Article
Comment
Morality
Sport
6 min read

The day the Ashes caught fire

After the upset following Alex Carey’s controversial stumping of Jonny Bairstow at Lord's, Graham Tomlin reflects on the so-called 'Spirit of Cricket' and what it tells us about our innate sense of justice and morality.

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Cricket Ball on Fire Illustration
Illustration generated by Dan Kim using Midjourney

Unless you have a complete aversion to sport or wilfully avoid all reference to cricket, you can’t have missed the controversy over the dismissal of the English player Jonny Bairstow by the Australian wicketkeeper Alex Carey at Lords during the final day of the second Ashes Test. Bairstow let a ball go through to the keeper and, thinking the ball (and the over) was finished, wandered down the pitch to chat to Ben Stokes his fellow batter, at which point Carey smartly threw the ball at the wickets to get him out stumped. The Aussie captain, Pat Cummins felt it was a fair cop, as it was within the rules of the game, and on that level, most English players and fans agreed with him. But what the English went on to say is that it was not within the ‘spirit of the game’, and therefore sneaky and underhand. Hence the unremittent booing of the Australians for the rest of the game from the usually sedate Lords crowd, hostility which is only likely to ramp up for the rest of the five-match series with the notoriously partisan Yorkshire crowd at Headingly next in line.

According to the Laws of Cricket, Bairstow was out. He had left his ground before the ball was considered ‘dead’ – which requires both teams to consider it such. The Aussies still felt the game was live, Carey threw the ball as soon as he received it, and so the England batsman has little grounds for complaint. Yet the distinction between the Laws of Cricket and the ‘Spirit of the Game’ has been invoked often since the incident to suggest the Australians are dastardly cheats who will do anything, however underhand, to win a game of cricket, just like they once famously got a young teammate to rough up the ball with sandpaper (clearly illegal) but got caught.

Laws and rules, whether in cricket, a business or charity or within a legal system, are there to protect something else, something deeper than the rules. Our legal system exists to protect more important things like families, community harmony, innocence or human life.

So where does this distinction come from and what does it tell us about our deepest moral instincts? The Laws of cricket are a human invention. Like all sports, cricket is a game which emerged in past centuries and then developed a complex series of rules (in cricket they are always called ‘Laws’) to govern the playing of the game. Those rules develop and change over time. Recent changes include instructions on what you do when a dog invades the pitch, or banning the use of saliva on the ball to make it swing more. Changes even come even in the new format called the Hundred, where bowlers bowl units of five or ten balls at a time instead of the traditional six-ball over. Yet each of these rules are in a way artificial. They are invented and monitored by humans to develop and monitor a human construction called the game of cricket.

Yet we also sense that the Laws cannot do everything. There is this elusive and instinctive thing called the ‘Spirit of Cricket’, so much so that the phrase ‘it’s not cricket’ has seeped into common usage to describe something that just doesn’t feel right. The MCC even runs a lecture every year at Lord called ‘The Spirit of Cricket’ inviting a former player or journalist to reflect on something deeper about the game than the nuts and bolts of the laws, individual performances or team results.

Yet the Spirit of Cricket is more than just about cricket. It appeals to a deeper sense, shared amongst all of us, that some things, even though not codified in human law, just don’t feel right. They go against our deepest moral instincts. They just seem wrong. When Ben Stokes said he wouldn’t have wanted to win a game in the way that the Australians had just done, he was appealing to a deeper moral structure than could ever be codified in a written rule.

So what does all this tell us? Two things, I suggest. The first is that we humans have a deep moral instinct of fairness. We have a sense of conscience, that is not just a human construct, and appeals to something more deeply embedded in the human heart and mind – and conscience is not just a matter of individual preference or cultural difference. We sometimes talk about respecting individual conscience, yet in a more important sense, something called ‘the spirit of cricket’ or the spirit of any game or human enterprise for that matter, testifies that conscience has a universal dimension that is common across societies and cultures – so much so that the spirit of cricket is said to hold whether the game is played in England, Australia, India or Afghanistan. Spot-fixing, or manipulating a game to win a bet, even though it’s not mentioned in the Laws of cricket, is thought of as bad practice wherever you are in the world. There is something universal about Conscience. It may not always be easy to deduce exact rules from it, and in grey areas like the Bairstow incident, it doesn’t lead to straightforward conclusions, but it does nag away at us when we are doing something shady or devious - even when we get away with it.

Secondly, It points to the distinction between human laws, that try to codify our way of living together and regulate human relationships, and a deeper moral law, that individual laws try to protect. Laws and rules, whether in cricket, a business or charity or within a legal system, are there to protect something else, something deeper than the rules. Our legal system exists to protect more important things like families, community harmony, innocence or human life. You might say that the Laws of Cricket are there to preserve the nebulous, but more important and very real thing we call the Spirit of Cricket – to ensure the game is played in a sporting, respectful and generous way, so that it can be enjoyed and not endured, and the competitive instincts it draws on at its best are regulated and don’t get out of hand into open conflict and violence.

once you take away.. the deeper natural law that pricks our consciences ... all you are left with is power – the imposition of the will of some upon the destiny of the many.

In one of his lesser known books, The Abolition of Man, CS Lewis called this deeper moral structure the Tao, drawing on a concept in east Asian religions. He said it included things like duties to parents, elders or ancestors, the importance of justice, good faith & truthfulness, valuing mercy, magnanimity and so on. This natural law is embedded in us, he argued, and that all our value systems are but fragments of the Tao. Despite our ideas of progress, we can no more imagine a deeper or different Tao than we can invent a new primary colour. To try to live outside this Tao, leads, he argues, to the Abolition of Man - the ultimate unravelling of humanity, because once you take away the Tao, the deeper natural law that pricks our consciences, that God-implanted instinct for what is right and wrong, fair and unfair, all you are left with is power – the imposition of the will of some upon the destiny of the many.

St Paul once described what happens when the divine Spirit of God begins to work in a person – they begin to produce “love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” He goes on to say: “Against such things there is no law.” You cannot demand or legislate such things into life, yet individual laws exist to create the conditions in which they can flourish and grow. There is a moral law that we dimly sense underneath our human legal constructions and moral deliberations, which protects things that matter to us and to which we feel ourselves compelled to conform – unless that is we have silenced the voice of conscience, something we all feel is a dangerous thing to do.

Whether or not Bairstow should have been deemed out, whether or not the Australians were being unsportsmanlike or taking fair advantage, maybe a rumbling dispute over a fine point of cricketing practice can point to something profound about the nature of the world we live in after all.

Article
America
Comment
Conspiracy theory
Politics
6 min read

Charlie Kirk: the problem is not murder but anger

How to confront the rage in politics, in media, and in ourselves

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

An aerial view of a gazebo at the site of the Charlie Kirk shooting
The site of the shooting.
KSL News Utah, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The killing of Charlie Kirk has shaken most of us – including me. Over the past year or so, his pop-up debates on US university campuses kept appearing on my different social media channels, and they were fascinating. Here was a young, articulate conservative, venturing into college campuses – generally left-leaning, progressive places - opening up conversation, debate and challenge. He was opinionated, provocative, unafraid to voice unpopular opinions, generated hostility, but seldom seemed to show it himself. No question was off limits, he seemed to respect those who attacked him, and he made no secret of his Christian faith.  

I agreed with some of what he said but by no means all of it – that’s the point of public debate. His views on gun control, Israel, and Donald Trump just for starters, would be some way from mine. But inviting debate on controversial issues, seeking to change other people’s minds by discussion and reasonable argument is the very heart of a well-functioning democracy. There are precious few spaces where progressives & conservatives talk – and Charlie Kirk’s campus debates were one of them. It’s tragic that they cost him his life.  

In our times, such heinous acts are not usually committed by some secret, politically-motivated cabal, but often by an unhinged or deluded self-radicalised loner, influenced by fringe groups in politics or culture. In the UK, Axel Rudakubana, who killed three young girls in Southport, turned out not to be a terrorist after all (“he did not kill to further a political, religious or ideological cause” said the judge on sentencing) but a disturbed and lonely young man who killed for no apparent reason other than mental instability. The same was true for Ali Harbi Ali who stabbed the Conservative MP David Amess, Sirhan Sirhan who shot Robert F Kennedy, James L. Ray who murdered Martin Luther King, even (despite all the conspiracy theories) Lee Harvey Oswald who killed John F. Kennedy. All of them fit this category of lonely, unbalanced people who kill because of some grievance, sometimes loosely politically motivated, but usually acting alone. Conspiracy theories are alluring, but usually unfounded.  

It's tempting when something like this happens to draw all kinds of wider political and cultural lessons. And there have been no shortage of them over these past days. “Because they could not prove him wrong, they murdered him” went one trope. The problem with that is that ‘they’ did not kill him. One young man - now in custody - did. To imply that every left-leaning person in the USA or elsewhere is somehow responsible for Kirk’s death ironically colludes with the darker motivations of this act. 

It's Jesus who explains why. “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.' But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Anyone who says, 'You fool!' will be in danger of the fire of hell.”  

Sounds harsh. We all think murder is wrong, but losing your temper with a work colleague? Calling your neighbour an idiot because of who they vote for?  

The saying points to the root of murder as rage. And boy, is there rage around today.  

There are different kinds of anger. There is the red-hot furious kind where your blood boils and your temperature rises. Yet that kind of anger can settle into different mood - a hardened, determined malice, a fixed hatred of the person who provoked your anger in the first place and a determination to get your revenge, or to silence them once and for all. What both kinds have in common is the red mist that descends and remains, leaving an inability to see past the enmity, a refusal to see the humanity in the other person - the fact that they are, at the end of the day, a ‘brother’ as Jesus put it - a blindness to the essential commonality between you and the person you hate.  

Anger is a dangerous thing for us humans. It deceives us into thinking that because we think we are in the right it gives us license to do despicable things.

Killings like this have always occurred, from Julius Caesar, to Abraham Lincoln, to Archduke Franz Ferdinand, to Yitzhak Rabin. And they always will. No political solution will ever erase the possibility of a mentally disturbed or angry person taking it into their own hands to murder another human being, particularly one with political prominence.  

Yet we can do something. When we build algorithms that encourage the strongest and most extreme views, a media culture that highlights argument and division, refuse to see the common humanity in people we disagree with, when we demonise the opposition and blame them for all the ills of society that we see, we sow the seeds that enable this kind of tragic event to happen.  

Another deceptively simple piece of New Testament wisdom runs: “Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold.”  

It is good advice. Yes, we will get angry from time to time. But don’t let it take root. Sometimes a certain righteous anger can be a good thing – but it’s rare. Anger is a dangerous thing for us humans. It deceives us into thinking that because we think we are in the right (and we may well be) it gives us license to do despicable things. The heart of Christian wisdom on anger is that it is God’s prerogative to exercise wrath. Our anger, however initially righteous, tends to harden into something more sinister. God alone can sustain righteous anger that will truly bring justice. 

The right response to the murder of Charlie Kirk, the response that reflects the Christian faith that was so important to him, is not to blame it on an entire group of people, to tar them with the brush of the deluded young man who committed this terrible deed, but to see again the essential humanity that we share with our enemies. It is to actively cultivate a culture that encourages restraint rather than rage. It is to learn to be ruthless with our own tendency to hold grudges, our own deep-seated hostility to those whose views we find repulsive. It is to learn to hate racism, but to love the racist, to hate crime, but to love the criminal.  

To respond wisely is to recognise that even my enemy - whether progressive or conservative - is a human being created and loved by God, a fellow sinner like me, and to look for the things we have in common, more than our differences. When Jesus taught us to love our enemies, he may have asked us to do something supremely difficult, but it is the only thing that can overcome the kind of malice that led to the tragic death of Charlie Kirk. 

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