In 2014, Dutch journalist Wim Kayzer interviewed 26 eminent people for the TV series ‘Of beauty and comfort’. He asked scientists, writers, philosophers, artists and musicians: ‘What makes this life worth living?’
Twenty of them then gathered in Amsterdam for a discussion. It became a three hour film. An evening with Simon Schama, Richard Rorty, Sir Roger Scruton, Germaine Greer, George Steiner, Martha Nussbaum, Jane Goodall, Wole Soyinka, and some other people that I haven’t heard of: Dubravka Ugresic, John Coetzee, Leon Lederman, Tatjana Tolstaja, Freeman Dyson, Elizabeth Loftus, Gary Lynch, Catherine Bott, Rutger Kopland, Rudi Fuchs, György Konrád, and Karel Appel.
A sparkling highlight was the following exchange on football.
Germaine Greer: Football is an enormous phenomenon. It commands vast amounts of money. Every single person watching it is an expert; can discuss it for hours. Bertolt Brecht said what he wanted from a theatre audience was the same intelligent detachment and passion as in a sports crowd. It is the legitimate cultural expression in Britain. It finances itself; it doesn’t need to plunder anybody; it doesn’t need to lie and bullshit and grandstand. We have totally mediocre people running the arts establishment in England, and geniuses running football. And the music is great.
It’s important not to be snobbish about football. That culture is hostile to us because the arts establishment has withdrawn unto itself, patted itself on the back, invited itself to cocktail parties. We became an onanistic elite, and football is our punishment.
George Steiner: Let’s have a moment of modesty about our small brains. The best historical estimate is there were 10 people at Golgotha. We can say there were 1,100 at the premiere of Hamlet. There were 1,400 at Beethoven’s first Missa Solemnis. Watching the World Cup Final were 2.5 billion people. We can’t take in what that means.
When Karl Marx says quantity leaps into absolute quality, he’s right. When Maradona is running towards the goal, the heart rates of two and a half billion people are racing.
The comic side, was that the English Water Board issued a polite statement: ‘Try to avoid all going to the toilet at the same moment at half time – we can’t handle it!’ No Shakespeare, no Beethoven has had the loo system suspended for human emotion. How do we handle such a planetary emotion?
Sir Roger Scruton: One important distinction surely, George, is that from those ten people at Golgotha, an emotion has been passed down the centuries, increasing, so that across time, diachronically, the weight of emotion is enormous, and is also carrying on. Whereas those 2.5 billion ephemeral heart-beats have gone, forever. It means nothing. And after those 1,400 at the Missa Solemnis, over the next 170 years, there have been another billion more emotional vibrations. It goes on vibrating. You can return to that perfect object that encapsulates within itself the meaning of that experience.
Germaine Greer: There is something transcendent about football. I have a friend who is a cell biologist. He works at the cutting edge of the proteins involved in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. I asked him, ‘How did you feel when Cambridge United were promoted?’, and he said, ‘I was walking on air.’ Whereas the discovery of a new protein did not make him walk on air.
George Steiner: Every child in Newcastle knows the quotation, ‘Football is not a matter of life and death. It’s much more important than that.’
Well, you’re absolutely right, dearly departed and beloved George, they do know it in Newcastle, as well as in Liverpool, and everywhere.
James Neophytou
