Why I Said What I Said About Sports

Today in the office it came up, though I can’t at the moment remember how, that I happened to be in broad—though qualified—agreement with an idea that is apparently considered common sense among a certain faction of liberals in America: that sports generally serve as a distraction from things that matter in one’s life. Chomsky has outright said this (stated it, for example, in an interview included in the documentary Manufacturing Consent), but of course Chomsky is one of those people I both admire and have issues with.

In any case, I knew in stating my belief that there is some truth to this, that there would be some hostility to the idea. No, wait, what I knew was that it was going to have a very dubious reception at best. After all, since about January the main topic of widespread discussion in the office (aside from problems we’re having with administration, or how we have junk PCs) has been the playoffs and scores and players in whatever game has happened to be in season.

The discussions have been loud, but of course those of us annoyed by it have had the common sense to just shut up. You can’t go around telling people not to talk about sports 90% of the time, no matter how annoying it is, when you have a shared office space. Of course, at the same time, it’s not like I play music in the office, though it’s a comparable passion for me, and I don’t start lengthy and loud discussions of musical theory with Myoung either. Still, I recognize that I’m in the minority in thinking it’s just a bit annoying when I have to listen to sports talk all the time. (Oh, and for a while it was computer games, which was less loud and bothersome to me, but more constant for a short time.)

But that’s not why I said what I said.

I’ve been thinking about why I said what I said. One of the things I’ve noticed is that, with the exception of one person I can think of, the people who are all continually fascinated with game scores have been—and this is not a castigation, believe me—but I’ll say it even at the risk of it being taken the wrong way and the rest of this not being read. They’ve been American males.

Now, before you flood my comments box, please bear in mind I’m not bashing these people in my office. I have good working relationships with most of them despite in some cases wideningly apparent ideological differences. They’re mostly okay folks, something I can assert happily because a lot of our differences don’t matter much to me anyway. They’re generous enough to share, they’re nice enough to inquire as to things like my health. They’re nice people.

I’m also not bashing America as a nation, or American culture, though I am looking at certain aspects of it critically. I am also trying to clear out my thoughts a little, and point my finger at something I was kind of trying to say today, and saying pretty badly because I was self-censoring for the sake of office relations, and because I felt from the look I was given when I said what I said that there’d be little point in trying to really explain. Well, in the office there might be… but here, in what seems to be both public diary and a clearing-house for my thoughts, I have every reason to clarify my thinking.

So here is what my thinking is: Consumerist societies are filled with endless distractions (termed industries) that work to consumerize others. Because a person’s free time and energy is finite, the way a person becomes more of a consumer is by giving up other avenues for the expenditure of energy and time.

That is, the more of a good consumer you become, the less of anything else you become.

This is not a radical observation, though you’re probably guessing right that I’m going in a direction that might seem radical. Bear with me, and see if they radical conclusions I come to maybe actually follow from this simple, sensible assertion. For I think it shouldn’t meet too much resisance. For example, Christians should be nodding their heads and recalling that their Messiah pointed out the same thing, calling for people to put nothing before him for fear of pursuing their salvation in any degree of distraction. This is a conventional understanding of Jesus’ injunction to leave all else behind and follow him, as well as his comment regarding rich men, eyes of needles, and the gates of heaven.

Wait, you say, so is this therefore a positive appraisal of organized religion coming from Gord?

Heavens, no. For all the good it can (and does) do people, religion is far too often a kind of commodity which is “consumed” by “adherents”. People are sold on a kind of whole worldview that goes with a religion, and it’s naturalized as part of their culture. Their religion defines their whole reality, rather than simply shining like a light and inspiring them to look at reality more closely and joyfully. My favorite philosopher, Kierkegaard, railed against this. His writings constituted a war with Christendom, though he was deeply Christian. Because the Church had primary allegiance to Christian society and its own continued existence (and this is, bear in mind, the Lutheran Church, which was not very Protestant at all in Kierkegaard’s day), he railed against it because really, what it was doing was selling a comforting belief in the current social orde,r instead of the radical vision of truth-seeking he detected at the heart of Christianity, something that would necessarily be at odds with comfortable faith.

In response to the question, “Do you mean the established order can assure my eternal salvation?”

Why certainly. And if with regard to this matter you encounter in the end some obstacle, can you not be contented like all the others, when your last hour has come, to go well baled and crated in one of the large shipments which the established order sends straight through to heaven under its own seal and plainly addressed to