Novak Djokovic has spoken. But should we listen?
Novak Djokovic has spoken. But should we listen?
Well, yes, if you want advice on how to improve your backhand slice. In that case, there would be few people as qualified as the winner of 20 grand-slam titles to offer you tips. It would, however, be obviously foolish to ask his advice on tackling tricky leg-spin on a grassy Indian wicket. Nor should you give much merit to his opinions of Rembrandt or the novels of Virginia Woolf or Putin’s military options in Ukraine. Any suggestion otherwise is absurd given his lack of expertise in high art, geopolitical, slow-wicket thinking.
Yet we live in the Age of Names. The world arrives before us marketed in extraordinary ways that trump the lived experience. Here’s Paris Hilton on cryptocurrency; Justin Bieber on Non-Fungible Tokens. Next up is Gwyneth Paltrow on US dreadnoughts of the First World War and here’s another Name with great teeth and immaculate clothes talking gut biology on YouTube. Who in their right mind would not prefer their advice to anything offered by some dour GP with bad breath from behind a chipped NHS issue desk?
The same is true of the man considered by many to be the greatest tennis player in the history of the game. When Djokovic speaks, millions listen, even if what he says is well-hydrated nonsense lobbed expertly in from the backcourt of irrelevance.
“I was never against vaccination,” he is reported to have told the BBC, “but I’ve always supported the freedom to choose what you put in your body.”
Well, there you have it. A truth as profound as white bread. Repeated at a bus stop, it’s the kind of wisdom that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. When said to the BBC, it’s headline news across the globe for no reason other than the Name.
So, must we need to go through this again? Well, clearly, we must. Once a Name has claimed the Moon is flat, we need to consult the record, recheck those photographs from the Apollo missions, measure the shadows cast by the men who claimed to have walked there.
In this case, Djokovic continues to refuse the vaccine but not (apparently) because he’s anti-vax. Oh no. His stance is more principled than the increasingly indefensible criticism of vaccines that have now been taken by millions and saved the lives of countless thousands. Forget about social contracts, moral obligations, or increasingly conclusive scientific arguments about the efficacy of vaccines, Djokovic’s stance is about the rights of the individual to decide what’s put in their body.
It’s a principled (if stubborn) point of view that must also be defended. Sad, too, that one of tennis’s greatest players should end his career in this way on this matter, but greats have a habit of making equally poor decisions. Pete Sampras probably retired too early, whilst Ali was fighting long past his prime. Sean Connery retired because The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was such a disaster, thereby possibly denying us the chance to see him play Gandalf in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings.
“You sshaall not passh!”
And so, this is the hill Novak chooses to smash his racquets on…
Yet from a philosophical perspective, what does Djokovic add to the debate that we don’t already know? A hint of topspin? A particularly strong defence from the baseline? We already accept there’s a well-rehearsed libertarian argument that is only persuasive in the same way that free speech is often positioned against “cancel culture”. The right of the individual to speak is matched by an equal right of others not to listen. Djokovic expresses one right, but the sport’s organisers express the other. They have as much right to refuse an invite to Djokovic as they might ban somebody caught doping (which, essentially, involves the same decision about what competitors inject into their bodies).
The only novel aspect of Djokovic’s argument is his position as an easily identified figure in the world of celebrity. He is occupying the position of the brave, principled, uniquely “individual” individual. It’s the Self against the Other as if the “Other” weren’t also a collection of selves (aka you, me, and the nameless rest). And it’s always the case that it’s easier to sympathise with a Name because they’re a Name. It’s never quite so compelling to argue in favour of the “lesser” players on the tour. Who cares what the 97th or 218th best tennis players have to say on vaccines, medicine, or, indeed, moral philosophy? Who cares what the professor of history has to say about Dunkirk so long as we have a famous pub landlord to do the same? Who cares what the greatest literary critics of our age might say about poetry if we can have Stephen Fry chip in?
So, well done Djokovic for expressing the freedoms we all express each day in what we choose to read, to eat, to watch, to hear, or believe. It’s admirable seeing somebody stand on their principles, even if some of us believe his reasoning misjudged, but it is equally satisfying to see others stand by theirs.