Role Models

 "I am not a role model. I'm not paid to be a role model. I'm paid to wreak havoc on the basketball court. Parents should be role models. Just because I dunk a basketball doesn't mean I should raise your kids."

'Old birds are not caught by chaff'
John Arthur Lomax ( 1857-1923)
Photo Credit: Manchester Art Gallery [CC  BY-NC-ND] 

So said Charles Barkley, the brilliant NBA player, in a commercial in 1993. I've been reflecting on it with the news that Jordan Henderson is leaving Saudi Arabia after a six-month stint, presumably disappointed that his main objective of "growing the game" and "aiding understanding" between our two cultures didn't quite work out.

You see, Henderson wanted to be a role model and not just a footballer... talking about his conscience, his "real" feelings about social justice, his commitment to minority rights...

This public image, though, was found to be somewhat wanting when an offer came in from a football team in Saudi Arabia. I doubt that people would have been too judgemental had Henderson been honest when he signed for Al-Ettifaq and admitted that he did it for for the big paycheck...

In an interview with The Athletic, he said that it "wasn't about the money", that the "money had never been a motivation" and that he might be able to shift attitudes to gay people in Saudi (where homosexuality can be punished by death) because people "know his values".

Yeah, right. It isn't just Henderson of course. Some would say that Gary Lineker has demonstrated  similar hypocrisy over his proclamations of immigrant workers rights in Qatar, despite having previously taken the Qatari dollar.

One also thinks of golfers, tennis players, basketball players and NFL stars whose self-proclaimed political values have been found to be slightly flakier than one might expect. Is it cynical to suggest that they might have been expressing opinions not out of conviction but because they seemed conveniently virtuous, marketable, or both.

There is a word for this, of course: bullshit. And let me suggest that it is what tends to happen when we vest too much significance in the opinions of people not because of their expertise or conviction but because they can kick a football well, or have a big TikTok presence, or because they have appeared in The Only Way is Essex.

It is in many ways, a symptom of what has become known as celebrity culture, where people such as Lineker dominate contemporary political debate rather than (as was the case a few decades ago) intellectuals such as Bertrand Russell, AJP Taylor and Karl Popper...

Is it not, then time to shake things up? Isn't it time to drop the presumption that because a footballer can make a decent 30-yard, right-to-left pass we are also obliged to know their opinion on Gaza or minority rights or Donald Trump (unless, of course, they have particular expertise on the issue)?

Indeed, don't we need to move beyond our more general preoccupation with the views not just of footballers, but actors, TV presenters, pop stars and "influencers"?

In a serious age, perhaps it's time to get a bit more serious. And that, I'd suggest, means moving on from our celebrity infatuation.

(Matthew Syed, The Times, 2024)

Bravo. With individuals expressing their opinions be very aware of what their level of expertise is in the subject being discussed. Actors know about the skills required to act. Footballers know about football. Once people step out of their own individual skill your critical faculties should become heightened. Some politicians, for example, seem to want us to believe that their level of expertise applies to many subjects. It doesn't.