I got a few minutes into a podcast and the interviewee was talking about how he didn't follow sports, didn't like sports, didn't see the point of sports, and had gone viral in because of complaining about the attention that Americans put on sports.
Well, I'm complaining about the attention that Americans give to people who say such stupid things, that they haven't thought through and are merely socially signalling. Don't get me wrong here. If you don't like sports, don't follow them. Some people don't like sports. I pay little attention to TV and movies even though they are clearly culturally important. Furthermore, I do recognise that they are legitimate art forms that express some types of ideas particularly well and can provoke thought. I even made a movie reference over at Grim's from the narrow band of years back when I was dating. It's good stuff. Just not my stuff. I have too many other things and have to make the cut somewhere.
When one studies anthropology and they try to define culture there will usually be a list of things that every culture has, a list that is sometimes two dozen elements long: everyone has mating customs, everyone has religion, everyone has artistic expression, everyone has housing customs, everyone has economic exchange...so if you are objecting to people having those things at all, you're just an idiot. They don't have your religion or your sports or your economic preferences.
Cultures have sports. They vary. Animal violence, like cockfighting and bear-baiting used to be big and things like it are still popular in places. (In case you didn't notice, that is Martin doing the juggling.)
Animal racing, or motorized racing, is big in other places. Even in "primitive" cultures that don't have an NBA or a Premier League people lift things, or throw things, or aim at things, or run up mountains and down. If Bilbo's birthday party is any indication, you could have had a "Dancin' with the Tooks" TV show, or "Bree's Got Talent." In America in 1950 it was boxing, and horse racing, and baseball, but even then there were people - indeed whole regions and classes of people who didn't care about those things. We use sports to practice for war, like the biathlon (a sport that is impossible to watch but still impresses the hell out of me); people show off their verbal facility with crossword puzzle tournaments or charades; or abstract reasoning in contract bridge or chess. Now it is video games with the intense need for reflexes and fine-motor coordination. Even the noncompetitive sports beloved by those who find competition unfair to...someone...have a hidden element of competition in them.
It's fine not to like sports, but if you have to keep telling me that you "don't care about sportsball"or turn up your nose at other people's pleasures you are not saying you don't like competition, you are saying that you prefer the social competition of knowing what's in intellectual fashion and being able to insult others cleverly. Showing how much you hated the mean girls you had to put up with in high school by being able to put them down now, from a safe distance (Janice Ian made her career out of it, and Tina Fey rode that wave quite a ways) is just telling everyone that you finally won that competition, and are drinking the blood of those girls from their skulls now. Or writing novels or TV scripts about how stoopid those football players were.
It's similar to Post 6000 which I recently quoted.
An extreme of this was discovered from Norwegian news by the marvelous David Thompson, of competitive disability and disadvantage.
It's popular anthropology, popular sociology, popular psychology. You just need to see what's in front of you and not virtue-signal about it. Plain signalling, to let potential mates in a dating app, or at a bar, or at work or the church social or in class - that's all fine. that's just saving everyone a lot of time that you like fishing or listening closely to the cellos or trying new South American foods. But the people who are signalling that they are really proud of being from near Philadelphia, and know the recent history of the NFL draft, and think the interplay of violent collisions with graceful fingerwork catching footballs is exhilarating, they can have that, without your snarking about it.
I didn't grow up with sports, and don't find watching them particularly exhilarating, but actually trying to play is involving. (And frustrating) If somebody I know is on the field, that matters. But I suspect (as Lewis did about gambling) that the lack of interest represents something missing, not a superior moral stature. Maybe I just don't get interested in strangers very easily.
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