Cheating the Game: Manliness vs. Machines

Since I grew up in the jagged concrete and steel environs of the Bronx, the prospect of camping seemed not only alien but downright uncomfortable.
Even worse, my youthful experience taught me that people slept outdoors out of desperation—they were literally homeless—rather than recreation; “roughing it” was not one weekend option among many but a wrenching response to misfortune. I saw camping as a macabre staging of my immigrant father’s deepest lower middle class fears.

Forgoing the comfort and security of the Great Indoors was not a choice but a burden one bore in aching despair—there was nothing remotely romantic about sleeping on a street bench and, if I ever saw a whole family reduced to such dire straits, the last thing that occurred to me was to ask them where they purchased their gear, or if they had considered the better views offered by an elevated train station platform. I averted my eyes to allow them the dignified illusion that their suffering had not transformed into a tragic spectacle for others.

So my sensibility on this score was always reflexively informed more by The Grapes of Wrath than The Hardy Boy’s Survival Guide. Still, after I moved upstate, now surrounded by a dizzying expanse of woodlands and grassy plains, I was excited to finally go camping, and willingly shed the shelter I labored so hard to maintain for free space and air, dispensed equally to all by Nature herself. I expected that my restive urban soul would be soothed by the tranquil, even tranquilizing sights and sounds of unperturbed creation. I would exchange the convenient urban planning of the streetlight for the random romance of the moonlight, bums for birch trees, curb side falafel for whatever the forest would offer. I even bought a compass in anticipation of a world unmarked by instructive signs.

Instead of finding what struck me as a happy paradox, invigorating quietude, others quixotically leaving the distractions of modern life for some transcendental union with nature, I found trailers equipped with bathrooms, microwaves and portable hair blow dryers, self-inflating queen sized beds adorned by Martha Stewart sheets (what is the thread count of un-mowed grass?). I remember that no one had a really good knife but everyone had a smart phone, as if a rope could be cut with the right APP. And instead of slowly succumbing to a deep, dreamless sleep accompanied by the flickering of a campfire, my last images were the pulsing colored lights that danced in the darkness from a plasma television screen. There was no self-effacing communion with nature-our incongruent campsite stood in victorious defiance of it. The lesson seemed to be that the molecular disturbance of modern life could be imported anywhere, that the only world now was the one we self-consciously fashioned for ourselves.

I can actually live with the intrusion of modern technology into otherwise pristine nature—I grew up hypnotized by the sight of a Manhattan skyline just visible over a horizon of leafy Central Park trees. I’ve made my peace with the possibility of only a partial escape and, after all, even the park is man-made, too well manicured, too conspicuously pedestrian friendly, too adorned with tasteful art, to really be a true sanctuary for modern man from himself. Modernity is the stickiest of all the great historical epochs—it shadows its inhabitants wherever they go, stubbornly insinuating itself into every crevasse of human life that can be filled. Now that 3G is upon us, the universe itself is not capacious enough for anyone to hide.

The good news seems to be that since modernity is so thoroughly man-made—this is the era of human construction—the same products that hopelessly distract us also provide portals into self-understanding. What kinds of beings would make such things? Isn’t modern making also an expression of our natures, of a peculiarly technological dimension of human freedom? I should be able to learn about myself at Best Buy just as well in the dense thicket of wilderness reserves. It might even be the case that modern life is so indelibly stamped with the imprint of human activity that we have no choice but to confront ourselves since wherever we turn we find reflections of our diligence-the Oracle at Delphi has been replaced by Google. Excellent fodder for thought while the next website I summon too slowly materializes.

Nevertheless, we need a reliable barometer to know when we’ve crossed some watershed threshold, when completing the aims of nature by art becomes destroying it with art, when all these anthropomorphic expressions of ourselves finally become obfuscating distortions of authentic human endeavor.

I’ve decided to draw the line at sports.

This might initially seem arbitrary—surely I’m not suggesting the ESPN is the last fence against techno-barbarism—but there is an almost elemental affinity between athletic competition and technological innovation. Both singularly rest upon the inexorable logic of spirited and ceaseless thriving for more, or the magnetic attraction towards the other side of human limitations. Both are self-aggrandizing extensions of human freedom, grasping attempts to protest what initially appeared to immovable objects in the way of further achievement. Just as nature, and increasingly even our own bodies, taunt us into contriving projects for further mastery, athletic records dare us to break them, to re-set them as a challenge to the next young upstart.

And the manly world of sports has been invaded by the very techno-geeks who once suffered at the hands of its stars. I’m not just talking about steroids—the artificial chemical enhancement of our natural chemical makeup, the scientific exaggeration of already natural endowments. Lance Armstrong has just been stripped every victoryhe won over the course of his entire career for doping, an oddly disproportionate and even blinkered punishment given that it’s very likely the vast majority of his competitors did the same. As creepy as the intrusive revision of our own bodies can be (Barry Bonds now looks like an artist’s caricature of himself), there is at least the acknowledgement that the human body is the primary instrument of competition, a telling concession to the irreducibly human element of sports. The newest development is even more discomfiting since it skips the body entirely and defers to machines: the officials at the Tour de France will now be scanning bicycles for hidden motors ever since the Swiss champion, Fabian Cancellara, has been suspected of “mechanical doping”. Even our machines are on drugs, suffering from the insecurity that classically plagues overachievers. We have been poor examples for our mechanical progeny.

This all might seem like a natural consequence of professional bicycling, a sport that is already centered around the complex engineering of a machine—why not extend the same ingenuity that created the instrument to also perfect it? Hold in abeyance, if only for a moment, the obvious question regarding honest compliance with well promulgated rules—the issue now on the table is the animating logic and tenability of those rules. And unfolding this logic to the furthest periphery of its reach, can’t the same be said for the doping of the human body, our most proximate instrument? If athletic competition is premised on the recalcitrance of the human will to all tethers, especially those tied by nature, why not take advantage of every avenue of physical liberation? Doesn’t MANLINESS itself demand that we flout every bold border that circumscribes our current capabilities and color outside the lines of human possibility? Doesn’t every human athlete necessarily pine to be superhuman?

This primitive human longing for new modes of mastery, our own self-directed form of evolution, is especially salient in sports since it very well might be the most uncompromisingly meritocratic sector of American life. Claims to rule based on Aristocracy mean nothing—the only dynasties are the ones renewed year after year through continued victory. Affirmative action would be impossible—it would be painful for the spectator to witness the unfit ravaged by the super-fit. Fans assume the role of gatekeepers by becoming amateur accountants, meticulously tracking and comparing the statistical success of every participant every game—it is impossible to shroud failure in rhetorical spin. Even the corrupting influence of money can’t undermine the dominion of talent, since money only serves to purchase what is clearly best, what inarguably delivers triumph.

The only threat to the last theater of meritocratic battle, our free market of corporeal forces, is another meritocracy: science. It apparently wasn’t enough to merely treat the body as a machine subject to this and that technically induced permutation—nature proved harder to decisively revise than was previously thought—so they’ve moved on to making machines that do the work of the body. They cut out the middle man between innovation and perfection, the athlete himself. Our relentlessly competitive captains of science have managed to increase athletic performance by diminishing the contribution of the athlete to his performance. This is the ultimate revenge of the lab coat donning high school outcast, turning the success of the jock into a winning science fair project. They could only get so far with the scientific commandeering of courtship, engineering the just the right car or scent to pull the wooer out of wooing. They could not effectively crack the elusive code of human romance (history will reveal that lonely male scientists invented chocolate and sangria) but they can least resentfully lay siege to the contests that glorify their natural tormenters.

Jocks naturally loathe science, not because it lampoons their limited comprehension, but because science aims to make life easier, more comfortable, free from the physical toil that makes athletic drama so compelling. By increments our athletes have acquiesced to the intrusion of science into the locker room—multivitamins, protein shakes, sneakers fashioned by former NASA engineers—as long as such accompaniments left untouched the centrality of authentic athleticism and sheer brute exertion. But we now seem to be drifting toward that eventuality, without an impeachable logic to defend our anachronistic attachments to unaided bodily struggle. This is the not so hidden premise of the blockbuster movie Iron Man: Robert Downey Jr. can simultaneously achieve effete boyishness and superhero manliness as long as he hides in the protective cradle of the machine he brilliantly designs. Imagine how effective Iron man would be on the football field.

One basic problem that plagues the American Meritocracy is that it’s not a univocal phenomenon, like an unbroken phalanx marching towards ever greater heights of perfection. Our longing for scientific progress often wars with our spirited desire to overcome physical adversity, just as supermarkets have relegated hunting to a seasonal pastime replete with government issued licenses and special super warm socks. The core of the modern scientific project, as Francis Bacon authoritatively put it, is the “relief of man’s estate”, or, less poetically, the comfortable extension of our lives and minimization of risk and hardship. Athletic glory requires obstacles to the human will but science is premised on removing or eluding those obstacles, rational control versus bodily risk, flying around the world rather than trudging through it. Science brings us ease but not glory, and the athlete wants glory. The best athlete and the best scientist are two fundamentally different human types animated by incommensurable aims. When these aims collide, one predictably distorts the other.

But both are unmistakably human. It is wrong, or at least not adequately precise, to say that the technological mastery of nature is somehow inhuman or subhuman—our thirst for freedom from the limitations we’re naturally addled with is itself an organic, and peculiarly human desire. If dolphins are just as clever as human beings, and this is monstrously unlikely, then they are at least unbelievably lazy in comparison to us. There doesn’t to be any identifiable dolphin progress. Opposable thumbs would be wasted on them, not that monkeys have done much with them.

Being human seems to require a certain internal volatility—it is our nature to resist the dictates of nature itself. We don’t seem to evolve naturally or organically any longer—we can consciously choose to alter the natural conditions that limit us, that seem indifferent to our happiness and prosperity. We are the only creature that can experience indignation at our creatureliness—we seem offended that an array of impersonal forces can determine the strictures of our being. This means it is uniquely human to suffer from existential angst—dolphins don’t have identity crisis because they have no identities. Sometimes their human trainers name them but there has never been a recorded case of a dolphin naming itself.

Nevertheless, however capable we are of altering the borders of human capability itself the conditions for our experience of victory don’t change—everyone knows that an asterisk next to some new record means it was really a triumph of gamesmanship over the game. We want to win but humanly, and overcome adversity, even overcome ourselves, but not the fact of our humanity, or the very mortality and finitude that justify, and even dignify the breathless exertions for victory. Our achievements only make sense against the backdrop of the insuperable limitations that challenge our uniquely human will and summon spirited defiance. We want to win as a celebration of our very humanity, not as an indictment of our inferiority before the machines we construct. Even if we can ceaselessly re-engineer ourselves, we can’t simply rewrite the rules for what satisfies us, for what really counts as accomplishment, since this is written so deeply into the tapestry of human consciousness it is a permanent feature of who we are. We can deceive umpires and competitors but not ourselves on this score.

In many ways, our progress in science has genuinely improved athletic competition, increasing our understanding of the body and what fortifies it, providing even greater testament to the wonders of human striving. Likewise, camping has improved considerably too—hardly anyone ends up dying of starvation or being eaten by bears. Not in America, at least. A pensive respite from a world of torrid activity is still possible by retreating into the woods, especially when I have the discipline to shut my smart phone off. I could always sleep in my car if it got too cold or rained, but that would be cheating, itself a specifically human option. Still, even if no one else noticed I would still know, and no app on my blackberry will change that.

Ivan Kenneally is the Editor in Chief of the Daily Witness.

Category: Philosophical Asides