Soccer spectacles undermine order
IT HAS been a difficult past few days for people who try to avoid getting involved in matters of civic order or soccer. The member (of the Upper Jukskei Flyfishing Collective) failed dismally, and that because of a slew of newspaper cartoons reflecting on a man-eating striker, one Luis Suarez.
That was too good an event to ignore, which meant the member discovered there was a biggish tourney going on in Brazil, not dissimilar to the nonsense which disrupted traffic in Rustenburg in 2010, and almost good enough to revise his lifelong dislike for soccer as a sport, for that it is not.
The member must hasten to give notice that he is an equalopportunity abuser of stadiumlevel team-based spectacle, including and especially rugby. (You never know what manner of class-sensitive guardian of politically correct discourse will claim to have accidently found this column in the waiting room at the brothel.)
Certainly, it is not advocacy against the hoi polloi spending their money on lager. As the liberal anarchist JL Borges points out, freedom of choice can be compatible with civic order, provided the individuals who make up society exercise self-constraint. Yet, Borges, too, despised soccer.
In a gratifying article by Shaj Mathew in the New Republic, Borges is quoted as saying soccer is one of England’s “biggest crimes”, though it was not the “aesthetically ugly” game that gave offence, but the fan culture associated with soccer, the unqualified devotion to a club or a national side.
The member can confirm this bizarre behaviour: in 2010, at soccer’s previous incidence in polite conversation, he interrogated a pair of South Africans who were fans of English clubs. One of the informants was a supporter of Tottenham Hotspur, and although the man had never been to London, he had a spurred cock and ball tattoo on his shoulder as a sign of his devotion. Another was a Manchester United fan, and when the two got together they referred to their respective clubs as “we”.
Neither could provide a rational explanation for choosing their particular clubs or their devotion to the spectacle. When pressed, the best they could come up with was that it was a substitute for war, and thus a noble thing.
What rot, and Borges agrees. It is precisely this primitive need for ecstasy, this desire to belong to something beyond ourselves, to a group or a sex or a race, which dehumanises us.
In satisfying this urge we surrender our individuality and fob off personal accountability. It is in precisely this way that the Nazis manipulated Germany and how otherwise decent white South Africans became believers in apartheid.
In these authoritarian and apparently orderly societies, which are designed to compensate for the fallibility of the individual, the outcome is not civic order, but its extreme opposite.
The apartheid regime could not maintain civic order without coercion and in doing so robbed individual members of society of their ethics.
Such regimes thrive on the fanatical and unqualified devotion to a cause larger than the individual. Individual fallibility is not corrected in the group, but amplified. On a national level it is jingoism and ultimately leads to war.
In the spectacle that is soccer we witness humanity at its weakest and most dangerous. The great congregation watching the televised spectacle in Brazil is a 21st century version of the Nuremberg rallies of the 1930s; the Mexican wave is epistemologically no different from a Nazi salute. Borges warns us that it is in the nature of the state to coerce individuals and that it will grow monstrously. In SA, the state is doing just that. The ruling party already thinks it is the state and, if unchecked, will usurp all our institutions and replace what remains of our individuality with amorphous mindlessness.
Even a televised soccer match is preferable to that.