| 摘要 | I.
The Super Bowl is over. March Madness is fast approaching, with NBA and Stanley Cup playoffs close behind. Spring training for the new baseball season has begun. Year after year, season by season, sports fans across the country shift their attentions, polish their loyalties, and renew their hopes: maybe this year, just this once, it won’t again be “wait ’til next year.”
For many decades, America’s most significant athletic contests have been our most popular civic rituals, temporarily removing us from the normal rhythms of everyday life. Medieval Europeans built cathedrals; our ancestors built civic monuments and memorials; we build sports palaces. There we gather, not only vicariously to taste the sweetness of victory but also to celebrate together all that is perennially great in human sport–excellence, grace, and the intense moments that separate triumph from tragedy. It is easy to dismiss sport as a triviality, and some highbrows will always do so. Yet these games that youngsters play somehow seem to capture both the lowest and the loftiest possibilities of embodied human life, eliciting in participant spectators and spectating participants the full range of human passions, from rapturous joy to paralyzing despair.
But all is not well in the world of sports. The football season began with a superstar banished for killing dogs and ended with a United States senator charging espionage; former Olympic winners are forced to return their medals; and the baseball season will open under a cloud of steroids and finger-wagging congressional hearings, which put one of baseball’s greatest pitchers in the stocks. More generally, many contemporary fans believe that the golden age of sport has long since passed–that modern athletics has become both corrupt and corrupting. Athletes are mercenaries, goes the lament, driven by the love of money. The pursuit of excellence has been sacrificed to spectacle, shaped more by the demands of television profits than the dignity of the game. Our heroes are often villains, with no regard for the law of the land or the rules of the game. Sport has morphed into entertainment, and sportsmen into unsportsmanlike trash-talking punks. It was not always thus, the old man sighs, longing for the days of Ruth and Gehrig, Williams and DiMaggio.
Our nostalgia, of course, is something of a distortion, if a noble one. Our ignorance of the sporting past–the vanity of the original Greek Olympians, the base passions of the original Roman fans, the tawdry character of many early twentieth-century baseball stars, the point-shaving and other gambling-related scandals–allows us to forget that much of what we lament about the present is not at all novel. And when it comes to the recent past–the era that today’s graying elders remember longingly from their now lost youth–it is far more pleasant and ennobling to remember the best and to forget the worst; to judge today’s athletes against an idealization of those who came before. No doubt, a generation hence, tomorrow’s elders will do the same, longing for the days of Tiger Woods and Derek Jeter and Peyton Manning.
Yet if nostalgia is a danger, so is failing to reckon squarely with an adulteration of sports that is, in fact, unique to our age. For the nature of athletics has indeed changed greatly from the naked runners and wrestlers of Athens and Sparta to the would-be champions of the Beijing Olympics. In the modern era we have seen a series of dramatic changes in what it means to be both an athlete and a spectator. The first great transformation was captured powerfully in 1981 in the film Chariots of Fire, which dealt with the Olympics of 1924: it portrayed the cultural shift, then just emerging, from the amateur to the professional. Exercise became training; practice became drills; the pursuit of victory became a science (and a business). The new professionals quickly accomplished feats unheard of in the days of the amateur–with more power, greater speed, and unprecedentedly complex strategies of execution. The original men of the gridiron would find much about modern football unimaginable: the size and the skill of the players; the management of the game with overhead photos, helmet headphones, and aging masterminds calling every play from upstairs; the serial loyalties of players who move from one team to the next, abandoning their followers to follow the money.
Combined with the new age of radio and especially big-market television, the professionalization of sport changed the ethic of the players and the outlook of the fans. With team owners raking in billions, players came to expect, and to demand, financial rewards commensurate with their value in the marketplace. They came to see their own achievements, measured quantitatively and enshrined in record books, as assets that may be “monetized” into endorsements. And fans became ambivalent about the games that they followed with such intensity. We still marvel at the games’ great players, but we question their motivations. We hunger for greater thrills and broken records, but we mourn a lost purity of play that the new professionalism has crowded out. We are devoted unto death to our local teams, but we watch our hometown heroes sign contracts with our arch-rivals within minutes (or so it seems) of the city’s victory parade. We expect to be entertained, but we still want sport to be something more than a circus or a rock concert. We love taking our children to the ball field, but we fear that today’s superstars are bad role models for the young.
Into this culture of ambivalence comes the Mitchell Report and the congressional hearings that it has prompted. The report, issued last December, is a 409-page indictment of the widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. Commissioned by Bud Selig, the commissioner of baseball, and provoked by numerous allegations of illicit drug use by recently active and current players, the report was written by former Senator George Mitchell after months of thorough investigation, extensive interviews, and private testimony. We now live, the report declares to no one’s surprise, in the “era of steroids. ” Although it does little to explain how or why we entered this tawdry era, the report expresses the hope that its findings will help bring the era to an end, through stricter oversight, tougher penalties, and better education about the dangerous side effects of performance-enhancing drugs.
Such reforms, however welcome, seem unlikely to halt the glory- or wealth-seeking athlete’s turn to biotechnology in the pursuit of superior performance. Indeed, in a few years the age of steroids may look quaint by comparison with future doping technologies, such as genetic muscle enhancements that could be both impossible to trace and more effective than steroids or growth hormone. If professionalization was the last century’s great transformation of sport, biotechnical enhancement looks to be this century’s great degradation of sport. And while the Mitchell Report gives voice to a widespread concern about the disturbing effects of performance-enhancing drugs on modern athletics, it also demonstrates our inability (or unwillingness) to confront the deeper sources of the trouble. We seem to know that biotechnological enhancement is a threat to the “integrity of the game,” but we cannot really articulate why. The reason is that we have lost an understanding of what makes sports truly admirable, and hence worthy of our attention and our devotion.
II.
By spending nearly all of its hundreds of pages documenting who used which drugs and when, the Mitchell Report takes for granted that using steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs is a moral and legal offense that should be opposed. It offers a brief list of reasons for the current ban: steroid use unfairly disadvantages honest athletes, undermines the validity of baseball records, harms the human body, sets a bad example for young athletes, and threatens the integrity of the game. These concerns are all genuine, but they are never subjected to rigorous analysis. Only by examining them carefully can we see their inadequacy.
The fact that steroids are illegal is, of course, a good reason not to use them–but not a reason why they should remain illegal, or why they were proscribed in the first place. Declaring that steroids unfairly advantage those who use them, while true, is not a sufficient reason for continuing to prohibit their use. Why not, in the name of fairness, allow those individuals with more limited natural gifts to use steroids and other chemical agents to level the playing field, so that victory will come not to the most talented but rather to those who make the best use of their talents? Or why not allow all athletes to use performance-enhancing drugs openly and legally, thus giving everyone free and fair access to whatever enhancements they choose? Indeed, the Mitchell Report itself suggests that one of the solutions to the steroid problem is to promote other kinds of nutritional supplements that would allow players to “achieve the same results.” But this begs the question: why are some body-altering or performance-boosting supplements to be applauded and others to be decried?
In its claim that steroid use “victimizes” non-users by giving them three undesirable choices–lose out to the biologically enhanced, quit the game, or imperil their bodies by becoming users themselves–the Mitchell Report pushes the argument a little deeper. In an age of biotechnical enhancements, many athletes feel constrained by the fact–or by the belief–that it is impossible to compete, or to compete on an equal playing field, without them. The choice to forgo performance-enhancing drugs amounts to unilateral disarmament, virtually guaranteeing that only those taking every biological advantage will succeed. In the steroid era, the pressure to use drugs has certainly been widespread, felt especially by the many marginal players–or by minor leaguers trying to move up–for whom any edge is the difference between staying in the game and losing the big salaries that all major leaguers now earn.
But if the majority of the players, as the report suggests, would truly prefer to stay chemically clean and avoid the need for this unwelcome choice, they could easily and successfully remove such pressures by agreeing collectively to expose the violators and to shame them–something the Players’ Union (which urged players not to cooperate with Mitchell) is light-years away from even considering. Moreover, the concern about coercion fails to get to the heart of the matter: competition is always demanding, often coercively so, and competitive athletes are always forced to measure up to their peers in training and practice or else be left behind. And many of the sports we find most thrilling–football, hockey, boxing, downhill skiing–require putting one’s body in peril. One of the athletic virtues we most admire is “playing hurt,” which often means placing excellence in action above bodily well-being. Beginning with Achilles, our most celebrated heroes–in sport as well as in war–have willingly put their bodies at risk on the field of glory, accepting bodily harm and even a shortened life as a price worth paying for being remembered. Why then should we decry, rather than admire, the athlete who sacrifices his body to the game he loves, or risks life and limb in the drive to bring his team to victory, or puts short-term glory above long-term health?
Even in sports that entail much less physical risk, such as baseball, concerns about adverse health effects, while appropriate, hardly seem to capture what really troubles us about steroids. The booing of Barry Bonds and the refusal to elect Mark McGwire to the Hall of Fame had nothing to do with their risking bodily harm. Even if the drugs were legal and safe, one imagines that the record-seeking batter would not like to be seen shooting up before heading to the plate, thus revealing his chemical dependence at the very moment when he is supposed to be demonstrating his personal excellence. He may use such drugs in private, without hesitation or apology, in his quest for fame, fortune, victory, or greatness; but he would be embarrassed to be seen in the act by the very public whose adulation he craves. Why, exactly, is he ashamed? And would such shame persist for long in a culture that gradually normalized doping because it lacked any better arguments than the risk of bodily harm for maintaining the taboo against it?
The Mitchell Report is surely right to highlight concern for the health effects on youthful athletes who would imitate their steroid-using heroes. The bodies and brains of still-growing young people are especially susceptible to drug-induced harms; a shocking number of teenage and collegiate superstarwannabes are already placing themselves needlessly at risk, and many more would be endangered should the taboo on these drugs be relaxed. Yet high schools, colleges, and even national Olympic committees, all bent on victory and the money and prestige that it brings, enthusiastically expose young athletes to enormous dangers to life and limb, not to speak of deforming their very lives, all in the service of glory for school and country. Sequestering women’s volleyball teams or pubescent gymnasts in drug-free but monomaniacal 24/ 7/365 training camps for the Olympics arguably deforms the bodies and minds of young people even more than steroid use, cheating, or flouting the law.
In the end, the Mitchell Report leaves us with a circular argument: we deride record-breakers such as Bonds as cheaters, yet we fail to articulate the deep ethical and human grounds for preserving the rules that they flouted in their pursuit of athletic glory. In its concern about the “integrity of the game,” the report invites us to think about the meaning of performance-enhancing drugs for the game itself; but the various hazards it lists–cheaters win unfairly, baseball records become illegitimate, drug suppliers can influence the outcome of games by threatening to expose their clients–are limited if genuine. All three points stress concerns about honesty and authenticity affecting only the outcome of the game–no cheating to win, no distorted records of personal accomplishment, no pressure to throw games–not the authenticity of the game itself.
What is missing is any exploration of why athletic activity and athletic excellence are diminished and dehumanized by the turn to biotechnological enhancements; why the steroid-using athlete cheats not simply his competitor, but first and foremost himself and those who cheer for him. The report leaves unexplored and undescribed what makes doping shameful and degrading, both for the athletes who engage in it and the culture that fails to oppose it. And it never probes or captures, by image or argument, what makes human sport at its best a realm of excellence and grace, ennobling for participants and spectators alike.
III.
Like the Mitchell Report, most discussions of biotechnical enhancement are preoccupied with the novel biotechnologies themselves. Commonplace in such discussions are quasi-Talmudic (and inconclusive) arguments about whether and how, for example, steroid use differs from special diets as a means for increasing the mass of muscles, or how an erythropoietin injection (“blood doping”) differs from taking vitamins as a means for increasing the oxygen-carrying capacity of blood. But a deeper analysis of enhancement should begin not from assessments of the technical means, but from explorations of the desirable ends. Only if we have a clear idea of the nature and dignity of human activity, in sport and beyond, can we see how that dignity is threatened by the age of biotechnological enhancement. (This was the approach adopted in Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness, the 2003 report of the President’s Council on Bioethics, which we helped to draft and from which, in this section of our essay and the next, we freely draw.) We begin by examining athletic activity itself, seeking to illuminate the integrity of the athlete; and move then to consider the activity of the spectators, so as to illuminate the integrity of sport and its value for all of us.
In athletics, as in other human activities, excellence has until now been achievable only by disciplined effort. For this reason, attaining those achievements by means of drugs, genetic engineering, or implanted devices looks to many people to be a form of “cheating”–not just their opponents but also the game, themselves, and their would-be admirers. Many of us believe that each person should work hard for his achievements, and we look down on those who try to fly high on the cheap. Even if we prefer the grace of the “natural athlete,” whose performance deceptively appears to be effortless, we admire also those who overcome obstacles and struggle to achieve their excellence.
This matter of character–the merit of disciplined and dedicated striving–though not the deepest basis of one’s objection to biotechnological shortcuts, is surely pertinent. Moreover, character is not only the source of our deeds, but also their product. Rowdy children or unruly athletes whose disruptive behavior is “remedied” by pacifying drugs rather than by their own efforts are not learning self-control; if anything, they are learning to think self-control unnecessary. A drug to induce fearlessness does not produce courage. An injection to induce aggressiveness does not cultivate the genuine desire to excel.
The reason that cheating should bother us is not simply our love of fairness but, more fundamentally, our admiration for human achievement. We esteem the human doer at his best, especially when he is engaged in those activities, like sport, that invite all human beings to admire the excellence of the few. How did he–a human being just like me–do that? If the answer is steroids, then we come to feel as if the body we admire is less like ours, and we come to believe that the deeds we admire are mere simulations of the human rather than the human at his best. The concern about cheating and bad character thus points to the deeper concern about the nature and dignity of human activity, in sport and beyond. In short: what makes human activity truly human, and what makes excellent human activity truly excellent?
In athletics, as in so many other human activities, superior performance is generally attained through training and practice. One gets to run faster by running; one builds up endurance by enduring; one increases one’s strength by using it on ever-increasing burdens. Likewise with the complex specific skills of the game–hitting, fielding, and throwing the baseball. The capacity to be improved is improved by using it; the deed to be perfected is perfected by doing it. In many cases, of course, no amount of practice can overcome one’s limited natural endowments: nature dispenses her unequal gifts with little regard for any abstract principle of “fairness.” Yet however mysterious the source and the distribution of each person’s natural potential, the individual’s cultivation of his natural endowments is intelligible. As agents and as spectators, we can understand the connection between effort and improvement, between activity and experience, between work and result. We appreciate self-achieved excellence because it flows from and manifests the presence of an active, excellence-seeking self.
By contrast, when we use performance-enhancing drugs to alter our native biology–whether to make the best even better or the below-average more equal–we paradoxically make improvements to our performance less intelligible, in the sense of being less connected to our own self-conscious activity and exertion. The improvements that we once might have made through training alone we now make only with the assistance of stimulants or steroids. Though we might be using rational and scientific means to remedy the mysterious inequality or unchosen limits of our native gifts, we would in fact make the individual’s agency less humanly or experientially intelligible to himself.
The steroid-using athlete certainly gains new physical powers, and the scientist who produced the biological agents of such improvement can certainly understand in scientific terms the genetic workings or physiochemical processes that make it possible. But from the athlete’s perspective, he improves as if by “magic.” True, steroids (or, someday, genetic muscle enhancement) will enable him to perform at a higher level only if he continues to train. True, as he trains, he still tires, perspires, and feels his (altered) body at work. But as the athlete himself can surely attest, the changes in his body are decisively (albeit not solely) owed to the pills he popped or the shots he took, interventions whose relation to the changes he undergoes are utterly opaque to his direct human experience. He has the advantage of the mastery of modern biology, but he risks a partial alienation from his own efforts. Precisely because he has chosen to be chemically made into a better athlete, his resulting superior performances are not great athletic achievements. A patient to his druggist, less doer and more done-to, he is dependent on outside agents for “his” performance. His doings become, in a crucial sense, less “his own.”
Why would an aspiring athlete subject himself to such magical transformations? Why would he adulterate his body and dilute his agency in pursuit of a personal achievement, which, once achieved, ironically mocks itself by being less personally his own? The pursuit of an answer will soon lead us to the heart of athletic activity and why we esteem it. In the process, we shall discover that the use of steroids or other biological enhancers is in fact a symptom of a much deeper adulteration.
In competitive athletics, the goal is victory–the defeat of the opponent, the display of one’s own superiority–usually not only in a single contest but over an entire season. Team success is measured by making the playoffs and then winning it all; individual success is measured by batting over .300, driving in more than 100 runs, or winning more than twenty games in a season. And beyond the contests of this season, the star players also compete against those who excelled in seasons past. Athletes who strive for glory often want to be known as the best ever; and since Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds cannot compete directly against Babe Ruth or Hank Aaron, they do so by compiling higher numbers in the book of records. Over time, athletic excellence becomes defined solely in terms of outcomes: winning rather than losing, breaking previous records, and compiling a stellar statisticum vitae. Some old-fashioned connoisseurs may still watch sports for the love of a game well played; but most fans, encouraged by sports media’s mania for keeping score, pay and watch largely to learn and celebrate the result.
Once athletic excellence is equated largely with successful outcomes, admired and compensated only for its contributions to the bottom line, it is surely tempting for athletes to seek an extra edge that will increase the chance of victory, boost their individual statistics, and enable them not only to stay in the game but to rise to the top of the ladder. If their native powers do not suffice or begin to decline, they will be only too happy to seek magical means of getting a better or a different body, all in the service of the longed-for final results.
IV.
Yet the dignity and the worth of athletic activity are not defined only by winners and losers, faster and slower times, old records and new. It is not simply the separable, measurable, and comparative result that makes a performance excellent. It is also the humanity of the human performer. Excellent athletic activity seems to have a meaning–the human body in action, the grace and rhythm of the moving human form, the striving and exertion of the aspiring human athlete–that is separable from competition, even when the athlete is competitively engaged. What matters more than the measurable outcome is the lived experience, for doer and spectator alike, of a humanly cultivated gift, excellently at work, striving for superiority and with the outcome in doubt.
Animals, after all, also run, often quickly and gracefully, doer and deed seamlessly united. The average cheetah runs much faster than the fastest human being. But we do not honor the cheetah in the same way we honor the Olympic runner, because the Olympian runs in a human way as a human being. We admire the cheetah’s grace and beauty, but we do not esteem its performance. The cheetah cannot help but run fast, and should he catch his quarry he will not have run in vain. The human runner, by contrast, must cultivate his gifts in order to perfect them, and although the race is to the swift, his distinctive humanity is on display throughout, win or lose. Racing itself is a human achievement, for each runner alone and for all runners together. For this reason, in assessing athletic performance, we do not in fact separate what is done from how it is done and who is doing it–from the fact that it is being done by a human doer. And we should not separate the score from the purpose of keeping score in the first place: to honor and to promote a given type of human accomplishment whose meaning is in the doing, not simply in the scored result. Tomorrow’s box score is at most a ghostly shadow of today’s ball game. The record book’s statistics are anything but vital.
Athletic contests are live human dramas, compressed versions of the overall human drama, in which desire and drive are of the essence. A game comprises more than competing moves calculated for, or justified solely, by the result. Consider the best human chess player playing against a chess-playing computer–an outstanding human being facing off against an outstanding human artifact. Are man and machine really “playing chess”? On one level, they are indeed playing the same game, making intelligible moves according to the same rules. Yet the computer “plays” the game rather differently–with no uncertainty, no nervousness, no sweaty palms, no active mind, and, most crucially, with no desires or hopes regarding future success. The computer’s way of “playing” is really a kind of simulation–the product of genuine human achievement, to be sure, but not the real thing: playing chess. By building computers that “play” perfect chess, we change the meaning of the activity itself, reorienting the very character of our aspiration from becoming great chess players to producing the best-executed game of chess.
Why, if chess is no more than the sum of opposing moves that are in principle calculable by a machine, would human beings wish to play chess at all, especially if the machines can do it better? Why would no one watch a “match” between two chess-playing computers, or, to come back to sports, a baseball game that pitted robot pitchers against automatic batting machines? The answer is at once simple and complex. We still play chess because only we can play chess, that is, as human beings, as genuine chess players. (The computer programmer is not a chess player.)
In baseball, similarly, we still run and pitch because running and pitching, while not as fast as roller-skating or using pitching machines, possess a dignity unique to themselves and unique to those who engage in these activities. The runner or pitcher on steroids is still a human being who runs or pitches; but the doer of the deed is, arguably, less obviously himself and less obviously human than his unaltered counterpart. He may be faster, but he may also be on the way to becoming more like an efficient machine or a horse bred for the racetrack than a self-willing and self-directing human agent.
To determine the specific difference of a human act or performance, and to identify the qualities that make us admire the performance as a human activity and as the performer’s own, comparison with the doings of other animals again proves helpful. In the activity of other animals, there is necessarily a unity between doer and deed; acting impulsively and without reflection, an animal–unlike a human being–cannot deliberately feign activity or separate its acts from itself as their immediate source. But although a cheetah runs, it does not run a race. Though it senses and pursues its prey, it does not harbor ambitions to surpass previous performances. Though its motion is not externally compelled, it does not run by choice. Though it moves in ordered sequence, it has not planned the course. It owes its beauty and its excellence–and these are not to be disparaged–to nature and to instinct alone.
In contrast, the human runner chooses to run a race and sets before himself his goal. He measures the course and prepares himself for it. He surveys his rivals and plots his strategy. He disciplines his body and cultivates his natural gifts to pursue his goal. The end, the means, and the manner are all matters of conscious awareness and deliberate choice. The racer’s running is a human act humanly done, because it is done freely and knowingly.
But the humanity of athletic performance resides not only in the chosenness and the intelligibility of the deed. It depends decisively also on the activity of a well-tuned and well-working body. The body in question is a living body, not a mere machine; not just any animal body but a human one; not someone else’s body but one’s own. Each of us is personally embodied. Each of us lives with, and because of, certain bodily gifts that owe nothing to our rational will. Each of us not only has a body; each of us also is a body.
The truth and the beauty of integrated and embodied human activity are displayed and celebrated in human sport (and also in dance and musical performance). When we see an outstanding athlete in action, we do not see–as we do in horse racing–a rational agent riding or whipping a separate animal body. We see instead a body gracefully and harmoniously at work, but at work with discipline and focus, pushing its limits and displaying its powers, all the while tacitly obeying the rules and requirements of the game. We know immediately that the human athlete is engaged in deliberate and goal-directed activity, that he is not running in flight moved by fear or in pursuit moved by hunger. Yet while the human character of his bodily movements is at once obvious, the “mindedness” of the bodily activity is tacit and unobtrusive. So attuned is the body, and so harmonious is it with heart and mind, that–in the best instance–the whole activity of the athlete appears effortlessly to flow from a unified and undivided being. At such moments the athlete experiences and displays something like the unity of doer and deed one observes in other animals, but with this difference: for humans, such a unity is an achievement. A great sprinter may run like a gazelle and a great boxer may fight like a tiger, but one would never mistake their harmony of body and soul for the brute instinct that spurs an animal toward flight or fight.
In the most complex sports–baseball, football, basketball, soccer–many of our most sophisticated psychic and physical powers come into play, visibly and elegantly united. The athlete goes beyond what is animal in man to ascend from acts of the body to acts of mind-body coordination. Man and cheetah both run, but man alone executes a hit-and-run, or dives to catch a sinking liner, or gallops to run down a towering fly ball whose trajectory he has subconsciously calculated correctly after hearing it leave the bat. The expert base-stealer knows how to time the pitcher’s delivery to gain an undefeatable head start, and the sharp-eyed base runner knows when to extend a double into a triple and how to complete his feat with an artful slide.
Beyond these individual anatomized acts of mind and body, there is the great feat of playing the game itself, both from moment to moment and from beginning to end, in light of the larger whole. Players survey the entire scene as they perform in concert with others, attending to where their teammates are heading and how their opponents are defending. They embody the rules, manage the clock, execute their game plans, and make innumerable strategic adjustments when things go badly. At their peak, the great player and the great team reveal the human difference in its glory.
At the root of athletic activity, as of all worthy human activity, is de |
