Chess Is Not a Sport

A few days ago (see here), I described Bart Giamatti’s taxonomy of play. Giamatti defined “contest” as a competitive game. There are, he said, two types of contest: intellectual and physical. Physical contests are sports. I wrote that chess and checkers exemplify the category of intellectual contests and that baseball and bicycle racing exemplify the category of physical contests (sports). To my surprise, three or four people wrote to say that chess is a sport. (See here, for example.) They said that it requires endurance and that it causes an elevated heart rate and perspiration. I assume they would say the same about marathon Monopoly, Scrabble, checkers, or card-playing sessions. Is high-stakes poker a sport? I’m sure it gets the players’ hearts racing. Monopoly and card-playing are not sports, and, with all due respect to my correspondents, chess isn’t, either. The tone of the letters suggests that classifying chess as an intellectual contest rather than as a sport is insulting. But why? What’s wrong with intellectual contests? Dividing contests into those that are intellectual and those that are physical isn’t to rank them in a hierarchy, any more than to divide humanity into male and female is to rank them in a hierarchy. Two things can be different but equal. Baseball is better than chess, but not because it’s a sport. What I actually said in my post, as Matthew S. Mullins of Ektopos pointed out in my defense, is that there are two types of contest: those that are purely intellectual and those that are both intellectual and physical. Every physical contest has an intellectual component or dimension, so defining a category of purely physical contests would create an empty category. I suppose it’s also true that any intellectual contest has a physical component or dimension. We’re embodied beings, after all. Any competition is going to affect one’s body. Playing cards all night requires endurance. Tense moments in Scrabble, checkers, or bridge make one sweat and cause one’s heart rate to increase. So where do we draw the line? How physical does a contest have to be to count as a sport? Different people will draw the line in different places, depending, perhaps, on which physical attributes they think are most important. Is it strength? Speed? Quickness? Endurance? Agility? It’s an abuse of language to call chess a sport. It’s not an abuse of language to call golf a sport, although I consider golf a borderline case and am inclined to classify it as an intellectual contest. Chess is not even borderline. It’s a paradigmatic nonsport. Indeed, I would consider it a defect in any taxonomy that it classifies chess as a sport, just as I would consider it a defect in any taxonomy that it classifies bicycle racing as a nonsport. Bill's Comments Bill Keezer is discovering his inner blogger. See here for his latest provocative posts. I hope you're visiting his blog on a regular basis. The best blogs, like the best teachers, both edify and entertain. Thanks I'd like to thank all the people who sent birthday greetings. I wasn't fishing for greetings, but I'll take 'em.

From Today's New York Times

To the Editor: I applaud Princeton University for trying to rein in grade inflation (news article, April 8). But its proposed quota for A's (35 percent of all grades, down from 47 percent) will not address the underlying problem. Where college grades used to be critical only for those going on to graduate or professional schools, now students applying for jobs send transcripts to potential employers. The result is students badgering instructors to raise their grades, and faculty and graduate assistants trying to help their students' prospects. If college career offices stopped encouraging students to make their grades part of the job-hunting process, perhaps students would stop credentialing themselves and get back to the business of learning. AMANDA I. SELIGMAN Glendale, Wis., April 8, 2004 The writer is an assistant professor, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Intellectual Dishonesty Paul Krugman is trying to have it both ways. He wants to blame President Bush when economic indicators are down, but not praise him when they're up. See here. But then, liberals have never been known for their honesty, have they? The thing you must remember about liberals is that, for all their talk of principle, they're result-oriented. The end justifies the means. To achieve their social-engineering goals, they must have power; and they will do whatever it takes, including lie, to get that power. Take my word for it: I used to be one of them. I know how they think.

John E. Hare on Ethics and Christianity

Writing from the perspective of traditional Christianity will already make [my] project suspect to much of the audience I would like to reach. I intend the book for two groups and their intersection: both for those who call themselves Christians, or at least take the claims of Christianity seriously, and for those interested in the academic study of ethics. This makes the project problematic, since many of those who fall into the second group find the attitudes and commitments of the first group incomprehensible or, if comprehensible, entirely unattractive. From the perspective of the academic study of ethics, it can seem that belief in traditional Christianity is possible for the uneducated, perhaps even desirable; but that for those who are fully alive to the movement of thought over the last two hundred years, it is no longer a serious option. I believe, however, that a strong case can be made that this attitude within academic philosophy has led to a bad misreading of the great philosophical texts on which academic philosophy depends. I have an advantage here from an accident of my education. I did Greats at Oxford, in which the syllabus took a leap from Aristotle to Frege; and then a Ph.D. in the Classical Philosophy programme at Princeton, in which I read nothing between Aristotle’s medieval commentators and Bradley. ‘Modern’ philosophy is therefore something I have read on my own, directly from the primary sources. I have been constantly struck by how often the Christian content of these sources has been ignored by the standard interpretations in the secondary literature. This is notably true of Kant, as I shall try to show. His system does not work unless he is seen as genuinely trying to ‘make room for faith’. Failure to see this has led to heroic measures, either excising portions of text as not properly ‘critical’, or attributing his views to a desire to appease the pious sentiments of his faithful manservant. What is true of Kant is also true of Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Leibniz, and even Hume. We are given a reading of modern philosophy that leads from its birth in the new science of the sixteenth century to its maturation in the death of God and the death of metaphysics. Descartes is seen as an incipient atheist, bringing in God not because of personal faith but to appease the Church. Large sections of Leviathan, where Hobbes talks about the will of God, are ignored as though they were inessential to the project of the whole. In Bertrand Russell’s critical exposition of the philosophy of Leibniz, God appears in none of the five original axioms. Hume is seen at the end of the Dialogues as insincere in portraying Philo’s change of heart. It is no doubt tempting, if you cannot take Christianity seriously yourself, to interpret your favourite philosophers as sharing this distaste; but it leads to a distortion of the texts. Those engaged in the academic study of ethics ought to try the experiment of seeing what the world looks like from the perspective of traditional Christianity, even if merely to understand their own tradition. This book can be seen as such an experiment. (John E. Hare, The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God’s Assistance, Oxford Studies in Theological Ethics [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996], 2-3)

Wednesday, April 07, 2004

I’m forty-seven years old today. Every year, when my birthday comes around, I whine about not wanting to get older. It’s not fair, I say. I refuse to get older. Who set things up this way? But life is not fair. It’s not unfair, either. It just is. We’re born; we plod along; we die. If we’re lucky, we have fun along the way. If we’re really lucky, as I am, we get to spend our days doing exactly as we please. Sometimes I have to pinch myself to ensure that I’m not dreaming. You mean they pay me to read, write, think, and teach? I would do all but the teaching part for free. (Don’t tell the dean!) When I was twenty, I would have thought someone forty-seven years of age old. But now that I’m forty-seven, I think twenty-year olds are children. They know nothing; they’ve experienced nothing; they have no perspective on even their own small region of spacetime. And yet they think they know everything. It’s funny, really. As you age, you realize how little you know and how little you’ll ever know. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t try to learn, only that you should be humble about it. Learn what you can; accept your limitations. If I’m lucky, I’ll have another thirty years in this vale of tears (to use Jeremy Bentham’s term). The first thirty years of my life seemed to take forever, probably because there were so many big events along the way. High-school graduation, the first job, the first car, college, graduation from college, law school, the bar exam, graduate school, the Ph.D. dissertation, the first job. Once I got tenure, the temporal slide began. The past ten years have gone by in a flash. My life, like Immanuel Kant’s, is filled with pleasant routines. Every day is full. I have never been bored for a minute in my life. But now that all the big events are over, there’s nothing to stop the flow of time. If twenty years ago seems like yesterday, then tomorrow is 2024 and the day after that 2044. I envy theists, for they believe that life is eternal. I’ve never believed that and couldn’t if I tried. I have a finite amount of days. I believe I value each of them more than any theist does for the simple reason that they’re finite. If you have an infinite amount of something, how valuable can it be? Water is more valuable in Arizona than in Michigan. Nor do I believe that this mundane life is preparation for something greater. It’s all I have. But it’s enough. More than enough. I’ve had a wonderful life. If I die tonight, do not mourn for me. Celebrate. Celebrate my demise if you must, but celebrate.

From Today's New York Times

To the Editor: Re "Tracking Terrorist Bankrolls" (editorial, April 4): Ending terrorist financing is a top priority for President Bush. The president's budget includes a more than 16 percent increase for the Treasury Department and a 5 percent increase for Internal Revenue Service criminal investigation activities. In fact, more than 400 special agents and more than 200 investigative analysts will be added for I.R.S. criminal investigations in 2005 alone. The global campaign to find and seize terrorists' blood money uses the strengths of multiple agencies strategically. The interagency team, which includes the Treasury, State, Justice, Defense and Homeland Security Departments, the intelligence community, the F.B.I., federal regulators, and state and local authorities, has achieved many successes. President Bush has made the battle against terror financing a front-burner issue worldwide and has led a global coalition in the identification and disruption of terrorist financing networks around the world. As a result, America is safer and more secure from those who would harm us. ROBERT NICHOLS Asst. Secretary for Public Affairs Department of the Treasury Washington, April 5, 2004

From Today's Dallas Morning News

France and Germany are the big cheeses of what Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has described as "Old Europe." An undiplomatic phrase? Perhaps. But judging by the current state of affairs in both countries, the designation "old"--as in crabby, feeble and resistant to change--is apt. The governments of President Jacques Chirac and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder are dealing with widespread public discontent, stemming in large part from persistently high unemployment and sluggish economic growth. Yet the public remains stubbornly defiant in the face of attempts to rein in generous social spending by the vast welfare state bureaucracies. The French and the Germans no longer can afford their welfare states, yet they can't bring themselves to abandon them. There's a French word for what grips both nations: malaise. It's a word commentators used to describe the speech that Jimmy Carter delivered to a national TV audience in July 1979--an address that recognized the crisis of confidence then paralyzing America. There's a straight line from the malaise speech to the election of Ronald Reagan 16 months later, which restored America's self-confidence and brought about painful but necessary reforms (as Britain had embraced earlier with the election of Margaret Thatcher). We will see if there are any Reagans or Thatchers in France and Germany. In the meantime, we Americans should learn the lessons of our allies' crises. In an era of globalization, reality will wash away economic and social structures that seemed permanent. If France and Germany don't find ways to embrace reform and arrest decline, they will write one more lesson into the history books: Old nations never die; they just fade away. Ambrose Bierce Friendship, n. A ship big enough to carry two in fair weather, but only one in foul. (Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

Morality and Self-Interest

Most of us experience morality as a burden. It constrains our actions. It tells us either not to do what we’d like to do or to do what we don’t want to do. Morality is like a parent, a boss, or a drill sergeant: stern, demanding, unforgiving. For better or for worse, we cannot escape it. Making moral judgments is in our nature, and having moral judgments made about one--or one’s actions--is inescapable. We are hard-wired to think in terms of right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust. We are moral animals. Every now and then, however, morality and self-interest converge. It’s wonderful--and remarkable--when they do, as this snippet from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn shows: By and by it was getting-up time. So I come down the ladder and started for down-stairs; but as I come to the girls’ room the door was open, and I see Mary Jane setting by her old hair trunk, which was open and she’d been packing things in it--getting ready to go to England. But she had stopped now with a folded gown in her lap, and had her face in her hands, crying. I felt awful bad to see it; of course anybody would. I went in there and says: “Miss Mary Jane, you can’t a-bear to see people in trouble, and I can’t--most always. Tell me about it.” So she done it. And it was the niggers--I just expected it. She said the beautiful trip to England was most about spoiled for her; she didn’t know how she was ever going to be happy there, knowing the mother and the children warn’t ever going to see each other no more--and then busted out bitterer than ever, and flung up her hands, and says: “Oh, dear, dear, to think they ain’t ever going to see each other any more!” “But they will--and inside of two weeks--and I know it!” says I. Laws, it was out before I could think! And before I could budge she throws her arms around my neck and told me to say it again, say it again, say it again! I see I had spoke too sudden and said too much, and was in a close place. I asked her to let me think a minute; and she set there, very impatient and excited and handsome, but looking kind of happy and eased-up, like a person that’s had a tooth pulled out. So I went to studying it out. I says to myself, I reckon a body that ups and tells the truth when he is in a tight place is taking considerable many resks, though I ain’t had no experience, and can’t say for certain; but it looks so to me, anyway; and yet here’s a case where I’m blest if it don’t look to me like the truth is better and actuly safer than a lie. I must lay it by in my mind, and think it over some time or other, it’s so kind of strange and unregular. I never see nothing like it. Well, I says to myself at last, I’m a-going to chance it; I’ll up and tell the truth this time, though it does seem most like setting down on a kag of powder and touching it off just to see where you’ll go to. (Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn [Toronto: Bantam Books, 1981], chap. XXVIII, pp. 179-80 [italics in original] [originally published in 1884]) Huck could not believe that doing the right thing and doing what was in his interest converged in this case. It was “strange and unregular.” Well, here’s another case. Becoming a vegetarian (or moving in that direction by eliminating certain animal products from your diet) is both the right thing to do and the prudent thing to do. By ceasing to eat meat, you both refuse to participate in an oppressive institution and improve your health. You can become a vegetarian both for the sake of the animals (the moral reason) and for your sake (the prudential reason). I hope nobody thinks meat-eating is healthy. If you do, then you have not been keeping up with the science of nutrition. Not only is meat-eating not healthy; it’s unhealthy. It sets back your interest in health, and therefore your ulterior interest in a long, happy life. See here for a statement by the American Dietetic Association, which is a nonpartisan organization. Live clean. Do right. Vegetarianism accomplishes both.