The Playing Fields of Eton: Equality and Excellence in Modern Meritocracy

Three - Mens Sana, the Playing Fields of Eton, and Other Clich

::: three ::: Mens Sana, the Playing Fields of Eton, and Other Clichés In chapter 1, I mentioned Immanuel Kant’s injunction that bodily cultivation—“gymnastics in the strict sense”—is a moral duty. There are good reasons not to be surprised about this. A central piece of Kant’s moral, social, and political philosophy holds that humans are unavoidably physical beings—hybrids of angels and cattle —and one of his main preoccupations is to come to terms with that fact. As we saw in Chapter 1, he appreciates and even celebrates children’s embodiment and physicality as the ‹rst important moments of their autonomy. This chapter is about the nineteenth century, but this re›ection of Kant’s thought—expressed just a few years before the beginning of the nineteenth century, anyway—is helpful. Several very signi‹cant decades later, we ‹nd similar sentiments in thinkers very different from Kant. For example, Herbert Spencer, best known for the dubious theory of survival of the ‹ttest, wrote about education in 1861, Perhaps nothing will so much hasten the time when body and mind will both be adequately cared for, as a diffusion of the belief that the preservation of health is a duty. Few seem conscious that there is such a thing as physical morality. Spencer concludes his Education by noting that “all breaches of the laws of health are physical sins.”1 The world underwent radical changes between the publication of Kant’s and Spencer’s texts, in 1797 and 1861, respectively. The period is a veritable era of revolutions—political (France in 1830 and 1848; 79 much of the rest of Europe in 1848; and the U.S. Civil War begins in 1861, for example), scienti‹c (most famously of course Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859), and industrial. And these are arbitrary dates; if we go a decade or so in each direction, the changes will seem even more radical. Yet the similarity of Kant’s and Spencer’s sentiments isn’t a coincidence . One thing that remained constant throughout these decades— indeed, throughout the entire nineteenth century and beyond—was an obsession with human embodiment and physical culture. It wasn’t the predominant cultural obsession, but it was important. This obsession follows the social processes I illustrated in chapters 1 and 2 in two ways. Some of the practices to maintain physical courage as a sign of masculine honor get channeled into sports in the nineteenth century, as Norbert Elias and his coauthors have shown. And the emergence of physical education in Germany becomes an in›uential import. It is rare that one can plausibly point to the impact of a single person, but Johann Christoph Friedrich Guts Muths did become something resembling a long-distance guru to early-nineteenth -century Britons. The obsession with the human body and physical culture gives us a wonderful lens on the bigger themes of the nineteenth century. My interests are primarily political, but they are inseparable from scienti‹c and socioeconomic themes. Physical culture is one site where we see them coming together. I focus on certain questions in this chapter: How did people conceive of the relationship between a person’s character—or simply a person’s personhood—and his (almost always his) body? This sounds like the philosophers’ hoary old mind/body problem, and many contemporaries made the connection explicit.2 But it wasn’t just or even primarily a metaphysical question: it was a question in which practice and metaphysics blended together and had political consequences. So arises my second major question: How did people think about the political consequences of some of the answers? Speci‹cally, what we see in the nineteenth century is the emergence of three closely related social phenomena: institutionalized physical education, modern sports, and spectator sports. Different ideas about how these practices should be—or should have been—arranged re›ect different positions on the nature of equality of opportunity, masculinity, competition, 80 ::: The Playing Fields of Eton science, and professionalism. For example, debates raged about whether modern sports were a social leveler and whether that was a happy circumstance. Some thought it was the former and so very decidedly not the latter: sports were bad because they mixed social orders —or, as they were increasingly called, classes—and so helped dumb down culture. Others thought precisely the opposite: the mixing was felicitous and the leveling upward: physical culture...