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Last week, Terry Eagleton wrote this piece deriding the world cup in particular (and football in general), claiming that football is the opium of today’s masses. While I think I grasp Eagleton’s struggle, I can’t help but wonder if he is being a bit too high and mighty. This is a tendency I notice among many academics. Not only is there a severe lack of FUN in academia, but there is also a desire to suck any pleasure out of the world in favor of a pious, puritanical intellectualism. Yes, of course global capitalism is an evil that must be fought, and fought hard. But is criticizing one of the things that actually has the power to make people happy and unite otherwise disparate cultures the solution? To be clear, I am not ignoring the power of sports or music or art or whatever to dull the attention of the “masses” and to cause the latter to become copacetic in their attitude toward the world that is in ever-dire need of action from said persons. Rather, what I’m wondering is how can we harness the power – the power to stimulate and the power to unite – that sports seems to exhibit for global liberatory ends. I’m not sure this is such an easy problem to solve. But I don’t believe that a wholesale write-off of sport is the answer. It seems that Eagleton may have jumped into the ditch on the other side of the road…
Sub Specie Aeterni 
Troy Polidori said:
Jock Apologetics…
phil_style said:
Anything that’s popular can be denegrated as an opiate… the endless lists of historical opiates is so exhaustive the term is almost meaningless
Austin said:
yes and yes
Dan said:
Austin,
I think the problem with the World Cup isn’t so much that it is an opiate (although it is that) but that the event itself is used to advance the capitalist agenda in significant ways.
To provide a point of comparison from my own backyard, Vancouver recently hosted the Olympics (the sort of sporting event that you seem to speak of with at least some approval in the post above). However, those Olympics were used as a means to do several things: change laws related to free speech, change laws around poverty and further criminalize homelessness, increase the level of surveillance in the city (cameras ‘temporarily’ installed in public places have yet to come down…), transfer public money into the pockets of private corporations (mostly official sponsors), further tighten corporate regulations on the mainstream media, boost the militarization of Canada’s policing bodies, and further the agenda of gentrification (affordable housing units and squatting spaces were destroyed and million dollar condos were built)… just to name a few things!
Comparable things have occurred in South Africa with the coming of the World Cup.
Thus, these events are more than opiates and are less ‘neutral’ than your post implies.
Timothy Morton said:
In his autobiography Eagleton writes that if sport were suddenly banned, all the revolutionary energy bound up in it could be directed towards other ends.
Austin said:
Dan, I actually largely agree with you. I just tend to be moody and a bit fickle. I think I’m just in a mood to play and Eagleton’s broad sweep just irked me as being a bit too “serious.”
Timothy – I’m sure there’s some truth in that. I don’t deny that whatsoever. I just wonder if that’s not a bit too extreme. Perhaps there’s a way to find a balance.
The problem isn’t one that seems intrinsic to football or even to a worldwide competition. Rather, it’s a problem with the pervasive extent of capitalism’s influence. It’s viral and infects any and all entities that it can reach in order to code them. So, it seems that Eagleton’s suggestion is to rid the world of sports in order to free the energy contained therein for other (more noble means). But perhaps that solution is just a intellectual’s wet dream. Rather, I do think it could be possible to retain sports while simultaneously dissolving the extent and perversive power of capitalism. This would mean a massive change in the dynamics of sport across the board. But by no means, should sport be “banned”; it should just be rethought, retooled, and reformulated.
Dan said:
Besides didn’t Che use sport to train revolutionaries? In this sort of discourse Che-in-the-jungle trumps Eagleton-in-the-Academy, right?
Also, regarding Tim’s point, I reckon that the banning of sports would simply contaminate what little revolutionary fervor exists today. Instead of a true revolutionary we would just end up with a revolution demanding… sports (like people who want to take to the streets to demand better cable packages and what-not).
Austin said:
haha. yes, indeed… to both points!
I just get frustrated with academics who are against sports in general. If Eagleton doesn’t like sports, fine. But I can’t help but wonder if this is nothing more than the revenge of the nerds… (that might be a bit harsh, but perhaps a bit true). Sports aren’t intrinsically evil. Just like art isn’t intrinsically evil. It’s when they get corrupted that they turn bad (i.e. the current format of most professional sports and – in art – Kinkade… need I say more about the latter???).