In the Gymnasium of Life

I wrote last week about the role of the body in education and quoted from Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” in order to trace the recent genealogy of our academic elites’ resentment of the physical body and the reality of the natural world we inhabit. For simple folks, the world is a cornucopia of beauty, pleasure, and opportunity. But for a certain breed of the ambitious, the limits represented by nature and the body provoke resentment and a hubristic interest in reshaping the world to our fancy.

A few days after wading through Haraway’s harangue, my friend Jim sent me a Crossfit Journal article from back in 2006 about gymnastics and tumbling. It was written by Greg Glassman and reviewed an old (1943) U.S. Naval Institute training manual regarding physical fitness for aviators. The article quotes extensively from the manual which, in justifying itself, makes arguments and observations about the role of the body in human thriving (and not just in the context of war).

The first thing to notice is the untortured prose of the Navy manual. The introduction to the manual notes “records have proven that mental improvement of the cadets goes hand in hand with better physical condition,” and later, the authors reference the Swiss educational reformer Johann Pestalozzi who taught that “methodical exercising trained the pupil intellectually, morally, and aesthetically.” “Gymnastics,” they write, “develops attitudes vital to the successful naval aviator: fearlessness, initiative, decisiveness, courage, perseverance, presence of mind, self-confidence, as well as an analytical outlook and the ability to size up a situation quickly.”

That all sounds pretty good doesn’t it? For one thing, it’s written in plain, straightforward prose and all those attributes sound wholesome and desirable. Another way to put it would be that it lists attributes that contribute to human thriving rather than disintegration. This is at least in part, as Glassman notes, because the training program was not the product of the ivory tower. It was “designed and implemented by coaches, not professors….and let successful practice trump more academic approaches.”

Cue Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Theory as “Exhibit A” in the “more academic approaches” category. Haraway begins by contradicting the principle of non contradiction: “this experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind.” It is both fiction and fact you see. She continues: “liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility….The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity….The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family.” You caught all that right?

Perhaps Cyborg Theory seems like an extreme example of the absurd abstraction of academia, but in fact, Haraway’s flight from reality into the cold mechanical embrace of cybernetics is exemplary of the academic hatred for the flesh. Privileging abstraction over practice and theory over experience is the academic move. The ivory tower is a tower because it reaches up and away from the low and dirty arena of incarnate reality.

However tortured its prose and unlovely its erotics, we live in an increasingly academic and cybernetic world. Theory threatens new mutilations to both individual bodies and to the environment as a whole. The antics of our elites seem to come straight out of the James Bond villain handbook - once we’re done experimenting on children in Africa, we’ll move on to blocking out the sun.

All of this presents a choice.

On the one hand, we can continue to marginalize the body in and out of school, valorize the sedentary, and promote academic “excellence” at the expense of whole human integration. This route will envelop us in ever more digital and virtual ephemera with predictable softening and disfiguration of our moral stature.

The alternative is to engage in the difficult work of being fully integrated human beings…and this includes the body, which, at least in the 40s, the Navy knew was properly integral to the human being, including morally and intellectually. We can acknowledge the limits imposed on us by having bodies in a physical world and nevertheless work to cultivate excellence in the body - a way of being at home in the world. This is where Gymnastics & Tumbling comes in handy.

When I was a young Marine I used to joke that all the officers should have to sustain themselves by farming in addition to their military duties. I thought this would ground them in reality and occupy all the extra time they seemed to have in which they cooked up the most absurd and irrelevant things for us to do. The more I think about it, that was a great idea. The more distant we become from the fundamentals of life—including physical fundamentals like food, drink, sex, weather, weight—the more tenuous and perverse our initiatives become.