I have been wondering lately if the liberal world has crossed some anthropological tipping point.
The social change from liberalism to wokeism can be seen as symptomatic of a more profound shift: from engaging with reality to hiding from it in fantasy.
The woke ideology of symbolism over substance now characterises all public discussion.
That this has transpired today seems to be a convergence of five factors:
- COVID and the loss of meaning in the accepted norms of heroic materialism.
- Climate change and the loss of meaning in personal empowerment in the light of irreversible global destruction.
- A liberalism doom loop of economic corruption, broken politics and class warfare.
- The rise of nihilist French theory in education.
- The rise of the Internet and social media to empower lunatic fringes and divergent communities.
These political economy gales have triggered waves of a woke culture war that cancels the tertiary language of bigotry while exacerbating primary economic inequality.
It expresses itself via a live-streamed Western self-disgust that makes room for toxic narcissists to occupy and gaslight the public sphere in all areas of life. From gender to sport to politics.
What has this got to do with cricket?
Viewed through the prism of a cultural artifact instead of a sporting event, the Ashes have taken on the trappings of broader Western cognitive implosion.
Consider. As a Kiwi coach oversees an English cricket team divorced from strategic time and space, what is left of tradition and statistical fact?
Bazball, as it is called, privileges vibe over winning, hysteria over reason, lightening strikes of individual brilliance over team effort, and violently yokes hyper-aggressive behaviour to high moral ground.
Thus, like its surrounding culture, Bazball opens a gaslit space of unreality in which drama and celebrity trump sense and sensibility.
As it signals virtue, sporting values are unrecognisable: losing is winning, infantile is mature, individual is collective, the sacred is profane and vice versa.
Bazballians aren’t athletes. They are inked influencers in a pantomime of Tweecket. Playing out every phony act as a downpayment on virtual fortune.
This is not strategic genius; it is cultural osmosis. The sporting outgrowth of a mental illness of the commons masquerading as profundity. An internecine moral panic that lifts ratings and make the rights owners richer as commerce consumes culture.
Bazball is Wokeball and eleven ruthless, stinking, unshaven Aussie blokes are its perfect antidote.
God help us with the rest of the planet’s problems.
