Sports Commentary, Or Deep Cultural Criticism?

Bill Simmons writes a very good article for ESPN The Magazine (published on Earth, the planet, as Tuesday Morning Quarterback would point out.) He is discussing the fleeting nature of sports fandom, as the next generation of superstars is lauded as being the Greatest! Ever! regardless of their relative quality vs. those who came before.

So why do we pump up the present at the expense of the past? Goldman believed that every era is "so arrogant (and) so dismissive," and again he was right, although that arrogance/dismissiveness isn't entirely intentional.

With all due credit to Daniel Quinn, whose arguments I am undoubtedly about to mangle, as I have done so often, it basically is true that people, at least as we tend to define them, are arrogant and dismissive of the past.

This is not universally true, and it has been less true in the past than it is now.

In the book Ishmael (once again, and in this case I mean this as seriously as I can possibly say it: if you haven't read this book, you should. And then you should read it again.) Quinn develops the argument that there was a major cultural break in human history about 10,000 years ago, when three memes came to reside in a particular culture simultaneously.

1) You should grow all your own food using agriculture.

2) Growing your own food is the Right Way To Live.

3) Everyone else in the world should live this way as well.

Quinn uses these three ideas to define a Culture which he calls The Takers. Now, this is a pretty controversial way of defining 'culture', since it means that Americans, Japanese, Swedes, and Brazilians are all part of the same culture. If you want to know more, please, read the book.

For the purposes of this conversation, though, please accept this definition and move on. Quinn's point, and it's a strong one, is that the peoples who don't live as Takers (who he calls Leavers) continue to live, on those few places on planet Earth where they still exist, much as they have been living for thousands, or tens of thousands, or, in parts of Africa, hundreds of thousands of years. Living in much the same way for this long gives your cultural identity a kind of permanence, a feeling that the culture long predates you, by so far that it may as well have been around forever, and that it will postdate you, again for so long it may as well be forever.

Our Culture, however, is a technological one. Which is not to say that it uses technology; all cultures do this. I would go so far as to offer up 'uses technology' as one of the three or four things that defines human beings as human beings. What I mean to say is that our Culture, the Takers, are defined by our technology. It inspires us, drives us, forces us to further and further accomplishments. And it's not a bad thing, not at all. In a mere 10,000 years, we have gone from scattering some grass seeds to peering into the cores of atoms.

But one of the downsides of this technology is that every generation feels like it has to come up with a new way of living, because those old rules don't apply anymore. And so we go 'round and 'round, each generation thinking that it is the first one, ever, to have to deal with these problems, and constantly refighting battles of the past.

This is not to say that I have a solution to this problem. I have some ideas, but they're a bit...complicated. Stick around for a year or two, maybe we'll get there.

And while Simmons is just trying to make a point about sports, he ends up making a point about Culture. The never-ending drive for growth, improvement, advancement, while it has been responsible for some remarkable accomplishments, also prevents us from being able to appreciate the accomplishments of the ones who came before. Which is a shame, purely for moral reasons, but also leads to much of the strife we have in our political and religious strifes historically.