It’s true that under severe marital pressure I once took to visiting a gym. After a year of grudgingly lifting weights and hanging like an inverted bat from wall bars, the only perceptible difference to my body was a slight increase in the circumference of my calves. So I jacked it in and returned to debauchery and six-course meals heavy in carbohydrates, all of which made me feel a lot more lithe and sprightly. Exercise can be fatal to your health. Having spent a lifetime high on various kinds of dope, Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead was arm-twisted into going to a gym, where he did a few sit-ups and promptly dropped dead.

My churlish attitude to sport is shaped by childhood experience. A sickly, waif-like creature, I was forced to play rugby at school and opted to be a winger, which meant I could race purposefully up and down the touchline avoiding the ball. Over time, I developed the technique of appearing to play rugby but not actually doing so with a virtuosity far superior to those whose heads were stuck in the scrum. At the end of a game, the captain would clap me on the back with a gruff “Well done, Eagleton”, having mistaken taking flight for taking part. Afterwards I would sleep for a day. It’s remarkable how exhausting not playing rugby can be.

More from this author

How Salford made modern Britain

By Terry Eagleton

There have been moments, however, when I was proud to be mistaken for an athletic type. I was once in a swimming pool in the United States (I don’t know why, since I can’t swim) when two young boys approached me and asked “Are you a lifeguard, sir?” No doubt they needed a lifeguard present if they were to swim. I conceded rather reluctantly that I wasn’t but returned to my hotel glowing with quiet pride. Being mistaken for a lifeguard seemed second only to being mistaken for Tom Cruise.

So there’s something to be said for sport after all. In fact, it’s hard to think of a brand of popular culture which has such universal appeal as football, yet which combines this mass devotion with such magnificent displays of artistry. According to most theories of 20th-century culture, this isn’t supposed to happen. Instead, culture is sharply polarized between high and low, the former being unintelligible to the latter and the latter being contemptible to the former. Not much manages to slip over this well-policed frontier. There’s Shostakovich on the one hand and the Sun newspaper on the other. Yet football dismantles this opposition. It pulls in millions of ordinary men and women, yet also offers a dazzling display of talent which at times can touch on genius. No other cultural form can equal it in this respect.

It is, in fact, a form of secular religion, vastly more popular than the churches, with its own pantheon of saints, demi-gods, collective rituals, communal ecstasy and time-honored ceremonies. In the United States, the religious fervor surrounding sport borders on the pathological: no political speech is possible without a sprinkling of sporting metaphors. One day when I’ve nothing better to do I might find out what a slam dunk is, since it occurs about as often in American speech as the phrase “proud Americans”. (I know what a slam dunk means, but not what it is.) As for Britain, if you want to bring the place to its knees, ban all football games immediately. The result would be an outbreak of social disruption not far short of revolution. Governments would be toppled, public buildings would be razed to the ground and supporters’ clubs would take over the running of Whitehall.

In reality, football is a cunning way of heading off such turmoil, not of creating it. All ruling classes are aware that it’s not only bread but circuses that keep the common people content. Theater, pageantry and spectacle are crucial ways of keeping governments in power, siphoning off energies which might otherwise prove troublesome. Much of this today is known as television, rather as for the ancient Romans it was called gladiatorial combat; but football offers a great deal more than TV.

For one thing, it allows every plumber and taxi driver in the country to be an expert. People who might have trouble in spelling “fortuitous” can make the subtlest of judgments on whether a player is minimally off-side, or whether someone who’s playing mid-field should be moved upfront. They could also probably tell you when their club last played Everton, and what the score was. In a society for which the past is largely irrelevant unless you can package it as “heritage”, football helps to sustain the idea of tradition. You are heir to a heritage which stretches back far beyond your birth. Not many young Mancunians know who Harold Macmillan or Harold Wilson were, but a lot of them know about Matt Busby and George Best.

Football also allows people an experience of solidarity in a social order sorely lacking in it. It’s true that like many forms of solidarity, this can involve a collective hostility to others. Could there be Celtic without Rangers? But there’s more to it than that. A demonstration is a crowd of men and women united by a common goal — to drive out immigrants, for example, or protest against a war. A football crowd, like an audience at the London Philharmonic, is united simply by a shared love of what they’re witnessing, and that affection is intensified by the knowledge that thousands of others are feeling it too. It’s true that a lot of players are grotesquely overpaid, but many of them would probably want to do what they do even if they weren’t so grossly over-recompensed, which is more than you can say about sausage manufacturers.

Football is a form of collective celebration which includes an appreciation of the individual — of the defensive agility of one player or the strategic sense of another. Besides, football clubs can be the focal point of local identity, in the way that supermarkets or the town hall can’t be. Even those who’ve never been to a game in their lives may well see the club as in some way symbolic of their city. All this, to be sure, has been much diminished by the absorption of the sport into corporate capitalism, a scandal which has politicized many an outraged fan. The obvious solution is that clubs should be owned and controlled by their patrons, not by avaricious overseas businessmen who wouldn’t know a free kick from a throw-in.

Suggested Reading

The triumph of Brexitball

By Jonathan Wilson

When did I last go to a soccer game? Maybe 70 years ago. I haven’t ever played the game myself, since as I began by saying I have principled moral objections to physical exercise. If others want to shorten their lives by chasing a ball, doing 50 press-ups a day or indulging in other potentially suicidal activities, that’s up to them. This isn’t a popular view in a society which makes a fetish of the body. We live in a culture in which you bear your body around with you like a sickeningly fragile piece of china which might shatter at any moment. In a postmodern world in which people insist on being themselves, one treats the body as though it were someone else’s. One thinks of the unctuous Mr Pecksniff of Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit, warming his hands at the fire as benevolently as if they belonged to a friend. It’s a self-alienation implicit in the phrase “to put something in your body”, as if it were an icebox or a paper bag. You mustn’t put a vaccine in your body, for example, even if failing to do so may inflict a painful death on others. Having to take an aspirin can trigger a panic attack in some young people. A meal becomes as complex, potentially as lethal an operation as defusing a landmine. Judiciously selected items are occasionally placed in the body with scrupulous care, an activity once known as eating. We become custodians of our bodies, attending to their every whim like those of some imperious aunt or querulously demanding pet.

Postmodern bodies also demand their own sealed-off spaces. It’s a far cry from the libidinal riot of medieval carnival, where it could prove hard to say where one body ended and another began. Some people today say “excuse me” if they come within five yards of you. Smoking is forbidden not only because it can kill you but because smoke violates other people’s space. It constitutes a lethal, almost invisible link between them. It won’t be long before we walk around zipped up in astronaut suits and communicating only by radios built into our helmets. Hygiene is a posh word for not interacting with others. In this context, football reminds us of the other meaning of the word “body”, namely a mass of men and women who assemble together either for some practical purpose or just for collective enjoyment. It’s the people’s theater or concert hall. Which doesn’t mean that I’ll be watching the Champions League any time soon…

Chaos is a void because nothingness has no shape. There isn’t a triangular kind of negativity as opposed to an oval one. So-called “chaos theory” deals with systems whose behaviour is random and unpredictable, one of which is known as Vladimir Putin. One of the curious features of the Russian president’s attack on Ukraine is its recklessness. Former KGB agents may be callous or thick-headed or sadistic, but one would not expect them to be impetuous.

Still, Putin was a KGB man a long time ago, and has had plenty of time to go mad since then. Not mad in the sense of not knowing what he’s up to, but mad in the way that pop stars who are surrounded by sycophants and don’t know what a can opener is. Shakespeare’s Lear is in something like this state when the play opens, and has to be hauled through hell in order to be cured of it. (He didn’t know what a can opener was either, but that was understandable.)

Putin’s motive in flattening Ukraine is partly ethnic. He thinks that the country is ethnically speaking a fiction, a cardboard cut-out of a nation, and should be wound up as soon as possible. Ukraine is a void, a non-entity, and Russia will impose some order on this chaos by incorporating it into itself. Then the Ukrainians will cease to be unreal and become what they essentially are, namely Russians.

In this sense, the war reminds us of the dangers of ethnicity. Contrary to postmodern thinking, it isn’t always to be applauded. You don’t have to be a racist to be aware of the murderous conflicts ethnic difference has inflicted on humankind. If everyone came from Cornwall or the Democratic Republic of Congo, the world would be a lot more dreary but a lot less bloodstained as well.

Behind Putin’s assault on his neighbours lies one of the worst ideas humanity has had for a long time: the Romantic-nationalist demand that there should be a precise fit between politics and ethnicity, so that an ethnic ‘people’, whatever that means, is entitled to its own sovereign state, and should extend this sovereignty to those of its own kind currently living under different regimes.

The result of this doctrine has been political havoc. The English have a right to self-determination, but not because they are English. Scottish independence is a question of democracy, not a genetic or patriotic affair. Colonised nations from India to Mozambique have thrown off their colonisers, but this is a political matter, not an ethnic one.

Colonialism is objectionable even if those who have plundered your resources are of the same ethnic origin as yourself. There are Republicans in Northern Ireland who oppose the partition of the country because they would prefer to live with their fellow Gaels over the border rather than with a bunch of benighted Ulster Scots who believe the world was created only 6,000 years ago. There are, however, better reasons for opposing partition than that. Ethnicity in the West is mostly a matter of ensuring equal rights, and is thus to be affirmed; yet ethnicity on a more general scale has piled the bodies high, and continues to do so as I write.

Too sharp a contrast between order and chaos is misleading. War creates chaos, but it is a deliberately manufactured disorder, not an arbitrary mess. You spread ruin and despair, but in as planned, well-disciplined way as possible. Besides, what you regard as chaos depends largely on your idea of order. In this sense, the two concepts are mutually parasitic.

More from this author

The emptiness of Evil

By Terry Eagleton

Anyone who has just returned to Britain from a so-called developing nation will be struck by how surreally neat and tidy everything seems, but people in poorer countries don’t consider their lives to be anarchic. Virginia Woolf saw life as fragmentary and formless, but it’s unlikely that the housemaids who scrubbed her floors felt the same.

My university tutor regarded almost everything around him as chaotic, from the gurgling of a baby to the purring of a car engine, but this was because his notion of order was pathological. He would refuse to shake hands with you in the vacation because of some medieval university statute which nobody else had ever heard of. I once asked him at the end of a tutorial whether I might consult him in his role as a university officer, whereupon he asked me to leave the room, knock on the door and wait till he invited me to come in again. People like this should be chained to the wall in padded cells, approached only by those wearing protective suits. One could only wonder what wild orgiastic urges he was repressing.

Like many deep-dyed conservatives, my tutor was a devout adherent of what one might call the floodgates argument. Allow one person to play the trombone in a tube station, and (key phrase) before you know where you are the whole of the London underground system will be packed wall-to-wall with people playing trombones and chaos will ensue. In Freudian idiom, this man had fallen morbidly in love with the law. Like the Pharisees of the New Testament, he had turned the law into a fetish in order to keep chaos at bay.

Naive libertarians react to this pathology by ditching the law altogether, but this fails to acknowledge the distinction between obeying the law because of what it commends and obeying it for its own sake. “The law is the law” is one of the most lethal tautologies in any language. On this view, you don’t do what the law demands for a reason, because that would mean that legality was dependent on rationality and was thus no longer absolute.

For Immanuel Kant, probably the greatest of modern philosophers, you should be moral because it is moral to be so. This is deeply questionable, but it contains a kernel of truth, which is that being moral doesn’t get you anywhere. It isn’t necessarily a path to a more fulfilling life. In fact, for the New Testament it is a path which leads to a squalid death at the hands of the state. The 18^th century novelist Henry Fielding writes that there is a noble doctrine to the effect that the virtuous will reap their reward in this world — a doctrine, he adds, which has only one defect, namely that it is not true.

Suggested reading

Putin can't win a Cold War

By Dominic Sandbrook

There are other ways in which order and chaos are old friends. In Freud’s view, what enforces law and order is the superego, a faculty which draws its formidable strength from the forces of the chaotic unconscious. No political order could endure if it didn’t engage us at this kind of depth. You can’t govern people off the top of their heads, not even if they are French. Any political power which can tap into the collective unconscious will prove remarkably difficult to dislodge. If it also provides its citizens with just enough satisfaction, however meagre, to keep them going, it is very likely to survive. There has to be something in it for you. If there isn’t, however, either affectively or materially, power is highly vulnerable.

Social order is shrewd enough to encourage us to disrupt it from time to time. The traditional name for this in medieval Europe was carnival. The common people tumble into the streets wearing monstrous papier-mâché phalluses and vaginas and hump merrily away in defiance of the state. A wave of travesty and inversion — nose/phallus, face/buttocks, mouth/anus, high/low — sweeps through social life. Absolutely nothing escapes this great spasm of satire. Nothing is too solemn or sacred to be blasphemed. People dress up as Cardinals and piss in the streets. All this calls the established social order into question, but it is also a way of protecting it, a collective blow-off after which the sun will rise on myriad empty wine flagons and gnawed chicken legs and the populace will return obediently to work.

You need order if you want to be free. Unless you can predict how the world is likely to behave, you can’t fulfil your powers and capabilities, which is the positive meaning of freedom. You can’t play croquet if the hoops consist of flamingos which keep wandering around, as they do in Alice in Wonderland.

All the same, social life wouldn’t work if every bit of it was bound by precise rules. You wouldn’t be able to say “Stand roughly there”, which makes perfect sense, or shake someone’s hand, since there are no rules which determine how long a handshake should last. Maybe this is why my tutor was so wary of them.

We live and work on what Ludwig Wittgenstein calls the rough ground of social existence, even if there are those who try to walk on the pure ice of some flawless vision of order. But the two are not simply opposites. What we have witnessed in Ukraine is how easily such flawless visions can create the rough ground of a city brought to ruin.