216. The Horrors Competition

  

No, I don't mean a competition to see who can do the most horrible things to people.  Nobody tries to be a champion in that league.  I mean a competition to see who can rack up the most horrible things the other fellow has done.  It's the competition that gives us bragging rights in the Human League.  "You're more inhuman than I am."

Of course we mean "your tribe," "your race," "your religion," and, some of us, hope we can take the meaning to "your genes," "your essential nature."

People keep trying to win at this game. In the Balkans five nations are still piling up evidence that worse things were done to them than they ever did.  In Ireland Protestants are still adding up Catholic atrocities and Catholics adding up Protestant atrocities.  There's hardly time to get a count.  Stop to measure a pile in Asia — Muslims against Hindus, Buddhists against Muslims, Sikhs against Hindus — and somebody's sure to come running up with another bundle.  "Hold on!  The latest from Myanmar!  The Buddhists will never match these figures!"

Of course the Buddhists will match them.  Groups embarrassed by current figures just go to the past.  "Yes, we're bad now but seven centuries ago you had a general that makes us all look good.  Look how he slaughtered."

Not that there haven't been undoubted, all-conquering slaughterers.  Admit it, though, and what do you hear?  "Here's one, here's an undeniable case," and up comes another victim dragging his victimizer.  One Holocaust exception opens the gates. 

And not that there haven't been pure non-slaughterers.  Be one of those and you're a sure winner.  I don't think we'll hear from you, though.  You'll be too sweet to play this game. 

With everybody else, though, it's a contest that gets more complicated with every play.  Imagine yourself the scorekeeper.  The Crusades.  "You behead!"  "You crucify."  "Yeah, but you behead more than we crucify."  "We do not."  "Yes you do.  History shows that in 1189 you beheaded this many people." "Whose history?  Yours!"  "Yes but our history is more reliable than yours."  "OK, but even if the numbers are too high we're still ahead.  Crucified people suffer more than beheaded people."

Oi, the scoreboard.  Go from quantity to quality and it's a mess.  Well how about ten points for a crucifixion and three for a beheading, three leaving room for lethal injection, etc., lying ahead.  Sounds good but you just know that as soon as you get it fixed somebody's going to come running in with a disemboweling or a gassing.  And, if you're an old historian, you'll know more: any historian who runs in claiming to have found the last horror is going to be followed by another who has looked at the period more closely.  The closer historians look at any period the more horrors they are going to find.  Sounds to me as if anybody, if they slice it right, can be on top of the leader board.  "You're all more inhuman than I am."

Maybe what we need is a big, loud voice coming in and saying, "You're all inhuman, period.  Yes you too, you weak, you meek, you oppressed.  You just haven't had a chance yet."   The voice of the old-time God would end the game all right.

195. Humane Feelings and the Collapse of the Cincinnati Reds.

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Oh how well we clear thinkers understand games.  We know (preceding post) that they are pure tests of ability, that humane feelings gum them up, and that if you don't get rid of them you'll look as foolish as those who let Oscar Pritorius run with a metal foot, Renée Richards play women's tennis with men's muscles, and thousands of handicapped people think they have really won something when they come in first at the Special Olympics.

And where might this superior thinking lead us?  I think the experience of Cincinnati and the players on its baseball team, much of it detailed in my posts on Baseball Pain (#179 through #192), gives us a good idea.

For the players I think right thinking would lead to their shutting out, on the field, every thought of the dying Fred Hutchinson.  That means, distant analyst, that in every at-bat during those thirty-three innings when all they needed (to bring home the runner who would give them victory) was to lay the bat firmly on just one ball, they would be saying to themselves, as each ball came out of the pitcher's hand (see it, analyst, get up close), "Here comes a ball, like any other, that I am going to swing at, or not, according to its position (high, low, out, in) and appearance (spin, little spin, no spin), judged by my experience with other balls leaving pitchers' hands."  That would follow from their knowledge of the game, and indeed from their coaches' instruction.  To win you keep your poise; you don't heighten your determination.  You do not say, it would be fatal to say, "Here comes a ball I'm by God going to hit for Hutch."

And what are you saying if you are a clear-thinking fan?  "Way to go.  Keep it up.  No Hutch."  And if you are a clear-thinking analyst you're saying, "Yes, that's the right thing, for player and fan."

Us now.  What do we say?  We know the full story.  We know what a great job these players have done maintaining their poise.  It's almost unbelievable.  For months they have watched Hutchinson lose weight and sag, and walk more and more slowly out to relieve his pitcher.   They have followed him as he went out of uniform and into the stands.  They have seen him up there as a spectator, and they have managed, apparently, to put that and all those other pictures of him out of their minds as they made their plays and swung their bats and climbed in the standings.  And then, during a road trip that removed the pictures, when there remained only the temptation to think of him at home, listening on the radio, they had continued to keep their balance, on and on, through now nine straight victories. 

Sure, in the last six of those wins, in these days when the visible finish line tightens the tension in every pennant race, the schedule had blessed them with the advantage of playing out of sight (and, often, radio range) of Hutchinson, in distant cities, and that must have made it easier.  But now they are in their home town, with Hutch's hospital close by, and his picture in the papers.  We know that the fans know that.  They know that the preceding tests are small compared to what the players are going to face in the coming games.

What most of them don't know, and won't learn until later (as I did, from Doug Wilson's book, Fred Hutchinson and the 1964 Cincinnati Reds), is that Hutchinson, within six weeks of his grave, was in the midnight crowd at the airport waiting to greet the returning team, and that he would make his way to them, and hug each of them.

That's a test we have to imagine, before we face our own test.  Say you're Deron Johnson, clean-up man, counted on to bat runs in.  You know you have the best chance of being up at bat with the game on the line, maybe the season on the line.  You know that you have the best chance of coming through if your mind is empty.  And you, by this time, know how much effort it takes to keep Hutchinson's image out of it.  You know the odds, and what your emotions will do to them.  OK.  You see Hutchinson coming down the line giving hugs.  Do you bail out?  Sneak off, go home, try to forget him?  Or do you risk the hug? 

That's Johnson's problem, and we, forgetting what we know about the actual outcome (that Johnson, with one out in the fourteenth inning of the crucial game, with the winning run on third, struck out), have to imagine what Johnson faced at that time, feeling what he knows he would feel in that hug — the looser grip, the closer face, the bone in the sagging shoulder.  Our problem, our test, is whether or not we want him to do it.  Wanting is what makes the spectator complicit with the actor. Don't object that the test of the fan here, wanting or not wanting a hug, is microscopic.  Trace elements are good enough.  One small slide and there it will be: character!

What we will have a trace of may be small but there will be no mistaking it.  One kind of character says, "No!  No!  No hugs!  Go the other way.  Ignore him.  Forget Hutchinson.  Do anything, callous or not, to win.""  The other says, "Forget winning, forget the game, forget logic.  Feeling for a suffering human being comes first."

It's a small test and we baseball fans are, culturally, small people, but it's a test to be taken seriously.  Here is our chance to share in the decision-making of the great — Ulysses Grant counting the number he will have to sacrifice at Antietam, a scientist like Gottlieb (in Arrowsmith) anticipating the deaths in his control group, Tennessee Williams foreseeing the suffering of the sister he will abandon, Doris Lessing seeing the same in the children she will leave in Africa, all great generals and scientists and artists, really, all who have to be ruthless to succeed.  We can share in their decision-making by reading about it but that doesn't really test us, not like getting into a baseball season (or a novel, or a play) and being forced to decide, up close: do I really want this ruthlessness?  There's so much supporting either answer, whatever the grandeur of the outcome. Say No and in our culture you've got Christ behind you.  Say Yes and you've got the Greeks, the Romans, and Machiavelli. 

And there's so much to lose, either way.  Yes and you lose your humanity (in older terms, your soul).  No and you lose your reason, the faculty that told you what a game was, and distinguished it from parties and treatments, and made your words fit into a logic — in short, put things in conceptual order.

Try to go both ways, want both success and humanity, and you lose your reputation with analysts. You get called a "coward," one unwilling to pay the necessary price, or a "dullard," one unable to see the connection between success and price, or, both together, a "sentimentalist," one who wants "every idea without its sequence and every pleasure without its consequence."

These are the hazards once you throw yourself into spectating or reading, and quit just filling a seat.  Do that, become a fan in the old full, sense ("fanatic"), follow your passion one way or the other, and, by the experience of the fanatics in Cincinnati, I think your imagination will carry you well beyond the season — or the novel, or the play.  Did I make the right decision?  Do I have the right character?  We all want to be justified.

So some of us will have Johnson, after he has avoided the hug, meeting Hutchinson in Heaven.  "Hell, Hutch," he says, "my mind was on the next game."  We are seeing Hutchinson's character tested.  If he is the good manager we think he is he will understand perfectly. He'll forgive Johnson as Billy Budd forgave Captain Vere.  You do what you have to do to win. Superior ballplayers, superior beings, don't make a big deal out of hugs.

And some of us will have Johnson, after he has hugged, meeting Socrates, who will understand and sympathize, but who yet will say, "Yes, you have seen the injury you might have done to a man, but do you see the injury you have done to the laws, the laws of thought?  Logic.  The ordering of our concepts."  And he will go into the consequences of that for later generations, including his own children and grandchildren, who will look to his example.

Since those who give in to their hearts can track consequences in the same way, though, and we don't know how it will come out, we are left pretty much in the air.  It looks like a lady-or-the-tiger kind of choice.  I myself choose the hug-avoiders, but I'd be interested in hearing from others.  My email: hswardson@yahoo.com

194. Humane Feelings and Conceptual Order

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Violations of conceptual order can dizzy us.  I was dizzied by the Olympic Committee's ruling that let Oscar Pistorius, with his metal feet, compete against normal people.  If you finished ahead of him would you be proud?  Would you say, "Look at me, I beat a man with artificial legs"?  If behind would you be embarrassed ("Oh my, I got beat by a cripple") or would you be indignant ("Not fair, he got a spring from the metal")?  In the end you'd be wondering, I think, if you could call what you had just been in a "race."

Such violations can also amuse us.  I laughed when in News of the Weird, under the heading, "Unclear on the Concept," I read of the priest who said that though he had committed rape he didn't use a condom because it was "against church doctrine."  Concerning sin, I presume.  Sin?

And occasionally they outrage us.  I was outraged when I read the New York Supreme Court's justification for its ruling that the former man, Renée Richards, could play on the women's tennis circuit: he was "now female" on the "overwhelming medical evidence" that he had the same genitals as the others.  There the court is, brows knit over Richards' genitals, while his already developed male muscles, the reason the U. S. Tennis Association (who fought the ruling) had conceived a separate circuit, are ignored.  Men obviously play tennis with their penises.  "None here, boss."

My outrage deepens as I see Richards taking her muscles to the Lahoya Women's Tennis Tournament and, as Wikipedia has it, "crushing the opposition."  And (in my imagination) feeling satisfaction. "Wow, I really blew Nancy away.  The club champion!"

But that's not the end of the outrage.  I go so far as to be outraged by those who don't regard the New York Supreme Court's ruling as an outrage.  To the author of the Wikipedia entry on Richards it "was a landmark decision in favor of transsexual rights.  Through her fight to play tennis as a woman, she challenged gender roles and became a role model and spokesperson for the transgender community."

I think I am not the only one who will feel the ground giving way under him here.  The loss of meaning in our words — "winner," "loser," "competition," "race"— sucks us down.  Something in our conceptual substratum has given way.  How do we get out? 

I suggest we start by distinguishing a game from a party.  A party is something you throw for other people's satisfaction.  You want them to be happy, and have a good time, and feel good about life.  You are expressing your altruism.  That's what Judge Ascione and the Wikipedia author are expressing.  They are welcoming Richards to the party of general humanity.

A game, on the other hand, is something you play for your own satisfaction.  You want to win, and be superior, and feel good about your abilities.  You are expressing your egoism.  

Rules follow from the need for satisfaction of the ego.  A group of young adult men asks, "What stipulations must we make in order to be able to say, happily, 'I'm better at this than you are.'"  Whole categories — children, handicapped people, old men, women — are excluded because it's no fun beating them.  They know they are going to lose before they start.  These rules parallel rules to exclude those who are winners before they start.  "Well never be able to say, 'I'm better at this than you are,' if those types — golfers under 50, male wrestlers, heavyweight boxers — are allowed to play."  Games are necessarily contests between peers.

So the test is, "Can I happily and legitimately say, 'I am superior'?"  Activities that don't pass this test must be called something other than "games."  If not "parties" then "ceremonies" maybe, or "entertainments," or "exercises," or "promotions," or "treatments."

That's logic, that's order, that's the mind coming to the aid of the emotions.  And what happens to it when it comes to something like the Special Olympics?  Satisfaction of the ego is out the window.  This is altruism.  Humane feeling takes over here, and ought to take over.  But that doesn't keep the word "game" from losing its meaning — along with "winner," "loser," "competition," and "race."

If you try to maintain those meanings, if you stick up for conceptual order there, you are properly rebuked. "You are as bad as the Wikipedia author.  You close your ears to the claims of the heart as he closed his eyes to the claims of the head."  You, found deficient in humane feeling, are embarrassed.

Yet (and this is what gets me) in that stadium, as in every stadium where our unthinking hearts go out, you are embarrassed by demanding what can save the day elsewhere.  Say the American people are asked to join a "war on communism," and attack it "only ninety miles away" in Cuba.  You point out that "communism" is an abstraction and that you can't "war on" (concretely kill) it.  People who fit words together that way can get you to do dumb things, as in the Bay of Pigs.   Or, with the "war on terrorism," in the Middle East.  Thank you, thank you, picky English teacher, for pointing that out.

So, argue for conceptual order in the political arena and you are a hero.  Argue for it in a Special Olympics stadium and you are a monster.

"A monster because you lack what makes us human.  Humane feeling is what makes us human, right?"

No, reason is what makes us human.

We've gone from quandary to quagmire.  We can't let the reason quit putting our concepts in order.  That would leave  beliefs in a pile of their own, separate from consequences. Inferences in one pile, evidence in another.  An ends pile and a means pile.  A life viewed as a bunch of piles can't be lived.  On the other hand, a life without humane feeling is not worth living.  Oi.