In lieu of North America hosting the World Cup, I am compelled to regurgitate one of my recurring rants: the crucifixion of beauty.
The culprit, I would argue, lies in the over-numerisation of life; in this case, sport.
Modern sports culture increasingly thrives on statistical entertainment. Basketball, American football, and most notoriously, baseball. Fans, commentators, and players alike obsess over metrics, percentages, expected goals, efficiency ratings, and records. Sport becomes a language of quantification. An outcome-centric worldview where value is validated through numbers alone.
This is not uniquely American, nor even Anglo-Saxon. Rather, it is the inevitable offspring of industrial modernity: a civilization obsessed with optimization, productivity, and measurement. The same culture that transformed workers into units of output has increasingly transformed athletes into units of performance.
Yet statistics tell us who won. Beauty tells us why we cared.
For those who, if I may, possess a certain sensitivity to beauty, there is nothing more exhilarating than witnessing Roger Federer’s backhand, Dimitar Berbatov’s nonchalant first touch, or Stefka Kostadinova’s impossibly silky leap. Such moments elevate athletes into artists rather than machines. They remind us that sport can be poetry before it becomes industry.
This is not to diminish Novak Djokovic's relentless precision or Bryson DeChambeau's monstrous drives. Their achievements are extraordinary. The issue is not that beauty and effectiveness are opposites. The issue is that effectiveness can be measured while beauty can only be experienced.
A statistic may explain a goal. It cannot explain elegance.
Perhaps this is what Pierre Bourdieu meant by habitus: taste as a form of cultural capital. Not in the vulgar sense of wealth or status, but in the ability to perceive value beyond utility. Beauty requires a certain freedom from relentless pragmatism. A rootedness. A comfort with the world that allows one to appreciate what serves no immediate purpose beyond its existence.
Yet, borrowing from Edward Said, perhaps my own position is merely a romanticisation of the Other. Perhaps this longing for beauty is itself a reaction against a civilization that has commodified everything, including excellence. Perhaps I am guilty of constructing my own mythology.
Still, give me someone who prefers Cristiano Ronaldo to Lionel Messi and I will show you two profoundly different value systems. One admires discipline, willpower, and the triumph of self-construction. The other gravitates toward intuition, grace, and the effortless appearance of genius. Neither is wrong. Yet the preference reveals something deeper than football.
Beauty, sadly, is rarely taught consciously. We teach technique, discipline, and efficiency. Beauty emerges elsewhere. It emerges through temperament, culture, memory, environment, and expression. It is the personal manifestation of one's abilities in a language entirely their own.
Untranslatable.
Unreplicable.
Beyond measurement.
And perhaps that is why beauty feels sacred. It begins precisely where quantification ends. What cannot be reduced to numbers remains, in some small way, divine.
A lot of the things people seek beauty in are composed or seem to have a mathematical structure. Like symmetry or synchrony or rhythm. Even if the reaction we get to this is not measurable, sometimes the input is. So maybe beauty is just always in tension with quantification, and our reaction to seeing something like messis intuitive unexpected genius is a response to this internalised quantified norm society has imposed on our perception. Cuz you cant appreciate messis skills (the ability to experience beauty) without first knowing whats statistically normal (internalised quantified norm).
ReplyDeleteA insightful breakdown of what truly drives the author's sharp observation.
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