LIT CRIT

Jerry Harkins

What do these people have in common:  Harry Martinson, Wislawa Szymborska, Christian Mommsen, Bjornstjerne Bjornson, Sigrid Undset, Par Lagerkvist, Yasunari Kawabata, John Coetzee, Elfriede Jelinek, Herta Müller, Tomas Transtromer and Mo Yan (aka Guan Moye)? 

Let me give you a hint.  There are more Scandinavian names here than you will find on most lists that do not involve winter sports.  Right, there you are:  all are winners of the Nobel Prize for literature.  Further, they also constitute a small part of that large class of writers you never heard of.  You can’t name a single work by any of them.  Hopefully, you have at least a passing acquaintance with some of their fellow laureates, folks like Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, Eugene O’Neill and Winston Churchill, all of whom had the good sense to write in English.  If you happen to be Irish or know someone who is, you’ve probably heard of William Butler Yeats and Seamus Heaney.  But if you guessed James Joyce, you’d be wrong.  Ditto for Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Mark Twain, Emile Zola, Marcel Proust, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings and Vladimir Nabokov.  These worthies were never anointed by the Swedish Academy.

Let me hasten to state the obvious.  Lousy writers do not usually win Nobel Prizes.  All those listed in the first paragraph are or were outstanding practitioners of a difficult art.  Some are or once were widely read.  Some of them and their co-laureates, a very small number, may be read as long as there remain people who care about literature.  But,  if you know only one poem written by a Nobel laureate, it is probably Kipling’s “If” a perennial warhorse of high school anthologies.  It is medium length and maximum embarrassing.  Of its thirty-two lines, here are the four people remember:  "If you can fill the unforgiving minute / With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -- / Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, / And -- which is more -- you'll be a Man, my son!”  Of course it’s drivel.  Of course that which is an ungrammatical pronoun.  Of course the second line makes no sense.  But “If” threatens to live forever.  The 1907 Nobel Committee cited Kipling’s, “…power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration.”  George Orwell had the better of it when he wrote, “Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting.”

Between 1901 and 2014, one hundred eleven writers were awarded the Nobel Prize.  Of these, maybe sixty percent were well known in their time and place.  The rest were a matter of the Academy displaying its priestly gnosis.  Maybe twenty-five or thirty of those names would be recognized today by a reasonably well informed American.  Writers like Ernest Hemmingway, John Steinbeck, Toni Morrison and even William Faulkner are just too much a part of modern culture to be obscure.  Yet.  No predictions are ventured about their celebrity a hundred years from now.  Educated Europeans are probably better informed about such things than educated Americans because a lot of them for some strange reason speak and read foreign languages.  But even sophisticated French readers would find it hard to place Mo Yan, the 2012 laureate who was cited for his “hallucinatory realism” which strikes an unsophisticated American reader as an oxymoron.  Every French person, even the one or two who are not so sophisticated, knows the work of their countryman Patrick Modiano (2014).  It is just one of the things that make the French different from everybody else.

The sad truth is that literature is not so vital to non-French persons today as it once was.  There are far too many alternatives for information, education and entertainment.  According to one recent survey, 68% of Americans have never been inside a bookstore and, if Amazon has its way, they never will be.  Fully 50% of us have never read a newspaper.

There are three forces at work here.  First, for whatever reason, we do not do a good job teaching basic skills like reading which means that most students do not develop an appreciation of the pleasures of reading.  This is by no means the fault of our teachers but of our Know Nothing politicians who find education a safe subject on which to mount the rhetorical barricades.  Second, our writers, editors and publishers turn out enormous quantities of  soporific prose.  Some of this consists of academics and other professionals writing specialized bullshit to one another in the hope of gaining tenure.  There is a great deal of terrible writing in our newspapers and magazines.  I’m not talking about vocabulary, spelling and the niceties of grammar, but about sentences that have no discernible meaning and paragraphs whose logic contradicts itself.  The classic example of this is the United States Tax Code. For example, Section 24 of Subpart A of Part IV of Subchapter A of Chapter 1 of Subtitle A reads as follows:  “The amount of the credit allowable under subsection (a) shall be reduced (but not below zero) by $50 for each $1,000 (or fraction thereof) by which the taxpayer's modified adjusted gross income exceeds the threshold amount. For purposes of the preceding sentence, the term ‘modified adjusted gross income’ means adjusted gross income increased by any amount excluded from gross income under section 911, 931 or 933.”  The entire tax code, Title 26, is 3,387 pages long.  That’s the Reader’s Digest version.  The IRS Regulations interpreting it run to 13,458 more pages.

The third and most potent force is that it is no longer necessary to read much.   Worse, reading for pleasure has been reduced to the status of an eccentric hobby.  It is optional, a luxury few people have time for.  In spite of podcasts, audio books, condensed books, electronic books and newspapers containing mostly celebrity gossip written at the fourth grade level, most of us do not include reading or any of its surrogates as part of our lives except for the most utilitarian purposes.  Even then, the first thing the business writer learns is how to compose a punchy executive summary.  We have returned to the days of yore when Western Union charged by the word thereby putting a premium on terseness.  That has now evolved into something called Twitter in which each tweet is limited to 140 characters including spaces and punctuation marks.  Of course for many users of Twitter that just about exhausts their entire vocabulary not counting acronyms, emoticons, and numbers-as-syllables.  (That last sentence contains 144 characters.  Too much punctuation.)

If Shakespeare was the archetypical literary figure of the last 500 years, that of the next 500 is likely to be the red circle with a backward slash through it:  a truly minimalist abbreviation of the complex word NO.  The problem is our free time these days comes in short bursts suitable only for headlines.  We are slaves to our smart phones and please note it is the phones that are smart.  We, on the other hand, have merely to learn a new skill, multitasking.  We text, surf the internet and check our email while we are driving.  We are addicted to machines that can tell us whatever we need to know in nanoseconds.

This has been going on a long time.  By the early 1980’s it had become obvious that we were on the threshold of what came to be called the Information Age.  Until the advent of the personal computer, the tools of the information workers had not changed much for centuries. We employed armies of clerks and bookkeepers, equipping them with paper and pencils, typewriters, carbon paper and adding machines.  Everything was going fine until, on Wednesday, August 12, 1981, IBM introduced its first Personal Computer.  Three months later, it began an unprecedented ad campaign built around the character of Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp.  Both television and print versions were brilliantly innovative on many levels , among them, they were minimally verbal, like the silent movies.  And they were powerful.  Within a short time, a new industry was born and both white collar and pink collar productivity posted spectacular gains.  Within five years, companies were instituting epoch-making layoffs in the clerical and middle management sectors of the workforce.

The information revolution has changed the nature of the transaction between writer and reader in a profound way.  The writer’s job used to be to engage the intellect and emotions but is now a matter of concision and simplicity.  A phrase like “Fourscore and seven years ago” is extravagant because it requires a moment’s thought.  It gives a quantum of pleasure where none is needed.  You can buy powerful personal computers today the complete instructions for which contain fewer than ten words.  You are lucky to get a single fold-out sheet with a dozen or so line drawings.  For less than $500, you can buy an iPhone.  Ask it a question, any question, and a robot named Siri will tell you the answer.  It’s an automated voice transaction, no reading or writing required.

So the world has changed and no one knows what to do about it.  Some responses are truly laughable.  As print journalism goes the way of the buggy whip, the best idea The New York Times can come up with is to create more long form, deep think analytic pieces, more soft-focus feature stories and more of yesterday’s hard news tomorrow.  Gone are the days when the Late City edition would provide a full account of today’s World Series game.  Now that is likely to appear the day after tomorrow. It used to be said that yesterday’s paper was good only for lining the bottom of the bird cage.  Now today’s edition will do fine.  Instant obsolescence.  To call it “news” would be false advertising.  If you want to know what’s happening, ask Siri.   Of course The Times has designed a brilliant web site.  Unfortunately Americans think freedom of the press means the press should be free.  Moreover, as Marshall McLuhan said, information wants to be free.

We are at the beginning of the Information Revolution and there is no way of imagining how information exchange will evolve.  Anyone over fifty who has taught bright college students has observed that they seem to process information in unfamiliar and often disconcerting ways.  They connect the dots differently, avoiding the careful sequential logic of Aristotle in favor of what seems to be random walks through non-Euclidean hyperspace.  They seem to function in a world shaped by Gödel’s incompleteness theory or Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.  But their creativity and insight continue to startle the world and there may be a causal relationship at work there.

It is hard to envision an advanced community without an intensive amount of reading, writing and other verbal behavior.  There may be other ways to communicate.  Some, for example, think the Neanderthals whose vocal anatomy seems to have been inadequate for speech may have developed some level of telepathic skills to meet their needs for cooperative behavior. The 1980 historical novel The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel speculated persuasively about the nature of such skills among Neanderthals and how they might have gradually evolved into vocal language among Cro-Magnon humans.  Others have proposed that we ourselves have always had unrecognized skills for uncovering and validating knowledge, skills that are so basic as to be almost invisible.  The English chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi  called this “personal knowledge” and suggested it is the root of all complex ideation.  Modern “abstract” art and music seem largely an effort to communicate internal understandings that are verbally inexpressible.

Those of us who love to read, whether the mystery novels of Tony Hillerman or the convoluted prose of James Joyce, are riding a lame horse.  Language is restrictive.  Words are, at best, crude symbols that serve as filters for ideas on their passage from one mind to another.  Grammar sets necessary borders that both define and limit the scope of ideas with alien logic.  For millennia, mathematicians have been developing an entirely different system of symbols and structures to communicate the kinds of ideas that attract their attention.  It may be that we have reached a point in our cultural evolution that will necessitate something similar for more general use.  We are a long way from releasing ourselves from the limitations of words and grammar but the evidence suggests the journey has begun.

THE BURDEN OF BELIEF

Jerry Harkins

Shortly after our ancestors developed a settled, agricultural way of life, they sought an explanation of why there were four seasons.  This was only one of many such questions people wondered about but it was an important and highly practical one.  As hunter-gatherers they had already learned that the cycles of the seasons were intimately associated with the availability of food and now, as farmers and stockmen, they discovered that not only were these cycles not precise, but they could also be somewhat capricious.  In most years the food supply would be just reliable enough.  In others it failed in whole or in part for reasons that seemed trivial.  An early frost or an untimely storm could ruin an entire harvest.  Like so many other things it must have seemed inscrutable, mystical and somehow sacred.  It would have been natural to wonder how and why things worked as they did.

In Greece, by the time of Homer, there had evolved a coherent explanation of the seasons which became part of Greek theology.  It was said that Hades, the giver of wealth and Lord of the Underworld, had abducted his niece, the lovely Persephone, daughter of his brother Zeus and their sister the harvest goddess Demeter.  The besotted Hades installed her as his Queen of the Underworld.  Demeter was outraged and so withheld the harvest causing a famine on earth.  Zeus affected a compromise with his brother whereby Persephone would spend only a quarter of each year in the Underworld.  During that time which came to be known as winter nothing would grow on the earth.  When Persephone returned, so would the cycle of fertility, maturity and harvest, respectively spring, summer and autumn.  It was vitally important to keep all these divine players happy through prayer and sacrifice but it was never clear what might make one or the other unhappy.  The Romans adopted pretty much the same story.

As an explanation of the seasons, the story of Demeter and Persephone is preposterous.  But myth is not meant to be either science or history and it is futile to judge it by the standards of either.  The point is that the citizens of two of history’s most sophisticated civilizations believed such nonsense for more than a thousand years.  It was part and parcel of a philosophical system that was centered on astrology and prophecy, that reasoned from unprovable first principles and that was often enforced by the state.

The believers were not ignorant people.  They knew their myths were ambiguous and unreliable.  Pythia, the Oracle of Delphi, spoke in tongues which had to be interpreted by the priests of Apollo.  This imparted power to the priesthood while shielding Apollo himself from error or misdirection.  The Oracle continued to be a central religious figure even as scientific astronomy was being developed by such luminaries as the mathematician Eudoxus of Cnidus and the navigator Callippus of Cyzicus in the fourth century BCE.  Through the generations believers clung to the myths as though they were the truths of their childhood, familiar and comfortable.  In the second century CE, the skeptic philosopher Sextus Empiricus suggested that humans invented the gods themselves to explain things that frightened them.  He was careful to attribute this heresy to the long-dead Democritus even while asserting that “dogma,” any assertion that is not evident to the senses, exists in a realm of knowledge beyond proof or non-proof.  It may be believed as a possibility but not defended as truth.  Empiricus was standing on the shoulders of Titus Lucretius who had written De Rerum Natura about 250 years earlier.  In it, he did not deny the existence of the gods but maintained that everything could be explained by natural laws.  His work was highly influential among Roman intellectuals but disappeared shortly after the consolidation of orthodox Christian dogma in the fifth century.  It was rediscovered in 1417 and is regarded by some as a catalyst of the Renaissance. [1] At a minimum, it certainly set the stage for and gave legitimacy to a profound shift in the way we perceive truth, a shift toward empirical observation and experimentation.

Empiricism has sometimes been thought of as grim and rigid because it seems to alienate us from any possible solution to our most poignant questions.  Why am I here?  Does my life have any meaning?  How did evil evolve in the world?  What are the invisible forces that shape my life and where do they originate?  To understand the centrality of these questions and the persistence of the mythical answers you have to imagine living at the whim of forces you cannot predict or control.  Think of Job, a paragon of virtue, suddenly dispossessed of all he had without discernable rhyme or reason.  We know why:  God has made a whimsical bet with Satan.  But Job is not privy to the wager.  He cries out not against injustice but against the seemingly irrational ways of his tormenter.  “If only I knew where to find him;
 if only I could go to his dwelling!  I would state my case before him and fill my mouth with arguments… But if I go to the east, he is not there;  if I go to the west, I do not find him.  When he is at work in the north, I do not see him;
 when he turns to the south, I catch no glimpse of him.” 

Nor is Job alone in his protest against the unknowable.  Saint Paul compares our earthly state with the perfection of heaven, saying, “…now we see through a glass darkly;  then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”  More broadly, the French scholar Henri-Charles Puech wrote that the human condition seems to include a sense of apartness from the experience of time and the material world, a desire for deliverance from what seems to be some kind of fall.  The Scottish polymath J.B.S. Haldane  put it more poetically in his oft-repeated remark that, “...the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”  Thus religion—irrational, incredible, paradoxical religion—became what Marx was describing when he wrote, “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.  Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.  It is the opium of the people.”  In an age when opium and its derivatives were openly advertised as medicine and taken for a wide variety of complaints, Marx was not necessarily disparaging religion but placing it in the context of the human condition.  He understood its power and its potential for abuse by despots.  For thousands of years, people bowed to the tyranny not so much to gain its promises as to find solace in them.

No longer.  All over the world, religion is losing its grip on how people think and act.  Where it remains successful in attracting adherents it is largely because it has become a form of inexpensive socializing and entertainment or, far worse, of inciting the discontented to join violent sociopathic causes.  Certainly religious extremism has always been a source of human misery but now it may be the most prominent characteristic of religion itself.  In America, the more moderate and more educated Protestants, Catholics and Jews have distanced themselves from institutionalized religion.  One indication of this is the rate of religious intermarriage.  In 1960, about 20% of married couples were of different religions (defined to include marriages between Protestants of different denominations).  In 2013, that share had grown to 45%.  Religion is just not as important as it used to be.

In part, the institutions themselves are to blame.  As information has become more ubiquitous, it has become increasingly difficult to hide the depredations committed in God’s name –– the sexual depravity, the terrorism and the animosity preached from so many pulpits.  But it is much more than that and it has been going on for much longer than the information revolution.  The mystery that gave rise to religion is, for the most part, no longer a major factor in our lives.  We may not know precisely how tornadoes are formed or what causes long term droughts.  But most of us believe the answers are to found in science, the dynamics of meteorology, not in theology or mythology.  Some of us may still pray for rain.  A few of us cling to other exotic beliefs.  Illness is said by some to be an illusion best “cured” by prayer alone; the second coming is at hand and will conquer evil; a menstruating woman is ritually unclean; a virgin conceived the son of God through the “overshadowing” of the Holy Ghost.  As recently as 1997, 909 members of a California cult committed mass suicide in order to reach an alien spaceship that would save them from the imminent “recycling” of the earth.  Perhaps the most persistent and widespread mythical belief is the creation story related in the Book of Genesis.

There are many such stories from cultures all over the world and some are quite similar although few are as detailed and specific as the biblical account.  We know Genesis is not even close to the truth and we know that the modern scientific synthesis of the Big Bang and Darwinian evolution is.  Theoretical physics is nearing a fundamental discovery.  Soon we will know whether there is a discoverable “theory of everything” or that such a theory must inherently be incomplete.  Either result will confirm Marquis de Laplace’s perhaps apocryphal reply to Napoleon that he had had no need for the God hypothesis.  Most creationists, of course, are scientifically illiterate and cling to Genesis for a variety of understandable reasons.  First, it is a good story.  It “listens” well and is at least superficially consistent.  Second, it relieves the existential angst described by Henri-Charles Puech.  Finally, it explains to some degree the presence of evil in the world, a puzzle even more profound than the progress of the seasons.  That it is no longer needed cannot compete with the simple fact that it is still very much wanted.

What is really wanted is bedrock certainty but truth is not like that.  It is rather a pastiche of knowledge derived from very different sources including art, science and philosophy.  It also proceeds from experience, memory and imagination and other more enigmatic parts of our subconscious and unconscious minds.  An example of the latter is what C. G. Jung called the collective unconscious, a class of “archetypes” which seem to be universal, not individual, inborn, not acquired and ambiguous.  In the absence of some sort of psychic DNA, it is hard to imagine how such a mechanism might arise in humans.  Still it might explain both our almost universal sense of the divine and the tenaciousness with which we cling to religious ideas.

No matter how tenaciously it is held, truth is notoriously fickle.  It changes; it is malleable and inconstant.  It is a journey with roadmaps that are imperfect.  As G. K. Chesterton wrote, “Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians.  It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.”  Cardinal Bellarmine was right to complain that the sun seems to move around the earth from east to west.  It does.  His rejection of the theory of Copernicus was commonsensical.  But as soon as Galileo published his work, “truth” changed in the sense that informed people had to conclude that they and Aristotle had been wrong.  Furthermore, it was no longer possible to read the Bible literally, a lesson many find fearsome.  To them we recommend the prayer of Saint Brendan the Navigator:

Help me to journey beyond the familiar and into the unknown.

Give me the faith to leave old ways and break fresh ground with You.

Christ of the mysteries, I trust you to be stronger than each storm within me.

I will trust in the darkness and know that my times, even now, are in Your hand.

Tune my spirit to the music of heaven, and somehow, make my obedience count for You.

---

1.   Most notably by Stephen Greenblatt in his remarkable book The Swerve:  How the World Became Modern (W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2011).  This is the book that won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

THE ALLURE OF VIOLENCE IN LIFE AND SPORTS

Jerry Harkins

It’s the most perfect  feeling in the world to know you’ve hit a guy just right, that you’ve maximized the physical pain he can feel. . . You feel the life just go out of him. You’ve taken all this man’s energy and just dominated him.
                                         —Michael Strahan, NFL Hall of Fame Defensive End

Now a real hitter is a head-hunter who puts his head in the chest of his opponents and ain’t happy if his opponent is still breathing after the play. A real hitter doesn’t know what fear is except when he sees it in the eyes of a ball carrier he’s about to split in half. A real hitter loves pain, loves the screaming and the sweating and the brawling and the hatred of life down in the trenches. He likes to be at the spot where the blood flows and the teeth get kicked out. That’s what this sport’s about, men. It’s war, pure and simple.

— Tom Wingo in The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy, p. 384.

I firmly believe that any man's finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear, is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle - victorious.

                                                —Vince Lombardi

Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best; it removes all that is base. All men are afraid in battle. The coward is the one who lets his fear overcome his sense of duty. Duty is the essence of manhood.
                                                                                       –General George S. Patton

                                                                      

The Puritans hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.
                                                                                                 —Thomas Macaulay

W

e have long known that our species has a strange attraction to violence of all kinds.  Maybe it’s in our genes.  Maybe it is a side effect of our hormones.  Whatever it is, we find danger exciting.  When we witness it, our hearts beat faster and respiration increases.  Simply observing it triggers the “fight or flight” response which, in turn, increases the production of adrenaline.  When the danger is real and personal, the physiology also lessens or masks psychological fear.  But it is not the “real and personal” threat of violence that normal people are attracted to.  Rather, it is “sanctioned” violence, situations in which the violence is more or less controlled by agreed upon rules, rituals or traditions which may offer some degree of protection to the participants and, more importantly, release spectators to enjoy the mayhem vicariously without feeling any moral responsibility for the results.

Sanction is what makes the difference between cheering at a bullfight and being horrified by “mindless” violence.  Sanction does not mean only to permit or make legal or even to regulate but it involves granting permission to stand apart and enjoy, to see a violent act as entertainment.  When an American city builds a football stadium for a professional team with taxpayers’ money, its motive may be to stimulate the economy but its message is to grant approval to a brutal sport.  It is pretty much the same thing as the Roman Empire building coliseums to keep the population amused.

Sport hunting is another example.  About 12.5 million Americans hunt legally each year, devoting an average of 17.6 days in the field and spending an average of $1,832.  The pleasures they derive from hunting include companionship, the enjoyment of the outdoors, the satisfaction of putting food on the table, and the mastery of a complex set of skills.  Most hunters are dedicated conservationists and hunting is a socially important component of wildlife management.  But it is also undeniably a blood sport.  It inherently requires the taking of life for what amounts to the personal pleasure, recreation or enjoyment of the hunter.  In the past it was often essential to providing food but this necessity is rarely the case today.  All of the other motives can as readily be achieved with a camera as with a rifle.  The problem is hunting with a camera requires no rules, no choreography.  Go where you want, when you want. No license necessary.  No “sportsmanship” required.  If you botch a shot, no arduous tracking down of the subject to put it out of its misery.

It may help to compare hunting with bullfighting which, by any humane standard, is far worse.  In the wake of an economic downturn which has reduced the number of corridas by nearly 50%, the Spanish government is considering declaring bullfighting part of the national patrimony.  Even in Spain, it is generally not referred to as a sport but rather a performance that shares some of the same attractions as flamenco.  As a spectacle, though, it is pure violence.  The matador runs life threatening risks for as long as a fight lasts, usually about 20 minutes.  The bull, of course, is certain to be tortured and killed even in the rare case when he “wins” the contest.  But the performers are not the most interesting aspect of bullfighting.  It is the crowd of spectators:  thousands of human beings screaming their critique of the performance, chanting their encouragement of the matador’s elegance or the bull’s courage.  In short, participating vicariously in the bloodletting and enjoying the death spectacle.

There are, of course, many other violent spectator sports including boxing in which the whole object is to beat the opponent senseless in front of a crowd of cheering onlookers.  And there are sports that are not essentially violent but which are still dangerous.  But one sport is unique in that it is both violent and dangerous and has a culture of widespread approval and that, of course, is American-style football.

Each week from early September through late December, an average of 1,094,400 Americans gather to eat, drink and watch professional football games in 15 or 16 stadiums.  That’s an average of 68,000 people per game.  No one really knows how many people watch the NFL on television but, according to the Harris Poll, 73% of American men and 55% of American women watch games regularly.  In 2012, 644 NCAA college teams played 3,569 games attended by a total of 48,958,547 people, an average of 13,718.  1,134,377 boys (and nearly 6,000 girls) at 15,513 high schools (61% of all high schools) played football of one kind or another in the 2010-11 season.  And nearly 3 million children, age 6 to 14, played the game  in schools and independent leagues such as Pop Warner and Pee Wee in 2011.

The idea of football is not to kill or cripple your opponent and, in fact, sponsors have worked hard and with some success to reduce the number of catastrophic injuries at all levels of the game.  Players still get killed every year, lives are shortened and the overall injury rate is frightening.  Violence remains the heart of the game.  Every play begins with a sudden, head-on collision at the line of “scrimmage” (which comes from the Italian word scaramuccia meaning a small battle).  Typically, it ends with players knocked down, tripped up or otherwise crashed into the ground.  Plays are elaborately choreographed and, at times, gracefully executed.  But this is not ballet.  It is war waged by infantry and artillery only without deliberate bloodshed.  It is the essence of machismo and it is not surprising that there are many men who love to play it.  What is more interesting is that so many millions love to watch it.  Football is merely the preferred American version of what seems to be a universal appetite.  In Europe, the equivalent is soccer which is less violent on the field but much more so in the stands.  In ancient Rome, “circuses” were staged to entertain upwards of 60,000 spectators with chariot races, gladiatorial fights to the death, gruesome executions and even re-enactments of naval battles.  In nineteenth century America, thousands of people would bring their families and picnic baskets to witness public hangings.  In the contemporary world, graphic violence is the key attraction of many movies and computer games.

Why?  What is the attraction of violence?  Why do we encourage our 8-year old boys to expose themselves to life threatening injury in the name of sport?  Why do we encourage grown men to display the most atavistic behaviors associated with nature red in tooth and claw?  There has been no lack of research and speculation about these and similar questions.  Aristotle thought that witnessing tragedy helped people cleanse their emotions in a process he called catharsis.  Some contemporary observers think a similar phenomenon occurs when people watch violent acts thereby purging themselves of their own dangerous impulses.  Then, of course, there is sex. 

As we work toward a theory of violence, the apparent connection between sex and violence seems unavoidable.  That there is some such link seems obvious from the prevalence of sadomasochism and related practices in clinical literature, erotic literature and on internet pornography sites.  From a biological perspective, both involve the activation of the hormones adrenaline and testosterone but this does not answer the question of why they do so nor does it come to terms with the fact that any such connection is more a matter of fantasy than of actual practice.  In that respect, it is exactly analogous to football spectators.  A significant majority of both audiences are not given to participatory violence.  They are excited by watching other people engage in violent activities.  One might think this would attract the attention of psychoanalysts but generally it has not.  Freud dealt with aggression as did Karl Menninger and other pioneers of the field and there is some speculation that it is an instinctive inheritance from our primitive ancestors.  The argument from evolution is that those who enjoy violence will be better at it than others and will enjoy greater reproductive success.  But aggression is not the same thing as and does not always lead to violence.  Moreover, as is often pointed out, violent people rarely become patients of analysts or other psychotherapists.

Early in his career, Freud speculated that aggression is rooted in the subconscious struggle between life and death, Eros and Thanatos.  He abandoned this view but not before giving rise to the notion that the biblical account of the fall is a metaphor for something very similar.  In the third chapter of the Book of Genesis, God metes out penalties for the disobedience of Adam and Eve.  To punish Eve, he invents sexual pleasure which will result in the extreme pain of childbirth.  This may explain the church’s attitude toward “artificial” contraception which permits the pleasure without the ordained pain.

Religion has always been associated with this pleasure-pain theme.  Christianity sees the entire purpose of life as a struggle between eternal bliss and eternal damnation.  Its attraction to extreme violence is a matter of the historical record.  On the morning of July 22, 1209, the crusaders of Pope Innocent III slaughtered some 20,000 unarmed citizens of Beziers in what is now southern France for the crime of being Cathar heretics.  In his book, The Perfect Heresy, Stephen O’Shea remarked, “In the days before gunpowder, to kill that many people in so short a time required a savage single-mindedness that beggars the imagination.”  Between 1487 and 1600, Innocent’s successors waged the Waldensian Crusade.  According to one history, “The crusaders ripped limbs from live victims, dashed the heads of children against the rocks, marched fathers to their deaths with the heads of their sons around their necks; parents watched their children violated and murdered. Other tortures were too vile to describe.”  The Holy Inquisition often conducted mass burnings, autos–da–fé, of witches and other heretics.  Huge crowds turned out to enjoy these liturgies.  Enjoy:  certainly there is pleasure involved; no one who responded to such horrendous bloodshed with repugnance would be able to perpetrate it or even watch it.  The sanction provided by the church would trump any feeling of sympathy and pleasure could be seen as virtuous.

There are, admittedly, more questions than answers to this paradox of good and evil, pleasure and violence.  The most poignant questions relate to participation in the Holocaust.  Scholars generally believe that knowledge of the mass murders was widespread in the German population.  Hundreds of thousands had some more direct involvement and an estimated 55,000 had personal involvement in the death camps.  Even more personal was the case of several hundred executioners who machine gunned 33,771 Jewish men, women and children at Babi Yar on the night of September 29-30, 1941.  The German commander was tried and hanged for these crimes in 1951.  The soldiers who did the actual killing and who presumably enjoyed it were never held accountable.  So lines are being drawn or blurred as each community reaches something of a consensus regarding responsibility but, again, there is little consideration of the emotional lives of the killers.  What was going through their minds as the tragedy was unfolding?  What goes through the minds of suburban spectators at a high school football game as they chant:  “Hit ‘em high;  hit ‘em low;  kick ‘em in the balls and go, go go!”

To return to the massacre of the Cathars in 1209, the Pope’s plenipotentiary on the scene was the Cistercian Abbot Arnold Amaury.  When asked by the soldiers how to tell the difference between Christians and Cathars, he replied, “Kill them all.  God will know his own.”  Was he shouting in anger?  Was he smiling at his bon mot?  He certainly knew he was ordering the murder of good Christians.  What would his patron, the Pope, have thought of that?  For that matter, what did Innocent think of the slaughter of the heretics?  Did he feel justified in exterminating people whose religious views were different from his own and might become a threat to his power?  Or did the exercise of such ultimate power enhance his self-worth or maybe just hold off the dogs of doubt and depression?  It is possible that he considered it a minor matter in his otherwise extremely busy life of dealing primarily with secular matters.  However he felt, this was an act of sanctioned violence.  He and Abbot Arnold and the soldiers were all doing the work of God.  Do you think any of them ever for a moment regretted it?

It is tempting to resort to Nietzsche’s theory of the will to power (der Wille zur Macht also referred to as Machtgelüst) to explain the connection between pleasure and violence.  In his 1882 book, The Gay Science, he specifically argues that there is an intimate connection between a “desire” for cruelty and the “pleasure” derived from the feeling of power.  Nietzsche, however, was never burdened with the will to write clearly or with consistency and a conventional interpretation of the will to power is no more persuasive than Freud’s opposite idea of the pleasure principle.  There can be no doubt, however, that some people at least are driven by something quite close to Machtgelüst.  Often enough such people render great service to their societies; we call them leaders and celebrate their charisma.  One thinks of Frederick the Great or, closer to our own time, Frederick’s admirer General George S. (Old Blood and Guts) Patton.  Of course it depends on one’s point of view.  Another American General, William Tecumseh (Uncle Billy) Sherman is still thought of as either a brutal war criminal or a paragon of military strategy and ethics.  Then there are the leaders who exercise their charisma for pure evil who need not be memorialized here.

There are hints that the attraction to violence may be declining.  The number of children and adolescents playing organized football has declined significantly in recent years.  Boxing is rapidly becoming as rehearsed as wrestling.  Dog fighting and cock fighting are going the way of bear baiting and the Spanish politicians are unlikely to reverse the fortunes of the bull ring.  If this turns out to be a real trend, change could come quickly and would unleash a torrent of evolutionary discussion.  It would not take a vast number of people to change their minds about, for example, football for it to go the way of public hangings.  But if football goes, can guns be far behind?