Golf: The Antidote to the Modern Madness
Golf: The Antidote to the Modern Madness
Greetings Golfers,
In 2007, former White House correspondent, Bill Moyers, observed “The further you get away from official Washington, the closer you get to reality”.
That’s quite an observation. And Moyers was hardly an extremist - he was considered a middle-of-the-road centrist.
How could the halls of power become so disconnected from reality? Well … philosophers have talked about it forever … they’ve seen the same patterns over-and-over.
For example:
Spengler: Mechanical Civilization devouring natural Culture.
Kierkegaard: The “Crowd” melting away individual responsibility.
Heidegger: Life reduced to extractable data and raw material.
Marcel: The bureaucratic reduction of humans to “psychic objects”.
Spengler and Heidegger warned that modernization turns the earth into an extractable, militarized grid.
They’re all basically saying that as big cities take over … that the people in cities are so removed from reality, that it turns societies into machines that devour its people.
Everyone becomes a number. And the earth just becomes a resource to be devoured.
So I asked AI if golf can be the antidote to this madness:
1.) Reconnecting with the Soil (Spengler’s Antidote)
Spengler warned that the tragedy of the world-city is that it cuts humanity off from the earth. That the early “culture-cities” (like Renaissance Florence) remained connected to their surroundings. However, the late-stage megapolis completely defies and contradicts nature.
The Golf Course: A golf course is a massive, carefully curated defiance of the concrete grid, it forces the human foot back onto the actual soil, surrounded by trees, water, and shifting winds.
2.) The Golf Course as the Ultimate Carlyle Sanctuary
Thomas Carlyle, the towering 19-century Scottish philosopher, looked at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and screamed that the machine was coming to murder the human soul.
When you look at a golfer on your course through Carlyle’s lens, the game transforms from a leisure sport into a profound, therapeutic ritual of the human spirit.
On the golf course, a player cannot “mechanize” a golf shot. No matter how much data of high-tech equipment they have, the actual execution of a swing requires a deeply organic, intuitive, and beautifully un-calculable connection between the mind, muscles, and the earth.
How fascinating is that?
Of course we’re all concerned about where our society is headed. It seems pretty screwed-up.
But … but … we have a remedy. And it works for everyone … even for old people like me.
If … golf courses start turning into real estate developments or data centers or even goofy parks … you know the end is near.
I hope Deer Run GC is here 100 years from now. And I hope golf will be in every community. I believe that we don’t have to become a mechanical, soulless society … golf is an important antidote.
Cheers!
Tom Abts
GM/Head PGA Professional
tabts@deerrungolf.com