Living, and playing, in the real world

We’ll begin with Rene Descartes, though you could pick almost any time to start. Philosophers, after all, have always pondered the connection between mind, soul and body – and what’s real and what isn’t.

And we’ll get back to basketball, eventually, but the story here is about what’s real, and how that reality draws us to sports, both as players and fans.

Descartes, after much cogitation, came up with the famous deduction, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ The statement grew out of Descartes’ search for what he could count on in this world, what was absolutely certain. In the end, he decided that all he really knew for sure was that he could think, and because he could think, he had to exist.

This, however, led Descartes to disassociate mind from body, to separate spirit from flesh. They were different entities, in different kinds of realities, he believed – but his grand scheme foundered on this key point: If the spirit isn’t connected to the body, then how does the spirit move the body? If the mind just thinks, how can that thinking mind make my fingers type this sentence?

That logical sticking point has not, however, deterred modern human beings from believing, at a deep level, that the mind and body are different, that somehow the individual soul exists separate from the blood and bones. In the 21st century, however, the evidence mounts that the mind and body are intimately connected, are one and the same. (Alzheimer’s is a sad example: A physical change in the brain creates massive mental changes that affect the mind and spirit.)

So what does this have to do with basketball? Simple enough. Basketball, like all sports, is essentially physical. There is a mental aspect, to be sure, but the game is played with the body, with the sweating body, the aching body, the machine-like body that runs and jumps and bruises and performs complex physical motions.

In short, it is real. Though we may like to think that the life of the mind somehow rises above gross materialism, the mind is meat just like the rest of us. If the blood doesn’t flow right, or the connections don’t connect precisely as they should, then the mind doesn’t work very well. (How clearly do you think when you haven’t eaten enough or slept enough?)

The physical is the ground of our reality, and when we engage it directly, we are, in a sense, at our most alive. The mental tasks we do, though of undoubted importance, are one step (or more) removed from what life is really about, from the flesh and blood interacting with earth, air, fire and water.

And when you get right down to the physical, you run smack into Charles Darwin, and the competition for food, for status, for the right to pass your genes on to the next generation. At its heart, that competition is physical: The big guys have an advantage, the more fertile women do too. The real world, the millions of years of primate evolution that led us to watch ‘Survivor’, is about who’s stronger, who’s tougher and who’s willing to get down in the dirt and fight and win if that’s what it takes.

Carl Jung called it the collective unconscious, and maybe it exists and maybe it doesn’t, but either way, we all know, at the blood and bone level, that we have to be physical. We have to fashion those axes, and build boats and make spears. And then we have to go out and beat the other tribe (the other troop of baboons) to the spot where the fruit has just ripened or the fish are jumping out of the river. That’s the reality we sprung from, and the couple hundred years that some of us have managed to rise above that lifestyle pale in comparison to the long stretch of history and evolution that goes millions of years into our genetic past.

And that is why every civilization with any kind of disposable income, or excess time and energy, has developed organized sports. (No society has ever gone to our extreme, granted, but from the Mongols to the Maya, from Rome to Byzantium, there have always been sports.) Athletics don’t just reflect reality – they, in the most basic of ways, are reality. They are physical, material collisions with those things that cannot be doubted. We hear our breath; we listen to our heart beat; we feel the sweat; we touch the outside world in ways we never can while reading a book, or holding a meeting about budget allocations for the next fiscal year.

So it is no wonder that we are drawn to sports, to athletic competition. Add in humanity’s fascination with its young, and it is inevitable that we would create and revel in organized sports.

There’s nothing fake about it (which is why the thought of players throwing games, or taking steroids, is so painful). It is artificial, granted, but then so is most of our culture – which is why the general disdain for sports amongst the intelligentsia seems so misplaced. Yes, Derrida’s deconstruction of texts is important, but we cannot only engage with ideas and what we think of as the mental world – remember, there is no mental world without the physical, without the meat of the brain being fed by the pump of the muscle of the heart, and the sloppy blood whispering through veins and arteries.

When we play, or even coach, we engage the reality of the physical world directly. Even as fans, we vicariously participate in the basic ground of human experience, watching the material world of muscle and sinew that feeds everything we do.

Yes, the life of the mind is important, and without it, we would still be living in mud huts and dying young, but it is equally dangerous to discard the physical, to treat it as the inferior part of human experience. Discussions of trade policy can make a difference in our lives, but so does the beat of the heart, the rush of adrenaline, the feel of the body doing what it was made to do.

To deny sports is to deny the physical – and to deny the physical is, no matter what Descartes said, to deny reality.