Cultivated Disinterest in Professional Sports

Benjamin Mako Hill criticizes his fellow intellectuals for cultivating disinterest in professional sports (and decides to become a football fan):

Several years ago, I was at a talk by Michael Albert at MIT where he chastised American intellectuals for what he claimed was cultivated disdain of professional sports. Albert suggested that sports reflect the go-to topic for small talk and building rapport across class and context. But he suggested that almost everybody who used the term “working class struggle” was incapable of making small talk with members of the working class because — unlike most working class people (and most people in general) — educated people systematically cultivate ignorance in sports….

Bethany Bryson, a sociologist at JMU has shown that increased education is associated with increased inclusiveness in musical taste (i.e., highly educated people like more types of music) but that these people are most likely to reject music that is highly favored by the least educated people. Her paper’s title sums up the attitude: “Anything But Heavy Metal”. For highly educated folks, it’s a sign of cultivation to be eclectic in one’s tastes. But to signal to others that you belong in the intellectual elite, it can pay in cultural capital to dislike things, like sports, that are enormously popular among the least educated parts of society.

I wouldn’t say my own lack of interest in sports is exactly cultivated at this point (it’s more the end result of the process of failing to acculturate to sports as a child) but he makes a good point.