Goading Gladiators

Seán Moran analyses amphitheatrical antics.

I bought an old camera in a dusty NorthAfrican souk. It still contained a film, soout of curiosity I developed it. Thepicture reprinted here finally saw the light of day after countless decades in the dark.

Wouldn’t that have been a great story? The truth is more prosaic. Granted, the camera is an old one, and the action did happen in North Africa. But I took the photograph, in the Roman amphitheatre of El Jem. Here I witnessed combat and heard the clash of weapons and the crowd’s roar. To capture this image for Philosophy Now readers, I too fought: not a struggle to the death, but a battle of wills. Philosophically, they were both examples of agon – an ancient Greek word meaning both ‘contest’ and ‘disputation’. More about that later.

There are people who do develop photographs taken by strangers. They haunt thrift shops and online auction sites, seeking exposed film and loaded vintage cameras. One enthusiast, Levi Bettwieser from Idaho, USA, “has spent ‘upwards of $10,000’ on rolls of film over the past five years, and says that he ‘can get 10 rolls in a row that come out blank’” (The Observer Magazine, 21st July, 2019). Why would anyone pursue such an unpredictable and expensive quest?

It is the very unpredictability of the enterprise that excites people like Mr Bettwieser. He says so himself: “My heart starts pumping.” What he enjoys is effectively gambling; a deferred gratification that is all the sweeter for being risky. Intermittent rewards, or in the behaviourists’ parlance, ‘variable-ratio reinforcement’, are so uplifting that we can become addicted.