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I rub the ball down my shirt to wipe off the sweat. “Ball’s in,” I announce as I toss it to the man I’m guarding. He passes it to his teammate on the wing, setting all ten of us in motion.
It’s 6:15 on a Monday morning in the high school gym, our weekly pickup basketball game. The Cougar logo snarls at midcourt, a picture of my pre-dawn pre-coffee mood. The parameters of the game are unspoken, unless someone new arrives and needs orientation: game’s to eleven, win by two, straight to fifteen. Threes are ones.
We want to win. That’s why we keep score.
One guy who plays every morning is the sports photographer for the local paper. He listens to pump-up music in his earbuds before we play, while I stretch my calves. His signature move is a series of between-the-legs dribbles at the top of the key, accentuated with purposeless head shimmies and jab steps that everyone defending him has learned to ignore. If he were quicker, these moves might lead to a layup; in reality, his ballhandling is a sideshow we patiently endure. When Tricky Dribble Sports Journalist hits a game-winning shot, he celebrates with tiny fist pumps. This used to annoy me until I realized I do the same thing.
Winning feels good, and men have celebrated victory with fist pumps for a long time.
The Roman Empire version of the fist pump was the triumphal procession. Think of a small-town Fourth of July parade on steroids, but instead of smiling white-shirted fez-topped Shriners doing figure-eights in miniature cars, imagine a sneering, toga-wearing, laurel-crowned general in a chariot being hailed as a god for his battlefield victory. Imagine also the chained prisoners of war, on display for the crowds to mock, being led to execution. The taste of immortality for the winner, hailed as a god. The humiliation and annihilation at a lion’s maw, or at the point of a spear, for the losers.
Winning feels good. Losing sucks.
One recent morning we argued about the score. Did the last basket make it 11–10, or did it make the score 12–10 and we win, game over? No one gets tossed to the lions for losing, but the core dynamic has not changed over millennia. Losing is shameful; honour is at stake.
When playing for stakes—even when the stakes are small—we want to be the ones pumping our fists, not hanging our heads.
On Winning and Losing
Winning feels so good you might be tempted to make a religion out of it. How else can you describe the exhilaration of victory and its spine-tingling surge of vitality if not to say that triumph confirms the presence of God with you? When you’re victorious, you soar. The world is yours. In this feeling of ecstatic self-transcendence, triumph gives us a whiff of life everlasting, a taste of the flavour of being eternally alive. This is what life is like if you yourself are a god. You feel like you will never die.
In the Roman triumphal procession, the winner’s lust for everlasting victory is fulfilled in the flush of adoring eyes that worship you as a deity. The loser’s humiliation finds its perfect expression in having his body exposed, perhaps on a cross, a terrifying means of execution and a sign of Roman state power. The loser is tortured and then murdered, a victim of the victor’s power not just to dominate but to humiliate while dominating.
Primal powers are gathered and released in competing and winning. The Roman triumphal procession put a ritual around these Dionysian powers, channelling the energy into a spectacle that ratified and maintained the political order. The ritual served as a container for the surging, unruly passions of conquest, preserving the political order that bloodlust and the unconstrained desire for domination might otherwise overthrow.
We like to think of ourselves as modern people who have progressed beyond the cruelties and irrationalities of the benighted past, but debaucheries of torture and murder in the quest for domination are never far off. Whenever I hear anyone talk about “essential human goodness” I feel like I’m hearing the plinking tones of a child’s piano being played with one finger. My ear wants to hear Rachmaninoff: the authentic struggle between good and evil that, as Solzhenitsyn reminds us, runs through every human heart. My ear wants to hear the two-handed virtuosity that holds in tension both the dignity and the depravity that are possible when human beings must negotiate the lust for winning and the shame of losing.
Humans are good. That’s not wrong. Without some account of evil’s agency and the disordering of our desires, however, the story of basic human goodness is too simple, too innocent. It leaves us disarmed in the face of the human depravity that will stop at nothing in order to win.
Jesus has some things to say about losing. When he says that we must lose ourselves in order to find ourselves, he’s not making an ethical point about how to be a good sport within a culture where winning is everything. He’s offering us a deep truth about who we are, expressed the only way these deep truths can be expressed—as paradox, confounding the rational mind.
We want to win, but Jesus tells us that defeat is the way to the victory that matters. This paradox sends us back into our lives not with a maxim to live by, but with a truth to live into. It’s an invitation, not a command. The last will be first. You can’t understand this teaching; you can only discover its meaning. This discovery, if it comes, will feel like an epiphany.
We want to win, but Jesus tells us that defeat is the way to the victory that matters.
Paul, whose audience understood the reference, uses the image of the Roman triumphal procession in his second letter to the Corinthians: “But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumph, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere.” Some scholars argue for an interpretation that places Paul in the procession with the winners, participating as a member of the general’s victorious army. The better interpretation, however, puts Paul (and us) with the captives because losing to the conquering God focuses our attention on the necessity of surrender. Anyone seriously interested in reclaiming a Christian ethical culture in America will emphasize “surrender” as a crucial movement of the heart. Fruits of the Spirit like kindness, gentleness, and self-control all require the emptying of ego and the willingness to serve. The extent to which kindness, gentleness, meekness, and forbearance sound weak and unmanly is the extent to which the pagan understanding of winning-as-domination now shapes our collective mind.
“Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing”—Vince Lombardi might have been channelling Julius Caesar. One portrayal of Christianity’s waning influence on American culture would tell how the Roman understanding of winning came to dominate our habits of thought and patterns of behaviour. The Roman understanding of winning spreads like quack grass into the edged beds of New Testament teaching, its pernicious roots penetrating the social imaginary. Eschatological hope is abandoned for a pagan “win now or we’re doomed.” A shared human condition of sinfulness is abandoned for a scapegoated “enemy,” while “our side” is innocent and therefore the legitimate agent of cultural and national redemption by any means possible, including violence. Christ is abandoned for Jupiter.
The Roman understanding of winning spreads like quack grass into the edged beds of New Testament teaching, its pernicious roots penetrating the social imaginary.
This tension between the Christian and the Roman understanding of winning is not new. It has existed in Christianity ever since Constantine had a vision of the Chi-Rho the night before his battle at Milvian Bridge.
In the universe of pickup basketball, we play within this tension. Winning is what we desire, and the game is a bore without the adrenaline of competition. At the same time, the game can continue only if winning is not all we desire. The desire for victory is held within the larger desire to share a world in common with our opponents. As soon as one team gets to eleven we shake hands, get a drink of water, and get ready to begin again. Playing, not winning, is the final end.
On Friends and Enemies
We’re not in the gym in the total darkness of mid-winter mornings to make friends, but men do learn things about other men playing basketball together. Over time, you get to know who’s on the court with you. A heating contractor who will fix your boiler. A cop. The high school math department chair.
One regular player is a poet who counts migrating hawks for the Audubon Society on a mountaintop in the fall. He’s a hothead on the court. Hothead Poet.
If Hothead Poet is on my team, I love his fire. He’ll yell at you if you’re not hustling. Because I’m a hustler he’s usually yelling at someone else on our team, and I like it. If he’s on the other team, however, he’s my enemy. He annoys me, and I try to beat him in the post using my size advantage. When we’re on opposing teams, both of us play as if our enmity is real. But we both know that this enmity is not ultimate. When the game ends, we shake hands. The enmity ends.
The religion of winning, combined with the sacralization of political belonging, transforms a politics of civic friendship into a politics of perpetual enmity. My opponent in the election becomes my enemy. Period. This conceptual shift from civic friendship to the politics of enmity has profound consequences for the physical world of time and bodies. The bounded and temporary enmity of this election cycle in a republican polity leaves its confines and becomes permanent and unconstrained. The game has changed. It’s as if I were to carry my enmity toward Hothead Poet past the basketball court and heckle him at his next public reading, having let Breitbart or MSNBC confirm what I want so hard to be true: that his sonnets are trash, the bastard. He deserves my heckling. He’s one of those people.
The religion of winning, combined with the sacralization of political belonging, transforms a politics of civic friendship into a politics of perpetual enmity.
What is the “sacralization” of politics? In the introduction to Politics as Religion, cultural historian Emilio Gentile says politics is sacralized “every time a political entity . . . is transformed into a sacred entity, which means it becomes transcendent, unchallengeable, and intangible.” In other words, the sacralization of political belonging is when religious significance is welded onto partisan political identity. It’s like putting a goat’s head on a lion’s body. In conditions of mass loneliness, aimlessness, and hopelessness—all of which build to mass rage—it takes only a small amount of demagogic heat to fuse the dogmatic certainty and ultimate meanings found in religion, and the agency and coercive power found in politics, into a grotesque and dangerous chimera.
The sacralization of political belonging in the United States leads to category mistakes. Augustine’s two cities merge into an ill-defined urban complex, and soon we use the language of the heavenly city to describe the earthly city: my political party is not just right, but righteous; my political party is not just in competition with opponents but is an innocent victim of persecution; my political party is not just a vehicle for improvement but is salvific. It, and its leader or its ideology, will save us.
When politics is sacralized, individuals invest political belonging with a weight of meaning that it cannot carry. This is not a simple misunderstanding that can be corrected with proper instruction, the way a golf pro might help you with your slice off the tee. It’s a spiritual disease: we are infected with a particular strain of Kierkegaard’s sickness unto death. In Kierkegaard’s Christian psychology, a human being is the relation of the finite and the infinite, of temporality and eternity. When I throw away the eternal part of myself, as I do when I replace my Creator with my political party or my ideology as the foundation of my identity and the source of ultimate meaning, I bring this sickness—Kierkegaard calls it despair—onto myself.
Kierkegaard tells us that when the sickness is “rooted out . . . the self rests transparently in the power that established it.” In this state of healthy human being, the self is rightly related to God the Eternal One, whose power is necessary and foundational. This self, resting in his Creator, is also rightly related to politics, in the practice of which power is contingent and derivative.
But that’s not where we are right now.
Right now we’re in a political fight that feels like a holy war. Not everyone is pulled into that holy war, but everyone is affected by it. A cost of the politics of enmity is that a significant number of people withdraw entirely from the project of republican self-governance. People express the need to disengage in order to protect their sanity. Disengagement, however, is not neutral. It itself erodes the capacity for the game of self-governance to continue.
The friend/enemy binary becomes our fundamental political category when politics becomes sacralized and winning becomes the value of values. You might say it’s a political failure with a moral dimension.
Or you might say it’s a moral failure with a political dimension.
Moral failures, in Iris Murdoch’s telling, are failures to see other people—“people” understood not in the aggregate as a mass, but as the plural of each singular person. This person and that person. You. Me. Persons.
Moral failure understood as the inability to see—call it disregard, call it carelessness, call it dehumanization—destabilizes the pre-political foundation of democratic self-governance. The structure built on that destabilized foundation begins to sway in the wind when we fail to see that my enemy on the basketball court is not my enemy off the court. In the politics of perpetual enmity in which the friend/enemy binary is fundamental, losing begins to feel like being lost forever, like being fed to the lions. Winning permanently and ending the game for others, on the other hand, begins to feel necessary.
Let’s Keep Playing
One of our regulars is an editor of a national magazine, with a shaved head and a solid body like Mr. Clean, who plays basketball as though playing football and who throws passes to his teammates as though playing dodgeball. Turnover Machine Editor.
Another player is our geezer, Dewey—“geezer” being a stock character in every mixed-age pickup basketball game in America. His run is a fast walk, and for extra juice on the release of his jump shot he snaps the heels of his sneakers together like Dorothy hoping for a return trip to Kansas.
An offensive possession builds to a shot attempt. The ball is in the air. We box out, bodies on bodies, fighting for advantage, anticipating a rebound.
One morning after a contested rebound, an enraged Dewey emerges from the pack with his hackles up, the way a placid old dog can suddenly snarl and bare fangs. The provocation is an aggressive push from behind; the offender is Turnover Machine Editor. Dewey spits out his mouthpiece and screams. “What the fuck are you doing? You can’t climb up my back like that! Dammit, you do that all the time!” Dewey’s gravelly voice rises to a pitch I thought was beyond his tessitura.
Turnover Machine Editor, a good man whose on-court aggression belies his gentleness and whose magazine publishes irenic, grandmotherly items like the best recipes for Boston cream pie, smiles awkwardly in astonished embarrassment.
At this point in the story you might expect a tidy resolution: Turnover Machine Editor asks forgiveness, Dewey accepts, and they shake hands. But that’s not what happened. What happened was, after a tense twelve-second silence, Dewey put his mouthpiece back in and shuffled down the court, and we kept on playing.
Whenever men play sports in which bodies collide, anger will come. Sometimes the anger will take the form of yells like Dewey’s; sometimes the anger will come in a shove. I’ve given a sharp elbow to the ribs as a warning to an opponent who’s grabbed me, saying without words, “Don’t do that again.” Anger that becomes reptilian violence can threaten the continuation of the game, and violence is always a possibility. Bounded aggression, however, can be a rough justice that keeps the game going.
We call our own fouls. This sounds easy, but it’s a complex calculation made in an instant. You have to coolly apply the rules to yourself and weigh the severity of your misdeed, at the same time as you heatedly engage in the play. There’s no time to think about any of this. It’s self-governance in its most basic form: you are at once judge and defendant, and the verdict you render on yourself must be fair and immediate. This takes humility and a small dose of self-surrender, both of which are virtues that meaningfully connect us to others. You have to resist the temptation to seat yourself, king-like, at the head of the table.
Another virtue necessary for calling your own fouls is obedience. Obedience, like humility, is a personal virtue; it’s also a virtue of democratic citizenship, although we rarely look at citizenship through the lens of virtue. In contrast to the impoverished notion that obedience is joyless subservience that crushes your will, real obedience flows from love, and obedience to a worthy authority sets you free.
You call a foul on yourself in obedience to the rules of the game, and you obey the rules of the game because they are the worthy authority by which the game exists. If you love basketball, the rules free you to play it. No rules, no freedom. You’re also responsible to the people you’re playing with, teammates and opponents alike. They are fellow players of equal moral standing within the small universe marked in painted lines that define the rectangular court. You share a world in common with them. You have regard for them, and they have regard for you—to return to Iris Murdoch’s idea of “seeing,” of having regard—as the primary moral act.
It’s only by sharing a world in common that we can keep playing. The friend/enemy binary and the religion of winning destroy a world in common, jeopardizing the game.
If you cheat repeatedly, always rendering favourable judgments on yourself when it’s clear you’re at fault, you become known as a cheater. Your character is revealed over time. I’ve played ball with cheaters. It’s not fun; the game sours. People stop showing up, and begin looking for a different game in a different gym.
Our pickup basketball game is democracy on a wood floor with a leather ball, practiced by sweaty men, some of whom are in their prime athletic years and some of whom have more basketball in their past than in their future. It’s just a game. It’s also a form of life, with explicit rules and implicit norms that all who play know by heart. Within the small universe marked in painted lines that define the rectangular court, we practice virtues to become the kind of players who can keep the game going.
I treasure this game. To lose it would be something to grieve, not simply for the hole that would be created by its absence, but for the absence of the beauty and the hope that the game contains.