<p>It is perhaps truer, or at least more evident, as regards sports than as
regards the other expressions of predatory emulation already spoken of,
that the temperament which inclines men to them is essentially a boyish
temperament. The addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree
marks an arrested development of the man's moral nature. This peculiar
boyishness of temperament in sporting men immediately becomes apparent
when attention is directed to the large element of make-believe that is
present in all sporting activity. Sports share this character of
make-believe with the games and exploits to which children, especially
boys, are habitually inclined. Make-believe does not enter in the same
proportion into all sports, but it is present in a very appreciable degree
in all. It is apparently present in a larger measure in sportsmanship
proper and in athletic contests than in set games of skill of a more
sedentary character; although this rule may not be found to apply with any
great uniformity. It is noticeable, for instance, that even very
mild-mannered and matter-of-fact men who go out shooting are apt to carry
an excess of arms and accoutrements in order to impress upon their own
imagination the seriousness of their undertaking. These huntsmen are also
prone to a histrionic, prancing gait and to an elaborate exaggeration of
the motions, whether of stealth or of onslaught, involved in their deeds
of exploit. Similarly in athletic sports there is almost invariably
present a good share of rant and swagger and ostensible mystification—features
which mark the histrionic nature of these employments. In all this, of
course, the reminder of boyish make-believe is plain enough. The slang of
athletics, by the way, is in great part made up of extremely sanguinary
locutions borrowed from the terminology of warfare. Except where it is
adopted as a necessary means of secret communication, the use of a special
slang in any employment is probably to be accepted as evidence that the
occupation in question is substantially make-believe.</p>
<p>A further feature in which sports differ from the duel and similar
disturbances of the peace is the peculiarity that they admit of other
motives being assigned for them besides the impulses of exploit and
ferocity. There is probably little if any other motive present in any
given case, but the fact that other reasons for indulging in sports are
frequently assigned goes to say that other grounds are sometimes present
in a subsidiary way. Sportsmen—hunters and anglers—are more or
less in the habit of assigning a love of nature, the need of recreation,
and the like, as the incentives to their favorite pastime. These motives
are no doubt frequently present and make up a part of the attractiveness
of the sportsman's life; but these can not be the chief incentives. These
ostensible needs could be more readily and fully satisfied without the
accompaniment of a systematic effort to take the life of those creatures
that make up an essential feature of that "nature" that is beloved by the
sportsman. It is, indeed, the most noticeable effect of the sportsman's
activity to keep nature in a state of chronic desolation by killing off
all living thing whose destruction he can compass.</p>
<p>Still, there is ground for the sportsman's claim that under the existing
conventionalities his need of recreation and of contact with nature can
best be satisfied by the course which he takes. Certain canons of good
breeding have been imposed by the prescriptive example of a predatory
leisure class in the past and have been somewhat painstakingly conserved
by the usage of the latter-day representatives of that class; and these
canons will not permit him, without blame, to seek contact with nature on
other terms. From being an honorable employment handed down from the
predatory culture as the highest form of everyday leisure, sports have
come to be the only form of outdoor activity that has the full sanction of
decorum. Among the proximate incentives to shooting and angling, then, may
be the need of recreation and outdoor life. The remoter cause which
imposes the necessity of seeking these objects under the cover of
systematic slaughter is a prescription that can not be violated except at
the risk of disrepute and consequent lesion to one's self-respect.</p>
<p>The case of other kinds of sport is somewhat similar. Of these, athletic
games are the best example. Prescriptive usage with respect to what forms
of activity, exercise, and recreation are permissible under the code of
reputable living is of course present here also. Those who are addicted to
athletic sports, or who admire them, set up the claim that these afford
the best available means of recreation and of "physical culture." And
prescriptive usage gives countenance to the claim. The canons of reputable
living exclude from the scheme of life of the leisure class all activity
that can not be classed as conspicuous leisure. And consequently they tend
by prescription to exclude it also from the scheme of life of the
community generally. At the same time purposeless physical exertion is
tedious and distasteful beyond tolerance. As has been noticed in another
connection, recourse is in such a case had to some form of activity which
shall at least afford a colorable pretense of purpose, even if the object
assigned be only a make-believe. Sports satisfy these requirements of
substantial futility together with a colorable make-believe of purpose. In
addition to this they afford scope for emulation, and are attractive also
on that account. In order to be decorous, an employment must conform to
the leisure-class canon of reputable waste; at the same time all activity,
in order to be persisted in as an habitual, even if only partial,
expression of life, must conform to the generically human canon of
efficiency for some serviceable objective end. The leisure-class canon
demands strict and comprehensive futility, the instinct of workmanship
demands purposeful action. The leisure-class canon of decorum acts slowly
and pervasively, by a selective elimination of all substantially useful or
purposeful modes of action from the accredited scheme of life; the
instinct of workmanship acts impulsively and may be satisfied,
provisionally, with a proximate purpose. It is only as the apprehended
ulterior futility of a given line of action enters the reflective complex
of consciousness as an element essentially alien to the normally
purposeful trend of the life process that its disquieting and deterrent
effect on the consciousness of the agent is wrought.</p>
<p>The individual's habits of thought make an organic complex, the trend of
which is necessarily in the direction of serviceability to the life
process. When it is attempted to assimilate systematic waste or futility,
as an end in life, into this organic complex, there presently supervenes a
revulsion. But this revulsion of the organism may be avoided if the
attention can be confined to the proximate, unreflected purpose of
dexterous or emulative exertion. Sports—hunting, angling, athletic
games, and the like—afford an exercise for dexterity and for the
emulative ferocity and astuteness characteristic of predatory life. So
long as the individual is but slightly gifted with reflection or with a
sense of the ulterior trend of his actions so long as his life is
substantially a life of naive impulsive action—so long the immediate
and unreflected purposefulness of sports, in the way of an expression of
dominance, will measurably satisfy his instinct of workmanship. This is
especially true if his dominant impulses are the unreflecting emulative
propensities of the predaceous temperament. At the same time the canons of
decorum will commend sports to him as expressions of a pecuniarily
blameless life. It is by meeting these two requirements, of ulterior
wastefulness and proximate purposefulness, that any given employment holds
its place as a traditional and habitual mode of decorous recreation. In
the sense that other forms of recreation and exercise are morally
impossible to persons of good breeding and delicate sensibilities, then,
sports are the best available means of recreation under existing
circumstances.</p>
<p>But those members of respectable society who advocate athletic games
commonly justify their attitude on this head to themselves and to their
neighbors on the ground that these games serve as an invaluable means of
development. They not only improve the contestant's physique, but it is
commonly added that they also foster a manly spirit, both in the
participants and in the spectators. Football is the particular game which
will probably first occur to any one in this community when the question
of the serviceability of athletic games is raised, as this form of
athletic contest is at present uppermost in the mind of those who plead
for or against games as a means of physical or moral salvation. This
typical athletic sport may, therefore, serve to illustrate the bearing of
athletics upon the development of the contestant's character and physique.
It has been said, not inaptly, that the relation of football to physical
culture is much the same as that of the bull-fight to agriculture.
Serviceability for these lusory institutions requires sedulous training or
breeding. The material used, whether brute or human, is subjected to
careful selection and discipline, in order to secure and accentuate
certain aptitudes and propensities which are characteristic of the ferine
state, and which tend to obsolescence under domestication. This does not
mean that the result in either case is an all around and consistent
rehabilitation of the ferine or barbarian habit of mind and body. The
result is rather a one-sided return to barbarism or to the feroe natura—a
rehabilitation and accentuation of those ferine traits which make for
damage and desolation, without a corresponding development of the traits
which would serve the individual's self-preservation and fullness of life
in a ferine environment. The culture bestowed in football gives a product
of exotic ferocity and cunning. It is a rehabilitation of the early
barbarian temperament, together with a suppression of those details of
temperament, which, as seen from the standpoint of the social and economic
exigencies, are the redeeming features of the savage character.</p>
<p>The physical vigor acquired in the training for athletic games—so
far as the training may be said to have this effect—is of advantage
both to the individual and to the collectivity, in that, other things
being equal, it conduces to economic serviceability. The spiritual traits
which go with athletic sports are likewise economically advantageous to
the individual, as contradistinguished from the interests of the
collectivity. This holds true in any community where these traits are
present in some degree in the population. Modern competition is in large
part a process of self-assertion on the basis of these traits of predatory
human nature. In the sophisticated form in which they enter into the
modern, peaceable emulation, the possession of these traits in some
measure is almost a necessary of life to the civilized man. But while they
are indispensable to the competitive individual, they are not directly
serviceable to the community. So far as regards the serviceability of the
individual for the purposes of the collective life, emulative efficiency
is of use only indirectly if at all. Ferocity and cunning are of no use to
the community except in its hostile dealings with other communities; and
they are useful to the individual only because there is so large a
proportion of the same traits actively present in the human environment to
which he is exposed. Any individual who enters the competitive struggle
without the due endowment of these traits is at a disadvantage, somewhat
as a hornless steer would find himself at a disadvantage in a drove of
horned cattle.</p>
<p>The possession and the cultivation of the predatory traits of character
may, of course, be desirable on other than economic grounds. There is a
prevalent aesthetic or ethical predilection for the barbarian aptitudes,
and the traits in question minister so effectively to this predilection
that their serviceability in the aesthetic or ethical respect probably
offsets any economic unserviceability which they may give. But for the
present purpose that is beside the point. Therefore nothing is said here
as to the desirability or advisability of sports on the whole, or as to
their value on other than economic grounds.</p>
<p>In popular apprehension there is much that is admirable in the type of
manhood which the life of sport fosters. There is self-reliance and
good-fellowship, so termed in the somewhat loose colloquial use of the
words. From a different point of view the qualities currently so
characterized might be described as truculence and clannishness. The
reason for the current approval and admiration of these manly qualities,
as well as for their being called manly, is the same as the reason for
their usefulness to the individual. The members of the community, and
especially that class of the community which sets the pace in canons of
taste, are endowed with this range of propensities in sufficient measure
to make their absence in others felt as a shortcoming, and to make their
possession in an exceptional degree appreciated as an attribute of
superior merit. The traits of predatory man are by no means obsolete in
the common run of modern populations. They are present and can be called
out in bold relief at any time by any appeal to the sentiments in which
they express themselves—unless this appeal should clash with the
specific activities that make up our habitual occupations and comprise the
general range of our everyday interests. The common run of the population
of any industrial community is emancipated from these, economically
considered, untoward propensities only in the sense that, through partial
and temporary disuse, they have lapsed into the background of
sub-conscious motives. With varying degrees of potency in different
individuals, they remain available for the aggressive shaping of men's
actions and sentiments whenever a stimulus of more than everyday intensity
comes in to call them forth. And they assert themselves forcibly in any
case where no occupation alien to the predatory culture has usurped the
individual's everyday range of interest and sentiment. This is the case
among the leisure class and among certain portions of the population which
are ancillary to that class. Hence the facility with which any new
accessions to the leisure class take to sports; and hence the rapid growth
of sports and of the sporting sentient in any industrial community where
wealth has accumulated sufficiently to exempt a considerable part of the
population from work.</p>
<p>A homely and familiar fact may serve to show that the predaceous impulse
does not prevail in the same degree in all classes. Taken simply as a
feature of modern life, the habit of carrying a walking-stick may seem at
best a trivial detail; but the usage has a significance for the point in
question. The classes among whom the habit most prevails—the classes
with whom the walking-stick is associated in popular apprehension—are
the men of the leisure class proper, sporting men, and the lower-class
delinquents. To these might perhaps be added the men engaged in the
pecuniary employments. The same is not true of the common run of men
engaged in industry and it may be noted by the way that women do not carry
a stick except in case of infirmity, where it has a use of a different
kind. The practice is of course in great measure a matter of polite usage;
but the basis of polite usage is, in turn, the proclivities of the class
which sets the pace in polite usage. The walking-stick serves the purpose
of an advertisement that the bearer's hands are employed otherwise than in
useful effort, and it therefore has utility as an evidence of leisure. But
it is also a weapon, and it meets a felt need of barbarian man on that
ground. The handling of so tangible and primitive a means of offense is
very comforting to any one who is gifted with even a moderate share of
ferocity. The exigencies of the language make it impossible to avoid an
apparent implication of disapproval of the aptitudes, propensities, and
expressions of life here under discussion. It is, however, not intended to
imply anything in the way of deprecation or commendation of any one of
these phases of human character or of the life process. The various
elements of the prevalent human nature are taken up from the point of view
of economic theory, and the traits discussed are gauged and graded with
regard to their immediate economic bearing on the facility of the
collective life process. That is to say, these phenomena are here
apprehended from the economic point of view and are valued with respect to
their direct action in furtherance or hindrance of a more perfect
adjustment of the human collectivity to the environment and to the
institutional structure required by the economic situation of the
collectivity for the present and for the immediate future. For these
purposes the traits handed down from the predatory culture are less
serviceable than might be. Although even in this connection it is not to
be overlooked that the energetic aggressiveness and pertinacity of
predatory man is a heritage of no mean value. The economic value—with
some regard also to the social value in the narrower sense—of these
aptitudes and propensities is attempted to be passed upon without
reflecting on their value as seen from another point of view. When
contrasted with the prosy mediocrity of the latter-day industrial scheme
of life, and judged by the accredited standards of morality, and more
especially by the standards of aesthetics and of poetry, these survivals
from a more primitive type of manhood may have a very different value from
that here assigned them. But all this being foreign to the purpose in
hand, no expression of opinion on this latter head would be in place here.
All that is admissible is to enter the caution that these standards of
excellence, which are alien to the present purpose, must not be allowed to
influence our economic appreciation of these traits of human character or
of the activities which foster their growth. This applies both as regards
those persons who actively participate in sports and those whose sporting
experience consists in contemplation only. What is here said of the
sporting propensity is likewise pertinent to sundry reflections presently
to be made in this connection on what would colloquially be known as the
religious life.</p>
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