Clock will run out for the cabbage-eared

Readers of Business Day’s slightly more nattily dressed sister publication Financial Mail would have been perplexed to gather from the editorial comment in the latest edition that the usually more circumspect publication supports SA’s bid to host the 2023 Rugby World Cup tournament.

To be clear, this columnist opposes the staging of such a public spectacle, in this country and anywhere else on earth, on the grounds that it is an ugly game played by a side of 15 cabbage-eared knuckle draggers. Plus, the atavistic pig’s bladder design of the ball offends all that is rational and pure in a world where the technology to create a perfect sphere has long existed.

It is a game better suited to private dungeons in which its main purpose — to libidinously arouse people with proclivities for violence — may be freely expressed. Just one look at the average fan in his bakkie should settle any doubts.

Such is the way of freedom of expression. The editorial does, however, advance philosophy’s perennial fixation with discovering the meaning of life to the 21st century’s quest: what makes life worth living?

North of Gauteng’s boerewors curtain (the Jukskei) a chorus would declare for rugby of course, but there are other causes like soccer, that other ugly game. When you put the question to Google the Omniscient, the first word that comes up is happiness.

Happiness? You don’t say, though the entry does qualify the statement with “happiness is usually the result of [leading] a meaningful life”, which leaves the thing wide open.

Next is an entry by Paul Thagard, PhD, in Psychology Today, in which he proposes four possible answers: nothing; religion; happiness and love; work and play. The evidence from psychology and neuroscience, writes Thagard, supports love, work and play.

This, we may conclude, is perfectly obvious, not because love, work and play constitute the sum of human endeavour, but because it is the conclusion Thagard reaches in his new book, now available from Amazon at more or less the same price as a day pass to go naartjie dodging at a rugby stadium. Plus, you have to read the entire book to realise that happiness is, in fact, not it.

There are other books, thankfully. Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind, has produced Homo Deus, A Brief History of Tomorrow, in which he argues for a shift in our navel gazing. Humanity has finally beaten the great killers — disease, famine and war — at least technically, which means it is no longer necessary to accept death as inevitable and that immortality is within our grasp.

This might have a few undesirable consequences, such as epidemic crankiness in the dole queue and perhaps the end of the scintillating actuarial profession, but some of the technological spin-offs would be great. Death will remain possible, but against its inevitability science has made great strides.

RUGBY IS A GAME … IN WHICH ITS MAIN PURPOSE IS TO AROUSE PEOPLE WITH PROCLIVITIES FOR VIOLENCE

Last week, The Francis Crick Institute in London announced that it had developed a technique to edit human genes to erase a range of genetically transferred disorders. Soon they’ll be able to edit out such pesky aberrations as red hair, large feet and sharp tongues.

Humans, says Harari, won’t stop there. What passes today as a medically justifiable intervention is likely to become a frivolous elective procedure and soon immortality will be an inalienable human right.

Genetic editing has other possibilities too. Instead of engineering physical immortality into the genetic make-up of the Blue Bulls, a scientist could edit them pretty but build in an expiry date, at which point they will die and go straight to the eternal field of glory in the sky.

Now that would truly be spiritual immortality and, with any luck, also the end of rugby and its spectacles.