Just now in a notebook I wrote, ‘Is football inevitable?’ and then, because I knew it would make a better essay, ‘Why football isn’t inevitable but wrestling is.’
And now I’ve already given up on that, and come here.
Philosophically, with the accuracy of Marianne Moore or Gilbert White, I want to discern what would always arise in human culture and what is accidental.
Football, because it’s now (due to imperialism, promotion and TV) almost global, seems a good case to examine.
It is easy to imagine a version of the game in which the goals are bigger or smaller. Occasionally it’s proposed they’re widened, to increase the likelihood of high scoring games, therefore luring Americans (used to basketball and American football scores) into watching.
And so there are bits of football which are entirely conventional. But is it equally conventional that there is a game in which you cannot touch the ball with your hands, unless you are the goalkeeper?
I suppose so.
In which case, is it also on the same level of convention that there is a human game dependent upon possession of a ball-shaped object that involves opposing teams?
Yes, but this doesn’t have to be football. It can be Quidditch or that Mongolian horseback sport played with a trussed up sheep.
How hard is it to imagine a human society that wouldn’t ever come up with a game involving two teams that both want a physical thing?
Not too hard.
Anthropologists would probably give me a dozen examples.
Yet if something is desirable, within a societal context, there’s very likely to be a tussle for it. Over decades, this fight may become formalized into a sport, but is that inevitable? Can it not stay a duel to the death, or the equivalent of monkeys play-fighting, as kittens or goldfish do?
Football may not be the best example, because it’s more arbitrary than wrestling.
Wrestling, I believe, is universal. Where there are humans and apes, there is always grappling.
I’m no nearer saying, What is it we have culturally that would arise universally?
Laughter and wine and a sense of the future, perhaps. For humans.
Extension and duration, perhaps. For aliens, too.
We cannot know for certain, but where are our guesses more educated?
One of the few phenomena that I think is more or less universal—albeit drastically different in form—is the appearance of ghosts. Which could mean i. finding it impossible to conceive that death is *really* real is a cultural constant; or ii. that ghosts actually exist. Or maybe both.