Abandon the arena
The Gist: Against TR's analogy
Many are inspired by Theodore Roosevelt’s speech at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1910:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
The problem with this analogy - with the man in the arena - is that he is essentially performative. Arenas are constructed for entertainment, not genuine resolution of “worthy causes.” They reward spectacle, not solutions. And indeed, the quote is often employed in its exact context: LeBron James used to write “Man in the Arena” on his basketball shoes; Tom Brady produced an autobiographical television series with the same title. And their worthy cause was… self-enrichment? Ensuring whatever city they were playing “for” at the time experienced a sense of pride that (rarely local) mercenaries hired by (not always local) billionaires would beat in games those “representing” other cities? Calling out critics of the Chinese Communist government as “misinformed” - perhaps because “it is not the critic who counts”? Or having children with multiple models either never or no longer one’s wife?
I can think of at least one worthy cause demonstrated in arenas: Christians were martyred and they “won,” but not in the sense that TR means. Relatedly, ancient arenas were used for the punishment of criminals, though the point was rather not to admire the participants, except maybe the lions. Perhaps the deeper irony is that arenas were the center of the famous “bread and circuses” strategy of Roman rulers to keep the public subdued while they pursued real politics. The closest we may come to TR’s intention is medieval trial by combat, which is not typically considered the epitome of judicial resolution.1 In modern times, arenas are paid for by entertainment (and taxpayers) but they occasionally also host revivals, where Christians survive at higher rates but with lower commitment.
Obviously, analogies are inexact - that’s what makes them analogies, x is like y, not x is x. And politics is performative, especially in a democracy, though we should wonder whether that is a flaw rather than something to be celebrated. To the extent politics is performative, who is to say that the critic is not in the arena, too? Thankfully, our system of government does not often devolve into violence; we engage in wars of words - or, in other words, criticisms. For those who love liberty, the stumblings of strongmen often should be celebrated.
Of course, TR was himself famously a critic of the doers of deeds, sparking vigorous antitrust action against capitalists who were serving consumers better than ever before - but we should prize bias for action in businessmen and criticize it in bureaucrats. Theodore Roosevelt was a colorful, manly executive whose charms have claimed the hearts of conservatives who should know better to actually look at his policies rather than merely his party. We remember his (unprofitable) years play-acting as a cowboy and his personality, including this nearly substance-less quote about the man in the arena which has all kinds of problems (wouldn’t we prefer Vladimir Lenin to have remained merely a critic rather than become a man in the arena?). But TR was the first president since the Civil War to articulate and pursue a vision of a much expanded, activist government at the expense of laissez-faire (i.e. attempted doers). A proud progressive, TR supported price controls, an income tax, central banking, a permanent bureaucracy insulated from democratic control, unprecedented federal regulation of the American economy, and unnecessary entry into the most destructive event in modern history: World War I. Defying the whole point of the Constitution, TR insisted “I don’t think that any harm comes from the concentration of power in one man’s hands” and that, in a crisis, he “has the legal right to do whatever the needs of the people demand, unless the Constitution or the laws explicitly forbid him to do it.” Never mind the critics! Do deeds! In the end, TR was certainly “marred by dust and sweat and blood” and knew “great enthusiasms,” but what did he accomplish that is not worth being subject to criticism? Even spotting him the Panama Canal plan he inherited, it’s best to say he “err[ed]” and came “up short again and again” and again…
Figure 1. The much better colorful manly executive that conservatives should root for, and would certainly have bested TR in individual combat, is Andrew Jackson (TR was in maybe 2 gunfights in Cuba, AJ in more than 20; when TR was shot on the campaign trail, he finished his speech; when AJ was shot at as president, he proceeded to beat his attempted assassin with a cane - and AJ was still carrying a bullet in his body from earlier duels).
And yet, setting aside his progressivism, we might note that the main argument of the speech Roosevelt gave at the Sorbonne was that, in a democracy, “in the long run, success or failure will be conditioned upon the way in which the average man, the average women, does his or her duty, first in the ordinary, every-day affairs of life, and next in those great occasional cries which call for heroic virtues.” What did those duties constitute? “Such ordinary, every-day qualities include the will and the power to work, to fight at need, and to have plenty of healthy children.”
We would be better off quoting a different part of the speech about stumbling:
“To say that the thriftless, the lazy, the vicious, the incapable, ought to have reward given to those who are far-sighted, capable, and upright, is to say what is not true and cannot be true. Let us try to level up, but let us beware of the evil of leveling down. If a man stumbles, it is a good thing to help him to his feet. Every one of us needs a helping hand now and then. But if a man lies down, it is a waste of time to try and carry him; and it is a very bad thing for every one if we make men feel that the same reward will come to those who shirk their work and those who do it.”
TR was an enthusiast for war, even the worst war. But TR also thought throughout his career and emphasized again in France:
“The greatest of all curses is the curse of sterility, and the severest of all condemnations should be that visited upon willful sterility…. If the failure is due to the deliberate and wilful fault, then it is not merely a misfortune, it is one of those crimes of ease and self-indulgence, of shrinking from pain and effort and risk, which in the long run Nature punishes more heavily than any other. If we of the great republics, if we, the free people who claim to have emancipated ourselves from the thraldom of wrong and error, bring down on our heads the curse that comes upon the willfully barren, then it will be an idle waste of breath to prattle of our achievements, to boast of all that we have done. “
You don’t see that one on social media, even accompanying birth announcements.
My conclusion? Abandon the arena, pursue virtue, and get engaged in real life beyond the spectators: build a family and work hard to accomplish things for good, not for plaudits.
PS. Some other excerpts from TR’s speech and brief comments
“The brilliant gallantry of the French soldier has for many centuries been proverbial.” That proverb would not last another 30 years.
TR commenting on the then common European observation that no great art and science were emerging out of the United States: “To conquer a continent, to tame the shaggy roughness of wild nature, means grim warfare; and the generations engaged in it cannot keep, still less add to, the stores of garnered wisdom which where once theirs, and which are still in the hands of their brethren who dwell in the old land. To conquer the wilderness means to wrest victory from the same hostile forces with which mankind struggled on the immemorial infancy of our race. The primaeval conditions must be met by the primaeval qualities which are incompatible with the retention of much that has been painfully acquired by humanity as through the ages it has striven upward toward civilization. In conditions so primitive there can be but a primitive culture. At first only the rudest school can be established, for no others would meet the needs of the hard-driven, sinewy folk who thrust forward the frontier in the teeth of savage men and savage nature; and many years elapse before any of these schools can develop into seats of higher learning and broader culture.”
“Most valuable work needed by civilization is essentially non-remunerative in its character, and of course the people who do this work should in large part be drawn from those to whom remuneration is an object of indifference.” This dramatically underappreciates capitalism’s contribution to civilization, but is interesting to think about what he means here, all the more so as the pace of scientific achievement has slowed down as we’ve gotten richer.
Quotes Lincoln: “I think the authors of the Declaration of Independence intended to include all men, but they did not mean to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all men were equal in color, size, intellect, moral development or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness in what they did consider all men created equal - equal in certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. This they said, and this they meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all were actually enjoying that equality, or yet that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society which should be familiar to all - constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and, even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people, everywhere.”
“There is need of a sound body, and even more of a sound mind. But above mind and above body stands character - the sum of those qualities which we mean when we speak of a man’s force and courage, of his good faith and sense of honor… We must ever remember that no keenness and subtleness of intellect, no polish, no cleverness, in any way make up for the lack of the great solid qualities. Self restraint, self mastery, common sense, the power of accepting individual responsibility and yet of acting in conjunction with others, courage and resolution - these are the qualities which mark a masterful people.”
Though Wikipedia offers this rock-solid legal analysis: “At the time of independence in 1776, trial by combat had not been abolished and it has never formally been abolished since. The question of whether trial by combat remains a valid alternative to civil action has been argued to remain open, at least in theory.”