To recap: professionalism and being expert has serious advantages, but sometimes we really get annoyed by them and need to compensate. Fair enough. But there is another side to this that I think is even more insidious: the tyranny of the professional.
Let’s start with sports. Not that long ago, kids played sports. Baseball, football, basketball, stickball, dodge ball, kick ball, soccer, kick the can, tag, hide-and-seek. The emphasis is on “play”, and it was just what they did. Kids at school or in the neighborhood would get together, get a ball or whatever else was needed, and play. Pretty much everybody played, whether they were any good or not. They might be the last picked, but they were usually picked. Rules and boundaries were agreed upon (that mailbox is a first down), and the rules were enforced by the players. They had to be. If the players couldn’t agree that a ball was foul, that a catch was made fairly, that a person was off-sides, then they couldn’t play. The game depended on cooperation and negotiation. My father did not like organized sports for children because of this. He thought that the skills learned in these negotiations, the recognition that the game was more important than any one call and the understanding that one must respect the game were more important than learning the fine points of technique. And I think he was right. Very few people will really need to spend hours perfecting their stance, their release, or their swing. Communication, negotiation, and respect for something other than oneself, however, are universal skills that many of us lack. Playing pick-up games, however, will not make us expert. It does not prepare us for being professionals. And the dirty little (not so) secret of youth sports is that many of the parents see it as a testing ground to see if, with expert help, their child might have a future as a professional.
Kids also sing and dance. Often before they can walk or even stand. Ask your parents if you don’t believe me. Music is powerful mojo. Not that long ago, most people played instruments, and nearly everybody sang. Now, I’ve not seen any research to indicate that people “back then” had significantly better voices than we do today, or that they were more coordinated or dexterous. Watch the end of “It’s a Wonderful Life” sometime. I certainly wouldn’t take the movie as gospel, but it seems like the idea that people would all get together and unselfconsciously sing together while a kid played a piano was one that the audience could buy into. Maybe they themselves hadn’t done it, but their parents likely had, back before radio and phonographs. Those actors were not all good singers (cough, cough, Jimmy Stewart), but it really didn’t matter. If you wanted music, someone had to sing and someone had to play an instrument.
People rarely sing if front of people nowadays, but nearly everybody, I would bet, sings by themselves in the car or in the shower. A few people play instruments, I would wager that far more children play than do adults. Playing music is best if it is communal - with a band or with folks singing or dancing, and as people grow older they seem less likely to take the time to do this. It is somehow seen as indulgent, even escapist to play with a group after around twenty-five or so. Unless you are getting gigs.
Sports, singing, making music - things we all remember from childhood, have turned into something that we rarely do for ourselves anymore. We have professionals to do this for us. Even dance has gone this direction. I work with teenagers, and they love to dance, but what has happened since the advent of the music video is that the professional dancers show them how to dance to any particular song. At a dance, or on a dance floor with young adults, when a popular song is played, look around and you will see people copying the moves that they saw on the video.
Now none of this is bad. There are a lot of good musicians out there playing excellent music, and wonderful singers interpreting songs. Professional sports can be great fun. What concerns me is not that professionals do these things, but that we amateurs have largely stopped doing these things for ourselves, and experience them more and more vicariously through the work of professionals. Sports, music, singing, drawing, painting, sculpting, telling stories - all of these are creative expressions of our common humanity. All of these are a part of our experience, things that we have done and enjoyed and gotten lost in. These are things that humans do. And we seem to have stopped doing them, to a large extent, because we have professionals, experts who do it better.
I would love for us to take them back. There are some bright spots. Karaoke has potential, but it generally fails. It is often people imitating professionals, sometimes rather pathetically, and sometimes ironically. Several years ago, in Ireland, I was in pubs where people just started singing. Lots of them. No one was trying to be Madonna, Rihanna, Usher, or Sinatra - they were just singing. There have always been adult athletic teams, so for talented players there is still an outlet. And people continue to dance (even guys). Certainly blogging has created opportunities for the amateur writer, and people obviously crave it. Now if we can just relegate the professionals to the same level as the chefs on TV - interesting experts who give us ideas and which are fun to watch, but who bear little relation to the cooking we do every day (and which is just fine, and sometimes better, thank you very much) - I think we would all be happier, healthier, and more in-tune humans. Pax.
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