Not a matter of life and death? Nobody told these guys that...
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But seriously, as if that were not serious enough...in what sense are you suggesting that sport is not biological or natural?
Sports is an organized, human-conceived activity, which operates according to man-made rules. I wasn't really referring to death sports, but modern sports as practiced in today's society. It's not a matter of life and death in the sense that it's not really a vital necessity for society to function. Its value is more of intangible, like entertainment.
Well of course you are conflating two common uses of the term "natural" here...in reality there is nothing "artificial" that does not conform to the "natural" laws by which the universe functions...
Well, if nothing is artificial, then what is everyone complaining about?
No, the real problem is the assumption that all social conventions are purely ideological and artificial (per Marx), designed by the powerful to subjugate the weak...the real problem is the failure to acknowledge that some of those conventions have grown out of our natural instinctive inclination to form groups and group hierarchies (just as many of our non-human evolutionary cousins do) and were not deliberately invented by some mythical "founder of civil society" and his ideological "progeny" to gain and preserve hegemony over his naïve and otherwise isolated and unpropertied "noble savage" contemporaries (per Rousseau).
Social conventions are conceived by humans and a reflection of human thought, although I never suggested anything about a mythical "founder of civil society." I don't suggest that it's "designed" either, but more likely the result of millennia of trial and error. I suppose one can consider it "natural," inasmuch as humans are a social animal, but that being the case, human nature itself can be mutable and malleable within the construct of the group of which they are part. The ability to adapt is a key component of survival. That's also natural.
We ARE a territorial animal - like many other territorial animals we are naturally inclined to defend our "territory" in order to protect the resources that are important to our survival (and the propagation of our genes)...our food, our mates, our "nest"...and we are especially vigorous in defending it against other members of our own species because, guess what, we all need the same things (more or less).
We ARE a "pack animal" and some of the hierarchical structures we so despise in our ultra-egalitarian 21st century sensibilities, unquestionably have their roots in the Darwinian naturally selective processes that have brought our species from hunter-gatherer to industrialization and beyond...they have their roots in the biological reality that for the vast majority of our 200,000 years as a species (not to mention the millions of years of our pre-human ancestry), life consisted of a daily struggle to survive that required us to work together in relatively small, tightknit, exclusive, territorial and mutually antagonistic groups in which social hierarchy was crucial to success.
The past 200 years have seen monumental changes which were largely unseen and unprecedented compared to the previous 200,000 years of humanity's existence on Earth (and the millions of years of pre-human ancestry, as you say). We moved from hunter-gathers to industrial societies. Throughout that time, we have had to contend with the "natural" aspects of who and what we are, as a species, such as our territorialism and the social hierarchies, which became more and more complex as cities became larger and nations became more populated and unified as singular political units. Underlying it all was language, both written and oral, which also became more and more complex (and diversified).
Interestingly, much of the time, human society has been an exercise in conditioning people
against being their more wild, natural, animalistic selves - and it has often been done in very cruel and vicious ways to drive the point home to the general public about what they're not supposed to be doing, natural or not. It may be natural for humans to want to kill, but if they do, they might suffer some penalty for doing so. It may be natural for humans to want to steal, but that, too, carries a penalty. Humans are also a sexual species, naturally speaking, but many societies have tried to keep that under control. Sometimes it might go a bit too far.
But the whole idea is that humans have learned to curb the baser aspects of their nature, largely out of a sense of shared survival. In the nuclear era, we've had to find ways to curb certain territorial instincts pretty quickly (although even then, we humans still can't seem to totally behave in that regard). People can learn to curb their natural instincts when they are aware and knowledgeable of that the fact that failing to do so could lead to a devastating outcome.
We have to have it both ways at the same time because it IS both ways at the same time...that's the point...we (our societies) are a product of both natural selection and learned behavior...there is no "choosing" which one to "embrace" - we have to acknowledge both.
That's what we've already been doing. We're trying to have it both ways, but there are some worrisome signs of late that it might not go on indefinitely. Even nature has certain limits. Sometimes there are natural consequences which may be unforeseen.
And moving forward, in the direction of progressive, liberal humanism, depends critically on an honest appraisal of why we are not already there yet. It is not (as Rousseau imagined a century before Darwin and Marx after him) because our egalitarian "paradise lost" was subverted by the deliberate intent of the political elite (though that might slow the process) - the reality is, we (our species) were never in that "paradise" in the first place. And unless we properly understand why not, we might never get there at all.
Well, we're not there yet because we're not really trying. Some might argue that many aspects of liberal humanism are impractical on a global scale. Some people worry about economics and matters of physical/material necessity. Scarcity and the fights over the world's resources are just as natural as rival animal packs fighting over food. If someone feels they're getting the short end of the stick, then it's within the same parameters of nature for them to react with anger and possibly violence. That's how wars can get started. And, in the context of this discussion, that's where the rubber meets the road.
