Football, Democracy & Darwin



  FOOTBALL, DEMOCRACY & DARWIN

  THE DNA OF RACISM

  By

  Guy Herman

  * * * * *

  PUBLISHED BY:

  Sextant Pocket Press

  FOOTBALL, DEMOCRACY & DARWIN

  THE DNA OF RACISM

  Copyright © Guy Herman

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN-13: 978-1492143550

  ISBN-10: 1492143553

  Sextant Pocket Press

  For centuries, if not millennia, man has struggled to understand what has caused both success and failure of his various cultures.

  As we have tried to understand the nature of particle physics, evolution, and the biology or neuroscience, how our incredibly complex brains work, the practical comprehension has required a process which has taken centuries.

  Some science and our understanding of the internal process remains elusive and still beyond the scope of our knowing, while in others, as in the science of cultures, the physics of why some fail and others succeed, we can see, more or less, the outlines of their construction.

  The social structure called democracy, and notable for having a small ‘d’, is one of the processes which, with our reasonably complex understanding of evolution, we can now say we have, a credible and reasonably complete understanding.As the agrarian society of our elders transformed to that which supported the industrial revolution, the deconstruction of the family as the elemental social molecular structure began to disintegrate.This does not mean we know enough yet to alter the course of human events and change the behavior of man or his artifact, the culture of one or another grouping of these mammals, however we do now have a basic outline of the building blocks, much as, in the last century we developed the periodic table for terrestrial elements essential to a more thorough and complete understanding of the chemistry, foundational to the study of all biota.

  Ironically, though reasonably, the understanding of the human condition, from the phylogenetic standpoint and the elements of macro behaviors which lead to the success or failure of the phylum, come from, in part, the study and understanding of some of the quite complex artifacts of human behavior and the human condition as it relates to the progression and passage of their lives.

  The fundamental question of this inquiry then is why and how do some civilizations flourish and why and how do some collapse.

  A peek into the genesis and function of democracy will point sketch the answer into two laboratory quality petri-dishes, football and racism, real time cat scans of human behavior, and provide an incredible insight and understanding into apparently inchoate facts.

  Clearly our focus comes from the very specific state of the civilization currently prevalent in the middle of the Northern Hemisphere of the Americas and largely bounded by the geographic region called the United States.

  In this society racism, a behavioral tool employed historically for self defense, manifest in one class or race unduly using, dominating, enslaving, debasing, employing another against its will, clearly a vestigial appendage of another earlier epoch and of incredibly important evolutionary value; is still widely prevalent.

  Racism, at its best, helped preserve the gene pool, keep pestilence and plague from decimating cultures, made or shaped the future of kith and kin and more than not served to further the species and the incorporation, into their genetic mix, of a more successful more beneficial, evolutionary gain.

  Endemic to this natural selection and evolutionary gain, fostering and succeeding, in part from the recognition of foreign or alien families, species, or races which would, could or did threaten the very survival of their own, is an elemental equation naturally fostering unfairness and inequality.

  Fundamental to the success of a species, until the perhaps artificial introduction of democracy, is the absolute law of ‘might makes right,’ and in this, there is scarce room for the more sophisticated and presumably refined notions of equality and the outcomes of the egalitarian societies whose rise were so pronounced in these last centuries, all be they with historic roots in ancient nomadic and agrarian man.

  In stark opposition, and an unsuspecting fortuity for the scientist wishing to understand evolution, there is, in this Hemisphere a veritable living and dynamic laboratory of human behavior providing at once a control and experimental group with which one can quite easily further the study of the oncoming collapse of this species of man.

  Found in a game advanced and nurtured by those inhabitants of this geographic region known as the America’s, there is an enormous population who organize themselves, in play, into a governing body called the National Football League and its preoccupation and association, one of their most popular and near universal artifact, is found in a game generally called football.

  In other continents and land masses all over the planet, there are similar cultural and athletic undertakings with similarly near universal participation which, though too called, ‘football’ utilize a different tool or artifact, round but of much the same proportion and construction but specifically called, by this American culture, a ‘soccer ball’.

  Despite the manifest differences in the rules and essential attributes of the sport, they are uncommonly alike and absolutely provide the same global and cultural intricacies, insights and outcomes.

  Football, in its currently highly organized format, albeit with roots tracing back millennia, appears, curiously an anti-dote to the humiliation, struggle and often outright degradation and unfair play of a culture which espouses universal freedom, known in these America’s as a constitutional democracy, but practices differently.

  Football allows an individual or group to act out all of the complex attributes of the human experience as brought to us by evolution, including the horror of tribalism, warfare and cannibalism while still maintaining the structure of a small ‘d’ democracy as taught from the ancient lineage of ancestors around the campfire.

  Agrarian Australopithecine wandering through Africa and Eastern Europe to the more recognizably recorded civilizations of the ancient Ottomans, Greeks and Romans learned, somewhat, and codified the rules, of equality, civility, honor and rights, allegedly due the common man and the responsibilities of the governors, to work for the governed.

  The nearly unbelievable popularity for this game of football, contrasted to the extraordinary contempt and near visceral hatred for the undertaking and outcome of politics, other than those whose interests advantage the participants with wealth or power, is a near perfect scientific key, a virtual strand of DNA allowing a methodical and anthropological peek into the occasion of the failure and collapse of many of the modern civilizations of Western man.

  Indeed, though the science is still out, and like the geologic record of ancient fossils more difficult to collect and gather for the detailed forensic study needed, it appears the same mechanisms which are debilitating the US, Western Europe, the British Empire, Greece and other rich and storied cultures, stretching back as far as the Russian Empires of Catherine the Great, Napoleon, the Ottomans, Pharaoh’s, Persia, the Ming, the Han, Sing, and a thousand others well before is no more or less than the simple and unsolvable equation which, on the one side posits commonwealth and the greater good, while on the other, categorically relies on the millions of years of evolutionary teachings which vest right, in the power of might, and reason in the hands of those whose interests are initially and finally, their own, once and always to the exclusion of, and trumping the ‘greater good’ of man.

  II

  Clearly, the behaviors of ‘right makes might’ and ‘self interest’ are readily known by all.It is an essential part of our evolutionary past to kill or be killed.

  There are none who ha
ve not suffered under the hand of ‘social injustice’ in the first person or if so, none who do not understand how the base meanness and naturally selfish behavior of man leaves little room for ‘commonwealth’ and or the ‘greater good’.

  With this as an ‘a priori’, and knowing factually how we have survived ice ages, saber tooth tigers and giant lemurs, none can dispute we know the elements and bounds of this side of the evolutionary coin, so the real question is from where did the notion of the ‘greater good’ arise, and irrespective of the answer, is it of any essential or ‘a priori’ merit, and finally, is it possible, in the life history of modern culture that the very push and pull of self interest versus commonwealth is the very seed of its destruction.

  In scientific terms, like the human appendix, a vestigial and now antiquated behavior or secondary autonomy learned from a culture ten hundred thousand years ago and now, an autonomous but dated afterthought, one must posit perhaps the application of democratic principle is now, not only useless but the very cause of the ruination