling, for instance, that the policies of closing special schools and putting children with learning disabilities into mainstream schools and classrooms is not to the children's benefit.

David certainly has problems, but over the years he has shown – not true savant-like abilities – but apparently remarkable aptitudes in various areas, and not just in reading notation and banging a drum.

I know my own values are obtrubing here! But the point remains that no attempt has been made by his educators to develop any of these aptitudes in a sustained way.

As it is all too often the case that parents of autistic children are under a lot of pressure and struggle just to get by from day to day, some kind of formal framework especially designed for children with these sorts of problems would certainly ease the burden and give the children a better chance of fulfilling their potential.

[I am looking again at the views of Simon Baron-Cohen (and others) on autism, and expect to post on the topic from time to time – both here (when policies and opinions are at issue) and at Language, Life and Logic (where the focus is more on the science).]

Sinister influences

In a pluralistic society it seems sensible to let the market decide as far as possible who should be paid for doing what. The market may not itself be moral but ultimately it does reflect the values of market participants and in fact can provide fertile ground for the development and growth of many human virtues, such as prudence and a sense of responsibility.

It's all very well to say that someone should be paid to perform some (presumably worthwhile) activity, but if businesses or individuals are unwilling to fund them then any money must come from the state, from public resources. And - especially in these times of high government indebtedness - a strong case can be made that controversial or ideologically motivated activities or activities which are normally deemed to be inessential or which only benefit a small group should (whenever possible) be paid for directly by those involved.

Take sport and the arts. There is nothing to stop people getting together to play games if they want to. There is nothing to stop people putting on concerts or plays; and, if the product is popular, the audience will pay. Why should I subsidize writers or artists or performers in whom I have no interest and who, in many cases (given the left-leaning tendency of the arts community), are seeking to undermine the values I hold most dear?

I know that sports and the arts constitute only a small fraction of government budgets, but these areas are not discrete or easily defined, and they impinge on and merge into other more significant areas of government concern. For example, the arts merge into the media, advertising and propaganda. And sports funding is associated with community health initiatives. Nanny state, yes, but at least sport (unlike much activity in the arts) is not ideological.

Much arts funding is more about promoting multiculturalism (or, more cynically, about placating certain ethnic minorities) or winning votes from the broader 'arts community' than it is about encouraging artistic excellence (whatever that may be these days). But then, why should the state promote artistic excellence anyway? It is a good and worthwhile thing, but let it be left to artists to excel and to their followers to reward them.

At the elite end of the spectrum, both sport and the arts are used by governments to promote the 'national brand', an unfortunate tendency that appears - at least in respect of the arts in some European countries and in respect of sport just about everywhere - to have popular support.

Although the number of people directly employed by governments may be falling in some Western countries, the number who work for organizations which are dependent on government funding - including international organizations - is growing. And in areas such as health, education and aged care many mainstream churches and previously-independent welfare organizations have become mere 'service providers', following government rules and dependent on government largesse for their continued existence.

More insidious - if not sinister - is the way many groups espousing and promoting so-called progressive causes have inserted themselves, formally or informally, into the bureaucracy of national and local governments, redirecting resources and effectively reshaping the ethos of these bodies. Institutions and bureaucracies devoted to education are particularly culpable in this regard.

More broadly, laws and government regulations - promoted and encouraged by unions and other left-wing pressure groups - are making it increasingly difficult in many countries for businesses to make decisions about their own operations, including hiring and firing.

Similar constraints are being placed on professionals of all kinds. Once the professional-client relationship was, though essentially market-based, associated with well-understood and respected ethical standards. Direct and indirect government intrusions on this relationship are effectively undermining the very concept of the independent professional who maintains a direct relationship with clients based on trust and a sense of responsibility.

Freedom does not guarantee morality, but morality will only develop in the context of freedom, and withers in a highly regulated environment.

Summoned by bells

Schools run by, or under the auspices of, mainstream churches were once the mainstay of conservative values in many Western countries. The schoolmasters and schoolmistresses of times past were natural conservatives, valuing hierarchies of authority, almost military (or monastic?) routine, and a relatively stable body of cultural lore to be passed on - Christian texts, Greek and Roman texts, and various literary works in English and European languages.

In many ways this traditional amalgam of Greek, Roman and Christian ideas became a liability for the West because of the high prestige accorded to classical learning and literature, and the low status attached to science and technology. Nietzsche, steeped in the classical tradition, saw science as democratic and levelling. At the school I attended from the age of nine to the age of seventeen - an institution which carried the Middle Ages well into the second half of the 20th century - Latin and French were high-prestige subjects and, before some long-overdue renovations, our chemistry laboratory would have made any time-travelling alchemists feel right at home.

But there is no doubt that the West's shared cultural traditions helped to create a sense of social harmony at home and the sense of belonging to a wider world; that the widespread teaching and learning of Latin and Greek helped to create self-discipline and a sense of history; and that the tedium of regular services in the school chapel taught the invaluable but dying art of sitting still.