Josiah Royce
∞
College Football and Moral Education
Lately I've been pondering the significance of college sports. In the United States, nearly every college or university devotes significant resources to athletic facilities, coaches, and teams. It's so prevalent, we don't think of how peculiar it is that we have so closely united academics and athletics. Plenty of theorists of education have suggested that there is a natural connection between playfully educating the body and educating the mind, but it is not always obvious that there's a natural link between having a basketball team and having a strong math department, for instance.
Whenever I read an article in the local paper about a local talented high school athlete who has signed with a college sports team, I wonder why we don't report that a local talented debater, chess expert, or math student just made it into Harvard or the University of Chicago on the basis of her talent. It makes me wonder: Do we not care about intellectual ability as much we care about physical prowess?
In 1908 Harvard Philosophy professor Josiah Royce published an essay entitled "Football and Ideals." The essay is over a century old, but the topic and the ideas sound like they could have been written yesterday. Royce writes, "Football is at present a great social force in our country. It has long been so. Apparently it is destined to remain so." So far, this is correct.
In Royce's time football was still largely a college sport. (The NFL was founded twelve years later.) Just as college sports in the United States do today, it drew big crowds. Just as in our time, football had its scandals: severe injuries among players; hooliganism among the crowds; and unethical behavior among players off the field and among fans and gamblers.
And just as in our time, supporters of the sport claimed that football did more social good than harm.
In his essay, Royce takes all of this seriously. Any social force this great deserves to be examined, Royce says, in order to determine what social goods it provides, and at what cost. Only a few play, but all of us are affected by the sport. He puts it like this:
We often hear this expressed in similar terms today when proponents of college sports say that participation in sports fosters virtues like teamwork, or school spirit.
I think participation in athletics actually can do even more than this. As an educator, I have noticed that college athletes are often some of my most disciplined students. In general, they wake up early, take care of their bodies, and get their work done. There are exceptions, of course, but this has been the case with most of my student-athletes, anyway. Perhaps this is because I teach philosophy, and the weak students shy away from it because it is a difficult subject with no obvious cash value for their lives. In any event, my student athletes generally keep up the "student" part of that title fairly well. Being an athlete can provide numerous benefits for a student.
But this is only a small part of the question, isn't it? Royce reminds us that the question we are asking is not "Does playing football help the student-athlete?" but "Does football on campuses make us and our communities better?" In other words, this is not a question about the athlete but about the spectators. It is really a question about us.
This question is not a soft, squishy, depends-on-what-you-mean question. Royce has something very specific in mind: does the example of others' athleticism make you more ready to "go and do likewise," or does it merely thrill you? Or does it even sap your desire and ability to demonstrate similar excellence and loyalty?
Royce says that "if a man has only taught you to cheer him, he has so far only amused you," and if football has only allowed you to "let off steam" without making you "more practically devoted to your own tasks," then it has not made you better but possibly it has even stripped you of your moral strength.
This requires honest self-assessment. When you watch football, or other athletic contests (like the World Cup) are you becoming a better person, one more able to devote yourself to the tasks that strike you as worthy of your energies? Are you developing a deeper loyalty to others, and deeper respect for the loyalties of others, or does fandom in fact make those goals more difficult to attain?
Note that this is not a critique of football as a game, nor even of college sports as an institution. It is a critique of the spectators, and of the effect sports have on us when we watch them. Are they making us more fit for life together, or are they in fact making us less so?
I will not try to answer that question for now. Royce's conclusion, in his time, was that the conditions of spectating made football unfavorable "to the best moral development of our youth." College sports may be great for the players, but not for those who do not play, he said.
It's not obvious to me that things are now as they were then, but it is obvious to me that football has become a greater social force than it was in Royce's time a century ago. If so, it merits our constant examination. And if we are honest, and good, we will not be content with vague observations about building teamwork in the players. After all, the players never play alone, but always with a crowd. It is not just two teams who play a football game, but those two teams play together with the combined energies of the crowd, and each influences the other.
This should be obvious to us from the simple fact of team selection. Coaches select players from the general body of students (or potential students) in order to win games for the school, not in order to help those select few become better people. At many high schools and colleges, coaches are considered teaching faculty. But there is this important difference between sports teams and academic classes: academic teachers are not permitted to choose which students they will educate, but coaches generally have free rein to eliminate from their tutelage any whom they choose. So while college sports may be similar to classes (inasmuch as they purport to teach) they differ significantly in this respect.
For myself, I am not opposed to college sports. If anything, I would like to expand them to include all students as players, not merely as spectators. After all, if there are moral benefits to playing sports, then why would any institution of higher education not want to urge all of its students to gain that benefit by playing?
Whenever I read an article in the local paper about a local talented high school athlete who has signed with a college sports team, I wonder why we don't report that a local talented debater, chess expert, or math student just made it into Harvard or the University of Chicago on the basis of her talent. It makes me wonder: Do we not care about intellectual ability as much we care about physical prowess?
*****
In 1908 Harvard Philosophy professor Josiah Royce published an essay entitled "Football and Ideals." The essay is over a century old, but the topic and the ideas sound like they could have been written yesterday. Royce writes, "Football is at present a great social force in our country. It has long been so. Apparently it is destined to remain so." So far, this is correct.
In Royce's time football was still largely a college sport. (The NFL was founded twelve years later.) Just as college sports in the United States do today, it drew big crowds. Just as in our time, football had its scandals: severe injuries among players; hooliganism among the crowds; and unethical behavior among players off the field and among fans and gamblers.
And just as in our time, supporters of the sport claimed that football did more social good than harm.
In his essay, Royce takes all of this seriously. Any social force this great deserves to be examined, Royce says, in order to determine what social goods it provides, and at what cost. Only a few play, but all of us are affected by the sport. He puts it like this:
"Football must be estimated as to its general relations to the welfare of society, just as Standard Oil, or just as the railway management which results in killing a larger proportion of railway passengers in our country than in other countries, must be estimated; it must be judged by non-experts, precisely in so far as it influences their great common social concerns."Royce was in one sense a non-expert inasmuch as he was a professor, not a college athlete; but in another sense he was an expert because he had devoted much of his research to this question of ethics and the common good. Royce held that the aim of our moral lives is the fostering of loyalty, and that we can see this in a range of social institutions. He wasn't arguing that we should aim for small and local loyalties, though, but for loyalties that, though they begin and are expressed locally, develop into a broad agape-like loyalty that includes all people.
We often hear this expressed in similar terms today when proponents of college sports say that participation in sports fosters virtues like teamwork, or school spirit.
I think participation in athletics actually can do even more than this. As an educator, I have noticed that college athletes are often some of my most disciplined students. In general, they wake up early, take care of their bodies, and get their work done. There are exceptions, of course, but this has been the case with most of my student-athletes, anyway. Perhaps this is because I teach philosophy, and the weak students shy away from it because it is a difficult subject with no obvious cash value for their lives. In any event, my student athletes generally keep up the "student" part of that title fairly well. Being an athlete can provide numerous benefits for a student.
But this is only a small part of the question, isn't it? Royce reminds us that the question we are asking is not "Does playing football help the student-athlete?" but "Does football on campuses make us and our communities better?" In other words, this is not a question about the athlete but about the spectators. It is really a question about us.
This question is not a soft, squishy, depends-on-what-you-mean question. Royce has something very specific in mind: does the example of others' athleticism make you more ready to "go and do likewise," or does it merely thrill you? Or does it even sap your desire and ability to demonstrate similar excellence and loyalty?
Royce says that "if a man has only taught you to cheer him, he has so far only amused you," and if football has only allowed you to "let off steam" without making you "more practically devoted to your own tasks," then it has not made you better but possibly it has even stripped you of your moral strength.
This requires honest self-assessment. When you watch football, or other athletic contests (like the World Cup) are you becoming a better person, one more able to devote yourself to the tasks that strike you as worthy of your energies? Are you developing a deeper loyalty to others, and deeper respect for the loyalties of others, or does fandom in fact make those goals more difficult to attain?
Note that this is not a critique of football as a game, nor even of college sports as an institution. It is a critique of the spectators, and of the effect sports have on us when we watch them. Are they making us more fit for life together, or are they in fact making us less so?
I will not try to answer that question for now. Royce's conclusion, in his time, was that the conditions of spectating made football unfavorable "to the best moral development of our youth." College sports may be great for the players, but not for those who do not play, he said.
It's not obvious to me that things are now as they were then, but it is obvious to me that football has become a greater social force than it was in Royce's time a century ago. If so, it merits our constant examination. And if we are honest, and good, we will not be content with vague observations about building teamwork in the players. After all, the players never play alone, but always with a crowd. It is not just two teams who play a football game, but those two teams play together with the combined energies of the crowd, and each influences the other.
This should be obvious to us from the simple fact of team selection. Coaches select players from the general body of students (or potential students) in order to win games for the school, not in order to help those select few become better people. At many high schools and colleges, coaches are considered teaching faculty. But there is this important difference between sports teams and academic classes: academic teachers are not permitted to choose which students they will educate, but coaches generally have free rein to eliminate from their tutelage any whom they choose. So while college sports may be similar to classes (inasmuch as they purport to teach) they differ significantly in this respect.
For myself, I am not opposed to college sports. If anything, I would like to expand them to include all students as players, not merely as spectators. After all, if there are moral benefits to playing sports, then why would any institution of higher education not want to urge all of its students to gain that benefit by playing?
∞
Spammer, Think Of Your Soul
I am barraged by spam and robocalls. Most of the email I get is spam, and similarly most of the calls I get are from machines that have been programmed to try to sell me something.
There are several things that bother me about this. One of the simplest is that I am receiving so many calls and emails that I don't want. The emails are a small bother; my spam filter catches some, and I delete the rest. It's tedious but tolerable. The robocalls are a bigger bother, because they've trained me to no longer answer the phone. Everything goes to voicemail unless I recognize the call as coming from a friend or family member.
But what bothers me most is the exclusion of rational conversation. I would love to be able to tell the spammers and robocallers that I, on principle, do not make impulse buys. I do not respond to any emailed ads, and I never buy something offered to me by a stranger over the phone. Nothing you send my way will interest me. In fact, just sending it my way, unsolicited, elicits the opposite response in me.
There is no way to say this, though. There is no conversation to be had. For a while I did answer the phone, and I asked the callers to remove my number from their lists. Until one caller told me, in no uncertain terms, that he would not do so. "But the law requires it," I protested. "No, you motherf***er," he said, "I will not, and there's nothing you can do about it." I protested again, and he again repeated his coarse epithet. There was no conversation to be had with him, unless I was willing to be his cash-provider. To him, I was not even a potential customer. I was a motherf***er, something not to be conversed with, but to be used for income.
One strong appeal of reason is that it is a substitute for violence. If we both want the same thing, we can reason together about whether it is possible to share resources, to take turns, to seek goods elsewhere. If we have a dispute, we do not need to resort to blows; we can seek a resolution in mutually acceptable terms. But we can only do this if our differences can be mediated by reason. When conversation is cut off absolutely, reason's reach is cut short.
Treating other people solely as means to income rather than as ends worthy of their own consideration independent of my interests cuts off conversation by deciding in advance that these mere means can have nothing to say that is worth listening to.
This angers me. In the ten minutes it has taken me to write this, I have received eight emails, seven of them spam. So I must say it here, even if I cannot say it to those who so mistreat me: I will continue to long for your rationality, for your willingness to remain within the bonds of society. But you must know that the habits of your capitalism are not only illegal but unethical and unkind. Which means that you are cutting yourself off from the people around you, one habit at a time. You may be gaining wealth, but what will you do with it? What will it profit you to gain the whole world and to lose the people around you, to lose your very soul? You may think you are gaining, but with each email sent, with each call made, you are spending a sliver of what makes you part of the community of humankind.
There are several things that bother me about this. One of the simplest is that I am receiving so many calls and emails that I don't want. The emails are a small bother; my spam filter catches some, and I delete the rest. It's tedious but tolerable. The robocalls are a bigger bother, because they've trained me to no longer answer the phone. Everything goes to voicemail unless I recognize the call as coming from a friend or family member.
But what bothers me most is the exclusion of rational conversation. I would love to be able to tell the spammers and robocallers that I, on principle, do not make impulse buys. I do not respond to any emailed ads, and I never buy something offered to me by a stranger over the phone. Nothing you send my way will interest me. In fact, just sending it my way, unsolicited, elicits the opposite response in me.
There is no way to say this, though. There is no conversation to be had. For a while I did answer the phone, and I asked the callers to remove my number from their lists. Until one caller told me, in no uncertain terms, that he would not do so. "But the law requires it," I protested. "No, you motherf***er," he said, "I will not, and there's nothing you can do about it." I protested again, and he again repeated his coarse epithet. There was no conversation to be had with him, unless I was willing to be his cash-provider. To him, I was not even a potential customer. I was a motherf***er, something not to be conversed with, but to be used for income.
One strong appeal of reason is that it is a substitute for violence. If we both want the same thing, we can reason together about whether it is possible to share resources, to take turns, to seek goods elsewhere. If we have a dispute, we do not need to resort to blows; we can seek a resolution in mutually acceptable terms. But we can only do this if our differences can be mediated by reason. When conversation is cut off absolutely, reason's reach is cut short.
Treating other people solely as means to income rather than as ends worthy of their own consideration independent of my interests cuts off conversation by deciding in advance that these mere means can have nothing to say that is worth listening to.
This angers me. In the ten minutes it has taken me to write this, I have received eight emails, seven of them spam. So I must say it here, even if I cannot say it to those who so mistreat me: I will continue to long for your rationality, for your willingness to remain within the bonds of society. But you must know that the habits of your capitalism are not only illegal but unethical and unkind. Which means that you are cutting yourself off from the people around you, one habit at a time. You may be gaining wealth, but what will you do with it? What will it profit you to gain the whole world and to lose the people around you, to lose your very soul? You may think you are gaining, but with each email sent, with each call made, you are spending a sliver of what makes you part of the community of humankind.
∞
Love One Another: Prisons and Devotion to Enemies
In his first book, Stride Toward Freedom, Dr. King wrote "We adopt the means of nonviolence because our end is a community at peace with itself." Paraphrasing Gandhi, he added a word for those who considered themselves his enemies, "In winning our freedom we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process."
This is a radical idea, one that is like the ideas of Jesus and St Paul that we should love our enemies. If your mind does not stumble over those words, you might be a saint; or you might not be listening to them.
King's argument is that we need our enemies. They need us to make them into the kind of people who embody love, not hatred. And we need - in the depths of our souls - the work of loving them in such a way that we win them over to the side of love and away from the crippling hatred that owns them.
It is easy to say "that's fine for church," or "I will love my enemy in my heart but in my life I will punish him." But what would happen if we thought of our worst enemies - I have in mind criminals and terrorists, the people we most seem to fear - as people with a "heart and conscience" that could be won. As people without whom we are incomplete.
We're good at finding ways to make people pay for their wrongdoing. We have great technology for warfare, and a brilliant system of criminal investigation and prosecution, perhaps the best history has ever seen. I don't propose eliminating those things. Instead, I am asking this: what if we decided that we would put the same creative energy and financial resources that have gone into creating our fine military, police, and courts into winning the consciences of our enemies?
When it comes to our anti-terror policies, I don't see what we can do to win terrorists' consciences, other than living our lives in such a way that anyone who supports our would-be enemies must feel shame at hating such virtuous people. That sounds to me like an end worth pursuing for its own sake, after all.
As for our prisons, our prisons seem to be good at exposing non-criminals to criminals; and to exposing criminals to more criminals, breeding gang culture. Violent criminals surely merit our censure, extraction from society, and punishment. But that doesn't mean our hearts need to be full of a desire for vengeance.
I'm not good at this, but I'm trying to become the kind of person who regards criminals as people I need, who need me to love them, who need me to win their consciences.
I believe a society needs to be prepared to use force against those who would forcefully harm others. But increasingly I am coming to believe that individuals in each society also need to be prepared to fight fire not with fire but with the healing waters of love, waters that overflow from hearts that daily struggle to regard the people we most hate and fear as the people we also most need to love. It's not easy. But it may be the only way to become "a community at peace with itself."
This is a radical idea, one that is like the ideas of Jesus and St Paul that we should love our enemies. If your mind does not stumble over those words, you might be a saint; or you might not be listening to them.
King's argument is that we need our enemies. They need us to make them into the kind of people who embody love, not hatred. And we need - in the depths of our souls - the work of loving them in such a way that we win them over to the side of love and away from the crippling hatred that owns them.
It is easy to say "that's fine for church," or "I will love my enemy in my heart but in my life I will punish him." But what would happen if we thought of our worst enemies - I have in mind criminals and terrorists, the people we most seem to fear - as people with a "heart and conscience" that could be won. As people without whom we are incomplete.
We're good at finding ways to make people pay for their wrongdoing. We have great technology for warfare, and a brilliant system of criminal investigation and prosecution, perhaps the best history has ever seen. I don't propose eliminating those things. Instead, I am asking this: what if we decided that we would put the same creative energy and financial resources that have gone into creating our fine military, police, and courts into winning the consciences of our enemies?
When it comes to our anti-terror policies, I don't see what we can do to win terrorists' consciences, other than living our lives in such a way that anyone who supports our would-be enemies must feel shame at hating such virtuous people. That sounds to me like an end worth pursuing for its own sake, after all.
As for our prisons, our prisons seem to be good at exposing non-criminals to criminals; and to exposing criminals to more criminals, breeding gang culture. Violent criminals surely merit our censure, extraction from society, and punishment. But that doesn't mean our hearts need to be full of a desire for vengeance.
 |
| "Peace." Over the head of the angel of peace in Bruton Parish, Williamsburg, VA. |
I believe a society needs to be prepared to use force against those who would forcefully harm others. But increasingly I am coming to believe that individuals in each society also need to be prepared to fight fire not with fire but with the healing waters of love, waters that overflow from hearts that daily struggle to regard the people we most hate and fear as the people we also most need to love. It's not easy. But it may be the only way to become "a community at peace with itself."
*****
I have written two other posts about prisons, and Charles Peirce's reasons why our current system is a mark of insanity--or at least that it evinces a serious lack of love--here and here.
∞
Steinbeck and Greene On Respect For Enemies
These two passages seem like they ought to be put together somehow. The first is from Steinbeck, the second is from Greene. Although the first is non-fiction and the second is fiction, they both deal with the same thing: soldiers who found themselves lamenting the deaths of their enemies, and who admired their enemies' fighting. The two passages remind me, in turn, of Josiah Royce's Philosophy of Loyalty, where he claims that soldiers may be loyal to their fellow soldiers but also to the same spirit of loyalty in their enemies, even though they are not loyal to their enemies themselves. I am also reminded of William James's point in "The Moral Equivalent of War" where he says that no one would repeat the American Civil War, but, just as surely, no one would erase it from history. The conflict engenders virtues and sacrifices that it would be just as wrong to seek as to destroy.
John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley In Search Of America, (New York: Penguin, 1983) 159-160.
Graham Greene, The Quiet American, (New York: Modern Library, 1992) 196-197.
“Some years ago my neighbor was Charles Erskine Scott Wood, who wrote Heavenly Discourse. He was a very old man when I knew him, but as a young lieutenant just out of military academy he had been assigned to General Miles and he served in the Chief Joseph campaign. His memory of it was very clear and very sad. He said it was one of the most gallant retreats in all history. Chief Joseph and the Nez Percés with squaws and children, dogs, and all their possessions, retreated under heavy fire for over a thousand miles, trying to escape to Canada. Wood said they fought every step of the way against odds until finally they were surrounded by the cavalry under General Miles and the large part of them wiped out. It was the saddest duty he had ever performed, Wood said, and he had never lost his respect for the fighting qualities of the Nez Percés. ‘If they hadn’t had their families with them we could never have caught them,” he said. “And if we had been evenly matched in men and weapons, we couldn’t have beaten them. They were men,” he said, “real men.”And here's Greene:
“Trouin said, ‘Today’s affair—that is not the worst for someone like myself. Over the village they could have shot us down. Our risk was as great as theirs. What I detest is napalm bombing. From three thousand feet, in safety.’ He made a hopeless gesture. ‘You see the forest catching fire. God knows what you would see from the ground. The poor devils are burned alive, the flames go over them like water. They are wet through with fire.’ He said with anger against a whole world that didn’t understand, ‘I’m not fighting a colonial war. Do you think I’d do these things for the planters of Terre Rouge? I’d rather be court-martialled. We are fighting all of your wars, but you leave us the guilt.”These are things that I, who have never had to fight a war, can only gaze at from afar, with wonder, and sadness, and gratitude.
*****
John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley In Search Of America, (New York: Penguin, 1983) 159-160.
Graham Greene, The Quiet American, (New York: Modern Library, 1992) 196-197.