Delight Springs

Friday, September 16, 2022

Lyceum

LISTEN. We're pleased, finally, to be bringing Professor Tadd Ruetenik of St. Ambrose University (in Davenport Iowa, south of the Field of Dreams and home of the lovely Quad Cities ballpark) to campus this afternoon for his Lyceum lecture (originally scheduled for March 2020 but canned by the pandemic) on "Sports: The Flywheel of the Military Industrial Complex" (5 pm, COE 164, followed-- as our friends at TPA always say-- by a spirited off-campus reception. 

William James's student Morris Raphael Cohen once ineffectively proposed to him the notion of baseball, then still credibly billed as our national pastime, as a moral equivalent of war. "All great men have their limitations."

National rivalries and aspirations could find their intensest expression in a close international pennant race, and yet such rivalry would not be incompatible with the establishment of the true Church Universal in which all men would feel their brotherhood in the Infinite Game. (Baseball as a National Religion, The Dial,Vol. 67, p. 57 (July 26, 1919)

I'll be eager to defend my still-favorite pastime against the charge of complicity in our military-industrial complex. But I'm always up for bashing football (the American version).

It'll fall to me to introduce our guest, so I'm scouring this interviewthis podcast, and this endorsement for useful material beyond the facts indicated on his department's website... 

"Professor Ruetenik teaches a variety of philosophy courses including American philosophy, critical thinking, philosophy of life, and philosophy of religion. He is a William James scholar and member of the William James Society (an organization I'm pleased to have had a small part in founding), Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, and the American Philosophical Association..." Tadd is the author of The Demons of William James: Religious Pragmatism Explores Unusual Mental States and Bodies and Battlefields: Abortion, War, and the Moral Sentiments of Sacrifice, and has published in The Pluralist, Contemporary Pragmatism, Teaching American Literature, The Journal of Philosophy and Theology, and The Journal of Religion and Health on topics ranging from animal ethics to Jane Addams to Christian Science.*

For instance,

I am following up on The Demons of William James: Religious Pragmatism Explores Unusual Mental States with another book called The Genius of Emerson: Creativity, Divinity, and the Weirdness of Religious Innovation. Whereas Demons focused mostly on the internal side of weird religious belief, The Genius of Emerson is focused on the external side, the way that individuals’ claims of divinity can lead to the creation of new religious movements.
...
My early interest in being a famous baseball player ended when I become aware that that kind of competitiveness was not in my nature. I retain my interest in exercise though, and will walk or bike at least four times a week.

Tadd's a Jamesian, a peripatetic, a cyclist, a former Detroit metal rocker, a fan of Emerson, Thoreau, Cornel West, and baseball... but wary-- like Wendell Berry-- of competition. 

[N]o individual can lead a good or a satisfying life under the rule of competition... Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy. --WB, "Economy and Pleasure"

I asked Tadd if there's anything he'd like to add to his introduction. He said "have that George Carlin bit handy..."

Baseball is a nineteenth-century pastoral game.
Football is a twentieth-century technological struggle.

Baseball is played on a diamond, in a park. The baseball park!
Football is played on a gridiron, in a stadium, sometimes called 
Soldier Field or War Memorial Stadium.

Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life.
Football begins in the fall, when everything's dying... 

--George Carlin, Baseball and Football

Just in case it's not clear, George is a baseball fan. Like Tadd.
          
No wonder we invited him. 
==
Postscript.

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