Fans and science

From the editor. Our regular author Lev Klein is able to organize debate on almost any topic. His opinions are always controversial and therefore especially interesting. This time we are publishing his thoughts on... Not so much about football fans, but about the nature of “fanaticism” in general. As always, Lev Samuilovich allows himself risky passages. In some especially developed countries they would be called politically incorrect. Well, in essence, TrV offers readers another test of tolerance. After all, the material itself, for all its polemics, is at least interesting.

Fans and admirers

After last year's December unrest, fans are on everyone's lips. Some are outraged by their actions, consider the fans to be scum and cattle, demanding their pacification. Others flirt with them, fearing them as a dark but organized force, and hoping to use it for their political interests. Still others sincerely do not admire them, their daring and solidarity, and are ready to join, join their ranks.

Some even point out that football is made up of 22 people who think with their feet, and 22 million people who think with their butts. That is, it is recognized that football is not a sport at all, because its main figure is not a coach, not a goalkeeper, not a referee, not a player, but a fan, a fan.

But fans are not our invention (just as football is not ours), it is everywhere, and has been at all times. We have our own characteristics in the fan world and in relation to it, but the phenomenon itself is international and universal. This means that it makes sense to take a closer look at it from a scientific point of view. First, let's take a philological look. Fans (English "fans") - short for "fanatics". Fanatics mean those who are recklessly and thoughtlessly passionate about something, selflessly devoted to this cause. What are they passionate about? Science fanatics are not included here, nor are art fanatics. We are talking about fanatics of sports, and not just any kind, but game and team sports. That is, let’s be honest – it’s a spectator sport.

But here there are closely related fans - passionate about this or that show business star: from Elvis Presley to Kirkorov, from Lolita to Glucose. Our sports fans have the same attitude towards sports as Lolita fans have towards singing or music. They can be as unathletic (smoking, drinking, fat) as fans of singers - voiceless and without an ear for music.

But what makes sports fans different is that they focus on teams that compete in competitive and spectator sports. Therefore, they unite in clubs against the same fans of other teams. In the old days, admirers of singers or musicians were called "fans", they support their idols at concerts, but rarely have the opportunity to compete against other singers or musicians (in competitions). Therefore, they do not show such a degree of belligerence. Even boxing is not team-based enough for club rivalries to arise. Therefore, the essence of fandom is the focus not so much on speaking for someone, but against someone.

There is one more philological note. Among English sports fans, their main action is not called “cheering”, but simply support (support) or to be a fan (to be a fan, to be a fan). But among our people this is considered to reach the level of illness, an abnormal condition. Similar to the Italian tifare (to be sick), with tifico (typhoid), tifosi (fans).

A little history

Now let's see how it is in terms of history. Football and hockey, of course, are recent developments. But wall-to-wall fist fighting is an old Russian pastime. In medieval Europe, knightly tournaments attracted the attention of society, and the squires of the knights fought among themselves (the same fist sport, but with shields, coats of arms and ceremonies). Even earlier, in Byzantium, the public tensely watched the chariot races, and they were representatives of two teams - “blue” and “green”. And in the end the whole country was divided into “blues” and “greens”, and there were clashes and clashes throughout the country. In the 5th-6th centuries, the “blues” and “greens” began to play a serious role in the political affairs of the country. In ancient Rome, in the stadiums, the public enjoyed much more brutal spectacles - the fight of gladiators and had the opportunity, with shouts and signs, to decide whether the gladiators should live or be killed right there - in front of everyone. This means that the general public is greedy for such spectacles and such fun, eager to participate in them. Why?

Human ethology

Here we need to turn to ethology - the science of the biological foundations of behavior.

One of the most popular ethologists, Desmond Morris, came to the conclusion that modern man retains a remnant psychophysiological attitude towards participation in tribal life. He has an irresistible desire to participate in a collective hunt, in skirmishes where the shoulder of his relatives standing nearby is felt. He artificially creates for himself a kind of tribe in the form of a non-family organization of peers pursuing common goals - no matter what. At the same time, the team should be large, but not too large - visible. No longer is he perceived as one of his own. That is, the nature of fan clubs is the same as that of teenage gangs and peer organizations in army hazing. In a primitive tribe, peers were also united and organized (“men’s house”, etc.).

Russian ethologist V. A. Dolnik (in the book “The Naughty Child of the Biosphere”) identifies more ancient psychological mechanisms in humans - from monkeys, these mechanisms break through in youth noisemakers that release energy, in fights that make it possible to establish and assert one’s status.

Evolution and culture

These considerations are reasonable and are backed by sober observations. But I have accumulated my own thoughts, which are somewhat different. I encountered this problem by observing the criminal environment in prison and camp and discovering many similarities in it with primitive society, the subject of my professional study. A clear division into three castes, leaders and their squads, tattoos as a system of status designations, a system of taboos (“zapadlo”), primitive speech with the replacement of many words with polysemantic (obscene) ones, ostentatious cult of the mother, etc.

Reflecting on the reasons for this similarity, I remembered that biological development (which determines psychophysiology) is greatly delayed compared to sociocultural development. And naturally: the biological requires multiple changes of generations, and they cannot be accelerated, while the sociocultural depends on a change of ideas, and the transfer of ideas requires less and less time. Therefore, over the last 40 thousand years in Europe (and about 100 thousand years in general), man has not experienced fundamental changes - he has remained with the same set of genes, with the same psychophysiological characteristics. And in sociocultural terms, he went through part of the Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron and all socioeconomic formations and entered the atomic age - with the same psychophysiological baggage that he had in the Stone Age.

Before that, man experienced dramatic changes - from ape-like creatures (Australopithecus, Homo habilis, Pithecanthropus and the like, Neanderthals) until he reached Cro-Magnon. The Cro-Magnon man arose about 100 thousand years ago, and in Europe it is 40 thousand years old. Cro-Magnon is a fossil of homo sapiens. In other words, Cro-Magnons are us. The differences between us are at the level of race, not species. If it were possible to create a living fetus using DNA extracted from bones, it would grow up in our environment as an absolutely normal modern person, in every way similar to many of us. But both he and we are best suited, strange as it may sound, to live in a primitive society - in the Paleolithic world. After all, every type of person was formed in order to adapt to the environment in which it was formed. But we were formed in that environment, and then we existed by inertia and changed only the culture, but not ourselves.

Freud also came to the conclusion that we are not adapted to our modern culture (his article is called “Dissatisfaction with Culture”). This is much clearer now. We were born to live in nature, eat natural products, hunt, live in small dwellings, communicate with small groups, but we live - well, everything is the opposite. We look not at mammoths in the distance, but at small letters in front of our noses - and we wear glasses. We suffer from a number of diseases (cardiovascular, mental, cancer), which wild animals normally do not suffer from (domestic animals do). We have a lot of problems caused by internal psychophysiological inconsistencies - take, for example, the so-called motiveless crimes. When there is a shortage of culture, a savage emerges from within.

But culture is important not only because it restrains instincts, sublimates (purifies, modifies) gross urges, but also because it has developed mechanisms for satisfying instincts that are relatively harmless to others (and to those involved themselves).

Compensatory mechanisms

It turned out that many people need to quench their thirst for adventure, they need adrenaline rushes, some kind of replacement for collective hunting and tribal wars - the stress that the body requires. Otherwise, they will commit motiveless crimes. And culture gives rise to these compensatory mechanisms - gladiatorial fights, bullfighting, boxing, football, hockey. These are not just spectacles. These are spectacles of complicity. Thus, all these phenomena are also mechanisms of culture.

Yes, there are more subtle mechanisms of the same thing - competitions of poets and musicians, discussions of scientists, politics, finally... (I said “politics” - and immediately thought: maybe it’s better to let these mechanisms remain more crude?) For many citizens, fan clubs and fandom solidarity is not so necessary. They have enough adrenaline rushes in scientific and literary discussions, in politics, in physical education and sports, in military and law enforcement work. Indeed, the fan movement is usually most embraced by teenagers who find themselves uninvolved in all these areas, restless, among them there are few students, few people of intellectual work, but many who have been noticed in criminal behavior. The fewer culture fans have, the more reckless they are and the closer they are to criminality. But they have self-organization. From their midst, both informal leaders and legal club bosses lured by the authorities stand out.

Having found themselves naturally put together, groups of fans that do not have any ideology other than the yard “boys’” can be used by any political forces - as squads of leaders or a source of hired killers, as bands of nationalists or a reserve of democracy, anarchy or reaction. The authorities usually hope that the fan world helps to cultivate patriotism, training its members in dividing the world into “us” and “them,” training the brain in inventing the priorities of all “ours.” In fact, this is only the education of xenophobia: patriotism is love, not hatred. In addition, fans are very capable of very expressively condemning their team if it does not live up to expectations. So, in the smoke, “our own” people should not rely on automatic support. Fans come forward with the ideas that accumulate among the people. They are an undoubted part of the people, and they get drunk like the people, and together with the people they become sober. For townspeople they are dangerous when drunk, but for the authorities they are, perhaps, much more dangerous when sober.