Michael Vick's savagery may have tarnished the game for some, but I can wax ever more lyrical on the deeper appeal of the game. I can repeat the line I first heard years ago from a similarly Americophile Englishman that football was like a cross between chess and rugby. I can tell you how it serves as an animated metaphor for America itself: the melding of Hobbes and Locke on the field of play--the brutest of force mediated by the most complex of regulations that only a nation in thrall to the law could ever devise.
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
QOTD
British reporter Gerard Baker on real football, in the September 10th Weekly Standard (subscription only for now):
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Mr. Baker's friend (and Mr. Baker)missed the opportunity to cite yet another English philosopher whose ideas on ethics have also been adopted to some extent in the U.S. and would apply to the Vick issue: Herbert Spencer.
In "Social Statics," Spencer states:
Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity. Instead of civilization being artificial, it is a part of nature . . . as surely as a passion grows by indulgence and diminishes when restrained; as surely as a disregarded conscience becomes inert, and one that is obeyed active; as surely as there is any efficacy in educational culture, or any meaning in such terms as habit, custom, practice;—so surely must the human faculties be moulded into complete fitness for the social state; so surely must the things we call evil and immorality disappear; so surely must man become perfect.
Ergo, football is not just a brutish game with complex rules, but perhaps a reflection of U.S. social evolution.
-Cogito
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