I have a lengthening shelf of books by Noam Chomsky, but my sympathy with his views has declined in approximately inverse proportion to its expansion, writes John Waters.
The latest casualty of this progressive heresy relates to sport. In one interview in his book Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (Pantheon, 1988), Chomsky asserted that sport is one of the means by which the "special interests" that dominate government control public opinion. This process he described as operating at two levels, firstly the "indoctrination" of "the political class", the roughly 20 per cent of the population which is educated, articulate and at least marginally involved in decision-making. The remaining 80 per cent is managed to "follow orders and not think, and not to pay attention to anything".
Each segment has its own media, the 20 per cent what is called the "quality press", the majority what we call the "redtops", designed according to Chomsky to cater for "Joe Six Pack". The content of such media, he argued, is largely diversionary: "...just to dull people's brains. To get them to watch National Football League... Get them away from things that matter. And for that it's important to reduce their capacity to think. Take, say, sports - that's another crucial example of the indoctrination system, in my view. For one thing because it - you know, it offers people something to pay attention to that's of no importance. That keeps them from worrying about things that matter to their lives that they might have some idea of doing something about."
The writer, philosopher and onetime goalkeeper Albert Camus said that everything of importance he had learned in life he had learned from playing soccer. I once before understood what he meant, but then went through a long period of thinking Chomsky smarter. Bad call.
The more literally you think about life and politics, the more likely is Chomsky's view to make sense. The most significant changes in the public arena transpire not as a result of political activism but out of the subtextual theatres that run in modern societies 24/7. Sport is one of the most significant of these theatrical phenomena and, because of television, perhaps the most democratic.
Far from being a "diversion", sport carries all kinds of messages and metaphors concerning "real" life, many of them profoundly political. Sport allows us to introduce ourselves to the world; it teaches us the virtue of character above qualities of talent and strength; it demonstrates that effort and persistence can eventually be rewarded; it teaches us that the weak sometimes overcome the strong. It also tells us that life is often unfair, an idea with which left-wingers have the greatest difficulty.
Sport also offers society a means of dreaming. Just as the individual can resolve complex issues in dreams, so society resolves issues through culture, of which sport is a mainstay. There is a plausible case that the true roots of the Celtic Tiger are to be found in Jack Charlton's management of the Irish football team, when we were introduced to the intoxicating possibility that we were not born losers.
Following the World Cup these last couple of weeks, I have been revisited by feelings I last encountered as a teenager. Watching sport, even on television, is anything but a passive activity. It changes you, if only momentarily. Driving home last Tuesday evening after watching France beat Spain on a big screen, I had the distinct feeling of driving about 50 per cent above my usual standard, and knew it was down to Zinedine Zidane.
The last time I felt that was in 1970, when watching Brazil was to take a capsule of Samba that lasted an hour. Chomsky's most vehement point is the charge that sports play a societal role in engendering jingoist and chauvinist attitudes. "They're designed to organise a community to be committed to their gladiators."
This is true but presents as problematic only through a misreading of human nature. It was Chomsky who brilliantly divined that the human capacity for language is due to an innate mechanism that enables a child to construct the codes of his native tongue from listening to it being spoken. But this discovery is now being applied to other areas of human behaviour and there is increasing evidence that the urge to form tribes may have a similar source in the pre-programming of the human mind.
In other words, there may be a human need to belong to a particular tribe and to believe that this tribe is superior to others. And, since this is the way the human psyche works, moral disapproval of such behaviours may be as pointless as arguing that English is better than German. It isn't that we are too weak or ignorant to overcome these feelings in ourselves, but that we would cease to function without them.
We need our loyalties and enmities as much as we need words and sentences. Sport offers a way of acting out these responses, providing a harmless means of consolidating group identity in a relatively benign and creative way.