Killing Joy: VAR's search for objectivity is flawed

Why this Man United fan wishes his team had lost.

Graham Tomlin

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

A TV screen shows a football match with a superimposed diagonal line dividing the pitch.

VAR draws the line.

BBC Sport.

I am a Manchester United fan. But I wish Coventry had won the FA Cup semi-final.

I have supported United alongside my hometown team, Bristol City, ever since the days of George Best, Bobby Charlton and Denis Law. (Bristol City never win anything so it’s nice to have a team that does win things occasionally – or at least used to).

In case you’ve had your head under a pillow over the weekend, or just avoid anything football-related on principle, Manchester United won an FA Cup semi-final replay on penalties by the skin of their teeth. 3-0 up and cruising after 70 minutes they somehow capitulated to allow Coventry, a team in the division below, to score three goals in the last 20 minutes. With virtually the last kick of extra time Coventry scored a fourth. Cue scenes of sheer unbridled ecstasy and abandon among the Coventry supporters.

What they experienced at that moment is what every sports fan longs for. Beating your intense rivals or mounting an astonishing comeback, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat - when it happens there is nothing like it. It is what United fans experienced when they beat Liverpool with a last-minute winner in the quarter final, or in the never-to-be-forgotten 1999 Champions League Final when they scored twice in injury time to beat Bayern Munich. Now it was Coventry’s turn.

But then the VAR (Video Assistant Referee), like a killjoy schoolteacher, telling the kids they should calm down and not get so excited, spoiled the party, by pointing out that in the build-up, a Coventry player’s foot was about three inches in front of the nearest body part of the last Man United defender, and so was offside. The offside rule exists to stop attackers gaining an advantage. Quite how those three inches gave the Coventry player an advantage is beyond me. Before VAR, the rule was that, if the attacker was basically level with the defender, it was deemed to be onside. Let’s face it, it was a perfectly good goal. Coventry should have won. They deserved to.

This would have been one of the great comebacks in FA Cup history. For a second-tier team to come back from 3-0 down with 20 minutes left against a team of that fame and pedigree to potentially win the game was extraordinary. The sheer joy and ecstasy on the faces of the Coventry fans, incredulous that their team could perform such a feat against the great Manchester United made every fan of every other club just wish something like that would happen to them.

VAR was introduced to eliminate human error and to bring a more scientific and measurable accuracy to decisions like this. The reality is that it's done nothing of the kind and in fact has made things worse.

Yet the worst thing of all this is that it denied Coventry fans their moment of ecstasy, a moment they would bask in for the rest of their lives.

It is part of a general fallacy in our culture, that science and objectivity give us all the answers we need. So, we try to reduce the role of human instinct, on the assumption that only what can be measured and exactly delineated is of any value. Hence Boris Johnson's mantra “follow the science” during the COVID pandemic.

The reality is that ‘following the science’ still leaves a place for human decision. Science doesn't necessarily tell you what to do. During the pandemic it could tell us about the rate of spread of the virus, but it didn't dictate that a lockdown of the severity which we endured was necessarily the right way to deal with it. There was a human choice to be made, balancing the effect on the economy and the potential loss of life with the mental impact upon young people that is now becoming apparent.

In football, VAR doesn't solve every issue. It can tell whether the ball hit a defender’s hand in the penalty area, but it still requires a subjective judgement by the referee or VAR official. Over the weekend’s semi-finals, it was decided to not award a penalty against Manchester City's Jack Grealish, but to do the opposite for Manchester United's Aaron Wan-Bissaka, for virtually identical actions. VAR has not taken refereeing decisions out of the equation. It hasn’t made it any better.

Yet the worst thing of all this is that it denied Coventry fans their moment of ecstasy, a moment they would bask in for the rest of their lives. It was the kind of moment for which football fans live – the experience that makes the years of watching 1-0 defeats away from home, trudging around the country following your team, worthwhile. A moment that, even as a Man United fan, I would not want to deny them. Of course I'll support United in the final against the robotically efficient Manchester City, but in that moment, VAR destroyed joy. And if that joy is caused by a marginal human error, who cares? Better to have the possibility of joy than a world where it gets taken away by a spoilsport official in a darkened room watching screens and drawing fine lines across the pitch.

Thinking that we can rely on the seen and not the unseen is fundamentally flawed.

Blaise Pascal once famously wrote that “The heart has its reasons of which Reason knows nothing.” His point was that we have a deep instinct for things which we just know are right, that we cannot prove and just have to assume, and the attempt to reduce everything to rationality, to scientific explanation, to what can be measured, thinking that we can rely on the seen and not the unseen is fundamentally flawed. Ever since the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century we have lived with this dream of a perfectly scientific world where everything can be reduced to numbers, mechanisms and measurements. In such a world there is no room for God, no room for miracles. It even conspired to rule out the joy of Coventry fans celebrating a wildly unlikely winner.

It tries to delude us that it takes subjective human or moral judgement out of the equation. but it can never do that. And in doing that, it sucks the joy out of life. Science is a great gift, and it can tell us a lot about our world. But it cannot tell us everything. It was never meant to bear such weight and the sooner we realise that it has its limits, and doesn't overstep its boundaries, the better.

Article

Belief

Digital

28 August 2024

8 min read

When tech holds us captive, here’s how to find liberation

The last of a three-part series exploring the implications of technology.

James Lawrence

James is Canon Missioner at Blackburn Cathedral. He researches technology and theology at Oxford University.

A person wearing a heavy backpack of tech, connected by tangled cables to other technology behind him, walks towards a simpler space.

In my previous article, I outlined Heidegger’s suspicions about the technological age in which we live. We noticed that Heidegger saw a ‘way of being’ which lay underneath all the tech that fills our lives and that as members of a technological society, we have been shaped, or you could say ‘discipled’, to live in a certain way. This ‘way of being’, the essence of technology, is to see everything in the world primarily as a collection of tools and resources to be extracted as and when they are needed.

In contrast with the technology optimists that we looked at in the first article, Heidegger wants us to see that modern technology is not made up of neutral tools to be used for good or bad, nor is it simply a natural extension of human activity that we have been doing since the stone age. Modern technology has shaped a technological society and the members of that society, so that we position everything in the natural world (including ourselves and our neighbours) into resources to be mined.

So, if that is Heidegger’s diagnosis of modern technology – which he dubbed Gestell, what can we do about it? What is Heidegger’s solution to the problem that he identified? Is there a way to live free of the Gestell of modern technology? However, before we get to that question we first have to ask if it’s actually possible to do anything. Because, if Heidegger’s view of modern technology is correct and our thinking and being in the world have been so shaped by the essence of technology, we might be stuck within a way of thinking that has shaped us with no way to change.

A method or technique is simply a technology of self-transformation and therefore keeps us entrapped within the technological essence.

There are two reasons why we might not be able to fix the problem of technology that Heidegger has revealed to us.

Firstly, the problem of being trapped within a system that has formed our thinking: How could we think our way out of this technological age if we have already been shaped by that age’s way of being in the world? If the technological system is as totalising and has so powerfully shaped the minds of people within the society in the way that Heidegger suggests it would seem almost impossible to think beyond or around the system and therefore break out of it.

Secondly, there is the problem of using technological thinking to solve the problem of technological thinking. This second point is a natural extension of the first: within a technological society it will feel most natural to devise a series of techniques or methods that could be used to set people free from the technological age but, because they are techniques, they would do nothing more than reinforce the problems of technological thinking. Or to put it another way, we need a new way of thinking and being in the world that does not lead to just another method. A method or technique is simply a technology of self-transformation and therefore keeps us entrapped within the technological essence. Self-help books are the most obvious example of this. As Brian Brock says, “What must at all costs be avoided is trying to meet the problems raised by technological thinking using yet another technological or formalist decision-making method. The problem of technology lies in its addiction to methods of thinking and perceiving.”

Heidegger’s solution to the problem of Gestell is to invite members of a technological society to live open-handedly rather than grasping at the natural world.

Heidegger’s proposed solution to Gestell lies in another German word: Gelassenheit. If Gestell was about ‘positionality’, or ‘enframing’ then Gelassenheit refers to ‘releasement’, ‘tranquility’ or ‘letting things be for themselves’.

Heidegger develops the term Gelassenheit by inviting his readers to reject the desire that they find within themselves to force the natural world to conform to their needs. Secondly, and similarly, to invite the world around to present itself to the person rather than for the person. Heidegger’s solution to the problem of Gestell is to invite members of a technological society to live open-handedly rather than grasping at the natural world. The solution he offers is at the level of desire rather than activity. This is Heidegger’s only option given the diagnosis, if he were to offer a step-by-step solution to the problem of Gestell or a set of activities he would only be enframing the problem of enframing: one cannot use techniques to solve the problems of a technological age.

As Christopher Merwin says, “Heidegger’s account of releasement is neither a wholly active not, a wholly passive disposition… Heidegger is not a Neo-Luddite, and he does not think we can or should entirely abandon technology. Gelassenheit is not meant to overcome technology, but to place in check the tendency of technology to render everything into an object for use and production… Gelassenheit releases us from the danger of technology and opens us to alternative ways of relating to reality.”

Social media turns the human beings who use it into the content that it sells, we have become the resource that the machine is mining.

As a Christian and a priest in the Church of England, there is a lot about Heidegger’s analysis of our technological age that I find very compelling. I instinctively resonate with his existential description of the essence of modern technology as Gestell. When I observe my own habits, and when I listen to the stories of my parishioners, I see example after example of the technology in our lives training our sensibilities to treat the natural world as nothing more than a resource to be plundered for our needs and pleasures.

I think Heidegger’s concept of Gestell gives a real insight into why we are so far failing to curb our use of fossil fuels despite the near universal consensus that it would be a good and right thing to do. As a society, we have become conditioned to see nature as nothing more than a source of fuel to be harnessed. Our societal addiction to hydrocarbons begins with the assumption that oil is there for our use. It is only the Gestell mindset of a technological age which would make that assumption: oil isn’t there to be for itself but is instead positioned within the inventory as a useful and therefore valuable commodity to be harvested and deployed.

Beyond the natural resources of the creation within which we live, I see Heidegger’s analysis of Gestell at work in the attitudes of people to one another. It is becoming increasingly hard not to treat other human beings as nothing more than resources to be used or discarded depending on whether they fulfil their purpose or not. The ‘intention’ of the social media algorithm (obviously, this is an anthropomorphism: algorithms don’t have intentions) is to turn each of its users into content creators. We are encouraged to post, like, and share and we often fail to notice that the content we are ‘creating’ is ourselves. Social media turns the human beings who use it into the content that it sells, we have become the resource that the machine is mining. And while social media provides a stark example of human beings becoming little more than resources to be harvested, the effects of this technological mindset are not restricted to the virtual environment. When I fail to notice to person across the counter from me in the coffee shop, or the Uber driver, or the sales assistant, I am slipping into the Gestell mindset which characterises the problem of technology.

While I think Heidegger articulates the problem of technology more clearly and insightfully than almost anyone else in the modern era, I think his solution would benefit from deeper reflection on the Christian tradition.

Here we find a person through whom our minds can be transformed, who can set us free from the patterns of thinking of this world, who can reshape our desires.

Firstly, within the Christian tradition, there has long been the recognition of competing forces of discipleship. In the Christian worldview there is no neutral space of existence, our attitudes and desires are always being trained by one thing or another. In his letter to the church in Rome, Paul puts it like this: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God.” Paul tells us that ‘the world’, or in our case ‘the essence of modern technology’, is constantly pulling our thinking into conformity with it. But Paul goes on to point us to something that Heidegger cannot, the voice from outside the system. In the face of a totalising and all-compassing technological society which en-fames everything as a resource waiting to be used, Heidegger’s encouragement is Gelassenheit, to, by force of will, release yourself and the world from the drive to Gestell. Heidegger has no other hope than the willpower of the individual to liberate themselves from the system because he has no other site of hope, nothing outside the system. Paul on the other hand points us to God. A source of transformation and life that is not conformed to the world and is not dependent on the world for existence but nevertheless, by an act of grace, has chosen to reveal himself within the world for the sake of the world. Here we find a person through whom our minds can be transformed, who can set us free from the patterns of thinking of this world, who can reshape our desires. This is the gift of prayer, a space to be and to allow God and the world to be. For many Christians, the experience of prayer is that through sheer inactivity and silence, they are (slowly, sometimes imperceptibly) transformed.

However, Heidegger alerted us to a significant difficulty in finding our way out of the technological mindset. Am I suggesting that we turn God into a method for transforming our minds so that we might escape the pitfalls of modern technological thinking? I hope not. While it is certainly possible to attempt to turn prayer into a technique for getting God to give you what you want, that is not what I’m suggesting here. I’m aiming instead of the sort of prayer that Mother Teresa famously described when she was once asked in an interview, "What do you say when you pray?" She replied, "Nothing, I just listen." The reporter then asked, "Well then, what does God say to you?" To which she answered: "Nothing much, He listens too."