SPORT AND SOCIETY

SPORT AND SOCIETY


As indicated in. the introduction, sport plays a significant role in the cultural life of most societies. As Johan Huizinga has shown, this is true not only of more advanced modern societies, but even of ancient and primitive ones. Nevertheless, one could plausibly speculate that it has never been more true than in contemporary American society. Mil¬lions of our citizens participate in competitive sports of one sort or another. Only a small minority of these participants play at the highly visible levels of professional, intercollegiate, or interscholastic sport. Although it is easy to overlook this fact, the vast majority of sports events take place at the "sand-lot" or informal level. In addition to actual participation, attendance at sporting events around the country probably exceeds a million spectators per week. If we add to that the even greater number of people who watch televised sports, we see that sports touch the lives of enormous numbers of people. Metaphors and the vocabulary of the sports world now pervade nearly every walk of life; presidents speak of cooperative cab¬inet members as "team players," and heavy investors in the stock market are called "major players." Clearly, then, sports constitutes an important cultural phenomenon. What are the major issues of philosophic interest present in this convergence of sporting and societal issues?

SPORT AND VALUES
The first theme we shall take up bears directly on this relationship. It is clear to nearly everyone that, in both the good and the bad senses, the values in sport are at least in part a reflection of the values of the society in which the sports take place. The 19th century philosopher Hegel suggested that we understand a people by the gods they worship; one could make a similar claim about the sports popular among a people. A sport culture which emphasizes such values as teamwork, self-discipline, willingness to sacrifice personal glory of the benefit of the team, or the importance of sustained training, clearly tells us something about the cultural values, the cultural needs, of the society in which those sports take place. But this is no less true if the sport values include unquestioning obedience to authority, willingness to hurt others in pursuit of a goal, to lie, cheat, intimidate, and to risk the ruin of one's physical health.
Once it is recognized that the values present in the sport world are a reflection of the values of society, it is a plausible inference that sports can and do teach those values to its participants. Given the intensity of involvement that many people experience in sport, together with the fact that most sports present us with a learning atmosphere in order that we may develop and perfect the skills relevant to the given sport, it is plausible enough to suppose that sports will also teach the values reflected in them. Enthusiasts who praise sports for their capacity to teach the values of teamwork, self-discipline, and fair play, invariably appeal to the promise that those values, learned in a sporting context, will be useful, perhaps even more useful, in the context of life itself. General Douglas MacArthur is reported to have said that "On the friendly fields of athletic strife are sown the seeds which, on other days, on other fields, will reap the fruits of victory." To say this is to recognize both that sports do teach those values and that those values are not peculiar to sport but relevant and necessary to life in general. Perhaps the strongest claim of this sort was made by the French writer Albert Camus, who once claimed that the only situation where he ever really learned ethics was in sport.
The order of movement here seems to be as follows: First, sports are a reflection of the values inherent in a given society: That is, the values originate in the society at large, and are then reflected in the sports that that society generates. With a slightly different emphasis, the values that sports exhibit are not inherent in sport as sport, but are reflections of values that originate in society. But second, sports teach those values, instill them in the participants so that, in turn, those values, learned in the sporting context, are carried back into the society from which they originate. It is on the assumption of this structure that sports are so often praised for the values they can teach.
The exact same structure is assumed by the harshest critics of competitive sport. The difference is that such critics see a very different set of values being reflected and passed along by sport. Because of its clarity and forthrightness, I shall concentrate on the Marxian critique of competitive sport, but as I hope will be clear, such a critique has come to be largely shared by "liberal" critics of sport as well.
In order to better understand this critique, it may be helpful to set out, if only in outline, certain elements of the Marxian critique of capitalism. According to this analysis, capitalism is a developmental stage in world economy which begins in the quasi-primitive situation of scarcity. At some very early point in human social development, we were faced with a situation where there was not a sufficient supply of the basic needs—food, clothing, and shelter—to go around. This engendered what we might call the primal situation of competition: Two things should be noted about this original condition: First, it was brought about by economic conditions—the scarcity of basic needs—and thus is not, according to the Marxian analysis, a "natural" condition of human beings. As such, given the right conditions—the abolition of scarcity-competition could presumably be abolished. Second, the conditions under which this competition takes place are inherently alienating. This is a struggle for survival itself; under these conditions, it is absurd to ask for friendship and fair play among the competitors. People struggling for survival under conditions of scarcity where only some will live inevitably will be alienated from one another.
The first economic response to this was the ingenious solution of the division of labor. By assigning different tasks to different people with different abilities (the shoemaker only makes shoes, the farmer only grows crops, etc.), it was plausibly supposed that a much greater quantity of the goods needed could be produced, and scarcity could be overcome. Unfortunately, things were not that simple. The division of labor turned out to exacerbate the problem of competition, because certain occupations came to have a controlling power over others. The economic divisions between what quickly became the rich and the poor .grew even more acute, and with it the accompanying alienation. To make a very long story short, capitalism does not reach its full flowering until the industrial revolution and the development of the means of mass production through modern industry. At this point, according to Marx, capitalism reaches a new stage. For now, thanks to the development of modern industry, we have in principle the means to overcome scarcity. Given the development of industry in the 19th century, Marx was confident that if our productive capacities were properly organized, if we made socially beneficial products, and if goods were fairly distributed, it would be possible to satisfy people's needs. The problem, or, to use Marxian terminology, the contradiction, is that the very system—capitalism, which allows in principle for the overcoming of scarcity—will in fact never bring It about. This is because of certain characteristics of the system itself, to wit, competition and what follows from a competitive framework: alienation, greed, and a lack of concern for one's fellow humans.
In its developed form, capitalism, or to be more precise, the competition inherent in capitalism, beings about alienation in four ways. First, the worker experiences alienation from the product he or she makes. A worker in a Cadillac assembly line, for example, puts creative energy—sometimes exhausting creative energy—into a product that not only could he or she not afford to buy, but which, in the possession of those who can afford it, will be held over against the worker as a sign of the automobile owner's "superiority" to the worker. The very product of the worker's creative energy thus gets turned against him or her, and alienation results.
This leads directly to the second form of alienation, self-alienation. The worker's own creative energy, as the above example attests, gets turned against the worker. Since, according to Marx, human beings are essentially creative or productive beings (Homo faber), alienation from the product of that creative impulse is tantamount to alienation from oneself. The worker sees the product of his own work turned against him or her, and experiences self-alienation.
But since this creative, productive activity is, according to Marx, not just a contingent characteristic but the very essence of human nature, what Marx calls "species being", such alienation, thirdly, is at once alienation from human nature itself. From this, fourthly and inevitably, follows alienation from one's fellow humans, both from the owners who oppress the worker and from the fellow workers with whom, given the system of capitalism, one is forced to compete for one's very survival.
This brief summary of the Marxist critique of alienation under capitalism should enable us to understand how it gets plausibly applied to competition in sport. First, we are told, sports clearly reflect the values of the society in which they arise. In this case, all the worst values of capitalism are reflected in competitive sport. The alienation supposedly endemic to capitalist competition, its concomitant values of winning at all costs, self-degradation in the name of "beating" someone, mindless obedience to authority, willingness to hurt others, all these values present in sport are but reflections of the worst of capitalism's values. As the French Marxist Jean-Marie Brohm puts it,
Sport. . . . contains all the values of traditional, repressive morality and hence all the models of behavior promoted by bourgeois society: the cult of duty for its own sake, the sense of sacrifice for the community, the ideology of the super-ego, obedience, discipline, etc.
Moreover, sport values are not simply reflections of capitalist values; sports teaches those values as well.
Firstly, sport trains the work force to operate according to the norms of capitalist, or bureaucratic state-capitalist exploitation. Sort is basically a mechanisation of the body, treated as an automaton, governed by the principal of maximising output.
One need not be a Marxist to appreciate the general force of Brohm's argument. If the values in sport are reflections of the values of society and sports teaches those values, and if, in addition, those values are undesirable, then we have a serious problem with sport. Moreover, even advocates of the potentially positive value of sport (among whom I count myself) must surely admit that there are undesirable values often inculcated by sport, particularly by misguided coaches. We need not ad¬here to the Marxian solution that "Sport is alienating. It will disappear in a universal communist society", to agree that we do indeed have a problem.

As the above quote attests, the Marxian critique of sport is founded on the argument, crucial to their analysis of capitalism, that competition is inherently alienating, that competition is an essential and irreducible component of capitalism, and therefore that to get rid of alienation one must abolish capitalism. On this argument, the competitive aspect of sport makes it inherently alienating. There is no way to "save" competitive sport from its alienating consequences, and the only way to resolve the problem is to abolish competitive sport. In a later chapter, we shall return to the issue of whether the connection between alienation and athletic competition is necessary or contingent. If we discover that competition in sport is indeed inherently alienating, the Marxian analysis will have clear applicability to sport. If, on the other hand, we discover that the connection between competitive sport and alienation is only a contingent one—that sport can be alienating but does not have to be—we shall want to modify the Marxian analysis in significant ways.
The Marxian critique of competitive sport and its relation to societal values is a challenging one, but it is certainly not the only one. One could argue, for example, that it is not competition or anything else inherent in sport that is undercutting its value. Rather, other values in society, values not at all intrinsic to sport itself, are being imported into sport to its Jet.-!merit. Christopher Lasch, for example, argues that con¬temporary sport is being degraded and trivialized precisely by being turned into a vehicle for education, the enhancement of business, and entertainment. Sports, he suggests, in principle constitute their own "culture," which is in fundamental ways independent of the larger culture out of which they arise. Sports
. . . enlist skill and intelligence, the utmost concentration of purpose, on behalf of activities utterly useless, which make no contribution to the struggle of man against nature, to the wealth or comfort of the community, or to its physical survival.
Nevertheless, sports do bear a certain connection to the surrounding culture in that they,

. . . offer a dramatic commentary on reality rather than an escape from it—a heightened reenactment of communal traditions, not a repudiation of them".
Lasch argues that this delicate balance—that sport both reflects societal values yet constitutes an independent culture—is ruined when sport is "forced into the service of education, character development, or social improvement". This degradation becomes complete as sport has become a big business and part of the entertainment industry. The way to restore sport to its health would be (if this were possible) to relieve it of the business, entertainment, and educational burdens imposed upon it and restore it to its own integrity.
Note that Lasch's analysis still preserves the connection between sport and society, set out above: that the values in sport derive from and are a reflection of those in society. But unlike the Marxists, Lasch's is an example of a critique of sport that suggests that those negative values instilled in sport from society are contingent to sport itself. They could in principle be eliminated from sport (though Lasch himself does not seem especially optimistic about this). Sport thus would be liberated from the incursion into it of values from society that undercut its true nature.
For our purposes, it is important to recognize that the Marxian and Laschian analyses are examples of two ways that one might view the connection of sport and society critically. The Marxian analysis presents a structure in which the values inherent in sport are indeed reflections of the values inherent in society (in this case, the negative values of. capitalism), but that those values are so deeply a part of competitive sport that they become constitutive of sport itself. As such, the only way to eliminate the defects is to eliminate competitive sport, at least as it presently exists. In this sense, it is a more "radical" critique than the one exemplified by Lasch. He claims that at present, sport is affected to its detriment by certain values derived from society. But since these values are not inherent to sport itself, they could in principle be eliminated from sport, thus not only preserving but enhancing sport itself. If one holds to a critique such as this, one will advocate not the elimination but the "reform" of sport. Nevertheless, both critiques assume the two premises discussed so far, that the values in sport are a reflection of those in society, and that sports teach those values.
It should be noted that a third, implicit premise in these arguments is that the values in sport somehow all originate in society. To put the point somewhat differently, sport has no inherent or intrinsic values of its own—values, for example, that might be carried into society to the latter's benefit. There is, it should be noted, an implicit hint at this latter possibility in Lasch's claim that the values of sport cannot be completely assimilated to those of society. In an instructive remark, Lasch says,
“Sport does play a role in socialization, but the lessons it teaches are not necessarily the ones that coaches and teachers of physical education seek to impart. The mirror theory of sport (that the values in sport mirror those of society), like all reductionist interpretations of culture, males no allowance for the autonomy of cultural traditions. In sport, these traditions come down from one generation of players to another, and although athletics do reflect social values, they can never be completely assimilated to those values''.
If this is so, we might allow for the possibility that sport might contain some values which are not merely derived from society, values which might even be subversive to those of society, or values which might beneficially be carried back into society. We can raise and perhaps shed light on this possibility by turning our attention to two issues that are obviously serious problems in our society and have been no less so in sport: racism and sexism.

RACISM IN SPORT
Let us begin with racism. The manifest presence of racism in sport is a perfect instance of the claim that the values of a given society will be reflected in its sporting institutions, In its “purer” forms, when segregation was a formal institution in the country as a whole, blacks were segregated from most of the major sports and had to form their own leagues. When segregation was outlawed, we learned to our dismay that that was hardly the end to racism; its form simply became more subtle, more sophisticated, and in many ways more insidious. The same pattern occurred in organized sport. After segregation was banned, blacks were gradually integrated into organized sport, but often with strict, if unstated, quotas. Bill Russell, the great Boston Celtic center, is said to have claimed that in the early days of integrated basketball, teams would "start two blacks at home, three on the road, and four when they had to win." Moreover, even after formal integration, blacks were for a long time excluded from certain key "skill" positions, such as quarterback in football. Even today, there is much controversy about t6 thinning paucity of blacks in the coaching and management positions of professional sport.
Few would deny that important steps have been taken in the last thirty years or so to overcome racism in our society. But few would deny as well that racism still remains a problem, a problem in some ways more insidious because it is for the most part less straightforward, outspoken, and "honest." Thus the complaints of some whites that blacks and other minorities should be "satisfied" with the progress that has been made are insensitive to the more subtle but no less powerful and painful ways in which racism still holds sway.
Again, we find the same syndrome present in the world of sport. One example of a more subtle form of racism present in sport today concerns the assessment of great athletes and how they achieve their prowess. White athletes who attain "superstar" status are invariably praised for the hard work, commitment, sacrifice, etc., that they must exhibit to achieve their excellence. Black superstars, on the other hand, are often characterized as "natural" athletes. The claim implicit in this apparently innocent epithet is that they did not have to exhibit .the virtues of hard work and commitment that the white stars did—after all, blacks are just naturally gifted. It is understandable that black athletes, who have worked just as hard, just as long, and made just as many sacrifices as their white counter¬parts, would be irritated at the subtle racism exhibited in these judgments.
Considerations such as these make clear the plausibility of the claim that there has been and still is racism present in sport, and that this racism is a reflection of the racism still r resent in our society. The alternative would seem to be to argue that sports themselves are somehow inherently racist, that there is something racist about the nature of, say, baseball, or tennis, or golf. I have yet to discover anyone who suggested that. But that is to say that racism is not a necessary but a contingent characteristic of sport. Surely, most of us could agree that racism in principle could be eliminated from sports, and they would still be the sports that they are—indeed, they would be Superior in their reformed state.
If racism, like so many of the "values" in sport, is derived from society and is a contingent characteristic of sports themselves, then it raises the question broached earlier: Are there other values "intrinsic" to the sporting situation—values which might even be carried into society to its benefit? Let me try to make that possibility plausible with the example of racism. Imagine yourself at a playground basketball court. You know that the conventions of the court are that the winning team gets to keep on playing, while the losing team must sit until their next turn comes around. Imagine as well that this is a popular court with a large number of participants waiting to play, so that losing the game will more or less assure that you will be sitting for an hour or two. Typically for a sporting situation, this puts a considerable stake on winning. Now imagine further that the teams are being picked. You are one of those choosing sides. You happen to be white. Obviously, you want to pick the best team possible so as to maximize your chances of continuing to play. The best player waiting to be chosen when your turn comes is black. But you are racist; you much prefer not to have blacks on your team. So you pass over the superior black player to choose an inferior player, but one who is white. In this situation, the preservation of your racism has a clear price, the likelihood that you will lose and have to sit.
A closer look at this fairly typical athletic situation suggests that the very structure of the situation—the choosing of sides and a clear stake in winning—carries implicit in it a set of values, or at least, quite clear lessons. For example, one maximizes one's chances of doing well if one acts according to the following principle: "Judge people according to their ability." (In this example, their basketball ability, but the principle is obviously transferable). If one takes this principle to heart more generally, it might be a small step toward the overcoming of racism.
I use this example to be suggestive of a possibility, that the "direction" of movement between values in society and sport might be two ways, that while it is certainly true that certain values exhibited in sports are reflections of those same values originating in society (the case of racism), there might be other values intrinsic to the very structure of the sporting situation itself, values which one might want to see reflected in the society at large.
In my own youth, before the civil rights movement got into full swing, I can recall occasionally hearing, as "justification" for the segregation of blacks in organized sport, the claim that they were simply inferior athletes and it would be humiliating for them to compete with whites. A few years later, after it was demonstrated that they were at least as capable athletes as whites, one began to hear a perverse version of the exact opposite argument, that the reason blacks were "superior" athletes was that they were genetically and physiologically closer to primitive conditions where athletic prowess was necessary for survival. The former argument, asserting the inferiority of blacks as athletes, was no doubt in "bad faith" from the beginning, and in retrospect I suspect that even its proponents probably did not fully believe it. The latter argument, however, is still controversial today. It is no longer used as a justification for separation of whites and minorities in sport but as an explanation for the remarkable success of minorities, especially blacks, in American athletics.
Surely, something about the situation does call for explanation. For example, 75 percent of the basketball players in the NBA are black, as are 55 percent of the football players in the NFL. Especially given the fact that in the nation at large blacks still represent a small minority of the total population, these figures attest to a stunning level of athletic achievement by blacks. How are we to explain this? The first thing that needs to be said is that no one knows. An adequate explanation of this phenomenon is yet to be presented. Moreover, the problem is exacerbated by the sensitivity of race relations, which is the context for such an investigation. Often the very effort to investigate the question is regarded as a sign of implicit ration, particularly for those who wish to investigate the possibility of genetic or physiological differences.
Nevertheless, two general directions of explanation are discernible: sociological explanations and genetic or physiological explanations. The sociological explanations, which seem to be predominant at present, base their account on an interpretation of the sociological differences that typify the childhood and nurturing of white and black youth. Perhaps the most common version of this account points to the lower socioeconomic status of most blacks as the basis of an explanation. Faced with a struggle for survival throughout their lives, blacks earlier and more readily develop the competitive attitude which, turned to the athletic realm, helps make them superior athletes. Conversely, many white youths, by contrast, "have it too easy" to become great athletes. Or alternatively blacks, faced with de facto exclusion from many of the standard paths to economic success, recognize early on that athletic success is one of the few avenues to financial success genuinely open to them (the "way out of the ghetto" argument).
Either of these arguments, or variants of them, appeal not to anything inherently or "naturally" different about blacks which would make them superior athletes but to the socioeconomic conditions under which they are raised. One appeal of this explanation is that in denying any "natural" differences relevant to athletic success, it avoids establishing an explanatory framework—"whites and blacks are just different"—which has been at the ideological foundation of so much of racism.
The second explanatory framework, genetic or physiological explanation, is for that very reason much more controversial. Here the explanation of enormous athletic success among blacks takes some form of the claim that genetic or physiological differences between blacks and whites predispose them to athletic prowess. Claims have been made, for example, about differences in muscle fiber, about statistical differences in muscle configuration, and even, at the level of silliness, that blacks have an extra bone in their foot, the latter used as an explanation of why so many black basketball players are outstanding leapers. Although fortunately few are given to explanations such as the latter, the phenomenon it seeks to explain, the remarkable leaping ability of many black athletes, is widely enough accepted that even among blacks, the occasional black athlete who does not jump especially well is characterized as suffering from "white man's disease".
Even the serious investigations into possible genetic or physiological differences are controversial both scientifically and politically. They are controversial scientifically because the evidence supporting or denying the claim that biological differences might explain differences in athletic prowess is not strong enough to be widely accepted. Indeed, whether or not there even are objectively delineable racial characteristics is itself controversial. It may be, for example, that the differences between skin pigmentation or facial structure from, say, Swedes to Zulus, simply reflect a range or spectrum, and no more constitute evidence for "objective" differences in race than would the difference between people under five feet tall and people over seven feet. Perhaps the former range of difference has simply been invested with a political significance that the latter does not have.
But such scientific investigations are also controversial politically. We know from bitter experience in the past that claims about the "natural inferiority" of blacks have been used as part of the ideological basis for racism and the systematic exclusion of blacks from conventional avenues to social and economic success. Now, ironically, converse hypotheses about the natural superiority of blacks as athletes are being entertained. Many fear that, in the context of a still racist society, arguments about natural differences between races, even if ostensibly pointing to the superiority of blacks, will nevertheless be put in the ideological service of racism. Indeed, there is already some evidence that this fear is warranted. As mentioned in an earlier discussion, the claim that blacks are "natural" athletes has ironically been turned against them as implicit or explicit evidence that they do not need to exhibit, and therefore need not be praised for, such virtues as discipline, commitment, and sustained effort for which white athletes are regularly praised.
Another version of this ironic transformation of black athletic superiority into the service of racism plays on the well-known dualism of mind and body. Yes, the claim goes, blacks are naturally superior athletes. But the inference drawn from this is that they are therefore probably inferior intellectually. White players, having to overcome their supposedly inferior natural ability, do so, it is suggested, by being "smart" players, by "knowing the game" so well, by being "heady." The inference is easily (if implicitly) drawn that when black players accomplish the same feats as whites, it is by virtue not of their intelligence but of their "natural ability." However absurd the conclusion, it is so often drawn that black athletes, sensitive to these implications, have found themselves moved to deny characterizations of their "natural" ability ostensibly intended as praise.
This situation puts contemporary scientists interested in investigating this issue in a difficult, delicate, but not unprecedented position. On the one hand, next to none of them, hopefully, wants the results of their investigations put in the service of racism. On the other hand, should they hold back their conclusions or even hold back from investigating these issues on the grounds that the results might be controversial or politically "dangerous?". Most researchers, deeply committed to freedom of inquiry and some version or other of the enlightenment conviction that "the truth shall make you free," .resist the latter path as a dire threat to academic freedom and to science itself. Nevertheless, it is with understandable fear and trembling that a scientist of good will would embark on an investigation the results of which might be put to deplorable uses.
In the investigation of the statistically enormous athletic 15UCCOS Of blacks, then, we have an issue which is intellectually fascinating, potentially important to our understanding of human beings, yet politically delicate and even dangerous. It will be interesting to watch what happens with this issue in the coming years.

SEXISM IN SPORT
A controversy similar in many ways to the problem of racism in sport exists when we turn to sexism. For years and even centuries, women have been systematically excluded from full participation in sport. The evidence for this claim is painfully obvious, from the relatively small participation in sport among women, to the amount of money spent on women's sports, to the extent of press coverage of women's athletics, even to the different ways in which little girls are raised. What is more controversial, again, is the explanation of this phenomenon. Is it straightforwardly the result of sexism in society? That is, is it simply a social phenomenon which, as such, could be over¬come in a more just society? Or are there reasons and even justifications for the exclusion of women from full participation in sport?
In this case too, a number of accounts for the phenomenon have gained some acceptance. One view argues that however equal women might be to men intellectually, women are simply and clearly weaker and smaller than men physically, and therefore naturally inferior as athletes. Given the clear statistical differences in size, in ratios of fat to muscle, even in muscle and bone structure, women simply do not have the physical ability to compete with men as athletes, and they should not try, or so the argument goes.
To this is added a second argument, based on the "values" supposedly inculcated in our youth through participation in sport. It has been asserted that such values as discipline, competitiveness, courage, and indeed "manliness" are most desirable for our male youth to develop-hence the value of sports participation for them—but that such values are unnecessary and even detrimental to the presumably different "nature" of women. A stunning example of this argument was made in the early seventies in Connecticut. A female high school runner; manifestly superior to her female peers, sought more adequate competition by going out for the boys' track team. She was refused the opportunity and challenged the case in court. The judge, deciding against her, affirmed that "Athletic competition builds character in our boys. We do not need that kind of character in our girls".
Such a claim may bring derisive laughter or righteous indignation to most of us today, but we should not dismiss it. For it hides a claim that is in principle important; not merely are there physical differences between women and men which militate against the full participation of women in athletics, there are intellectual, moral, or spiritual differences as well. Women and men are physically and spiritually different, and those differences make a difference when it comes to the appropriateness of athletic competition. This is the clear presumption of the judge's argument.
A different argument, still based upon the presumed difference between male and female nature, has been offered by Paul Weiss in his ground-breaking book on the philosophy of sport. Weiss argues that one of the things that sport accomplishes is to overcome the experienced separation between mind and body that so many men experience. Because sport demands both physical and mental activity, and because one invests one's entire being, mental and physical in it, it offers us one of the few occasions for bridging the gap between the mind and the body—so typical of men's experience of things. But, Weiss argues, this diremption is peculiar to men. Women, thanks to childbirth, their supposedly more emotional natures, and even their menstrual cycle, are so naturally in touch with their bodies that they do not experience a diremption between mind and body and so do not need sport to overcome it. Sport is therefore appealing and valuable to men and more or less useless to women because it answers to a problem—the separation of mind and body—that men suffer but women simply do not have.
Such arguments, it should be noted, are founded on a claimed difference in the natures of women and men, either physical differences or spiritual and moral differences. They are proffered as reasons why women do not excel in sports, are less interested in sports than men, or as justifications for the exclusion of women from sport.
In recent years, however, such arguments have come under attack, both empirically and philosophically. The empirical evidence is all around us, in the enormous increase in participation of women in sport, in the clear satisfaction they get from sport, and perhaps most significantly, in the sometimes astonishing improvement in women's athletic achievement. The tennis courts, the softball diamonds, road races, and fitness centers are increasingly full of women just as committed as the men to the sport of their choice. Once given the opportunity, it is clear that the significance, satisfaction, and depth of involvement of women in sport can equal that of men. It is also clear that their poorer record of achievement relative to men in sport in the past was more a function of women's exclusion from adequate opportunities to develop and train than to inherent physical differences. Now that opportunities to train and learn are increasing for women, so too are their standards of achievement.
It is often pointed out, for example, that the times in women's Olympic swimming races would have been sufficient to win the men's events only a few years ago. Women's basketball players are now developing their strength so that some of them can even dunk. Indeed, in some sports particularly adapted to women's physiology, such as ultramarathoning, it is predicted that in a few years women's times will be better than men's. All this offers evidence that a significant part of the explanation for women's relative inadequacy at sport in the past was that they were systematically excluded from the training and development opportunities which would have allowed them to excel.
Philosophically as well, a number of arguments have been put forward recently that call into question whatever justifications might have been offered in the past for the exclusion of women from sport. The first begins by noticing that the vast majority of our sports, and certainly all the "big-time" ones, have been developed by men and designed to showcase those qualities particularly characteristic of male musculature and body type: strength, speed, and size. Given that "bias" of most sports, it is hardly surprising that women have not excelled as much as men at sports which, after all, were not even developed for their body types. Some thinkers, Betsy Postow, for example, argue that given this built-in bias for most of our sports, it is dubious wisdom for women to actively participate in those very activities in which they are bound to "look bad" compared to men. Why should women play basketball, for example, a sport consummately developed to highlight height, speed, and strength, the very qualities that on the whole will be exhibited to a greater extent by men? Instead, women should concentrate on sports specifically designed to highlight their own physiological tendencies, such as the balance beam in gymnastics, diving, or ultramarathoning. Moreover, since, given the enormous domination of sport by males, the vast majority of sports are not designed for women, women should demand that more such sports be developed and take an active role in developing them.
This argument is sometimes countered by asking why women should deny themselves the opportunity to play, say, basketball (and the fun of so playing), just because on balance they will not be as big or fast as their male counterparts? The sex-differences, it is argued, are perhaps a justification for separating the men's and women's games in the name of fairness, but surely not for excluding women. Moreover, from a spectator standpoint, games between well-matched women's teams can be as exciting as those between men. In some sports, such as tennis, many consider the women's matches to be in fact even more exciting since they are not so dominated by power serves. Still, the point is well-taken that the bias against women in sport is already built into the very structure of most of our games, and surely something could and should be done about that.
A second argument, put forward by the philosopher Iris Marion Young, focuses its attack directly on the injustice of the exclusion of women from sport". Young begins with the distinction between the experience of oneself—or others—as "body-subject" and as "body-object." To experience oneself as body-subject is to experience oneself as a source of activity, energy, and power. To experience oneself or others as body-object is to experience one as a thing, as passive, as something to be looked at, and decisively, as "the other." Once this distinction is established, Young can argue plausibly for a number of claims. First, sport is a paradigm realm of the body-subject.
The identify of body and active subjectivity reaches its paradigm in sport: the very stance, muscle, movement, and directionality of the athlete exhibit directly her or his intentions and projects. . . . sport calls upon the body's capacities and skills merely for the sake of determining what they can achieve. By its nature, then, sport exhibits the essential body-subject.
Young's second claim, however, is that our culture, dominated by the masculine, has largely identified the body-subject, source of energy, activity, power, as the domain of the masculine. Conversely, it has identified body-object, entity to be looked at, passive, other, as the essence of the feminine. The force of this association will, I hope, be immediately plausible. In an all-too-common cultural scenario, while little boys are out on the athletic fields learning to be active, energetic, and assertive, little girls are at home learning to "primp" and "be beautiful". Or again, in discussions with my classes on the topic, I have discovered that for the most part male students, though they may joke about it, simply do not know what it really means to be taken as a "sex-object," and for a very good reason: it has simply never happened to them. But to the women it is all too familiar.
Given the body-subjective character of sport and the cultural associations of men with body-subjectivity and women as body-objects, Young's third claim becomes clear, that women have been not only "existentially" but conceptually excluded from sport. That is, in our very conception of what women are, we fundamentally exclude them from the realm of sport. But this is to exclude them from a realm of essential humanity. As Young points out, it is thus an injustice both to women and to sport, which is itself excluded from the full richness of the potential contribution of women.
Young's argument is a forceful one. Sport is indeed one of the decisive realms—and especially in our youth—where we experience ourselves as sources of energy, of power, of creative and self-creating activity. To exclude women from that possibility is to exclude them from an important, even definitive possibility of development. It has obviously contributed to their identification and, as Young points out, even their self-identification, as "sex-objects". And just as obviously, justice demands that this exclusion be overcome.
A third argument is one I have championed in an article entitled "Competition, Friendship, and Human Nature". It focuses not so much on the question of the relative athletic abilities of men and women as on the question of whether the various values proclaimed for sports are as appropriate for women as men. That is, in contrast to the judge quoted earlier, are sports as "good" for our little girls as for our little boys? I argue that they are.
A distinction can be drawn between claims regarding the natural physiological differences between men and women, about which there is relatively little controversy, and the question of whether there are natural (as opposed to culturally determined) psychological, intellectual, or "spiritual" differences. About the physiological differences between men and women—our "plumbing", musculature, differences in size and strength over a statistical range, etc.—there is some controversy but relatively little. Some might argue, for example, that at least some of the difference in size or strength or muscle development might be the result of social conditioning—how boys and girls are raised, the extent to which they are encouraged to be active, etc.—rather than "natural," genetically deter-mined differences. Nevertheless, few would deny the reality of at least some natural genetic or physiological differences.
When we turn to the question of psychological, intellectual, or spiritual differences, however, the situation is altogether more murky. To be sure, differences at this level between men and women, at least across large samplings, seem to be discernible: the tendency for men to be more aggressive, for women to be more at ease with the expression of their emotions, more gentle, more "intuitive," etc. What is exceedingly difficult to determine is whether those perceived tendencies are the result of social conditioning or are "natural", that is, again, genetically determined differences independent of the way in which one is raised. This is both an important issue and a controversial one, and it has certainly not been definitively answered.
Whatever the nature of these differences, it should not be forgotten that there is another level of our natures which men and women share as human—what has for centuries been dis¬cussed as the question of "human nature." Again, just what that human nature is, or even whether such a nature is "permanent" or itself historically conditioned, is an immensely difficult and important issue. What we need to appreciate tor the question of sports participation is that there are at least some characteristics, both physical and spiritual, which me:' and women will share by virtue of being human.
My point in raising these distinctions is not to claim a solution but to enable me to ask a different question which may be answerable. Whatever the differences between men and women and whatever their origin, does the difference make a difference when it comes to the supposed values derived from sport? Keep in mind that those characteristics which sports are claimed to inculcate include both bodily and spiritual values. Sports, it is claimed, develop strong bodies, good health, agility, but also self-confidence, self-discipline, teamwork, competitive spirit, and the spirit of fair play.
The question, then, is this: Whatever the differences between men and women, whether it be the physiological differences or the more controversial spiritual ones, do those differences have any affect on the appropriateness of the various values derived from sport? If there are values derived from sports participation which are a function of some of the differences between men and women, to that extent the judge may be right that such values and sports may be appropriate for men and inappropriate or irrelevant to women. That is what the judge claims, and that is what, in a very different way, Paul Weiss had claimed. If, on the other hand, the values available in sport are a function not of differences in our nature but of characteristics which women and men share as human, then the value of sport is as relevant to women as men, and the massive exclusion of women from the opportunity to share and enjoy those values is a manifest injustice.
This sets the framework for responding to the question of whether sport is an appropriate activity for women as well as men. We must look at the values supposedly available in sport and ask whether those values are related to aspects of our natures which are sexually differentiated—in which case, the difference will make a difference. Or are they rather connected to aspects of our natures as human in which case, we shall judge sport a humanly good thing rather than a "masculinely" good thing?
I shall not claim to develop a comprehensive list of all the values, physical and spiritual, available in sport. That is not necessary to establish the thrust of my argument, which is that surely most of the values claimed on behalf of sports participation are values appropriate to our natures as human rather than as male or female.
Begin with the physical values. Sport encourages health, strength, agility (although more than one skeptic has suggested that an intense involvement in sport, with its likely injuries, over-training, etc. is more likely to destroy one's physical health than to enhance it). Granting the physical differences in general between women and men, even granting, for example, that women are typically not as strong as men, does that suggest that they should not be as strong as they could be, as agile as they could be, as healthy as they can be? Surely they should. If sport does encourage those traits, clearly sport is of value for women as well as men.
A similar argument holds true for what I have been calling the spiritual values. Take the ones mentioned just above: self-confidence, self-discipline, teamwork, competitive spirit, the spirit of fair play. In order to claim that participation in sport was somehow inappropriate for women, one would need to argue that somehow those values are inappropriate or irrelevant to women. I submit that one would have to be a male chauvinist of monumental proportions to claim that women do not need those qualities, or will not benefit from those qualities, as much as men.
Perhaps the most interesting issue here is the question of competitive spirit. One might question first whether the inculcation of competitive spirit is even desirable. We saw, for example, that the Marxian critique of sport is founded precisely on its inculcation of the deplorable trait of competitiveness. But note that nothing in Marx's critique suggests that competition is bad for men, or that it must be overcome among men. If competition is bad, it is bad for humans as human. Does not the converse hold, that if competitive spirit is a positive value, it is so for humans, not for men or women alone?
On the other hand, one might argue that insofar as competitive spirit is connected to aggressiveness, and insofar as aggressiveness is a predominantly male trait, competitiveness, and so the value of competitive sport, is, after all, gender specific. But this argument would depend on showing that competitive spirit is a desirable characteristic for men but not for women. Even if it were shown that men had a tendency to be more competitive than women (and the evidence for this is by no means conclusive), the analogy with physical strength suggests that it would still be valuable for women, even granting. their "less competitive natures", to hone what competitive spirit they have in the proper way—supposedly the virtue of sport participation. And in any case, as I argue at length elsewhere, it is at least as likely that the competitive urge derives from something about our nature as human rather than our natures as male or female. One way or another, then, the evidence seems to me conclusive that the desirable values present in sport are values to and for human beings and therefore should be available to all human beings. The value of sport, in that sense, is androgynous.

THE ATHLETE AS HERO
The final issue focusing primarily on sport and society to which I wish to turn is that of the sports hero. If a culture's heroes are its secular gods, one learns much about a culture by noting what qualities and personality types it elevates to hero-status. Presumably, a culture's heroes will exhibit those traits of character and personality that are most needful, most desirable, most honored in that culture. To take an obvious example, a culture whose heroes are predominantly warriors would attest to the need in that culture for warrior virtues: courage, aggressiveness, etc. We could predict that that culture existed in a politically precarious environment, one in which war was always a possibility, and therefore the virtues of warriors always needful.
In this sense, the oft-noted tendency for Americans to elevate its great athletes to hero status is thought-provoking and puzzling. We live, after all, in an epoch increasingly dominated by technology. One of the characteristics of technology is that it accomplishes by machinery more and more of the activities which once required the physical strength and agility of humans. Even war, once the special domain of the physically strong and courageous, has become increasingly an activity requiring more technological knowledge than physical strength. In a culture, then, in which physical strength and agility is less and less necessary for everyday life, why should we be elevating to hero status people whose activity exhibits just those increasingly anachronistic virtues?
One argument is that it is precisely the increasingly less practical character of the athlete's virtues that leads us to so admire our athletes. Athletes remind us of "the way we were", they exhibit those qualities of physical strength, agility, and dexterity, which we all once needed in some form or other to go about our daily lives, but now typically neither need nor any longer exhibit. The hero status of athletes is thus a nostalgia for the past.
In its most negative version, this argument suggests that the athletic body has become like an orchid. It is a showy but useless spectacle which we may admire and may even goggle at, but which masks a fundamental pointlessness and sterility. A more positive formulation of the point would be that we recognize in the athlete qualities that we are indeed in danger of losing, and that we want to preserve. The appeal of sport generally is thus in part the desire to find a way of preserving our bodily agility in an age in which such agility is in danger of atrophy. Athletes thus become our model—less for the way we were as the way we want to be—in spite of a technological culture which renders that way of being increasingly less "practical".
On the other hand, part of the appeal of athletes might have less to do with physical prowess than their other qualities. If what the proponents of athletics say is true, that sports does indeed embody and inculcate virtues that, far from useless, are most needful in our lives—qualities such as self-discipline, teamwork, etc.—then athletes may appeal to us insofar as they are literally the most visible exhibiters of those qualities. One sees the teamwork, self-discipline, concentration of the athlete in a way which is simply not as manifest for the businessman in his office, or the doctor in her hospital. On this argument, it is not only the physical but also the spiritual qualities which the athletes exhibit that leads us to admire them so.
Moreover, as Paul Weiss has observed, the athletic field is one of the first arenas where our youth can hope to achieve and exhibit the excellence that they admire in their athletic heroes. Long before a young person is capable of achieving excellence in business, politics, or ethics, he or she can achieve excellence in athletics. That, surely, is part of its appeal, and part of the appeal of its outstanding example, the athletic hero.

Whatever the explanation of its source, this admiration is at times problematic. However admirable and worthy of imitation their athletic ability, great athletes sometimes lead ethical and moral lives which we would deplore. From Babe Ruth to Wade Boggs, from Joe Namath to Lawrence Taylor, athletes, even the greatest of them, have conducted their personal lives in ways which we would want our youth to renounce. Yet it is natural for aspiring athletes to imitate their athletic heroes. The separation of their athletic abilities from the quality of their personal lives is sometimes too subtle a distinction for an impressionable youth, especially when those personal lives are made to look exciting and glamorous. We shall look at specific instances of this problem in the next chapter when we turn to the problem of drug use among athletes.
A particularly acute example of the problematic nature of athletic hero worship concerns youths who are poverty-stricken. To them, the achievements, including the financial wealth, of outstanding professional athletes can seem so worthy of admiration that the imitation of them may seem “the way out of the ghetto”. But because the actual number of athletes who can actually achieve the financial rewards of professional fame is so minuscule, there is great danger that huge number of poor youths, hoping to "make it" in athletics, will spend inordinate time and energy on the playing fields, which they might better have spent getting a good education and preparing for a good job.
More generally, it is sometimes held to be deplorable to hold up as heroes athletes who perform activities with no practical value to society, 'when there are others—politicians, scientists, business persons—who, engaged in activities genuinely useful to society, ought to be the real objects of admiration.
Others reply that this is not so obvious. In many cultures, and in the not too distant past of our own culture, the cultural hero was more often than not the soldier. But soldiers, so the skeptics proclaim, are trained killers. Better to establish as heroes and objects of imitation athletes, even if their activities are culturally useless, than to hold up as heroes and objects of imitation soldiers, agents of destruction and death. Perhaps the hero worship of athletes is in that sense a sign of a higher culture!

And in any case, who cares if athletes do not perform activities of great practical value, so long as they stand forth as paragons of excellence? Are we so mired in a functionalist and utilitarian mentality that we can no longer see any value in an activity apart from its practical consequences? Perhaps, again, one of the virtues of holding athletes as heroes is that it reminds us that someone, or some activity, can be valuable and admirable independently of considerations of practical utility. If so, then perhaps we need not be so troubled by the phenomenon of the athletic hero.
In this chapter, we have looked at a number of issues that arise out of a reflection on the relation of sport and society. Already present in that relation, as we have seen, are a host of ethical questions regarding the role of athletes in society, and the ethical standards to which they should be held. In the next chapter, we shall focus on some of those ethical issues which are particularly problematic or instructive.