Twenty-five years ago, Markus Koch was a defensive lineman for the Washington Redskins. During his third season, he broke his lumbar vertebrae, but he continued to play for three more years. Now in his late forties, he suffers from depression, and when he stands for extended periods of time, his legs go numb.
Recently, Markus Koch reflected on the gap between football fans watching the game at home and the physical experience of the players on the field. To close that gap, he facetiously suggested, players might be fitted with a mouth guard that “registers the impact they’re getting on the field, and at certain g-forces the helmet shell would crack and explode and leak gray matter and blood.” Or, conversely, the fan might be fitted with an adjustable pneumatic suit, which would be “telemetrically linked to a player on the field.” In that way the fan could “experience what the player is going through.”
Markus Koch’s suggestions, quoted by Ben McGrath in his article “Does Football Have a Future?”,* illustrate what McGrath calls the “necessary abstraction that allows fans to view their football heroes as characters rather than as people with families.” Although McGrath’s subject is professional football, the “necessary abstraction” to which he refers is hardly limited to football-watching or even to the world of sports. Truth be told, we create abstractions whenever we watch TV, whether the figures on the screen be football players, celebrities, or the protesters in Cairo. Viewing other people through the lens of the broadcast media, we tend to make characters of them all. And even when we view them “up close and personal,” what we are encountering is not so much their personal experience as their assigned roles and their edited personae, accompanied by a reporter’s interpretive commentary. As the social critic Frank Rich recently noted, when watching the demonstrations in Cairo, we are “more likely to hear speculation about how many cents per gallon the day’s events might cost at the pump than to get an intimate look at the demonstrators’ lives.”**
To be sure, we can always turn off our TVs. But should we do so, and should we become cognizant of what is unfolding within and around us, we may find that the habit of objectifying the “other” persists in our private reflections, even when the other is ourselves. We, too, create necessary abstractions. We, too, mediate, mainly by means of images and concepts, between our minds and our ever-changing lives. And, as the Vipassana teacher Jack Kornfield once observed, what we know of ourselves is often what we think about ourselves. Or what others think. Or some amalgam of the two.
By way of illustration, please take a few minutes to describe yourself. Imagine yourself to be a separate, solid entity, and describe your most salient features. Those features might include your physical attributes, your temperament, your interests, your social and professional roles, and your family relationships. Consider others’ perceptions as well as your own.
Now set your description aside. Sit in an upright, stable, and balanced posture. Follow your breathing for a minute or two. Then do nothing but be aware of whatever is happening in your body, your surroundings, and your state of mind. If a sound occurs, take note of it; if your back hurts, be present for the pain; if a thought comes along, acknowledge it; if you grow impatient, bored, or judgmental, recognize those passing mental states.
When you have sat in this way for ten minutes or so, stop and examine what has just occurred. Compare your self-description with the evidence of your senses. What, if anything, do these modes of inquiry have in common? What kinds of knowledge does each of them provide? To what degree and in what ways was your description verified by your experience? To what extent was your experience encompassed by your description?
To propose this experiment is not to suggest that descriptions are always false or that experience, as the saying goes, is the true and only teacher. Rather, it is to illuminate the choice we have at any given moment. We can draw back, making solid objects of our “selves,” our experiences, and other people. Employing images, concepts, and other vehicles of abstraction, we can make characters of ourselves and stories of our experiences. We can entertain ourselves, while also reinforcing our sense of separation.
But at any moment we can also draw near, both to ourselves and to the world. Rather than cling to our personal stories, we can become fully aware of our moment-to-moment lives, just as they are. Rather than adhere to habits of thought and feeling, we can fully experience our experience, however pleasant or unpleasant, comforting or troubling it may be. And rather than objectify the protester in Tahrir Square or the linebacker incurring a life-altering injury, we can cultivate our connection to others’ suffering.
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*The New Yorker, January 31, 2011, 41-51.
**Frank Rich, “Wallflowers at the Revolution,” New York Times, Sunday, February 6, 2011.
One Time, One Meeting 
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Kyōshin, Ben Howard. Ben Howard said: 77. Near and Far: on cultivating a connection to others' suffering. https://practiceofzen.wordpress.com/2011/02/24/77-near-and-far/ […]
Hard not to think of Dave Duerson, the former Chicago Bears player who recently took his life. I remembering watching him and the others win the Super Bowl, and really had no idea of the impact playing had on the rest of their lives. That 25 years later, one of the stars of that team would be faced with an increasingly failing mind and body, and having nowhere to really turn for good answers. It’s really troubling.
Thank you for putting this out there. Objectification of (other) is exactly what I was getting at in Ben’s New Yorker article, and I’m glad the point conveyed. The only thing you missed is that I was NOT being facetious. As you point out, empathic connection is how we dispel objectification of self and others. In our modern consumer culture, obsessed with products and gadgetry, I was merely speaking the language of the game in order to be understood.
Consciousness practice IS what has helped examine and diffuse my mental depression and suffering from spinal injuries. Both intensive yoga and Buddhist lineage insight technique and meditation practice have been crucial in my adjustment to what is. Acceptance and appreciation, less harsh judgement of my mind and my body. My suffering has lessened as my attachments have become less firm.
Football players are held as the penultimate example of manhood in our culture. From our first days on the field we are drilled into being stronger, tougher, faster and better by screaming and manipulative coaches. The carrot of adulation and financial reward is constantly dangled in front of us. At the elite (professional) level, enough is never enough as we become hooked into the measurements of self worth dictated by the won/lost column and the thousands of hours of game and practice film evaluation. Every second of our lives becomes a competition to be the top dog.
By the time we are eventually discarded, as our bodies and minds deteriorate and we can no longer perform the gladiatorial skills in the arena, our self worth is so strongly ingrained with the concept of “domination” that we often become dysfunctional in a peaceful society, unless we have some skills and motivation to join the Wall Street set, which I did not.
The story of the elite football player is a rich archetypal mirror of our society. Will it be short sighted? Will it evolve into greater understanding of the underlying human needs for connection and safety? Or will we continue to burn the candle at both ends?
I am curious to see what happens next!
Markus and Nathan –
Thank you for your comments, which help to illuminate what I was saying in my column.
Thank you, Kyoshin, for “re-tweeting” this post.
I couldn’t read this post and the comments on it without thinking of Robert Sherry’s book, In the Shadow of War, treating American military culture from 1930 to 1990. Sherry artfully traces how for most of postwar America most of the time, “war remained largely an arena not of experience but of imagination, where it could be played out and acted on in lavish ways. In their hearts, Americans longed for war’s spirit more than its substance.” (Sherry 500)
It was if we took the stock phrase “theater of war” literally.
His rendering (at pp. 469-71) of the American experience of the 1991 Gulf War is a chilling example of this pattern, starting with the “industrial light and magic” of the first stage bombing campaign:
The high-tech aerial show would eliminate the costly ground war many feared, display anew America’s superior technology, and reveal its moral superiority by securing quick victory with minimal damage. . . . Air power also kept war at a satisfying psychic distance for Americans, but that distance was troubling if Americans felt no sense of risk or involvement: war that was too easy and mechanical would be drained of the peril and passion that made it meaningful. . . . Here too, the Scud attacks played a vital role. As they rained down on Israel, most of them traced by television cameras, many Americans evinced a sense of vicarious participation in war, as if they were on the front lines—Tel Aviv playing in 1991 the role London had played in 1941. Stateside Americans could erase the distance and still maintain it: war’s enduring remoteness was overcome in imagination even as it was sustained in reality. . . . The old dream of swift, sanitary, satisfying victory was vindicated . . . . Vengeance was wreaked on the enemy – yet not so brutally, they thought, that consciences had to be troubled, and with stunningly little loss of American lives. . . .
The shoring up of America’s self-image was even more explicit after the hundred hours land invasion of Iraq was over. A leading columnist wrote that the invasion had “restored America’s can-do spirit. . . . It felt good to win.” “It is as if all the confusion and pain of recent decades have melted,” said the New York Times, “leaving the nation with its reassuring images from World War II intact.”
As Robert Sherry noted, President Bush declared that the soldiers of operation Desert Storm had “set out to confront an enemy abroad, and in the process, they transformed a nation at home. . . .” Bush urged Americans to applaud the troops for “all they taught us about our values, ourselves. . . . It spoke volumes about their moods that many Americans thought it took a war to restore and reveal ‘America’s can-do spirit.’ It exposed anew the driving element of American war-making since the Vietnam era – to address Americans’ sense of themselves more than their place in the world or the evils in it they sought to combat.” (Sherry 472)
This is the behavior of a profoundly narcissistic people, using whatever and whomever it takes, objectifiying and instrumentalizing the world, to palliate their thinly populated inner lives. Anything to keep the scary desolation at bay.
Including throwing professional athletes and soldiers barely out of childhood into the meatgrinder and then shooting up on the mass media voyeurism this enables.
Rev. Preston Moore
Preston – Thanks for these reflections, which provide another, relevant context for my own remarks.
The current controversy over the Notre Dame linebacker and his online (and perhaps completely imaginary) girlfriend is yet another strand in this fabric. (“Image Becomes a Puzzle as Theories on Te’o Swirl,” NYT 1/17/13) We have to wonder whether he has seen the film Lars and the Real Girl, in which a psychically wounded young man uses a blow-up doll to work his way out of his emotional difficulties. In the case of the linebacker, it appears he has used his imaginary girlfriend to descend even more deeply into his emotional chaos.
We are living in an image-saturated culture. The power of imagery has us by the throat. Some are wondering whether the linebacker has worked this fantasy for the conscious purpose of enhancing his Heisman Trophy prospects. That this even has to be considered shows how far the hegemony of image has gone.
Self-image has virtually effaced the Self — in both the analog and digital sense of “virtual.”
Christopher Lasch wrote presciently of this tendency in America thirty years ago, in Culture of Narcissism, saying that we are
“surrounded by a “proliferation of visual and audial images in the ‘society of the spectacle.’ We live in a swirl of images and echoes that arrest experience and play it back in slow motion. Cameras and recording machines not only transcribe experience but alter its quality, giving to much of modern life the character of an enormous echo chamber, a hall of mirrors. Life presents itself as a succession of images or electronic signals. . . . [It is] so thoroughly mediated by electronic images that we cannot help responding to others as if their actions – and our own – were being recorded and simultaneously transmitted to an unseen audience or stored up for close scrutiny at some later time.”
What Lasch said was true then and has become exponentially true in the digital age. It is all about looking good. You — the you underneath all the layers of affectation — don’t matter any more, man. It’s all about your AVATAR.
If you can inflate your avatar to sufficiently monstrous proportions, you can hide behind it, keeping in shadow the Self you mistakenly fear is woefully small and unlovable. And if you can leverage the avatars of others to reflect more klieg light onto your own (e.g., making up a Stanford University girlfriend whose intellectual standing can complement your own brute strength), our culture shouts, “more power to you.” You can compete in the ubiquitous imagery market by which we are all being reduced to vendors and consumers of image enhancement, prosthetic everything.
The Notre Dame linebacker is whole and perfect exactly as he is, sans Heisman, sans Stanford girlfriend, sans every finite thing. He has the misfortune to live in a culture that strives mightily to block any connection to that spiritual reality.
Rev. Preston Moore