BY SEAN WALSH
Traditions exist for the preservation of the truths, practices, and things which comfort us, so that we can pass these gifts on to people not yet alive.
Modernism exists to disrupt all this via energetic historical revisionism and a continuous recreation of Year Zero. To the modernist, the inheritance rights of future generations are no more than useful fictions intended to serve the needs of the moment. Think “net zero”.
Modernism is a system of thought which rewards impatience and therefore has no business being anywhere near the forms of life most obviously in touch with past things.
One of which is cricket.
It used to be that you could find some relief from the insanity of modern living within the eccentric traditions of cricket. Far more so than football, this is a form of life quite inscrutable to those looking at it from the outside. There can’t really be a decent anthropology of cricket. The first rule of cricket—actually, that should be law—is that whatever happens in cricket remains baffling to the outsider.
This is part of what the commentator Dan Norcross calls the game’s exceptionalism.
In football, you might try to foul your opponent; in cricket, especially if that opponent is tragically Australian, you quite literally try to kill him (although you will pretend to be concerned when you come close to doing so).
I want to pause here for just a second and get you to think about the most beautiful image in sport: a felled Australian opener, struck in the gentleman’s area by a snorter from an English quick, who is looking down at him while insisting that the whole thing is an unfortunate misunderstanding.
It was therefore inevitable that the modernists would go after cricket. The spiritual vandalism started some years ago with the introduction of technology, the ostensible reason being to correct umpiring mistakes—as if it is ever a desirable thing to eliminate human error from an activity performed for the most part by human beings.
The introduction of technology into cricket, the so-called Decision Review System (DRS), in any case involves a category error. The assumption is that a computer algorithm has a better take on an on-field event than a human adjudicator, or that you improve the game by dropping some computer coding into the action.
In truth, the algorithm has no “take” at all, and its “interpretation” of an appeal for LBW or catch behind requires a further interpretation by an off-screen human being. This is the thing about algorithms: they process and consolidate the prejudices and assumptions of their creators, albeit at impressively high speed.
Cricket, being cricket, and as a living tradition, came to absorb this modernist attack and to integrate DRS as just another part of the game, as its followers were gradually reassured that on-field miscarriages of justice would continue to happen, and that, as in real life, rotten luck would still be a thing.
The sub-tradition of the cricketing grudge—a dispute about a decision for LBW from a match fifty years ago, for example—has survived the newer technology, and so the fears of the faithful are largely assuaged.
So, the modernists have regrouped and are now doing what they do best, which is to appropriate and relitigate the language of the tradition they look to undermine, and to force the game of cricket to conform itself to the dreary identity categories of the asphyxiating woke culture. Which is like forcing a Glenn Gould with a Steinway to play Three Blind Mice.
If there’s anything about the tradition of cricket that the rest of the world should leave alone, it’s the language through which the game is played and in which it is described. A language which is at least as impenetrable—and therefore as worthy of preservation—as anything spoken in Wales or Glasgow.
The most recent assault on the game’s settled vernacular is the de facto elimination of the noun batsman and its replacement by batter—a jarring neologism intended to contribute to the false belief that women’s cricket is as popular, beautiful, and morally charged as the real version.
The modernists, you see, take it as an injustice that the women’s game is not as widely followed as the men’s, hence the default resort to linguistic chicanery. But if there is a problem here, then the solution is simple: if the player has a gentleman’s area, then we call him a “batsman”; and if it’s a female player, then use whatever word you want, since nobody will be watching anyway.
Aside from the overall joylessness of the whole thing, there is a deeper, metaphysical problem with the modernist project in general. Put simply, it is this: modernism assumes that human beings are malleable and perfectible, that there is no such thing as a human essence, which is unchanging and without which you aren’t a human being at all.
But there is such a thing as a human essence, and part of that is that we are neither perfect nor perfectible. And neither are our games.
The modernists should leave the game be and let it make its own mistakes. This side of eternity, all beauty is flawed.