Re: The intellectual nature of sports, is it a diversion?

[Shawn Roth <ufpdev!shawnr@uunet.uu.net>]

Do you have nothing better to do then post this drivel?  Most people don't want
to understand this let alone read it.  Please tell me you didn't type all this
stuff yourself.....if you did, do you have a job?  

Go Celts!!!

Shawn

P.S.  Because of the loss at the worlds, not that I'm upset about it, we have
to play in to get into the 2000 Olympics.  We finished third with a bunch of
NBA rejects.  Don't you think we should get an exemption just for that?  I mean
FIBA should be happy that we allowed games to be competative.  So they should
be thanking us, and begging us to do it again.

Originally from Noah P. Evans:
> 
> 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. >
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