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ABSTRACT
In Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, T.S. Eliot asked whether culture should be understood as “essentially, the incarnation (so to speak) of the religion of a people.” By “incarnation,” Eliot meant that “what we believe is not merely what we formulate and subscribe to, but that behavior is also belief.” It is, Eliot insisted, our actions, and not merely our ideas, which matter. Together, our actions and our ideas embody and then give life to culture. “Religion” is, no doubt, a contested term. For present purposes, all that needs to be conceded to make Eliot’s point worth pursuing is that every culture has some conception of the good, the true, and the beautiful, which it promotes, encourages, and thereby cultivates. What implications does this have for kinesiology? I will examine three points. First, the discipline of kinesiology cannot be abstracted from the culture in which it finds itself, without becoming an anti-culture. This fact means that kinesiology must necessarily attend to the ways in which physical activity is embedded in the historical, anthropological, sociological, and philosophical foundations of society. Second, kinesiology contributes to the cultivation or brutalization of society. This results from the attention paid (or not paid) to the question of truth in the field. Such attention to truth requires recognition of the epistemological limits of science as well as to the importance of free-will, choice, and example. Finally, kinesiologists must be willing to cultivate and defend intellectual freedom as part of a free society. A free society allows for a diversity of opinions, not as end in itself, but as the vehicle by which fallible human beings approach the truth.
Notes
1. Andrew Hawkins made a similar point in his 2011 Hanna Lecture: “What concerns me more than anything else is how little this [what kinesiology is all about] seems to be a legitimate topic of conversation in our profession at large. One would think that the philosophers of our profession would keep this issue on our collective psyches. But where are the philosophers of our profession? There are some very good ones, but they are few and far between; a relative handful among the hundreds that comprise our profession. And what about our programs? How many programs even hire philosophers of sport or kinesiology these days? We have become so pragmatic, that asking the big questions seems to get in the way of getting the job done. The trains are running on time; we just don’t know where they’re going” (p. 261).
2. Of course, the acceptance of such an argument relies on one being open to the importance of tradition. Ironically, one dominant tradition in the Modern era alleges that we should reject tradition because we now know that “certain things are ‘modern,’ that other practices are ‘backward,’ that this idea is positively ‘medieval,’ and that other one is ‘progressive’…This buffered distance becomes part of a complex modern-European concept of ‘civilization’…whereby we place ourselves [as superior] to our own ‘barbarian’ past, and to other, less fortunate peoples” (Taylor, Citation2007, p. 301). Much could be said about the demerits of such thinking. The only thing that needs to be emphasized here is that such thinking survives (whatever its merits) on the basis of culture and tradition. We must be taught to see the world that way. It is not and could never be self-evident.
3. This account of technocracy is not unusual. Nor is it politically partisan or “right wing” (never mind the fact that partisanship, as such, is perfectly benign). In fact, criticisms of technocracy exist across the political spectrum. Fernandez-Balboa and Muros (Citation2006), for example, argued in Quest that “technocracy gives priority to the means (rather than the ends) and obsessively prioritizes ‘objective facts’, calculations, and measurements as the expense of ethical values and human sentiments” (p. 199). Building on this, they lament the “hegemonic paradigm,” which now “fosters individualism, competition, elitism and scientism” at the expense of “a whole range of ethical and political alternatives” (p. 200). Sport is not the panacea in terms of character development or intercultural exchange it is believed to be. For example, they condemn the “elitist and discriminatory” nature of the Olympic Games on the grounds that the Games, among other things, foster “nationalistic supremacy and acts of exclusionary patriotism” (p. 206). This is hardly “right wing” talk.
4. I am not interested in debating the empirical prevalence of the technocratic impulse, but rather the merits and demerits of the position. Nor do I assume that everyone who falls into or expresses technocratic assumptions or impulses is a full-throated adherent of the philosophy. For example, Edenic and wistful talk about the impact (and importance) of technology to the future of the field can be a simple expression of the zeitgeist rather than an endorsement of a set of technocratic commitments (See Tietjen-Smith, Citation2016). That does not minimize the import or the danger. Technology is a powerful tool, but only a tool. As such, our focus should be elsewhere. Moreover, instances of explicit technocratic thinking and concern are not hard to identify in in popular culture (Hamzelou, Citation2016) or in kinesiology. See, for instance, Brown’s (Citation2009) optimism regarding genetic enhancement in sport, the harms of which he believes can be controlled with careful “oversight” and with granting wide “access” (p. 136). That oversight requires power (which can be abused) and that the first rule of economics is scarcity seems to barely register with Brown (Citation2009), who can only muster that the future is “unknown” (p. 136), and may therefore contain both benefits and harms. Nevertheless, he ends on the optimistic note that genetically-enhanced sport will surely “reflect what is best in our evolving natures” (Brown, Citation2009, p. 137).
5. The embrace of doubt and the emphasis on means rather than ends results in a focus on things such as assessment, accreditation, and learning outcomes. A tangible and certified process becomes more important than the product, or even any specific content. As Lawler (Citation2015) put it, “Every moment of instruction has to be validated by measurable acquisition of skills and competencies” (p. 121).
6. James (Citation1907) continued: “But to have spent one’s youth at college, in contact with the choice and rare and precious, and yet still to be a blind prig or vulgarian, unable to scent out human excellence or to divine it amid its accidents, to know it only when ticketed and labeled and forced on us by others, this indeed should be accounted the very calamity and shipwreck of a higher education” (para. 6).
7. “Thus the purpose of so-called higher education, which is in fact professional education through specialization, ends up being the accumulation of various kinds of information, all of them provisional and urgent, solely because their shelf life is growing shorter. ‘Actuality,’ what is of current interest, thus confirms that it is defined by exclusive attention to what does not last, and therefore to what is unreal. If information must be understood as data that evaporates the moment it is acquired, then higher education that is enlisted in the diffusion of this current information has no future, because it does not even have a true present. It is necessary therefore to consider another model of higher education that proposes a contrary hypothesis of a universal knowledge” (Marion, Citation2013, p. 68).
8. The point is not to promote fideism, but rather a recognition of the mutual dependence of faith and reason. We should not believe blindly, but we must believe. As Polanyi (Citation1962) showed, “We owe our mental existence predominantly to works of art, morality, religious worship, scientific theory and other articulate systems which we accept as our dwelling place and as the soil of our mental development. Objectivism has totally falsified our conception of truth, by exalting what we can know and prove, while covering up with ambiguous utterances all that we know and cannot prove, even though the latter knowledge underlies, and must ultimately set seal to, all that we can prove” (p. 286; emphasis is original).
9. The difference between a traditional and a technocratic approach to the culture of kinesiology is neatly summarized by C.S. Lewis’ (Citation2001) examination of the possibility of innovation in language in The Abolition of Man: “A theorist about language may approach his native tongue, as it were from outside, regarding its genius as a thing that has no claim on him and advocating wholesale alterations of its idiom and spelling in the interests of commercial convenience or scientific accuracy. That is one thing. A great poet, who has ‘loved, and been well nurtured in, his mother tongue’, may also make great alterations in it, but his changes of the language are made in the spirit of the language itself: he works from within. The language which suffers, has also inspired the changes. That is a different thing—as different as the works of Shakespeare are from Basic English. It is the difference between alteration from within and alteration from without: between the organic and the surgical” (p. 45).
10. In fact, any given culture probably does both at the same time. Language yet again makes this obvious, for language both empowers and limits us. “Yet it notoriously is true that, from any point, only certain things can be seen; in any language, some things cannot easily be said” (Midgley, Citation1992, p. 60).
11. Though comprehensive evidence on this question is unavailable, compelling but incomplete empirical and anecdotal evidence is available. See Eagleman and McNary (Citation2010) for evidence of the dearth of humanities classes in sport management, despite the fact that the major’s accrediting body requires coverage of both historical, sociological, psychological foundations of sport and ethical issues in sport (Commission on Sport Management Accrediation [COSMA], Citation2016). See Twietmeyer (Citation2015a) for evidence of the lack of humanities options in kinesiology PhD programs. Finally, see DeLuca and Braunstein-Minkove (Citation2016) for a survey of student attitudes regarding the practical value of sport management classes taken. Sport marketing comes in at 63% of students finding value, sports in society comes in at 22%, sport history comes in at 1%, while sports ethics is not even on the list.
12. I would argue (Twietmeyer, Citation2015b) that scientific and therapeutic kinesiology both generally fall under the rubric of health, while ludic kinesiology generally falls under the rubric of play.
13. “This means that dramatization [prioritization and evaluation] itself is not dangerous, any more than perspective is dangerous, or indeed than breathing air or walking on two legs is dangerous. (All these things do have their dangers, but it isn’t helpful to try to get rid of them altogether). Definite views on what is and isn’t important, and on the kind of life-position from which thought should start, are a precondition of all thinking. What is dangerous is not being aware of these views. We shall be noting that danger in the uncontrolled dramatizations that often infest the work of those very writers who most noisily claim objectivity” (Midgley, Citation1992, p. 39; emphasis is original).
14. The claim may also be held to mean (and imply) different things. For examples of rival and competing answers to what embodiment means, see Woollaston (Citation2013), and Lee and George (Citation2008).
15. “The importance of movement to kinesiology is analogous to the practice of music in the study of music or the practice of arts in the study of the fine arts” (Anderson, Citation2002, p. 92).
16. “To put it another way: the ambiguity of progress becomes evident. Without doubt, it offers new possibilities for good, but it also opens up appalling possibilities for evil—possibilities that formerly did not exist. We have all witnessed the way in which progress, in the wrong hands, can become and has indeed become a terrifying progress in evil. If technical progress is not matched by corresponding progress in man’s ethical formation, in man’s inner growth (cf. Eph 3:16; 2 Cor 4:16), then it is not progress at all, but a threat for man and for the world” (Benedict XVI, Citation2007, para. 22).
17. “Here something new comes into play, something that cannot simply be grasped in concepts associated with the notion of evolution. Our discomfort does not have its cause in any doubts about the evolutionary potential of technological intelligence; no trace of doubt exists there. What disturbs us is something quite different, namely, worry about just how man, as a creature whose decisions are made in freedom and responsibility, will treat the immense power that has become available to him and what he will actually use it for” (Pieper, Citation1969, p. 38).
18. Even science involves such moral evaluation: “Moreover, the idea that we should rely on them [critical faculties]—the sense that somehow we ought to—is itself a moral judgment, and a very remarkable one, which those critical faculties themselves cannot validate. Taking this line would not release us from the need to treat this whole issue as what it is—a moral one, a question about how we should aim to live. This is what is still not sufficiently noticed about the change to a ‘scientific age’. It has been above all a moral change. A change in what we trust has inevitably involved a change in what we admire and honour, therefore in the direction we give to our lives” (Midgley, Citation1992, p. 125; emphasis is original).
19. St. Augustine (Citationn.d.) pointed out the relationship between virtue and love in the City of God by arguing that our loves shape our priorities. Virtue, then, is loving what we ought as we ought; it is the right ordering of our loves. For Augustine, this starts with the love of God: “But if the Creator is truly loved, that is, if He Himself is loved and not another thing in His stead, He cannot be evilly loved; for love itself is to be ordinately loved, because we do well to love that which, when we love it, makes us live well and virtuously. So that it seems to me that it is a brief but true definition of virtue to say, it is the order of love” (Book XV, Chapter 22).
20. The point is not to lionize Kipnis’ (Citation2015b) ideas, many of which I disagree with, but to point out that she has a right to assert her ideas (even controversial ones), free from the threat of a Title IX “sexual harassment” investigation.
21. “If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind” (Mill, Citation2002, p. 14).
22. Authority and discipline are, of course, an important part of cultivation. The gardener prunes the plant, when necessary, to help it flourish.
23. It is important to avoid smug self-assurance by learning to avoid the tyranny of the moment. As Berger (Citation1963) pointed out, “It is too easy to think that our own age is the epitome of what men have achieved so far, so that any past period can be judged on a scale of progress in terms of its closeness to or distance from the point at which we now stand. Perhaps the decisive event of man’s history on this planet took place on a quiet afternoon in the year 2405 B.C. when an Egyptian priest woke up from his siesta and suddenly knew the final answer to the riddle of human existence—and promptly expired without telling anyone. Perhaps everything that has happened since is nothing but an inconsequential postlude” (p. 56).