What do I mean by community porn? Without getting into a debate about the pros and cons of porn itself, I just mean it as shorthand for something that triggers a certain need or desire but doesn’t really deliver all that was promised. Specifically with respect to sports, I mean that although it seems like a promising way to build community, it may actually do more harm than good if it serves as a substitute for something more important.
I don’t believe that “people” are “experiencing such high levels of anxiety, loneliness, identity crisis” today. It’s just that these issues are more in the limelight and new levels of acute awareness of one’s own condition occur today which perhaps didn’t occur in the past.
This is a very important point, and one that deserves attention. If it wasn’t clear already, I definitely believe that certain psychological problems are more prevalent in modern societies (and not just because we are more likely to recognize or label them as such.) I understand that this is a difficult point to prove, but I think that evidence of severe mental illness broadly backs up the point (see, e.g., here).
Because this point can be a political device, perhaps opposition to it can also be political? I any case, tendency to believe it is almost certainly correlated with other aspects of a person’s belief system. In my case, my worldview includes the proposition that modern society comes with some significant psychological challenges that shouldn’t be ignored.
supporting a football team together is as real as anything
I don’t deny that fandom is real. I do deny that it is as real as anything. I’m not sure how I would prove such a point, but I think my relationship with my daughter, or my boss, is somehow more substantial than my relationship with fellow fans.
How to strengthen communities is a central concern of mine. I realize that “community” is a very fuzzy, messy concept. In fact, part of how I would define a healthy community is one that is thick, complex, multi-facted, and hard to define. Of course, if community is too fuzzy, that can perhaps be a bad things. On the whole I think our communities are probably too fractured/compartmentalized.
In any case, I see sports as something that can be a good thing for community. The mechanism being simply that enjoying entertainment together with other people strengthens our relationships. Watching sports together might be even a particularly good way of spending time together. Perhaps that is what you mean by it being as real as anything.
I also think it is plausible that sports, in their present form in American society, do more harm than good. For example, they could be a part of a package of community arrangements that falls short of giving people the kind community we need.
Maybe part of the disagreement lies in terminology. If by sports we mean any form of social institution that centers around friendly competition (or some other generic definition), than I would argue it is probably going to be a part of any healthy community.
If by sports we mean the present institution of major professional sports leagues/fandom, with the current relationship to other dominant social institutions, than I would say it is problematic because I think the whole package they are a part of has some major problems.
That doesn’t mean I will try to convince people not to watch sports (or that I will stop watching them myself). It just means I try to be conscious about the role they play in my life and how they relate to other aspects of my community.
