Running with the Pack (12 page)

Perhaps the cyclists find their avocation as frustrating here as I find running. But I think for me it's even worse. At least they actually get somewhere. I haven't yet discovered what I will come to call, for entirely obvious reasons, ‘snakeland' — the strip of land off Old Cutler Road, where, in years to come, I will run with a dog that is yet to be born. For now, it's the suburbs and we are getting, precisely, nowhere. Things are so spread-out in this country; the cities are extended, they were built around the car — something I had forgotten during my European hiatus. We started at the house on 146th Street,
and we ran north up 77th Avenue, towards 136th Street. There we turned east, and are now approaching Old Cutler Road. If we turn south down Old Cutler to 152nd, and then west to 77th and back to the house, that will be pretty much five miles; and that's certainly as much as Nina and Tess can handle now. There's a brief flirtation with the border of Pinecrest, but we won't even have left Palmetto Bay. And accompanying us for every stride is the whoosh of the cars and the slap and whir of the sprinklers on carefully manicured lawns.

It is 6.30 a.m., and the rush hour has already started. Everyone takes 77th at this time of the day because US 1 — or ‘Useless 1' as they call it here — will be gridlocked. I think many Miamians would shower in their cars if they could: Starbucks for coffee and muffins to go, eating and drinking, combing and brushing, texting and honking their way to the day's business. And while Lake Okeechobee, which supplies the water to Miami, is at a record low, the garden sprinklers are spinning, spitting plumes of water as far as the eye can see. All around me people rush to work so they can make money to pay gardeners to cut their grass that grows so fast because of the whir and the slap of their sprinklers.

Americans have fewer holidays than anyone else in the developed world. There is no federally mandated requirement for paid vacation time at all. And while there are ten public holidays, many Americans work through them. In contrast, in France, our previous country of residence, they have a little more
savoir faire
, at least in the art of living: the French are guaranteed thirty days of paid vacation every year, on top of their ten public holidays. Brazilians also do this right: thirty days' mandatory paid vacation plus eleven public holidays. Lithuania, Finland, Russia — their citizens
can all expect forty days or more of paid vacation and public holidays a year. Americans work. They are anxious, and not without reason. If the loss of a job, and therefore health insurance, should coincide with a serious (or even not so serious) illness, they will become bankrupt.

But the anxiety is more pervasive than that. This is a country built on consumption. For many, basic needs are easily met and so consumption quickly turns into the buying of things you don't need. These things will quickly break, I suspect largely because they have been designed to do so. To convince someone to buy something they do not need is not difficult: you simply make them afraid of the consequences of not buying it. Fear is the great friend of consumption. The things I now have to worry about at night, instead of sleeping (which Americans also seem to worry about a lot): yellow grass (if you have it, you will be shunned by your neighbours), crabgrass (even worse than yellow grass, consider yourself doubly shunned), termites (can apparently raze your house to the ground in seconds), bees (mostly Africanized down here, you know), queen palm disease (it's going around), hurricanes (self-evident), coconuts (the number-three cause of non-vehicular-related accidental death in South Florida, after pools and lightning; and anyway, hurricanes can turn them into lethal projectiles). And this list has been compiled purely from business cards left in my mailbox in the few days since we arrived.

If you listen carefully, in the whooshing, hissing, slapping and whirring of the sprinklers you will hear the American Dream.

Moritz Schlick was a well-known German philosopher of the 1920s and 1930s, one of the founding members of the
so-called Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers of science who became known as the logical positivists. He was shot and killed by a deranged student on the campus of the University of Vienna in 1936. I have been thinking about teaching a course on the meaning of life, and recently stumbled upon a paper Schlick wrote. It is entitled ‘On the Meaning of Life' and Schlick wrote this when he was a young man, before he became a famous positivist. It is a gem of a paper, very unpositivist, not at all the sort of thing you would normally associate with Schlick. ‘I do not know whether the burden of purpose has ever weighed more heavily on mankind than at the present time. The present idolizes work.' He wrote that in 1927. And, as far as I am aware, he never even saw America. We turn south down Old Cutler Road. Whoosh, slap, whir, whoosh, slap, whir: all around me pulses the American Dream. Moritz Schlick understood that it was idolatry.

Most of the things I do in my life I do for the sake of something else. The purpose of my activity is rarely found in the activity itself, but only in something else that the activity allows me to get. But this means that the value of the activity is also not to be found in the activity itself, but only in this other thing that the activity affords me. If I run simply for health, or because it helps me stay alive, and if this is the only purpose of my running, then the value of the run lies in the health it promotes, in the life it prolongs. It is true, of course, that health and a long life are valuable things. I would not want to deny something as obvious as this. My point concerns the relation between the value of running and the value of things like this. If I run only for the sake of things like health or a long life, running's value consists only in these other things that it allows me to get. In
itself, running would have no value. If the purpose of an activity is not to be found in the activity, neither is the value of that activity.

As I mentioned in the foreword, things I do only for the sake of something else have what philosophers call ‘instrumental' value — their value is as an instrument that allows me to get this something else. In contrast, an activity is intrinsically valuable if it has value in itself, independently of anything else it might allow me to get. It is not immediately obvious that there is anything I do that is valuable in itself. But I had better hope there is something: if there is not, then as Aristotle pointed out, nothing in my life has value. Suppose A is valuable only because of B, and B is valuable only because of C, and so on. There are two basic possibilities. First, as I continue the series, I eventually encounter something — call it Z — that has intrinsic value: something that is valuable in itself and not merely for the sake of something else. In this case, the value of everything leading up to Z derives from the intrinsic value of Z: this value grounds the instrumental value of everything else. The other possibility is that there is no Z: I never manage to find anything that has intrinsic value. Then there would be nothing that could ground the instrumental value of anything else. The value of everything in my life would always be deferred — always just out of reach. My life would resemble the punishment of Tantalus, standing in a pool of water beneath a tree laden with fruit. Whenever Tantalus reaches for the fruit, the tree's branches raise themselves out of his reach. Whenever he stoops to drink, the water recedes before he can get to it. A life that has no intrinsic value in it is, in this sense, ‘tantalizing'.

When I do something only for the sake of something else, what I am doing is, Schlick argued, a form of work. This is
somewhat broader than its usual sense and would include things not ordinarily thought of as work. However, work, in its usual sense, is a classic example of work in this broader sense. I work because I want to be paid. The payment is the external goal — the for-the-sake-of-which — towards which my work is directed. Similarly, if I run only because I want to stay healthy, or because I want to stay alive, then my running is work: an activity that is directed towards something outside it, something that gives it its purpose and value. If I run because I think that Nina and Tess need or enjoy it, my running is also work — in this case work aimed at benefiting someone else rather than me.

Instrumentally valuable activity is work. Therefore, intrinsically valuable activity is, as Schlick also concluded, a form of play. The value of work always lies in something else — something that is not work. In itself, work has no value. The expression ‘instrumental value' is, to this extent, unfortunate and misleading. It suggests that work has value, but this is merely of a specific sort — instrumental. In fact, to say that something has instrumental value is to say that its value always lies in something else — and so it is in this something else that the value is really found. That is, if something has merely instrumental value then it has, itself, no value at all. Play, on the other hand, is quite different. It has intrinsic value: it is something done far its own sake and therefore, by definition, has value in itself. Play has value, but work does not. It obviously follows that play must be more valuable than work. As Schlick put it: ‘The great gospel of our industrial age has been exposed as idolatry. The greater part of our existence, filled as it is with goal-seeking work at the behest of others, has no value in itself, but obtains this only by reference to the festive hours of play, for which work provides
merely the means and the preconditions.' A life of work is redeemed only through play. When we play, we do not chase value — for the value of play does not lie outside itself — we are immersed in it.

I may not be enjoying today's run — in fact, I am pretty sure it is work and not play — but I am enjoying the irony of this conclusion. I have just returned to the land that is — supposedly — built on the rejection of play. The rejection of communism in favour of capitalism is just a symptom of something deeper. America is the nation that rejected play in favour of work — or, at least, that's a common foundation myth that some of its citizens like to promulgate. We are put here, on this earth, to work hard. Work is inherently ennobling. Play is frivolous. I feel deliciously subversive: an outsider in a much deeper way than a mere communist ever could be.

Perhaps it is the utter lack of a gradient that causes me to cast my thoughts back fondly to the hill I used to run in Kinsale: the near-vertical wall I would charge up as fast as I possibly could. Whatever the reason, this is where my thoughts find themselves and, for the first time, I think I understand exactly what I was doing on that hill and why I was doing it. I was playing a game with the hill.

The twentieth-century Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that the word ‘game' cannot be defined. A definition would have to specify a common feature shared by all games and only games, and there is no such feature. Games need have nothing in common with each other. What unites them is mere family resemblance. A father might share a nose with his son, but not his eyes. These eyes may be shared with the mother, who lacks the nose. The chin may
be shared with an uncle, or sibling, but not with either of the parents. The family has a ‘look'; but this is not grounded in any common feature that all its members share. Games, Wittgenstein claimed, are like this. Instead of a common feature, there is a series of overlapping similarities. This network of similarity is what allows us to regard activities as games. This model, Wittgenstein argued, provided a useful way of thinking about concepts in general, not just the concept of a game.

Wittgenstein is, not without justification, one of the most famous philosophers of the twentieth century. Perhaps for this reason, most philosophers seem to think he is right about games and concepts more generally. Comparatively few, outside the small community of philosophers of sport, have heard of Bernard Suits — a Canadian philosopher who died a few years ago. However, Suits did what Wittgenstein said could not be done: came up with a perfectly adequate definition of the word ‘game'. That is, he identified a common feature that all games share — a feature that makes them all games. According to Suits, a game is an activity in which we voluntarily choose an inefficient means of achieving a goal, and we do this just so we can engage in the activity. Put in Suitsist terms, my entanglements with the hill can be analysed as follows. First, there is what he calls the ‘prelusory' goal. This is a goal that can be specified independently of the game. The pre-lusory goal is to get from the bottom of the hill to the top of the hill. This goal has nothing essentially to do with running. I can get from the bottom to the top of the hill in various ways. An easy way would be to drive up there. A gentle stroll would also be far easier than running full-tilt. What I bring to this pre-lusory goal is what Suits called a ‘lusory attitude.' (from the Latin
ludus
, meaning game). I want
to achieve the pre-lusory goal, but not just in any way. I want to achieve it in a peculiarly difficult way: by running as fast as I can. It is this lusory attitude that makes my achieving the pre-lusory goal a game. When we play a game we, in essence, make things difficult for ourselves. We choose a difficult way of doing something — something that could be done more easily — and we do this precisely so we can play the game. I am, therefore, playing a game with the hill (in the sense that one plays tennis with a racquet, rather than that in which one plays tennis with an opponent).

The same is true of running in general, and not just the running of that particularly intransigent hill. In running, the goal is to get from A to B — or to get from being at A at a given time to also being at A at a later time, if you begin and end at your own house — and there are various ways of achieving this pre-lusory goal: driving, walking, cycling. Indeed, if the goal is to get from A to A, then all you need to do is stay put. To run is to voluntarily choose a relatively difficult way of achieving this pre-lusory goal. This is true of games in general, not just running games: to play a game is to adopt a (relatively) difficult way of achieving a goal that could, in principle, always be achieved by other, less difficult, means. We do this precisely so we can engage in the activity of achieving the goal in this way: we do it precisely so we can play the game. All running can be play — it depends on why one does it. In fact, it seems I must go further than this. The essence of running is play — play is what running essentially is — and even when one runs for other, specific, reasons, play keeps continually reasserting itself at the heart of running. Running may be hard, but when it is done properly it is not hard work. Play can be hard too — as hard as any work. I have always presented my running, both
to other people and to myself, as a response to the pressure exerted on me by three large and destructive canines. I believed this and at one time it might even have been true. But now I'm beginning to understand that it can only be part of the truth. Those animals needed to be kept as exhausted as possible — that is true. But I could have chosen easier ways of doing it. I could have walked the fields rather than run the lanes — the dogs would have run almost as much, or even more if the fields were full of rabbits. I could have used my mountain bike regularly — and not just when I was injured. When I chose to run with them, and when I continued to run with them day in day out, I was choosing to play. And now, courtesy of Moritz Schlick and Bernard Suits, I am beginning to see why I chose this. To run, indeed to play any game, is to be in direct contact — as direct a contact as is possible — with intrinsic value in life.