Basketball, Amen

“Everything is what it is, and not another thing,” wrote Joseph Butler. But of course man, now become the measure of all things, has learned how to make one thing into quite something else. Shortly after Bishop Butler passed on, Immanuel Kant, dumbstruck by practical reason, began mischievously reducing religion to morality. In time, morality was to suffer; by the turn of this century, it had begun its precipitous slide into “good vibrations”—and, for those with consciences still to satisfy, into politics, alas.

Indeed, as everything has become something else, everything has tended to become, below all else, politics. Take sport, for example. Where would one expect to find sport still itself and not some palsying politics? Probably wherever sport is given to its highest ideal, that is, to the ideal of noble competition as nuanced by form, grace, and desire; probably the Olympic Games.

About the Author

Terry Eastland

Mr. Eastland was a publisher of The Weekly Standard. His books include Religious Liberty in the Supreme Court (1993).

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“Everything is what it is, and not another thing,” wrote Joseph Butler. But of course man, now become the measure of all things, has learned how to make one thing into quite something else. Shortly after Bishop Butler passed on, Immanuel Kant, dumbstruck by practical reason, began mischievously reducing religion to morality. In time, morality was to suffer; by the turn of this century, it had begun its precipitous slide into “good vibrations”—and, for those with consciences still to satisfy, into politics, alas.

Indeed, as everything has become something else, everything has tended to become, below all else, politics. Take sport, for example. Where would one expect to find sport still itself and not some palsying politics? Probably wherever sport is given to its highest ideal, that is, to the ideal of noble competition as nuanced by form, grace, and desire; probably the Olympic Games.