Football, Democracy & Darwin

by Guy Herman

and ultimate collapse Western civilization has so repeatedly endured. Though counterintuitive, perhaps the very fact of a modern civilization making promises of a culture appearing to reflect the ancient agrarian community and it’s more familial promise of universal care, and the indomitable forces of capitalism and the power of the dialectic of evolutionary gain are simply mutually exclusive.

  Whatever man may or may not be, we are creatures borne of the evolutionary process of survival. We know empirically a variable negatively reinforced schedule of reward (the relief from the hangman’s whip) or ‘punishment’ is far and away the most powerful ‘stimulus response’ paradigm known to man. Given our centuries or millennia of religious fervor, (promising our own democratically provisioned rights or that of a benevolent and omniscient creator), it is no surprise the cannons of Christianity, the notion of being kind to a fellow man and the persuasion to be nice and share kindness and care with Commonwealth, is but the infantile and well learned, superstitious fear, that lightening may strike, that hell may not freeze over and that we may be punished for our naturally uncharitable ways.

  Instilled by the robe and cross of the shaman frightening us as children and adults to follow their precepts, and of course, be kind as the tithing plate was passed, this is but another example of the natural conflict, most usually articulated by the ‘Constitutional democrats’ in excoriating the shame and rank meanness of the natural greed and selfishness of man, a mantle now most widely worn by the ‘conservative Republicans’.

  In the solution to this equation, however it be conjugated, there is much that will inform us as individuals and perhaps, more importantly, much that will inform our body politic so to allow it a greater chance of successful promulgation and perpetuation.

  Evolution does not care how we look, what we are and how silly, erratic or manifestly unconscionable our actions may appear, rather the absolute imperative of our biologic existence is to persist, persevere, and perpetuate ourselves, morality and conscience, (a vestigial tool of the church and early democrats from Aristotle to Locke, Russeau and the slave owning founding fathers), notwithstanding.

  How then is the reasonably simple game, football, so emblematic, ubiquitous and nearly tautological in elucidating human behavior and the elemental causes of its manifest decline. What is the reflection of the human condition which is apparently so disparate and so fundamentally different than the daily efforts and outcomes in our social and democratic lives.

  In the question there is much to be said for either outcome, either way of life, but caught in the middle, as the American’s seem, struggling to redefine the brain of a capitalist to recognize and accept socialism, or to convert the brain and will of the socialist to a willing slave or slave owner is an incongruence and seeming impossibility no less beneficial or likely than trying to breed Zebra’s without stripes.

  In the end, simply acknowledging that one doesn’t want to care for or educate the young, provide for the weakest and most vulnerable, then at least the populace can decode the problems facing them in a more amicable and less adversarial fashion and the quality of life, without the circus of a house divided, and the contagion likely to persist will quiet. Disagreements will decline and all will live a more peaceful and possibly productive life.

  America and much of the Western world are sloughs of conflict and ambiguity, yet unique among the undertakings of their many pastimes and hobbies is this sport and in that world of make believe is the one which allows us, as a civilization to enact all of the fantasy of a theoretical way of life, in this instance, the promise of democracy, and the simple social antecedent which declares any one can be a president or gain any success of their own making.

  Racism, in these Judeo-Christian democracies, has always presented a conundrum for those whose secular or religious preaching has included the manner in which one man ought to treat another. Though many treat the separation of church and state as witness to the fundamental awareness of the founding fathers notion of a state being more than the sum of our infantile or evolutionary notion of the world, perhaps, like all artifice of man, the ‘separation’ was a contractual strategy which, though naming the ‘evil’ from which we tried to separate in protecting this new child of Western democracy, historically or psychiatrically, one might more appropriately call it an instance of ‘Identification with the aggressor’ or as Freud would postulate, a way to name the substance of the fear, the ultimate transcendence of which was becoming the essence of the fear (thing) itself.

  An absolute universally espoused admonition, racism, the simple hatred, contempt or fear and loathing of one race by another, the hallmark of modern australopithecine and most species who have to compete, acknowledged openly in any form, recently has not been nor is now politically correct.

  This societies entire moral structure, manifestly is built upon the bulwark of the presumption of the equality all men share, to which all men have an inalienable birthright and which, amongst other sacred documents is memorialized in their constitution, law, statute and all legal and ethical doctrine of the mainstream.

  There have been, to be sure, hold outs from the civil war, confederates who cherish and or quietly harbor the hope reason will once again return and Aryan rights of the white man will once again become the law of the land, but by and large, tacitly or openly, racism, manifestly has been thought to have been quelled.

  Factually, it exists both in its simplest form, and metastasized in the reality of economic disparity, opportunity, and all aspects of multicultural life, all be these institutions largely silent on the articulated notions underlying the facts.

  A house divided describes this country in ways more profound than the presumably political events of the year 2011 including the debt ceiling debate, budget reconciliation, government shutdown and other man-made crises begin to portray. The strength of the vitriol and contempt is more reminiscent of Catholics and Muslims in the crusades or American pioneers slaughter of Native American Indians or the Programs and Holocaust of European Jews.

  One cannot hear or look at all of the anguish and anger, philosophical differences notwithstanding, and not recognize there is, at the root of it, an unspoken, profound and ancient artifice of man’s very real and evolutionary past at work. Racial fear, hatred and contempt is but the reasoned and historically learned behavior of a tribe taking care of its own, utilizing the smell of thunder to avoid lightning, the poison of the rhubarb leaf to avoid gastrointestinal distress or death and the smell of decay or putrefaction to avoid the plague or some real or imagined historical threat.

  While it is clearly true reasonable men and women can and do differ in their view of the world, cause and effect, outcomes, unintended or otherwise, it is not possible to have such enmity, outright anger, irrational contretemps without something more fundamental and thus far not spoken, to give such prime-evil and near sub-cortical instinctual force to the differences which in turn characterize the tone of those arguing and thinking to reason in such a visceral and nearly inexplicable anger, all speaking past the issues, past each other, growing more intractable, more angry and ever more frustrated as a result.

  There is, unequivocally, no right or wrong to any views or outcome expressed. One can live or die by the sword or by the rule of law and in the end it likely makes little difference, so why then, is the element of truth, as to our motivations or ultimate interests, so obfuscated.

  In the modern Judeo-Christian culture of the Americas where frank, forthright and honest discussion have presumably been the hallmark of the rights and freedoms forbears bestowed, why then is the population so plagued by the nearly universal calamity of false testimony, lies, deceit and the elements of language that serve not to elucidate and enable the listener to understand but rather an outright and steady drumbeat of innuendo and dissimulation, prevarication and outright deceit.

  What is, then, at root of the contradiction, the apparent and too often clear difference between fact and the words of their politicians.
/>   As in the case of racism, a long unsettled issue in this country, though there has been a political correctness in not stating one’s contempt or hatred for a policy or thought based soley on race, it has been clear, simple racism, the tribal ‘them and us’ of a true and beneficial evolutionary gain, for reason or habit, is at root of those carrying on this persistent and increasingly unpleasant declamation.

  As there is no right or wrong to the complexity of these issues, if we delve into the societal ambitions and interests perhaps there will be a marker or ruler by which one can take a measurement to at least acknowledge and better understand the facts, clouded heretofore.

  In the end, it does not matter if one species want to kill another because of their race, or to set the elderly on the iceberg as they are no longer of use to the society, rather, if one was more forthright separating fact from feeling, then the rancor could lessen.

  There is, beside a well conditioned populace, perhaps no evolutionary benefit which naturally arises from a more pacific and