Sports and Politics

Jul 3

I’m not much of a sports guy. I’m fairly athletic, but that’s very different from being interested in the world of sports, with its teams and leagues and billion-dollar spectacles. I’ve never had a favorite franchise, I’ve never watched the superbowl, and I can count on one hand the number of live games I’ve been to in my 43 years. I prefer trail running to tailgating. And, I must admit, I feel pretty superior about it.

Like I said, I’m athletic, but I’ve never felt like I was cut out for team sports. I played soccer in high school, but that’s because it was a small school and the bar was low. They’d take anybody. I could run fast; that was enough. So my condescension probably masks some insecurity, and in this I’m not so different from the rest of my ilk. Pointy-headed intellectuals pride themselves on being less prejudiced than the hoi-polloi, but we’ve got a glaring conflict of interest when it comes to judging the relative merits of brains and brawn. We also pride ourselves on our immunity to logical fallacies, but few dichotomies are so false as that one. Faculty are on firmer ground when they complain about the predominance of athletics over academics on our campuses. While colleges do aim to educate the so-called “whole person,” not just the person’s brain, it seems pretty ridiculous when an institution whose essential purpose is to train minds pays their football coaches more (much more) than their professors. On my campus, where 70% of the students play at least one sport, we all complain about this ad nauseum. Why should brawn rule brain’s rightful territory?

But I have recently been revising my views. If there’s anything we faculty complain about more than sports, it’s technology. You know the drill: these devices, and especially these new AI programs, are destroying what’s left of the ivory tower’s pretensions to be anything more than a very expensive diploma mill. Dan Sarofian-Butin, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, puts it in suitably stark terms. ChatGPT “collapses the entire process of teaching and learning (thoughtful, recursive, effortful) into an instantaneous, efficient, and polished transaction – no struggle, no iteration, no friction. It creates the perfect performative illusion of teaching and learning.” This is so obvious that I don’t know why we’re still debating it. But it occurs to me – and this thought comes as a surprise – that if there is one part of college life that is still relatively immune to this collapse, it’s sports.

It’s possible to use ChatGPT to write a paper for you; it’s not possible to use ChatGPT to win a football game. Everything else is falling to the AI, which can now create paintings, films, books, and music. Never mind that none of it is very good and that some of it is downright creepy; the point is that the shortcuts are available, and that people will take them. In sports, by contrast, there are no shortcuts like this, even if old-fashioned cheating still happens. It is simply not possible to play and win without “struggle, iteration, and friction.” If it were, nobody would watch, or at least I like to think so. It’s built into the activity in an especially robust way – maybe because it’s so embodied, and we still don’t have robots (we’ll see what happens when the robots start playing football). So I’m surprised to realize that sports might be something like an antidote to the poison that’s coursing through the university’s veins. At the very least it offers me an analogy that might be persuasive to students who know from experience that the struggle for excellence is the essence of the sports they cherish, but have trouble understanding that this is also the essence of scholarship. If you send a robot to run your plays, you’re not an athlete; you’re a wimp. Same thing if you send an AI to write your paper. More than an analogy, sports offers a large number of average people a concrete experience that could ground some resistance to the onslaught of mediocrity.

But this isn’t just about colleges and college students. People everywhere are less passionate than they used to be about a lot of things I wish they still cared about, yet many of them still care a lot about sports. The same tech-induced or tech-exacerbated mediocrity afflicts our politics, and I wonder if the passion for sports is and could become more of an anchor in that storm. Maybe people like me, who tend to see sports as a distraction from “the real issues,” would do well to consider whether the real issues might be more tractable if we were a little more sporting about them.

There’s a long tradition of theorizing the link between sports and politics, especially when politics turns to war and empire. The Duke of Wellington said that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, and critics have been drawing the same connection between American football and American imperialism at least since the Bush years. Scholars of sport regularly pen articles with titles like “Cricket and Colonialism: Toward a Political Theory of Sport” (“the internal norms and rules of cricket simultaneously perpetuate an oppressive social structure and articulate the beginnings of an emancipatory political project”). You can trace this back to the very beginning, when Plato argued in The Republic that political harmony required a rigorous education in which the training of the body was just as important as the training of the mind (and, in an aside which never fails to amuse the average sophomore, that women should train naked with men).

American politics today (not to mention global politics) is distinguished by an increasingly cacophonous disharmony between “the elites” and “the people.” This is an old story, but the elites in this case are not the rich; rather they are the “experts,” are the ones who make the decisions, and they make their decisions on the basis of something they call facts. Quantifiable facts, in particular. Experts believe in numbers. By contrast, the people are the ones who watch the experts making their decisions, and the people have some very strong feelings about those decisions. While it’s not really accurate, since both groups claim to have both the right facts and the appropriate feelings on their side, it’s also not unhelpful to gloss the situation as a divide between a self-described “party of facts” and an out-and-proud “party of feelings.” “Facts,” columnist Paul Krugman so smugly put it, “have a well-known liberal bias.” Meanwhile, Donald Trump prefers alternative facts, and generally likes to go with his gut (which prefers cheeseburgers).

I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. But I’ll note that the same kind of technocrat-populist divide is present in contemporary sports, where the managerial ethos of statistics-driven “moneyball” contends with critics who say it ruins the game (and that the idea of “moneyball for everything” has led to similar deterioration in other domains). At the same time, moneyball works; while a few romantics might long for the old days, fans also want their teams to win, and that gives popular cover to the experts who can deliver, even if they are depriving the game of its heart. The political theorist Jan Werner-Meuller argues that technocrats and populists aren’t really enemies; rather, both are enemies of genuine citizenship, which is something different. In the same way, there’s an unspoken complicity between those who wish to rationalize every aspect of a sport, in order to produce a perfected spectacle of victory, and those who seek in their sports nothing more than that spectacle. The party of facts paints by numbers, and the party of feelings says “look at the pretty picture.”

Once you start looking, you see this same complicity in all kinds of places. But the most concrete example is all that shiny new technology I mentioned before. A small number of brilliant, hardworking experts use an enormous amount of technical knowledge to produce devices and programs that are used by millions of people mainly to consume spectacular “content” that makes them dumber and lazier. As Matthew Crawford put it, quoting Barbara Garson: “Extraordinary human ingenuity has been used to eliminate the need for human ingenuity.” And this brings me back to my suggestion, which is that sports might be something like a site of resistance to this general flattening of political life into what Max Weber called “specialists without spirit” and “sensualists without heart.”

A more “sporting” approach to our political life would be one in which leaders do not promise, and citizens do not expect, an “instantaneous, efficient, and polished transaction,” and are therefore not so easily frustrated when politics turns out to involve “struggle,” “iteration,” and “friction.” Werner-Meuller’s argument about technocrats and populists is that they mirror each other in exactly this way. Both believe that there is only one correct and legitimate answer to a political question, and that the presence of disagreement is a bug, not a feature. But disagreement is an essential feature of politics; if you don’t have disagreement, you don’t have politics. Rather you have “the perfect performative illusion” of politics, just as ChatGPT gives you an illusion of education.

A more sporting approach would therefore be one in which the skills required for playing politics well – the arts of persuasion – are admired as virtues, not confused with one of several possible means to the end of electoral success. And sports, perhaps more than any other activity, still inculcate in citizens the subtle lesson that “victory,” while appearing to be the goal, is actually the means to a higher end. Athletes aim to win, but the whole idea of “sportsmanship” that is winning isn’t everything, and that what’s really worth admiring is not victory but excellence in the pursuit, as well as grace in defeat. If it weren’t so, we wouldn’t have any compunctions about cheating, which is just a word for what we do when we choose the more “instantaneous, efficient, and polished” method for getting from point A to point B. But we know what cheating is, especially in sports, and we seem to care an awful lot about it for what is supposed to be “only a game.” That’s because games matter. Tossing a ball through a hoop is by itself not very significant, but how you conduct yourself on the court shows something about who you are. The game of politics matters in the same way, but we are unfortunately less offended by political cheating, which is more than just rigging elections. Politics is about persuasion; cheating in politics can look like manipulation, which is about activating strong feelings that foreclose debate (“trust your gut”), or it can look like “depoliticization,” which is about foreclosing debate by declaring contestable issues to be matters of incontestable fact (“follow the science”). Either way, it’s the same thing: the collapse of politics into anti-political illusion, whether it’s spreadsheets of technocratic moneyball, or something more like the populist spectacle of pro wrestling.

To the extent that sports itself is threatened by the same problem (and it is), it won’t be able to serve as any kind of civic education. The saving grace, though, is that while many are certainly content to be nothing but fans – spectators who just want the show – sports is still something that a lot of people actually do, or have done. The 70% of students on my campus who are athletes are surely fans of this or that team, but they are also more than fans. They have concrete, personal experience of struggle and friction, and they know that in some sense that struggle is the point, because the real aim is not victory but excellence. Furthermore, when they watch a game, they bring that experience with them, and that makes it possible for them to be a spectator without being a passive consumer of spectacle. If more citizens had the same kind of active relationship to what they watch on the news, it would make for a healthier democracy, even if most citizens aren’t making the news. This means encouraging more people to play the political game – not in the big leagues, just in the places where they live. It’s good that so many of my students play sports, even if most of them aren’t going to the NFL (though it would be even better if fewer of them were under the illusion that they were going to the NFL). In the same way, it would be good if more people got involved in their local political life.

The fact that I myself don’t have this kind of experience is more of a loss than I’ve appreciated. I might have played more sports in my younger years, not to pad a resume but just to have fun, and I might have played more politics, too. Of course, you can’t do everything, and I don’t have any regrets. But I’d understand things differently if I had.