Norbert Elias on Sports: The Quest for Excitement

Sports play a large role in modern life. Many men and an increasing number of women spend an enormous amount of time and expend a great deal of emotion on sports. They play, watch, read and talk about sports. For many, sports are the most important topics of conversation. People care about sports. As participants, they give their all and as spectators, they are fans—short for fanatics. With the exception of professionals, people’s passion for sports is non-utilitarian. There is no practical gain for winning or for supporting a team that wins. Sports are a major aspect of modern societies, but a rather peculiar one, since unlike education or work, they appear to serve no useful purpose.

Norbert Elias has discussed sports in a number of essays, collected in The Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process (Elias and Dunning, 1986). As we shall see, the title tells us a lot about how Elias sees sports. Elias is mainly concerned with two questions. What human need do sports satisfy? How did modern sports develop? Elias believes sports satisfy a need for excitement and modern sports developed as part of a wider civilizing process.

Elias maintains that there is what he calls a “civilizing process.” Over long periods of time, human psychology changes. This theory was an extension and a deepening of Freud’s view on the movement from primitive to civilized. Elias is careful not to use civilized as a noun and to avoid using civilizing as a value term.

Elias believes all humans share certain psychological characteristics, but that each human, as he or she grows up from infancy, has their psychology shaped by their culture. All humans undergo a civilizing process, but not the same one. Everyone’s basic motivations are shaped by their society, that is, by other people. The result is a socially shaped second nature, which varies from society to society.

In present day societies the impulse towards violence is severely curtailed, in part externally by an effective state with a monopoly of legitimate violence, and in part through internalization of social norms. For many people the superego forbids physical harm to others. When such a person does harm another, he feels guilty. In all societies, it is presumably forbidden to harm another member of one’s own society. But in former time societies were small and strangers, and especially nearby enemies, were fair game. Today, except for war, we tend to forbid violence against people of other societies. This is, to say the least, convenient, as it allows us to walk in our streets and malls without fearing the strangers around us. This feeling of security is by no means universal. Among the Amazonian Indians and the pre-colonized peoples of New Guinea, and in the gang territories of Los Angeles, there is no such security. Once a person leaves the safety of their small territory, fear and vigilance are constant companions.

As Freud already noticed, there is a price to be paid for this civilizing of the urge to violence. It creates a kind of inner tension. At the same time, it may make ordinary life a bit boring. The function of sport according to Elias is to “stir the emotions, to evoke tensions in the form of a controlled, well-tempered excitement without the risks and tensions usually connected with excitement in other life situations” (Elias and Dunning, p. 48). Sport arouses people in a way that avoids harm. People can have the pleasure associated with violence without the normal consequences of violence. Sports such as football, both American and soccer, resemble battles between warring groups, but without the consequences. Thus, such sports have “two contradictory functions—the pleasurable de-controlling of human feelings, the full evocation of an enjoyable excitement on the one hand and on the other the maintenance of a set of checks to keep the pleasantly de-controlled emotions under control” (Elias and Dunning, p. 49). Modern humans have achieved these contradictory goals by creating strict rules and appointing referees to enforce them. Sport satisfies a human need that is

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not satisfied by an ordinary life of “getting and spending,” but does so without disrupting normal peaceful society.

Elias believes sport, in the modern sense, is a relatively recent development. Many societies have games and sports of some sort, but he believes modern sport is quite different than sport in earlier periods in the civilizing process. Even sports, such as wrestling and football, which in some form have been around for hundreds or thousands of years, were, in earlier times, quite different and different in ways that reflect the long-term civilizing process. To be quite clear, we can claim no credit for being shaped by a more pacific society; we did not make the society we grew up in less violent, nor was the process by which it became less violent the consequence of deliberate actions. The lower threshold of violence in modern societies is the consequence of a long unplanned development. This process can go into rapid reverse, as shown by the Nazis, and, to a lesser extent Abu Ghraib.

Wrestling, boxing, and other forms of individual sports contests are old and widespread, but they have changed. Ancient Greek wrestling and boxing allowed a level of real violence repugnant to modern sensibility. In the ancient pankration, the combatants were allowed to strangle their opponents, break their fingers and toes, and gouge out their eyes. We do not consider such a violent contest an acceptable sport today. Rome, with its gladiatorial games, was even more brutal. In contrast to the ancients, we want our violence to cause no real harm, hence not only in relatively safe sports, but in X-rated “violent” movies and television.

Football of various sorts was played in medieval and early modern England (and elsewhere), but unlike modern forms of football, it was far less regulated than the modern game. The result was numerous injuries and occasional deaths. The authorities disapproved and made numerous attempts to outlaw football, but with little success (Elias and Dunning, pp. 176-177). Modern games are tightly regulated to avoid, or at least minimize injuries, which makes them different than earlier games of a similar sort.

Elias points out most modern sports originated in England and spread to various regions of the world. Some, such as soccer, became almost universal; others, such as cricket, spread “only” to the British Empire, though a variant became American baseball. Rugby’s spread was somewhat limited, but also developed into American football. All these sports developed in England from rougher, more local, and more amorphous games into uniform nationally regulated sports, which limited their violence.

The first to be tamed and regularized were aristocratic pursuits, such as fox hunting, boxing, and horse racing. They were regularized in the eighteenth century in England and, subsequently, the English forms of these sports were adopted on the Continent. Thus, French aristocrats formed highly exclusive jockey clubs and used such English terms as jockey, steeplechase, and boxing (Elias and Dunning, p. 127).

Soccer, and other team sports, took longer to regularize and to spread. It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that uniform rules were adopted, which limited violence on the field. Soccer spread all over the world, as did such terms as goal and goalkeeper.

Elias believes that the English origin of these sports is no coincidence. The English upper class was the first group to develop a system under which factions could alternate power peacefully. For the first time, these factions ceased to see opponents as enemies to be persecuted when in power and plotted against when out of power. If the faction in power lost, they were willing to cede power, confident that they would be safe and that they would have a chance to fight another election and possibly gain power again. Elias connects this pacification of the English political class and the relative pacification of sport. For him, this is not a cause and effect relationship; sports and politics are two parts of a complex process of change.

The civilizing process has limited violence for most modern human beings, but humans, especially males, still crave the excitement that comes from violent encounters between individuals and groups. Modern sports are a partial solution to this disconnect between human needs and modern pacified human societies.

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