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

[Ken Mattina <mattinak@teleport.com>]

Hi Noah,

Are you Andy Kauffman in disguise?  

Just wondering. ;-)

You should do The Great Gatsby next week.

Ken




At 03:26 PM 8/10/98 -0400, Noah P. Evans wrote:
>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
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>JP=James Peck
>
>NC=Noam Chomsky
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>JP:
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>	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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mattinak@teleport.com
mattinak@ohsu.edu