In my last post I tried to indicate some ways in which a certain anti-body bias has worked its way into contemporary life. I worry about this re-emergence of the ancient Gnostic philosophy. “Hospitalism” or “failure to thrive” in babies led to high infant mortality because doctors did not understand the need for human bodies, especially new ones, to touch each other. And some of the problems associated with neurodivergence seem to be related to an inability of the brain to fully grasp where the end of one’s body occurs. It is almost as if we assume that human consciousness is like a pulsing orb that radiates outward as far as it can, rather than being bounded by the ends of human bodies. I want to make some parallel points about a couple other, quite different features of contemporary life in this post. They may seem to be so different as to be random, but I hope to convince you that it is in fact the same “gnostic” assumptions about human bodies and human nature that underlie them.
The first area is sports, especially professional sports. Advances in technology that have hastened gnosticism in other spheres of life have been very apparent in sports. Take sports broadcasting, now a high-tech field, for example. I still remember the awe I felt when the “first down” line first appeared on a TV screen during a football game I was watching 25 years ago. Equally interesting but less effective was the translucent blue blob that indicated where the fast-moving puck was in televised hockey games. The former is still with us, and the latter isn’t, but the newest tech trends in sports have to do not with broadcasting, but rather with refereeing.
The NFL instituted instant replay in 1999. “Instant” was and remains a misnomer, as it takes an awful long time to review plays. The impetus behind the move to replay was general rather than specific. That is, the desire to use cameras and recordings to help make calls was not in response to a particularly egregious officiating mistake. Major League Baseball, on the other hand, expanded use of instant replay after Jim Joyce’s infamous blown call at first base on what would have been the final out of Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga’s perfect game in 2014.
International soccer organizations have likewise expanded replay, called “VAR” for Video Assistant Referee. Implementation of this varies, but usually it’s another human referee who is not on the field of play but rather in front of video monitors with access to many technological supports to view past plays. Sometimes there is a sensor in the ball that can be pegged to a particular location on the field. That means that the VAR’s eyes can see whether the ball passed the plane of the goal, or the action can be stopped to see if a downfield player was ahead of or behind a defender at the time of the pass (though I must admit I’m with Ted Lasso in finding the “offsides” rule in soccer to be the most impenetrable and least useful).
It is not hard to understand the draw of these innovations. The soccer referee has so many things to watch. She or he is doing so across the length of a large field, while running full bore for an hour and a half or more. That they get so many calls right is a wonder. Baseball has more eyes on the action with four umpires sharing the duties, but the rate of play and closeness of calls is a huge challenge. Football has even more referees watching, but there are so many factors to take in at once and render a verdict. “Was the quarterback’s arm moving forward with possession of the ball when the defender interrupted his motion, making the play an incomplete pass rather than a fumble…”
Yet it is easy to see that this desire for accuracy is chasing a kind of false objectivity. It seeks a precision that simply isn’t there. There is a kind of faux-accuracy built into football refereeing. For instance, when a play is over, one official marks the spot of the ball, which is where the ball was when the ball carrier was called “down” because his knee hit the ground, he ran out of bounds, etc. Another official looks at where the spotter’s foot is, and then sets a ball down roughly at that spot. I say “roughly” because 99% of the time the precise location of the spot doesn’t matter. It can be a few inches too far forward or back, no problem. But if the play almost results in a first down, then this rudimentary , blunt instrument is given a false accuracy. Measurements are taken to see if the ball has advanced ten yards from the first-down spot. I mean, 10.0 yards. I mean, 10.00000 or 9.99997 yards. But of course the measured spot was as crudely chosen as the first down spot. One memorable scene came when a referee placed an index card between the ball and the first down marker. The presumed fineness of the measurement outpaces the actual precision possible – the “significant figures”, a scientist might say. Basal body temperature was determined to be 37 degrees Celsius in 1851 from a measure of 25,000 armpits in Leipzig. If you convert that to Fahrenheit, you technically get 98.6 degrees. But that doesn’t mean that 98.61 degrees is a “fever” because body temperature varies, because 98.61 has four digits but 37 has two, and so on.
We want there to be a real “answer” out there. Was the corner kick a goal or not? Did the running back make a first down or did he not? Was the pitch a ball or a strike? And because of our reliance on technology, we are becoming ever more insistent that it is the limitations of the human body that are getting in the way of getting to the truth. The referee’s vision, the hearing of the umpire as the baseball smacks a mitt and a foot thumps a base… these are impediments to the truth. But that’s gnostic! That’s arguing that the limitations of the body can be transcended in the name of a truer truth.
I’m not trying to persuade you to oppose robo-umps in baseball. Instead, the point I want to make is that there is a kind of anti-body animus at work in the discussion. The desire to have a perfectly “accurate” strike zone cuts against the fact that human bodies aren’t perfectly measurable or divisible things. The strike zone is, according to the rule book, the width of the plate (17″) and from the knees to the letters of the batter. There is no such thing, really, as the “level of the knee.” Not with terrible specificity, anyway. A knee is a region. There’s a patella, usually. Should the lowest strike be as low as the bottom of the patella? Or should it be the top of the patella? The average kneecap is about 2″ high, and many if not most pitches in baseball are aimed about at the height of the knee. Deciding what to measure by “knee” ends up covering up a lot of grey area. Major League Baseball says that the lowest strike should be at a line corresponding to the bottom of the hollow of the knee when the batter is in his batting stance. But is the “hollow of the knee” any more accurate than “the knee”? Similarly, the highest strike is supposed be at a line midway between the top of the player’s belt and the top of his shoulders. But belts move up and down, and shoulders slope and are often uneven. Some pitches are definitely strikes, and some pitches are definitely balls, but no technology exists that can make the determination objective and precise because bodies aren’t like that, and we should accept the limitations that human bodies impose on life.
In fact, there are very good reason to maintain a level of human discretion in something even as apparently “objective” as calling balls and strikes. Let’s say a batter displayed very poor sportsmanship in a previous inning. There are fairly few levers in the officials’ hands to punish such bad behavior. Not getting the benefit of the doubt on a few close calls later on can provide a strong incentive to better sportsmanship. You don’t want the umpire to become simply the janitor, brushing off home plate once in a while as the earpiece blue-toothed to the robot tells the ump whether to yell “ball” or “strike.” Umpires are responsible for breaking up fights and maintaining order in a tense, competitive environment. A certain amount of errors in eyesight, judgment or ability should be accepted as the price to be paid for a well-monitored game.
Let me change the context slightly but make these same points again, looking at the court system and then the government. First, judges in courts. When listening to the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, it struck me that she was really arguing for a system where there was no judgement being exercised. She seemed to be saying that the role of the person called “judge” is really the rote application of precedent to a new or particular circumstance. Her dislike of “activist judges” who rely in part on their personal experiences and moral priorities to render judgments is a hallmark of her party. And even in her legal scholarship before being appointed to the bench, Barrett seemed often to try to find a philosophy of judging that would be the least likely to result in a judge deciding to reverse any previously-ruled-upon principle. Judicial discretion, however, seems to me to be a vital part of a system that attends to the constantly changing circumstances of our shared life. We should strive to find judges who are worthy of our trust, and then trust them to make judgments. We should not ask them to erase their memories, experiences and insights in order to make them more like a judicial robot.
Lastly let’s take a very quick look at our system of government. In this week of violence in American politics I was reminded of a very good book that political philosopher Hannah Arendt published in 1970. It’s not nearly as famous as her other books about totalitarianism, Nazism, and labor. It’s called On Violence. Its argument is too complicated to boil down here, but two claims she makes help explain, she says, the incredible violence of recent history. First is the technological advancements in mass destruction, which have grown asymmetrically with political anger. I.e., a person getting the short end of the stick in 2024 might be twice as angry as a peasant getting the short end of the stick in 1764, but the one today can kill fifty times as many people. And the second point has to do with bureaucracy. She points out how damn difficult it is these days to actually speak to a person who can help you solve a problem in your life. That is, no one can really render a judgment that has any teeth. Way back when, a person might be able to get an audience with the monarch, quickly plead one’s case, and find out immediately if a favorable or unfavorable judgment were possible. There are a billion things wrong with that kind of government, but at least it’s a person talking to a person.
Contrast that with the contemporary experience of, say, trying to get help understanding a medical bill, or resolving a dispute with a badly-behaving neighbor. What do you do? Whom do you call? You can try the insurance helpline, but increasingly that’s not a good option. You can call the police about the neighbor, but that’s unlikely to lead to a lasting resolution. Instead we have a bureaucracy with a thousand departments, a billion regulations, and no bodies. Arendt writes,
“The greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one could argue, to whom one could present grievances… Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.” (p. 81)
Whether it is an umpire, a judge or a government official, the decisions we make should rest on bodies, be based in the body, accept what the body circumscribes as possible. The ability of the human to reason and make judgements is not a problem to be overcome, but a solution to the messy situations of our common life.
