[MUSIC] We're gonna look in this lecture at a bizarre, horrifying, thrilling aspect of the modern sports world. Namely, extreme sports. Now, as I'm sure you know, extreme sports are, by definition sports that are dangerous. Risky. Where you put your life on the line. And when you think about it there are a lot of extreme sports. Mountain climbing and rock climbing and motocross and ultra marathons and big wave surfing. Parkour and the list goes on. Now nobody forces anybody to surf 40 foot high waves. Or to run in races across the Sahara Desert in the burning heat that lasts for four or five days. As is always true of play, extreme sports are something that people choose to do, and so the question becomes, what is the attraction of extreme sports? Why do people choose to play them? How do we explain the paradox of people, some people anyway, finding pleasure in sports activities where they're risking their lives? And I wanna begin and try to answer this paradox with what I would call the Safety Fetish. The preoccupation that we have in modern life with being careful, with taking every precaution, with avoiding danger, with minimizing risk. And to illustrate the Safety Fetish I brought a treasured family photograph here. This is me at the age of about four, this must have been around 1964 with my dad and we're on his Vespa Spook scooter. And everyday we were living in Florence, Italy. Every day my dad would put not just me, but my little sister who was three on the back of the scooter and we'd wind our way through the narrow streets of Florence with all that honking crazy Italian traffic and he'd drop us off at daycare. Now this wouldn't happen in 1,000,000 years in the early 21st century. My dad would probably go to jail for doing something like this if he tried to do it now. You have to wear helmets. You have to have child seats. There are warning labels on everything. There are hazard lights. We are preoccupied with safety, safety especially around our children but safety in general, we're always worried that something bad might go wrong and we live in a society that is filled with labels and signs and cautions and injunctions to be careful, to be safe. And in general some important social critics of modern society have argued that modern life in general is about control. We've lost a certain kind of spontaneity in freedom. Max Vabor already, the great sociologist a 100 years ago talked about the iron cage of modernity. Michel Foucault, the great late-20th century French social theorist, talked about the advent of new forms of bureaucracy and surveillance, and the way we're always being watched, and the way that we never feel that we can do that crazy and wild thing without getting into trouble or being brought back into line. So we live in the age of the safety fetish. We live in an age of modern forms of control and surveillance of bureaucracy. And because human beings are contrarian animals, it's not surprising that a certain percentage of us, maybe a minority, rebel against the safety fetish, rebel against these modern ideas of control, and choose to do things that put ourselves into great danger, that involve great risk, that are out of the box, that defy the norms, that get out of the mainstream. And this is what extreme sports are all about. They're doing the thing that is not safe. They're doing the thing that puts one's own life in peril. So this I would say is a first part of the explanation of the paradox of extreme sports. Namely the prevalence of the safety fetish in our society and the counter reaction of contrarian people against it. And in the second part of the lecture I want to talk a little bit more about what I see as the appeal of extreme sports. [MUSIC]
