This past Sunday our local professional football team, the New England Patriots, played a conference championship game against the Kansas City Chiefs. Naturally, the game was televised.
Having watched football on television from an early age, I’ve seen many changes in the coverage, most of it due to technological advancements.
Back “in the day,” there was no such thing as an “instant replay.” The play happened in “real time” and that was it. You either saw it or you didn’t. Reliance on the referees, those on the field, was essential in getting the call right. Today, there are cameras all over the place. Each play is captured from multiple angles. And in slow-motion to boot!
On a day noted for questionable calls (especially the penalty NOT called at a critical juncture in the Saints/Rams game), there was one play during the Patriots’ game that seemed especially notable. To the naked eye, the play appeared to go one way but on closer inspection just may have been the exact opposite.
Late in the fourth quarter, the Chiefs punted the ball. The Patriot receiver appeared to touch the ball (without catching it). This meant the ball was “live” and could be picked up by the opposing team, which is exactly what happened. That, at least, was the way the referees on the field saw it, who immediately turned the ball over to the Chiefs.
After a review was called, a team of judges (some in distant New York) looked at the video replays over and over, and from every angle. From one angle it appeared as if the Patriot receiver did indeed touch the ball, while from another it looked as if he didn’t. Through the marvel of technology, we at home were able to see exactly what the review judges were seeing, backwards, forwards, and in slow-motion.
Ultimately, the judges ruled that the Patriot receiver had NOT touched the ball and reversed the decision made by the referees on the field.
Naturally, viewers at home and in the stadium reacted differently. Each had an opinion. Even those who agreed with the reversal had the benefit of studying the situation up-close-and-personal, and after the fact.
It got me to thinking about what it means to be a spectator, specifically in the context of today’s widespread moralizing.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for morality, virtue, and good character. It’s just that today, especially on social media, though hardly confined to it, our society is awash with armchair quarterbacks who casually decide who’s been naughty and who’s been nice.
But is morality so easily discerned? Aristotle (not Onassis, but the other Greek guy) once said that “it is our choice of good or evil that determines our character, not our opinion about good or evil.” [italics mine]
This accords with the writings of two of my earliest theological heroes, Søren Kierkegaard and Reinhold Niebuhr. But it was Kierkegaard, whom I first encountered from my favorite divinity school professor, Paul Holmer, who first helped me identify the error in much “contemporary” thought. (I put “contemporary” in quotes because the reigning thinking of our day is hardly new.)
Kierkegaard, for his part, was responding to the prevailing theological fashions of his day, which in many respects are with us still – i.e. the German idealism of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
In the 19th century, Hegel’s ideas were celebrated, the veritable “cutting edge” among those of refined theological tastes. Anybody who was anybody held Hegel’s views preeminent. Europe was enthralled.
Except for Kierkegaard, that is. Laboring in the relative obscurity of backwater Denmark (his writings weren’t translated into English until the mid-20th century), Kierkegaard questioned the basic assumptions of Hegelian idealism, which held that history (and human nature) is ever in flux, that it is plastic, malleable, and on its way to perfection.
Kierkegaard (as well as later 20th century “Neo-Orthodox” thinkers such as Niebuhr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Karl Barth) rejected this out of hand. Human nature, they argued, is not so easily manipulated or altered. Utopian schemes always end up, as one of my professors put it, “getting mugged by reality.”
A significant part of that reality is sin, which, of course, is a word we seldom bother to discuss these days. It sounds so old-fashioned. And besides, it’s icky. Yet it has a powerful hold on human beings as well as their various schemes of perfection.
Technically, sin means “separation from God,” and is thus a relational term. It suggests that because we live in a world where our relationship with our Creator is necessarily distant, even under the best of circumstances, we cannot fully know the heart and mind of God. Therefore, every single one of our thoughts, words, and deeds necessarily falls short of absolute truth, divine will, as well as God’s perfect love.
Kierkegaard, who read Aristotle closely, argued that real-time choices define us in ways pure intellect cannot. Idealism, on the other hand, falsely assumes that an idea need only be imagined or articulated to be true. Kierkegaard reminds us, however, that in practice, our choices are rarely pure or even obvious, though they’re all we have.
As has been noted, communism on paper sounds peachy keen. The problem, of course, is that if fails miserably when applied to reality. The mind, in other words, can conceive of virtually any possibility in the abstract. Two competing ideas can sit comfortably side-by-side in theory. When applied to life and the human condition, however, “your results may vary.”
It’s important to note that Karl Marx, of Das Kapital fame, got much of his thinking from Hegel. He was part of a group of intellectuals known as the “left-wing Hegelians.” For these theoreticians, there is no enduring structure or permanence to life or human nature.
As such, the social and political configurations of the present are but arbitrary social conventions which in no way reflect reality. Such conventions, for Marx’, are but chance arrangements imposed by economic forces and intended solely to maintain power and privilege.
Marx’s acolytes believe(d) that since there are no fixed truths, human beings can be persuaded, “re-educated,” and/or compelled under the direction of “experts” or an enlightened “vanguard” to fundamentally alter their thoughts, values, and behavior, if not their very being, so that perfect equality results.
The history of this experiment, however, has hardly produced stunning successes. 100 million deaths would suggest otherwise.
The point, then, is that theory and practice are two very different spheres. Simply put, what seems plausible in one arena may prove utter folly in another.
Unless you’re involved in the actual doing, forced to choose among a host of limited and imperfect options, often on the fly, and unless you’re required to face the very real consequences of these decisions, your opinions will remain forever just that, opinions, untested and purely hypothetical.
The armchair quarterbacks last Sunday, including myself, might easily fault the referees on the field who lacked the benefit of television cameras isolated on the play.
Referees are routinely situated in the frenzied chaos born of tall, large men running around and hitting each other. They are not afforded a perspective from on high (in the stands or on the sofa), but at ground-level. Even still, they must make split-second decisions.
Opinions are a dime a dozen. It’s the hard choices made in often imperfect real-life situations that form the crucible out of which true character, virtue, and goodness is defined. Sometimes the right decision is made, sometimes not.
In observing all the “virtue-signaling” taking place these days, perhaps especially among our comfortable, upper middle-class elites, I’m disheartened. Each day seems to bring new critiques and proscriptions elicited from the safe space of a computer screen.
Church leaders seem especially prone. Throwing around biblical quotes, often out of context, seems particularly popular. Phrases such as “peace and justice” roll off the tongue, or from the clatter of a keyboard, as if attaining such things is simple and straightforward. Merely naming the problem and desiring perfection somehow seems sufficient. Then again, I often wonder, who exactly is it who’s against justice or peace?
How to effect these goods is the point. All too often, the solutions offered strike me as simplistic and trite, though they certainly seem to make the authors feel pretty darn good about themselves.
In the end, a bit of humility would seem to be in order, and not the feigned kind. Genuine openness and genuine dialogue are desperately needed, though not, I’m afraid, something moral superiority is likely to countenance.