Monthly Archives: July 2021

The Olympics Return

From my visit to the Stade olympique de Montréal in 2019

As surely nearly everyone reading this knows, the Olympics are back on after a year-long delay due to the ongoing pandemic. And the many, many people who have argued that the games should’ve been cancelled because of COVID have a pretty solid case, if I’m being completely honest. The best I can tell is that the games went on largely because of the financial loss that Tokyo and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) would lose, let alone all of the national broadcasters and corporate sponsors, if the games had ended up being called off. Marketplace’s report on the costs related to holding the games placed the estimated cost of the current Olympiad in Tokyo “at around $35 billion,” a figure substantially higher than the most recent Summer Olympics five years ago in Rio ($13 billion).

Still, while I can’t help but agree with the naysayers, that bringing the globe’s top athletes to one city, the capital of a country with very low COVID vaccination rates, was a bad idea all around, I’m still enamored with the games like I am every time that they occur. The first Olympics that I can remember, the one that caught my attention and never gave up, was Sydney 2000. As a young seven year-old living on the edge of Kansas City, I loved everything about the Olympics, from the amazing opening ceremony, to how clean the facilities looked, to the gobsmacking talent of the athletes themselves, the ones who make the Olympics the spectacle they are every time around. That year I can particularly remember the diving events more than anything else; diving remains one of my favorite Summer Olympic sports because of it.

By the time the Winter Olympics came around in 2002, hosted by Salt Lake City, I was excited to see the circus begin all over again. Only this time, it’d be in my own country, albeit a good two-days drive west of home. At about the same time as the Salt Lake games, I even enrolled in a local fencing school, thinking that maybe someday I might even make it up to that stage of competition. My days in the saber competitions were fairly brief, though recently I’ve wondered if maybe the foil would’ve been a better fit for me. It’s been interesting watching each Olympiad in the intervening decades: as a child I got to look up to the Olympians of the Sydney, Salt Lake, Athens, Turin, Beijing, and Vancouver games, while by the time London came around in 2012, I suddenly found myself the same age as most of the athletes.

In the years since, with Sochi, Rio, Pyeongchang, and now Tokyo, I’ve found an even greater appreciation for the Olympics watching as an adult. I don’t really expect I’ll ever end up competing in any Olympic event, at 28 I’m likely past my prime in most categories, but I still enjoy sitting back and watching hours of competition each evening, and being awestruck at the skill of these top athletes in their respective sports.

If anything, I really hope the IOC can figure out the big issues wracking the games, from the corruption, to the high cost of hosting, to issues of doping scandals, and return these games to being purely 16 days focused on the individual athletes and their talents. Any global sporting event is going to be a massive revenue source for broadcasters and corporate sponsors, so while I may raise an eyebrow every time one of the athletes from my country comes on the screen talking about their favorite sandwich from Subway, I usually dismiss it as just something they’ve got to do to be able to afford to compete at this level.

Proposals have been made in the last couple of years to have permanent Olympic host cities, say a rotating set of cities that could take turns hosting the games. Dr. Dave Amos, an Assistant Professor in the Department of City & Regional Planning at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, CA made a pretty good argument for this in 2018 on his excellent urban planning YouTube channel City Beautiful.

In his video, Amos argues that there should be 6 cities designated permanent hosts of the Games, with the Summer and Winter Olympics rotating between those 6. For the Winter Games they are Calgary, Turin, and Pyeongchang, while for the Summer Games they are Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town, and Sydney. Honestly, the argument makes a lot of sense, and would be a good solution to the problem of cost and how useful Olympic venues become following their run in the spotlight, as those six cities’ venues would be reused every few years.

I like the idea, though one of the big draws for me every time is getting to see the events in a different city. I’m loving the opportunity to learn a bit more about Tokyo and Japan in general this time around, just as I found myself reading quite a bit more about Pyeongchang and South Korea three years ago during the last Winter Olympics. I’m hoping, for example, to be able to be in LA during the 2028 Summer Olympics, I’d love at least once to see the games in person, to not only immerse myself in the Olympics as I can watching them on TV, but to be there in person surrounded by the whole experience. I imagine it’s similar to going to an F1 race instead of just watching it on TV. The race itself is better on TV, honestly, but the fan experience alone is worth the trip.

Still, if the IOC ends up choosing a permanent host city, or a set of permanent host cities, I’ll be excited to see who they choose, and will undoubtedly begin daydreaming about making the trip out to see the Olympics in person there someday. For now though, I’m content to sit in front of the TV and spend an evening watching the events in Tokyo from afar.

Understanding the Classics to Understand Ourselves

I’m writing this having just read a stirring article in Commonweal by Cathleen Kaveny, a professor of law and theology at Boston College, on the merits of reading St. Augustine’s Confessions in the original Latin. Professor Kaveny’s article was in response to Princeton’s Classics department’s much noted decision to cut the requirement for its undergraduate majors to prove proficiency in Latin and/or Ancient Greek in order to earn their degrees. I’ve had a number of discussions with friends and colleagues about that particular decision, being a current student of Latin myself, and an off-again-on-again student of Classical and Koine Greek. While I personally haven’t yet read Augustine in the original Latin, in part from a personal dislike for what I perceive as the grumpiness of St. Augustine’s writings (of the early Church Fathers I prefer St. Gregory of Nyssa), I can relate to the thrill and benefit of reading these texts in their original languages.

A page from my copy of Ovid’s Ars Amorita

There’s something lost in the translation of any text. English, for all its excessive complexity, lacks the imperfect tense for verbs, meaning that when I am trying to express an idea in any of the languages my sources are written in that uses imperfect verbs, I’m often left struggling to find a really good clear way of expressing that the action is in the past but not quite completed. Think about particular words or phrases in English that sound like other words; the planet Uranus has a funny name depending on how you pronounce it, but that relation between the seventh planet and your posterior anatomy is lost if you try to translate it into practically any other language.

Beyond just understanding literature as its authors intended, the study of Latin and Ancient Greek is critically important to understanding the origins of our civilization, however problematic that word may well have become. The civilization of the peoples whose cultural origins are drawn from Europe, both eastern and western, derive in their origins from the ancient civilizations of the Greeks and the Romans. Those cultures, those powers, those memories have had such a profound and lasting influence on our world today that it would be profoundly shortsighted to stop teaching about them to such a detailed level as many programs do. Our political systems have their origins at least in part in the Classical World, modern representative governments can draw some of their lineage from the democracy of Athens as well as from the Roman Republic.

Generation after generation following the fall of the Western Roman Empire tried in their own way to set themselves up as the heirs of Rome, from Theodoric and the Ostrogoths based at Ravenna in the fifth century CE through Charlemagne and his successors the Holy Roman Emperors in the German-speaking lands north of the Alps, to the Tsars of Russia, the revolutionaries of France, and the founders of the United States. I once wrote in my book Travels in Time Across Europe that to me, Paris today feels as close to what I’d imagine an idealized vision of Rome during the height of the Republic would’ve been like two thousand years ago. The symbols of those governments, particularly of the Roman Republic and the later Roman Empire, remain so present in so many aspects of our world today.

I study the history of French natural history texts written in the second-half of the sixteenth century right at the tail end of the Renaissance that began in Florence in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The whole idea of a renaissance is that it was a period when classical culture, literature, architecture, politics, and philosophy saw a revival, a rebirth as is the etymology of the word “renaissance” itself. Advocates of this “renaissance” at the time saw themselves as rekindling the light of the classical world, of restoring the course of what at that time was beginning to be understood as European (aka Western) civilization.

The accidental realization that the Americas existed in 1492 thanks to Columbus resulted in one of the greatest changes in the history of humanity, the opening of the Atlantic and the beginning of permanent contact between the peoples of the Americas and those of Eurasia and Africa. It’s because of this that I prefer not to refer to our civilization as “Western” or “European,” but rather as an Atlantic civilization. It is still the descendant of the civilization of Christian Europe, itself a descendant of the older Mediterranean civilizations of Greece and Rome, but since 1500 our civilization has been profoundly altered by its encounters with civilizations beyond Europe’s waters.

I concede that many of the worst aspects of our Atlantic civilization, from colonialism to slavery can trace some of their origins back to the Greeks and Romans, and that ideas like Manifest Destiny here in the United States have been argued to have drawn influence from older ideas like Rome’s right to rule the world, but even in the historical periods when these claims were being made they were incredibly flimsy. That said, of any problem today, one cannot tie modern ideas of race back to the classical world, as our ideas about race didn’t really begin to develop until 1500; it’s development in the Americas is a central theme to my research.

All this said, we need to understand our history to understand who we are and how we got here, and to do that we need to understand the classical foundations upon which our civilization has been built. The best way to understand those foundations is to be able to read the books they left behind in their original languages. Since the Renaissance we’ve remained generally in the same steady period of knowledge about the classical past; in fact one could argue that the beginnings of all modern fields of research can draw their origins back to the humanists of the Renaissance who sought to revive the sciences of the classical past. Language barriers speak more so to the problems with our education system in general than to anything else. Language education isn’t prioritized in this country, where assimilation and Americanization have been the standards for generations; we come to expect schoolchildren to only know American English because anything else would be unpatriotic. Even if a student comes into a Classics program with a foundational knowledge of one of the Romance languages, in this country likely Spanish, they’ll have a way into beginning to understand Latin. There are strong connections between languages as much as there are between cultures of different ages, we just have to know where to look.

Want change? Make it profitable

This week I’ve decided to write a poem. Writer’s block has determined it’s not quite the right time for me to try and express my thoughts on this topic or any topic in full sentences. Enjoy!

Change is going to come

eventually, or so we hope.

But if it is to come

then it must be for everyone.

So, how do we make such potential possible?

Simple, indeed.

Make that change profitable

and what makes the markets sing

So too will change it bring.

A change has to come

eventually we’ll figure things out,

but if we really want change,

we’re going to have to admit

that someone’s going to make a profit off of it.

The American Civic Religion

One of the best ways for any government or other institution to assert their authority over its followers, whether they be citizens, consumers, or believers, is through a degree of providing those followers with a higher purpose to aim for in their devotions. As Catholics, we strive for Salvation, Union with God, Heaven, or whatever you want to call it. As capitalist consumers, we seek our own wealth and prosperity, and by buying into this economic system, by clicking that yellow purchase button on Amazon, we hope that our accumulation of material goods will bring us one step closer to being that prosperous person. Yet as Americans, citizens of the United States, regardless of partisanship, we are taught from a young age to value the preservation and promotion of some of the core ideals, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” as Jefferson put it.

With each of these institutions, there is always a need to establish a degree of devotion among their followers; with each, that devotion is something that was at one time new. In the political case of the American civic religion, we can easily trace the origins of that devotion back to our founding myths surrounding the American Revolution (1775-1783), when, as the story goes, a few brave colonists decided to value their freedom over loyalty to their distant king back in Great Britain. With this determination, they rebelled and declared their independence in July 1776. The Founding Fathers of the young republic that became the United States took on the mantle of apostles or saints, and over time the institutions of the republic became nigh sacrosanct: at the end of the day, the Constitution, the rule of law, and the fact that we live in a democracy became irrefutable testaments to that religion.

Whenever I am in Washington, D.C., and see the Capitol dome for the first time on that particular trip, I’m reminded of the scene from Frank Capra’s 1939 film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, starring James Stewart in the title role. The naïve young senator, upon first seeing the Capitol dome from inside Washington Union Station is gobsmacked, and struck by the sight of seeing the St. Peter’s of his deep-rooted belief in the inherent goodness of our government by, for, and of the people. I admit, on my most recent trip to D.C. last week, while I was excited to see the Capitol as I crossed Pennsylvania Avenue, I couldn’t help but feel that as profound our civic religion remains, it nevertheless faced its greatest test in generations this January when the Capitol was attacked by supporters of the now former President on the day when Congress met to certify the results of the Presidential election.

It’s curious to me, because as much as people from both sides of the political divide tout their devotion to “freedom,” the meaning of that very abstract word seems to change depending on the moment. In the broadest sense, freedom is one’s ability to decide how to live one’s life; in the narrowest, freedom has been interpreted as justification to deny the same basic decency and liberty to others on the basis of one’s own biases. I could very well turn this weekly blog into a mouthpiece for all the libels I’d ever want to spin, and likely that sort of fear-mongering clickbait would increase my readership, but I like to think of myself as a nice guy, so in this outlet I refrain from those sorts of obscenities.

As with any other form of devotion, the American civic religion has its own enforcement, people who seem to make it their life’s mission to call out or track down heresies against the civic religion no matter the cost to themselves or their target. This is often realized most fully in the scare tactics used by some to keep their followers loyal to their particular version of the civic religion. Fear keeps people energized, fear of loss, fear of the other. While I will always stand and applaud at the ballpark when the obligatory salute to veterans occurs, I find it chilling that if I didn’t stand, if I didn’t salute the military, it could be damaging to me. The extreme literalness of some religious sects in this country has been carried over into the civic religion, all to the extent that it has been monetized and turned for profit in our devotion to the markets and the accumulation of wealth.

Heretic hunters often have their own faults, that’s where the sacrament of confession comes into play. As a Catholic, I believe that my sins are forgiven in the confessional, so long as I am truly repentant, truly sorry for where I’ve gone wrong. Of course it could be argued that I could then say I could do anything I wanted, so long as I went to confession afterward, but there the actions wouldn’t convert to real results, as I wouldn’t actually believe in the power of the sacrament. So too with our civic religion, as forcibly the heretic hunters may decry their opponents, their enemies as they might well call them, they themselves will always have faults of their own, sins of their own. If we are going to preserve this country, its civic religion, its belief in democracy and in a future where representative government is a strong and viable option, we need to recognize that everyone has problems, and that everyone deserves second chances.

So, as I walked across Pennsylvania Avenue last Thursday, my mind turned to the supporters of the former President who violated the most sacred temple of our civic religion on January 6. Many of the same individuals and organizations that pose as heretic hunters in this civic religion of ours were the same ones that promoted the Big Lie which drove that mob to break into the Capitol, and the rioters themselves, in that most extreme act of heresy against the civic religion, cast themselves as restoring the faith, restoring the power of the people over our government. They too deserve second chances, the opportunity to repent and return to the fold, but not without some penance for the crimes they committed.

If anything, the entire civic religion, built on myth as much as on the ideals of the Revolution, deserves a second chance. It seems increasingly clear to me that the civic religion, the United States as a political community united around our common Constitution, needs refreshing, both to address the shortcomings and wrongs of the past and present, and to reaffirm the foundational covenants of this country’s relationship with its people in a way more in line with the circumstances facing us today in 2021.