Some fairly heavy stuff on the agenda this morning. You will need to be wide awake and on your intellectual mettle.
My colleague Fintan took a swipe the other day at the poor old FAI and its belated decision to cancel the match between Ireland and Yugoslavia. He says we were put in the absurd position of expecting moral leadership from people who organise football matches: "Asking the FAI to decide how civilised people should respond to the appalling atrocities at the heart of Europe is like seeking medical advice from a barman".
The FAI can defend itself, probably opting for the 4-4-2 formation, but I am more concerned at the slur on the nation's barmen (and women). Most regular pub-goers know that first-class medical advice is available from behind the counter at all times, and free too.
As often as not, you don't even have to ask: your barman will inquire about your health as soon as you arrive, and advise accordingly. In your local, you don't even have to name your poison, it is served up right away. And when your friendly barman later asks rhetorically about you having no home to go to, he is subtly issuing a general medical directive.
As for moral leadership, however, or would-be moral leadership, it is a surfeit of it rather than a lack of it from which we are currently suffering. Never have so many people been so judgmental about so many issues. Look at the US. Consider the rise of the nanny state in the UK. Watch television. Listen to the radio. Everyone is a moral arbiter these days. If all our wannabe moral leaders would only go away and lie down for a little while, we might get some peace, and perhaps be allowed that demanding luxury of thinking for ourselves.
In the increasingly insane broadcasting world, the only programme which guarantees a bit of impartial peace now is the shipping forecast. Indeed Alec Guinness made the same observation a couple of years back in his diary, My Name Escapes Me. The shipping forecast is his favourite programme: "It is romantic, authoritative, mesmeric and understandable. The girl who speaks it has a good, clear, unaffected voice, and she treats all areas with total impartiality. Today we had, among many excitements: `Finisterre, intermittent rain, visibility one mile, and rising slowly'. There was no moral judgment in her voice when she added, `Dover, visibility 10 metres, falling rapidly'."
That's the way it should be.
But the more we seek moral leadership, the less personal responsibility we seem prepared to take on. That is why, despite Fintan's criticism, we have much to learn from today's soccer game and its practitioners.
In moral terms, the FAI and its soccer players are in effect subverting the post-modern game, in which the team is paramount and the idea of personal responsibility de-legitimised. This highly moral course was taken as a result of the Schopenhauer Directive, issued from the FAI's Merrion Square headquarters in 1993, and means that players have to account for their behaviour, or more often their misbehaviour, and cannot simply dump on managers or colleagues.
All this is before we even touch on the distinction between relativism and pluralism in today's fast-moving game. The FAI was fighting this particular battle on the high moral grounds of Europe while the GAA was still arguing over the hand pass.
Isaiah Berlin, a useful sweeper in his day, has this to say: "Pluralism, with the measure of `negative' liberty that it entails, seems to me a truer and more human ideal than the goals of those who seek in the great, disciplined, authoritarian structures the ideal of `positive' self-mastery by classes, or peoples, or the whole of mankind". (From A Game of Two Halves, 1987).
We all know the kind of goals Berlin is talking of, goals like those of the Charlton era: decisive, planned, placed neatly in the back of the net, but without excitement or panache.
As for away games, the moral debate first has to consider the issue of mutual intelligibility across cultures. Here, the FAI has still to make up its mind, but I understand it is being increasingly swayed by the moral philosopher Bernard Williams and his nice distinction between real and notional cultural confrontations, i.e. in football terms, games where we have a genuine chance, and games where we haven't a hope in Hell. The debate continues.
