I. Football

The game itself is the only one, excepting Monopoly, another uniquely American game, where the possession and exact measurement of real estate determine one team's superiority over the other. After each play, turf is measured by preexisting lines on the field or officials with stakes and chains. The team which possesses the ball gains yardage, literally, as it marches down the field; when it owns enough real estate, the team is within striking distance of the goal and can score a touchdown. All sports have goals and scoring, of course, but none other than football elevates tangible ownership of the field to measurements conducted in yards, feet, inches and even fractions of inches. Soccer, polo, lacross, rugby and basketball, for example, have a fluid field; play is not stopped to measure a team's success by the amount of territory over which it has moved the ball. The highly ritualized games of cricket and baseball require that teams exchange positions on the field, but not because they have acquired ownership of it, rather because one team foils the batters of the other.

In sum, the American game of football is consummately about the ownership of real estate.

Football, is also about war. It shares this characteristic with many games, but makes others appear playful by comparison. Only in football are the players given full armor and license to maim and brutalize the opposition. As in war, combat strategies are devised by generals (coaches) not themselves physically subject to the violence, then radioed or sent by courier to commanders in the field (the quarterback, on offense; the field captain on defense), then executed by the opposing armies (the teams). As in war, elaborate medical resources are marshalled to keep the armies fighting; and, as in war, the question is not whether there will be casualties but how many.

Then we come to the massive entourage which surrounds and supports this sportive venture into combat and the acquisition of real estate. The cheerleaders' function is almost too obvious. Cheerleaders are, with few and trivial exceptions, nubile young women who exhort the civilian onlookers, or fans, to frenzies of physically empathetic connection between themselves and the mayhem transpiring on the field. How do cheerleaders accomplish this? By exploiting the well established connection between sex and violence in Western culture. The sight of women's hair flying and legs akimbo, combined with the insistently rhythmic sounds these women make while leaping about, raises the level of fan excitement which is then directed beyond these women towards the field of play. It is assumed that cheerleaders belong, sexually, to the football players; but while the players are otherwise occupied, the cheerleaders display their sexuality for the fans' consumption in order to gain maximum support for the men on the field. I might also mention that cheerleading is wildly competitive; we have the recent case in Texas where a mother was convicted of intent to murder in order to obtain a place for her daughter on the cheerleading squad.

So we have real estate, war and sex combined in the uniquely American game of football. But there is another element crucial to the enterprise, and that is patriotism. Enter the marching band. It deserves mention, first, that the marching band is the military compliment of the militaristic aspects of football itself. Just as the original marching bands were created to enter the fray with troops and, indeed, signal various military commands before the days of field radios, the football marching band displays a full fledged military heritage. The uniforms are military in style; the band's color guard often carries faux rifles; the maneuvers in which the band engages derive from military formations.1

But beyond this obvious militarism, and even beyond the obviously patriotic display of flags and the performance of patriotic music, the marching band embodies the idea of a united citizenry, obedient, largely anonymous, each person playing his or her part (gender becomes largely irrelevant in uniform) for the common good, the effect of the whole. The band musician, dressed identically with his or her fellows in military garb, following directions impeccably, deriving satisfaction from participation in a greater good, demonstrating wholehearted allegiance to this greater good, is a model patriotic citizen in a model state.

Finally, I will observe that the sport of football is wholly androcentric. It is the only major sport in America to be played solely by males.

Thus we have the spectacle, and the meaning of the spectacle, of the uniquely American game. On any given fall Saturday afternoon in America, imaged on television or actual in town, first comes the band, then the team, then the cheerleaders. They combine to powerful effect, and we do not have to wonder that in American high schools and colleges the single largest sports enterprise and the single largest musical program are both generated by the national veneration of real estate, militarism and patriotism.

Viewed in the context of football, the physical education program in American schools can and should be seen as an effort to instill many of the same values embodied by the football machine (the combination of band, team and cheerleaders). As with the football machine, participants in physical education generally are required to submerge their individuality, buy into dominant cultural values, and accept authority as it is used to manage and direct large numbers of people on an open field. Physical education is distinctly not about physical fitness: the single class period of forty to fifty minutes, diminished by at least fifteen minutes of locker room time and another ten minutes or so of lining up for instructions, allows somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five minutes of activity in some team game, hardly adequate for effective exercise. But what the forty or fifty minute physical education class does provide is the opportunity to put students into uniform, to teach them to respond without question to vocal or whistle commands, and to impress upon them the ethos of the team.

The football machine and physical education are as much a part of high school and college life in America as blackboards and cafeteria food. It should now be apparent on one level why football is the glamor sport of most schools and colleges, and why physical education is embedded in the curriculum of most secondary schools and, not infrequently, in colleges also.

II. Empathy's Absence

Let me propose that the football machine has roots deep in Western educational philosophy; indeed, from Plato onward, education has led, inexorably, toward football.

I do not think it far fetched to find, in Plato's myth of the metals, the structure of the football team. As we will remember, in The Republic there are to be men of bronze, the laborers; men of silver, the soldiers; and men of gold, the philosopher kings.2 Plato devised this myth not only to describe class differences in the Republic, but to reify them. The state is meant to allocate functions rigidly, and its citizens are to be sanguine that strict occupational and class distinctions make for the best society (or team). In football we may be said to witness linemen of bronze, an unglamorous labor force. The ends and backfield players, including the quarterback, are men of silver, the team's premier warriors. Within the coaching staff we find men of gold, philosopher kings, whose vision of "the good" enables them to govern the game. I can think of few sports other than football in which functions are so clearly divided and specialized. As members of different classes, the players are hardly comrades; among their ranks they are virtually different physical species. The men of bronze outweigh by a hundred pounds or more the men of silver; the tasks allocated the men of bronze are so blunt they can play with fingers taped together. In contrast, the men of silver are light and speedy, and their hands must be exceptionally adept in throwing, catching and holding the obloid ball. The physical attributes and physical skill of the coaches, the men of gold, are irrelevant, since only their brains matter.

Probing further the strata of The Republic, and of our own philosophical and educational legacy, we find that the absence of empathy is a prerequisite for class differentiation, the separation of groups or types, and ultimately, the isolation of individuals. Instead of empathy, acceptance and compulsion are dominant forces. Each person in the Republic is to accept his or her place in the society; and when it comes to being proactive on behalf of another person, one extends him or herself only because the state forces this action. In considering Plato's Cave, we realize that no one liberated from the Cave will voluntarily return to enlighten his or her fellows. Indeed, those benighted souls still in the Cave are regarded hardly as fellows at all. Only because a citizen is compelled by the State, and only because the good of the State requires it, will he or she go back into the Cave to emancipate others.3 In the Republic, empathy plays no role in a conception of the good or in the agency of education; the groundwork is laid for a version of society which culminates in football.

Subsequent treatises on education in our culture are similarly neglectful of empathy, even while they, like The Republic, profess to teach morality. Simply put, empathy is regarded as neither a skill useful to the state nor a virtue prized by it. Thus we find Rousseau's pupil, Emile, wholly egocentric; indeed, self-love is a virtue prized over all others in Rousseau's tract. We learn that empathy is weakness; any feelings that Emile has for the less fortunate are unabashedly declared to originate in the necessary fear that he might become like them.4 Even so personally compassionate an educator as Montessori does not educate her pupils to be empathetic; her autodidacts, grown, are to be self-sufficient and law abiding, rather than especially compassionate toward others.5 The same can be said of Whitehead, whose students are armed with a strong appreciation of cultural ethnocentrism, but not empathy.6

John Dewey's educational philosophy, which emphasizes community and what he calls "the interpenetration of needs" required in a democractic society might be viewed as an exception to my thesis. Yet even in a Deweyian world, where persons communicate as freely as possible to broaden and develop their experiential education, the point is not empathy but need, and the "interpenetration of needs." Dewey's ideal, the agrarian community, is a place where the doctor needs the grocer, who needs the farmer, who needs the veterinarian, who needs the smithy, and so forth. Such a community is not identified as a place of compassion and empathy, nor is the school which functions as an intentional community to replace the lost agrarian one.7

Given this history of ideas, we should not wonder that the first secular model of moral education to emerge from our educational tradition is also one which slights empathy as a virtue. I speak here of Kohlberg's stage-developmental typology of moral reasoning. In this six-stage schema, the stage which bears, if only slightly, on empathetic response to moral dilemnas, is designated as stage three, a stage even lower than the average adult norm of stage four moral reasoning.8 Kohlberg's schema, no less than Plato's, is one which depends on categorization and hierarchy, and the ascendence of an ideal not dissimilar from that espoused in The Republic--objective and abstract reason.

III. Empathy's Assertion

For me, a venerable and comprehensive description of empathy suffices: empathy is putting one's self in the place of either a living or a non-living thing.11 And by putting one's self in the place of the other, one can create a union between the self and the other; putting one's self in the place of the other is the basis for compassion. Consider this practical and spiritual depiction of empathy by poet Adrienne Rich:

We must further the conscious work of turning "Otherness" into a keen lens of empathy, so that we can bring into being a politics based on concrete, heartfelt understanding of what it means to be "Other."12

One does not make peace except with enemies, and one does not make peace with enemies who are despised or who are conceived of as inhuman monsters.13

Within this conception of empathy, let me make one differentiation, that of physical and affective empathy (it will be remembered that I earlier described cheerleaders as promoting physical empathy). Physical empathy occurs when one reflexively internalizes and joins responsively an action performed by another; for example, we might find our bodies leaning in the same direction as the wide receiver when he leaps toward a pass aimed just at his finger tips. Physical empathy can be created in the spectators of virtually any activity, is not limited to humans: as part of Kohler's research we have the engaging photograph of a spectator chimpanzee raising its hand in response to another chimpanzee's attempt to reach a banana hung from the ceiling.15

The football machine, of course, provides considerable stimulus for physical empathy: the spectacle encourages us to empathize with the exertions of those on the field. Yet the football machine discourages affective empathy, in several ways. Most visibly, the game may displace affective empathy by its massive exhortation to physical empathy. Next, by making virtually all participants (this includes cheerleaders and band members) anonymous by means of uniforms, physical distance and sheer numbers, the football machine diminishes the human connection required for affective empathy. Conversely, by individualizing certain players, but at the same time aggrandizing them into super-humans, the football machine also succeeds in undercutting conditions for affective empathy. Thus we have players grieviously injured (most recently, one linesman suffered a spinal dislocation resulting in permanent paralysis), and still the game proceeds at full or even accelerated pace without a murmur of objection from the fans. There is no perceptible empathy, on the field or in the stands. A step toward establishing empathy as a value in education has been taken already by two writers, Carol Gilligan and Nell Nodding. Gilligan, who initially bases her work on the Kohlbergian moral development typology, nonetheless rejects the values assigned to its stages. She recounts a female subject's struggle with Kohlberg's "Heinz" dilemna (should a man steal a drug he can't afford to buy, in order to save his ill wife). The subject, Claire, replaces the Kohlberg's hierarchy of rights with "a web of relationships." She "ties morality to the understanding that arises from the experience of the relationship, since she considers the capacity 'to understand what someone else is experiencing' as the prerequisite for moral response."16 Gilligan, looking at Kohlberg's stages from a feminine perspective, finds empathy wanting.

For Noddings, empathy is the result of "engrossment" in the other which leads to "stepping out of one's own personal frame of reference into the other's." 17 At one point, Noddings takes issue with empathy defined wholly as projection of oneself into the other--"I do not project; I receive the other into myself."18 However, her objection does not much concern me since, viewed as a whole, her thesis is manifestly that moral thought and action depends on caring, and that caring requires the union of the self and the other, i. e. empathy. Further, we might note that there is an apparent contradiction in Nodding's disavowal of projection, since she also says, "in caring I am turned both outward (toward the other) and inward (my engrossment may be reflected upon)."19 Finally, I will observe that Nodding invests caring with an educational mission similar to the one which motivates this paper: "the primary aim of every educational institution and of every educational effort must be the maintenance and enhancement of caring."20

If Gilligan and Nodding build systems or visions of moral education based on empathy, what's the problem? It is two-fold: first, their work, especially Nodding's depends largely on face-to-face interactions between persons. When the person, in the flesh, is absent, how does one make the connection between oneself and the other? Next, neither Gilligan nor Nodding offers a curriculum or program which can counteract the football machine in schools and colleges. Both calls for empathy are theoretical rather than practical.

Let me suggest now that we now have, already in place, albeit tenuously, a curriculum which can, strengthened, serve as an antidote to the football machine and its attack on affective empathy. I have in mind aesthetic education, which by name and intention is the education of feelings, as opposed to educations which are anaesthetic, like the football machine. Education in the arts, in all the arts, engages connections between persons; in order to understand and respond to art, in order to complete the heuristic circle which connects us as meaningful beings, one must use affective empathy. The arts call affective empathy into play, focus and sharpen its power, and leave us changed by the connection we have experienced, whether it is to Twain and Huck Finn, to Monet's vision of light, to Stravinski's musical embodiment of the carnal, or Michelangelo's perception of the human form in the hew and heft of the marble. In each instance, there is not only connection, but the connection of feeling; the perception of the reader, or viewer, or listener is fused with that of the artist, and this is not a fusion of intellect alone, but also of feeling. Together, intellect and feeling, connecting with the intellect and feeling of the artist, create understanding. Understanding of what? Of the other: the heuristic circle is completed not by cognitive analysis alone, but by the presence of affective empathy.

We need an education of empathy to counteract the football machine; I suggest that such an education is embedded in the study of the arts, and that to move from a society in which the dominant mode of empathy is also its crudest, physical empathy, to the kind of society in which connection and compassion, the consequences of affective empathy, can hold sway, we should look to the arts.

1 Atkins, Lieut. Col. H. E., Treatise on the Military Band, 2nd Edition, London:Boosey, 1958; and Swanger, David, "The Band Triumphant," The Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 20, No. 3, Fall 1986, pp. 31-7.

2 The Republic of Plato, trans. and with an introduction by Francis Macdonald Cornford (Oxford: Clarendon Press) 1941.

3 Ibid.

4 Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile, trans. Barbara Foxley (London: Dent) 1974.

5 Maria Montessori, The Montessori Method, trans. Anne E. George (New York: Schocken) 1964.

6 Albert North Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays (New York: The Free Press) 1967.

7 John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philsophy of Education (New York: The Free Press) 1966.

8 Lawrence Kohlbert, Essays on Moral Development (San Francisco: Harper and Row) 1981, 1984.

9 Staub, Ervin, "Commentary on Part I," in Nancy Eisenberg and Janet Strayer, Empathy and Its Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 1987, pp. 106-9.

10 Hoffman, Martin, "The Contribution of Empathy to Justice and Moral Development," in Eisenberg and Strayer, op. cit., pp. 51-53.

11 cf. G. Murphy, Personality: A Biosocial Approach to Origins and Structure (New York: Harper) 1947.

12 Adrienne Rich, Address to the New Jewish Agenda's 1986 National Convention.

13 from My Friend, the Enemy, Uri Avnery.

14 Alan Dershowitz, Chutzpah (Boston: Little, Brown and Co.) 1991. pp. 58-9.

15 W. Kohler, The Mentality of Apes, 2nd Edition, trans. E. Winter (New York: Harcourt) 1927.

16 Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. Press) 1982. p. 57.

17 Ibid, p. 24.

18 Ibid, p. 30.

19 Ibid, p. 38.

20 Ibid, p. 172.