The intellectual nature of sports, is it a diversion?

["Noah P. Evans" <ishbak@conknet.com>]

This is an excerpt from an interview with Chomsky included in _the Chomsky
Reader_(readily available in Harvard Square in Wordsworth's and The Coop for
all of you Bostonians out there). While laden with scientific jargon, it
does have a few gems regarding the nature of sports and their relationship
to society that we might want to consider. I *don't* agree with a lot of
what Chomsky says, but I do think his ideas are, at the very least,
interesting and sometimes, at their best, profound.

Noah

JP=James Peck

NC=Noam Chomsky

<
JP:

	You've written about the way that professional ideologists and the
mandarins obfuscate reality. And you have spoken--in some places you call it
a "Cartesian common sense"--of the commonsense capacities of people. Indeed,
you place a significant emphasis on this common sense when you reveal the
ideological aspects of arguments, especially in contemporary social science.
What do you mean by common sense? What does it mean in a society like our?
For example, you've written that within a highly competitive, fragmented
society, it's very difficult for people to become aware of what their
interests are. If you are not able to participate in the political system in
meaningful ways, if you are reduced to the role of a passive spectator, then
what kind of knowledge do you have? How can common sense emerge in this
context?

NC:

Let me give an example. When I'm driving, I sometimes turn on the radio and
I find very often that what I'm listening to is a discussion of sports.
These are telephone conversations. People call in and have long and
intricate discussions, and it's plain that quite a high degree of thought
and analysis is going into that. People know a tremendous amount. They know
all sorts of complicated details and enter into far reaching discussions
about whether the coach should made the right decision yesterday and so on.
These are ordinary people, not professionals, who are applying their
intelligence and analytic skills in these areas and accumulating quite a lot
of knowledge and, for all I know, understanding. On the other hand, when I
hear people talk about, say, international affairs or domestic problems,
it's at a level of superficiality that's beyond belief.
	In part, this reaction may be due to my own areas of interest, but I think
it's quite accurate, basically. And I think that this concentration on such
topics as sports makes a certain degree of sense. The way the system is set
up, there is virtually nothing people can do anyway, without a degree of
organization that's far beyond anything that exists now, to influence the
real world. They might as well live in a fantasy world, and that's in fact
what they do. I'm sure they are using their common sense and intellectual
skills, but in an area which has no meaning and probably thrives because it
has no meaning, as a displacement from the serious problems which one cannot
influence and affect because the power happens to lie elsewhere.
		Now it seems to me that the same intellectual skill and capacity for
understanding and accumulating evidence and gaining information and thinking
through problems could be used--would be used-- under different systems of
governance which involve popular participation in important decision making,
in areas that really matter to human life.
	These questions are not hard. There are areas where you need specialized
knowledge. I'm not suggesting a kind of anti-intellectualism. But the point
is that many things can be understood without a very far-reaching,
specialized knowledge. And in fact, even a specialized knowledge in these
areas is not beyond the reach of people who happen to be interested.
	So take simple cases. Take the Russian invasion of Afghanistan--a simple
case. Everybody understands immediately without any specialized knowledge
that the soviet union invaded Afghanistan. That's exactly what it is. You
don't debate it; it's not a deep point that is that difficult to understand.
It isn't necessary to know the history of Afghanistan to understand the
point. All right. Now let's take the American invasion of South Vietnam.
	The phrase itself is very strange. I don't think you will ever find that
phrase--I doubt if you'll find one case where that phrase was used in any
mainstream journal, or for the most part, even in the journals of the left,
while the war is going on. Yet it was just as much of an American invasion
of South Vietnam as it is a Russian invasion of Afghanistan. By 1962, when
nobody was paying attention, American pilots--not just mercenaries but
actual American pilots--were conducting murderous bombing raids against
Vietnamese villages. That's an American invasion of South Vietnam. The
purpose of that attack was to destroy the social fabric of rural South
Vietnam so as to undermine a resistance which the American imposed client
regime had evoked by its repression and was unable to control, though they
had already killed perhaps eighty thousand South Vietnamese since blocking
the political settlement called for in the 1954 Geneva Accords.
	So there was a U.S. attack against South Vietnam in the early sixties, not
to speak of later years when the United States sent an expeditionary force
to occupy the country and destroy the indigenous resistance. But it was
never referred to or thought of as an American invasion of South Vietnam.
	I don't know much about Russian Public opinion, but I imagine if you picked
up a man off the street, he would be surprised to hear a reference to the
Russian invasion of Afghanistan. They're defending Afghanistan against
capitalist plots and bandits supported by the CIA and so on. But I don't
think he would find it difficult to understand that the United States
invaded Vietnam.
	Well, these are very different societies; the mechanisms of control and
indoctrination work in a totally different fashion. There's a vast
difference in the use of force versus other techniques. But the effects are
very similar, and the effects extend to the intellectual elite themselves.
In fact, my guess is that you would find the intellectual elite is the most
indoctrinated sector, for good reasons. It's their role as a secular
priesthood to really believe the nonsense they put forth. Other people can
repeat it, but it's not crucial they really believe it. But for the
intellectual elite themselves, it's critical that believe it because, after
all, they are the guardians of the faith. Except for the very rare person
who's just an outright liar, it's hard to be a convincing exponent of the
faith unless you've internalized it and come to believe it. I find that
intellectuals just look at me with blank stares of incomprehension when I
talk about the American invasion of South Vietnam. On the other hand, when I
speak to general audiences, they don't seem to have much difficulty in
perceiving the essential points, once the facts are made accessible. And
that's perfectly reasonable--that's what should be expected of a society
that's set up the way ours is.
	When I talk about, say, Cartesian common sense, what I mean is that it does
not require very far-reaching, specialized knowledge to perceive that the
United States was invading South Vietnam. And, in fact, take apart that
system of illusions and deception which functions to prevent understanding
of contemporary reality, that's not a task that requires extraordinary skill
or understanding. It requires the kind of normal skepticism and willingness
to apply one's analytical skills that almost all people have and can
exercise. It just happens that they exercise them in analyzing what the New
England Patriots ought to do next Sunday instead of questions that really
matter for human life, their own included. >