Don't Watch Sports It's Time to Step Into the Arena

JOHANN KURTZ OCT 7, 2023

https://becomingnoble.substack.com/p/dont-watch-sports?

Rise up, you who would endeavor this prize.

— Homer, Iliad 23.753, trans. R. Lattimore

We - members of this movement - must stop watching sports. It’s weakening us. Like pornography, it is a simulation of engaging in the act itself, chemically satisfying our need for play and vigor without providing any of the relevant strength and virtue.

The relationship of modern man to sport is an unusual one. The playing of sport has been neatly removed from the life of the average adult. In ages past, engaging in sport was both an intrinsic part of the noble individual’s life and a constituent part of the social fabric within which he operated.

Professional, commercialized sports, conversely, place the activity entirely outside society - both omnipresent and yet totally alien and untouchable, impossible to participate in except as impotent observer, without any wider metaphysical, ethical, or religious significance.

Sport as pure spectator entertainment is trivial and sterile, and emblematic of a decadent late-stage culture that has lost its vitality. Sport has meant many things to the various cultural eras of Western history, but what these understandings have in common is the integration of the participation in sport into grander ideas of peoplehood, worship, and nobility.

Previous generations integrated physical play into the complex dynamics of energetic societies. Sport was used to elevate the quality of the young, to inculcate hard-won values and virtues, to cultivate aristocratic abilities like hunting and defence, to compete not just as individuals but as communities - each town measuring itself against the vitality of the next town over, attempting to demonstrate the superiority of a particular way of life over a rival.

Émile Friant, Wrestling (1889) Sport has been the foundation of identity, worship, celebration, joy, beauty, and the pursuit of a more perfect human.

Recent scholarship shows links among these Late Bronze Age cultures, including religious ceremonies, at least paramilitary combat sports, hunting, and bull sports. Religious rituals included processions, sacrifice and feasting, and music and dancing; and recurrent warfare fostered militaristic performances. Analogous to warfare, hunting, especially the great or royal hunts, involved extensive orchestration in practice and embellishment in art. Debate continues on the techniques, operation, and meaning of bull sports. If practiced locally and not just adopted in art, they could differ from culture to culture and era to era, but the elements of animal power, violence, and danger, and the necessity of human skill and fitness to avoid injury or death, were inherent in the activity.

— D. G. Kyle, Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World

This grand conception of sport was bought to its zenith in the ancient world with the Olympics, which were held far more metaphysical significance than their modern imitations. They centered the concepts of divinity and ethnicity.

Every four years the city-state of Elis held the oldest and most prestigious athletic competition of antiquity in the festival of Zeus at his sanctuary at Olympia. Competitors and spectators came from all over the Mediterranean for over a thousand years, from the eighth century B.C. to at least the late fourth century A.D.

Ancient Greece was not a single state but rather an area full of small, fiercely independent city-states too often at war with each other. At the Panhellenic (all-Greek) games of Zeus, however, Greeks assembled to venerate their gods, enjoy elite competition, and appreciate their common culture, which included their language, gods, mythology, and, of course, their passion for athletics. By Hellenistic times, the Olympics even provided the Greeks with a shared Olympic chronology. Vital to Greek ethnicity, Olympia reminded Greeks of what made them Greek.

Our task as contemporary dissidents is, for the immediate future, less grand than the establishment of such a majestic and sprawling event. We are too few and too early in our societal re-conceptualization. If we are to become the ascendent aristocracy required for the formation of a new age, we likewise must not relegate ourselves to being mere observers of sport - we must become competitors.

I suspect that a better model for us can be found earlier, further back in the reaches of history. We must turn to the Iliad to see the proper orientation of a small elite caste to noble competition.

Homer's epics provide the earliest and greatest descriptions of athletic competitions in Western literature. With elite competitors vying for multiple rich prizes, the main setting for sport in epic was funeral games, sport as surrogate combat, as in the contests Achilles organized for Patroklos in Iliad 23. Sport was an obvious and extended metaphor for war: prowess with the javelin in sport and war were analogous, and Achilles' pursuit of Hector around Troy is compared to a contest for a prize at funeral games.

Homer endorses the earliest Greek values and etiquette of sport, an aristocratic ideology of action that reinforced the warrior's heroic or aristocratic code. Their fathers told Glaukos and Achilles "Always to be best and to be eminent beyond others". To be recognized as a good man, an agathos, a man of worth, one had to possess and demonstrate arete or especial skill or excellence, most effectively in war but also in other areas such as hunting and sport.

The key word above is action. Mandatory participation for those that claim leadership roles and nobility. To maintain a higher place in their societal order, these aristocratic virtues had to be refined, demonstrated, proven.

Leaders were expected to be competitive, involved individuals rather than passive spectators in war and politics. Aggression in war and competition in games externalized and embodied excellence, confirmed status, and brought honor (‘time’). Hector rebukes Paris for shamefully shirking battle, and he himself would feel shame before the Trojans if he cowardly avoided fighting, even if the situation was hopeless.

Could anything be more different to the life and values of the average modern ‘sports fan’?

One of the most detestable books I’ve ever read (or attempted to read - I threw it away halfway through) is Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby’s autobiography told through the lens of his obsession with Arsenal football club.

It’s a perfect confessional of the sins of the modern sporting fan; the weak man whose entire life structure is built around a para-social relationship with a business, with men that he doesn’t know and whose world he can never truly be a part of.

The early chapters of the book are primarily an examination of the dynamics of the author’s relationship with his father. As his parents are divorced, he spends little time with his father, and their only frame of mutual understanding is watching football, which therefore becomes invested with far too much psychic and spiritual value.

A curious detail is that at no point in the book does the author actually mention playing sports with his father. He is never taught the art of the physical, to manipulate himself and the world around him. Instead, he is indoctrinated into a world of voyeurism, of spectatorship, of mutual disconnection and weakness.

Later on, he slightly pathetically admits that he doesn’t want to meet the players themselves, lest it be revealed that the players care less about the club and its fortunes than he does, undermining the fundamental value system around which his life revolves.

Sports fans might argue that certain virtues remain: the powerful roar of the crowd, the lifelong loyalty to an identity. But these virtues are fake and co-opted into the safe and progressive matrix in which we live.

Loyalty to a major sporting brand is a totally sterilized and arbitrary form of loyalty; it is identity neutered and made safe. It is the semblance of difference, a surface-level division with chants and colors and flags that indicate no deep physical or metaphysical distinctions.

This perversion of loyalty therefore teaches us that difference does not truly matter, and you’re silly if you take it too seriously. It allows men to satiate themselves on synthetic loyalty, placating their natural instincts for meaning without ever allowing them to truly inhabit it.

Professional sports also degrade our understanding of the fundamental concept of identity. Players can come from all over the world, with different languages, values, religions, ethnicities - but as long as they sign a professional contract and pull on a colored shirt, they are immediately accepted as not just members but representatives of a local community. It is the total financialization and trivialization of the social fabric.

Before professionalization and the importation of men from elsewhere, truly local teams would have to draw deeper from their limited local talent pool. All kinds of amateur men, including quite ordinary ones, would have to stay in shape and compete to help out. The sport truly represented the community, and the men were elevated by the necessity of their participation.

More cynically, modern sporting associations - and the web of progressive institutions that attach to them - realize that sport is a natural vehicle for the propagation of values. Thus we see endless rainbow flags, kneeling, etc.

Here it is worth asking what the natural virtues of sport should be, rather than the artificial ones superimposed on it by liberal ideologues.

Plato, for example, thought play was associated with the sacred. It was important, from his point of view, to be serious with what is truly serious. And for him, “God alone is worthy of supreme seriousness.”

— P. Kelly, Catholic Perspectives on Sports

To quote Plato directly:

But man is God’s plaything, and that is the best part of him. Therefore every man and woman should live life accordingly, and play the noblest games and be of another mind from what they are at present.… Life must be lived as play, playing certain games, making sacrifices, singing and dancing, and then a man will be able to propitiate the gods, and defend himself against his enemies and win in the contest.

St. Thomas Aquinas - influenced by Aristotle - held a similar perspective:

In Thomas’s view, it is also possible to sin by having less play in one’s life than is reasonable. A person who is always grave or serious and does not participate in any activities that provide enjoyment would be sinning... In human affairs whatever is against reason is a sin. Now it is against reason for a person to be burdensome to others, by offering no pleasure to others, and by hindering their enjoyment.

Uniting these perspectives is the centrality of the notion of play - one must play a sport, not observe it, to gain its virtues and to rejoice in our God-given bodies. It is no coincidence that this demand for participation, to step into the arena, spans the great ancient and medieval thinkers. Any sport that demands that you better yourself will suffice. Choose boxing or BJJ if in doubt.

Thus will we find joy for others and honor (arete) for ourselves.

https://becomingnoble.substack.com/p/dont-watch-sports?