Nothing To Worry About : Editorial about Modern Culture and Boxing

My friend who doesnt box sent me this. I dont think its life altering but I thought some of yall might enjoy it. Its from the February Esquire. ---------------------------------------------------------------- I was never a huge fan of Norman Mailer's writing, but I always thought he was a deeply fascinating, impossibly singular, sporadically terrifying personality. When he died last November, people kept claiming he was the "last of a breed," but I'm not sure that assessment is accurate; I don't think there is a "breed" of human who would choose to celebrate New York mayoral runs by stabbing their wives with penknives. He was, as they say, His Own Man. But as I read the countless tributes and eulogies, I was reminded of a cultural shift that has been quietly happening for twenty-five years: the disappearance of major American writers who care about professional boxing. And while I realize this is mostly due to the decline of the sport itself, I suspect it also illustrates a social evolution that has more to do with technology than with typing or punching. At least stylistically, Mailer was the greatest boxing writer of all time, although he certainly had rivals (George Plimpton and Joyce Carol Oates among them). His obituary in Sports Illustrated reprinted his central pugilistic theory, which originally ran in Esquire in October 1993: " arouses two of the deepest anxieties we contain. There is not only the fear of getting hurt, which is profound in more men than will admit to it, but there is the opposite panic, equally unadmitted, of hurting others." This was the inevitable thesis for all of the Hemingway-influenced boxing writers. What made the sport transcendent was its relationship with the base qualities of being alive. There is nothing contextual about hitting another man, and there is nothing metaphysical about getting punched in the face. For most of the twentieth century, people who wanted to write about primordial reality wrote about fighting. But not anymore. It seems we have finally reached the point where modern Americans have no relationship with primordial reality whatsoever. As a result, nobody cares (or writes) about the metaphoric meaning of boxing. For most of my life, I have been obsessed with two specific athletes: Whoever was heavyweight champion of the world and whoever held the world record in the hundred-meter dash. To me, these individuals represented the competitive apex of the fight-or-flight impulse all humans possess. My interest didn't have much to do with what they were winning -- it was just the concept of a) the one guy who could beat up everyone, and b) the one guy who could run away from anything. There is nothing more visceral than that. Yet as I write this column today, it is difficult for me to remember either individual who currently holds those distinctions. I can't name the fastest man alive -- and I admit this as someone with an inordinate interest in track and field. If a track meet is on TV, I will actually sit in my living room and watch people run. When I was growing up, I viewed certain track personalities (Bruce Jenner, Edwin Moses, Florence Griffith Joyner) as authentically famous. But there has not been a true track superstar since Carl Lewis, 1 and I doubt if there will be one again. The popular explanation for this is that steroids and blood doping have made sprinting a farce. However, I think what happened to track is the same thing that happened to boxing: It lost its abstract relevancy to life. What used to feel central now seems extraneous. Americans no longer need to run from -- or fight against -- anything. Ever. It is common to view the world as a dangerous place, and (obviously) it is. But not compared with the past. Canadian cognitive scientist Steven Pinker sometimes delivers a lecture titled "The Myth of Violence," in which he statistically shows how we currently inhabit the most peaceful era of human existence. Consciously, we've been moving in this direction since before the Age of Reason. But I think the subconscious realization of our rarefied physical security is just galvanizing now. In the aforementioned Mailer quote about boxing, he writes about the sport's relationship to fear -- the anxiety of hitting and the anxiety of being hit. He saw these fears as collective. When Muhammad Ali absorbed a left hook from George Foreman, both men were confronting a universal masculine phobia, and that's what Mailer loved. But that internal fear is gone. The fight-or-flight impulse still exists biologically, but it no longer has a purpose. What is the modern value of being a hard puncher or a fast runner? Virtually nothing. It might help you catch a bus. The only reason normal men lift weights is aesthetics: They want to look better in suits. Our society is preoccupied with terror, but we're generally not afraid of potential fistfights with neighbors; we are afraid of being attacked by machines. We worry about confrontations in which we have no real role. Contemporary nightmares exist outside of human physicality, so boxers no longer symbolize them. If Mailer were a college kid instead of a dead man, it would probably make more sense for him to write about Halo 3 than Roy Jones Jr. Society can no longer relate to the abhorrent purity of boxing. The last fighter who mattered was Mike Tyson, but that wasn't because fans understood who he was; it was because Tyson represented the final break between man and nature. He was so brutal and relentless that nobody viewed him as a regular human being. Journalists wrote about him like he was an animal. 2 And that perception showed how the world had changed: It was no longer possible for the typical American to understand the experience of fighting. Tyson seemed important because we could not relate to him at all. Now, I realize all of this is (obviously) more good than bad. I certainly don't aspire to "relate" to Mike Tyson. I'm happy that avoiding physical confrontation has become so easy that I don't even have to think about it. 3 But I wonder: If the decline of boxing is the product of civilization's detachment from physical fear, what is the accompanying downside? I think one possible answer might be a depressing brand of social overconfidence. It is impossible to deny that the culture is coarsening. Everyone concedes this -- even the people who are happy about it. It is now acceptable to say almost anything, about almost anyone, in a public space, and for no reason whatsoever. There is no line to step over, because such lines no longer exist. And I think those boundaries disappeared the moment people really, truly lost the fear of getting punched in the face. Americans have understood this intellectually for decades, but I don't think we accepted it in totality until now. Adults are now so insulated by technology (and so protected by modernity) that the possibility of a physical consequence for any action is a psychological nonfactor. We have removed interpersonal fear from day-to-day behavior. Today, boxers are the only people who get hit for fucking up. Whenever Norman Mailer encountered book critics, he would supposedly pop into a fighting crouch and put up his fists in a threatening display. When I first heard this anecdote, it struck me as juvenile and histrionic. It struck me as idiotic. But I'm sure it made perfect sense to Mailer. He was born in 1923. He still had the capacity to worry about somebody punching him first.