Soccer and Political Referees

The ongoing Soccer World Cup in South Africa has drawn a lot of attention to the match referees, some of them for their astonishingly poor decisions. A good referee is someone who just fairly and predictably punishes physical offences in the game. And such a good referee is a good analogy for what every government of the world is supposed to be.

A government is not supposed to be ruling a country in an unpredictable way. They are supposed to limit their punishment of offences only to initiations of physical force and its derivatives, not to any kind of offence they just dream up, in the name of “the public good.” If they are allowed the discretion of just effecting punishment wherever they feel there is an offence to the public, they will create an unpredictable environment.

Human beings are not designed to live in unpredictable environments. Nature is not that way. We can study anything in nature and be able to adapt it to our lives or to control it appropriately and intelligently. But politcians are able to create an environment that is impossible to live with because they have free will, because they are not bound to any predictable forces of nature. This is why the best and most successful human societies are those that have entrenched the rule of law in their culture through strong institutions that provide checks and balances against the whims of politicians. To give them unchecked power to punish any player if they just feel this is “in the public interest” (as Mr. Obama wanted to do against BP) would be equivalent to allowing a soccer referee to just send off one player from the field – perhaps because he feels that the team is too strong compared to their opponents. The game of soccer would not work because it would be anti-human.

No president should decide what is offensive and punishable, only the law should. And it is only those who have been physically injured by someone that should have the right to appeal to the law for justice, not those who just feel offended.

South Africa beats France : a lesson in cultural transfer.

Former world champions France have been stung by World Cup hosts South Africa. Only a couple of decades ago it was considered nearly impossible for an African team to beat a European team. Now it’s not so shocking.

We can take a lesson about cultural transfers from this. The African skill level has risen so high, firstly because of the large number of players the continent has been exporting to Europe. Secondly, cheap technology has made it possible for Africans to follow the European league closely, Just as if they lived in Europe. This means that the tactics and styles of top European league players can be seen and copied by kids growing up in poor areas of Africa.

If habits and skills in soccer can be transferred across continents and peoples, so could any other cultural traits that one group of people might be lacking. A less advanced group can learn from a culturally advanced group by merely paying attention and learning.

In fact, this happens to be the natural process whenever two culturally different groups meet. The group that has learned more things through many interactions with more cultures is always more advanced. It has nothing to do with race or genes.

When Europeans came to Africa, they had gone through much more cultural evolution than Africans. They had been to China and learnt some things, had met the Persians, etc. Africans had not had much contact with any other people, so they were backward. As interaction between the two groups happened, so did cultural transfer. It’s nothing to be ashamed of because that’s how every group developed.

It would be like feeling ashamed that we couldn’t play skillful soccer before but now we have learnt. It’s more shameful to fail to learn.

My ancestors could neither read nor write. In fact, my grand parents and great grand parents were part of the first generation of Africans to see written words for the first time as European missionaries read the Bible to them. My father was brought up by parents who could hardly read but he became an engineer (and I, of course became a Biochemist, and later, an entrepreneur). Within a generation of seeing the English alphabet for the first time, Africans were producing engineers and scientists!

Unfortunately, this natural process can be hindered or even reversed by politicians through their ideologies. After independence, many African presidents chased away Europeans by either forcing them to give up their jobs to Africans or by nationalizing their companies. South Africa itself has implemented what they call the Black Empowerment policy and it has seen a massive loss of European Africans who have migrated to Australia, Canada and other countries. Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe took their farm land and gave it to blacks who hadn’t learnt how to farm at that level. There is growing pressure in South Africa to nationalize the white-owned mines.

The Africans of old valued cultural transfer from Europeans, the new politically educated Africans want the transfer of stuff from Europeans. Their education tells them that whatever Europeans have was stolen from them. They have forgotten that it is a culture of discipline and knowledge that took the minerals from the hard ground, produced crops on a massive scale, and so on. Africans are now producing more “intellectuals” than engineers, scientists or entrepreneurs. There are more people who believe in sharing (redistributing) things than in creating things.