Roger Federer--who is the most successful tennis player in the recorded
history of the game and who won his 15th grand slam championship on
Sunday, July 5th at Wimbledon--is, contrary to suspicions voiced by Roger
Cohen, of The New York Times, in a column titled "Roger Federer
Unbuttoned"--is a human being. Cohen's column is mildly funny but also a
bit disturbing for its hint at what seems like a serious endorsement of
misanthrope.
Cohen argues that Roger Federer is such a good tennis player that, well,
he couldn't be human and must be some kind of cyborg. (He adduces as one
piece of evidence that Federer's shirt button never came undone throughout
his match with Andy Roddick (who gave his all and still lost in this
marathon match--5 sets with the final one going to 16-14). So what? Maybe
his shirt was well constructed--by human beings--and so it withstood all
the twists and turns it was put through in the match!
That's what bugs me about Cohen's piece; it intimates that for someone to
be as good a tennis player as Roger Federer is--so excellent at the game
as well as comporting himself in nearly flawlessly civilized fashion over
his adult career--one cannot be human. Of course it is a joke but it does
suggest a sad perspective on human beings. It seems to reflect a dominant
modern misanthropic idea, given ample exemplification in the arts where
the anti-hero is pretty much the norm these days, at least so far as the
connoisseurs would have it.
To their chagrin, it seems, Roger Federer and many other athletes--Michael
Phelps, the Olympiad swimmer, and a host of basketball players come
immediately to mind--just cannot be human. And so when they turn out to
be, it has to be something bizarre. (Often promoters of this misanthropic
outlook would seem to be just waiting for the greats to fall in some way
or another, lest they undermine their grim philosophy!)
Excellence, by its very nature, is something rare. So are heroes and
geniuses. But all of it is every bit as human as are the opposites. That's
because human nature is not wired either for superiority or inferiority.
People are born pretty much having the capacity to excel or to fail and
most will very likely hover somewhere in between. A bell shape curve
captures it well. Now and then this picture is upset either by the sudden
emergence of incredible and widespread excellence or its opposite.
History, I think, bears me out. In fact, for my money, there is probably
evidence of a slight upward incline over the long haul, although judging
by the 20th century I could be way off.
However this plays, it is wonderful to have, here and there, examples of
superior human performance in many spheres of life, sometimes even in all
of them at once. That, I believe, is the more accurate picture of the
human situation instead of the notion that excellence must be something
artificial, which is what Mr. Cohen seems to have suggested with his
admittedly lighthearted essay. Because it was lighthearted I maybe making
too much of it for the worse. Yet, for me the suggestion that human beings
couldn't possibly manage greatness, even at tennis, is upsetting. With all
of the challenges they face around them, often brought about by the
hopefully temporary triumph of the worst among us, they need to be
reminded of just the opposite, namely, that with focus, effort, and a bit
of luck they can manage well--and maybe manage at times superbly--living
their human lives.
No, there is no way to engineer human beings to be excellent. This is
precisely what makes them so human--however they turn out is to a large
measure their own doing, following their beliefs and choices. But
encouragement from their fellows is no small part of the total picture
here. So discouragement could be a serious impediment, one no one needs
right now (or ever). (And, by the way, cyborgs are human
artifacts--human-machine systems--and follow the law of garbage in,
garbage out!)