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The relationship between theory and practice across forms of life 347
movement of my body. But it remains up to me to make the practice and
theory meaningful. The ball never lies. If it goes on an errant course,
however, I know enough to ask several questions: Where did I finish? Were
my feet rooted? Did I cock my wrists at the top of the swing? Was the tempo of
my swing the same going forward as going back? Did I finish with my weight
on a straight left leg, arms relaxed, with club and hands behind my back.
Instant empirical feedback and an opportunity to put a little theory back into
practice. 11
The first moral of the story: We can all use a good coach – in golf and in
virtually all of our endeavours. 12 More importantly for our story, we can
even use a good coach in law: We need feedback supplied by coaches and
critics who can see what we cannot – where we are going, and where we are
going wrong – and we need exercises designed so as to train ourselves not to
constantly fall backwards into our unhelpful default positions. Again – what’s
true in golf is true in law. 13
The second moral of the story: Watch yourself swing a golf club on film:
then bring the insights and collective wisdom of millions of golfers – and your
professional golf coach Stansi – to bear on what you are doing right and
what you are doing wrong. Go out and repeat the drills designed to bring it all
together. Suddenly you are part of a social practice in which centuries of trial
11 Don’t believe me? Listen to Hank Haney – Tiger Woods’s previous coach – explaining
what most amateurs do not do: They fail to deconstruct and reconstruct their swing
when the flight of the ball tells them that something must be wrong. Here is the
question asked of Haney (8 October 2009) by Connel Barrett: ‘What’s the biggest
mistake we mortals make in the swing?’ Haney replies: ‘The average golfer doesn’t
correctly diagnose the problem in his swing ... Instead they experiment with what might
work, or with what they read in a magazine. Or they go after a “feeling” in the swing.
What you should do instead is ask, “What’s my golf ball doing? What’s my ball flight?”
... You have to be a detective, and work backwards from impact. Before a lesson or a
range session, start with a ball-flight diagnosis and work from there’.
12
Psychotherapy is another such practice. One initiates therapy because one believes that
the manner in which one engages the world is flawed and leads to less-than-optimal
outcomes. The therapist provides two goods that the individual alone cannot provide.
First, she presents a relationship – a context – in which the patient can act out general
patterns of behaviour in the world. Second, she can provide a critical voice that sets out
the individual’s maladaptive behaviour in sharp relief. While there is no substitute for the
internalisation of this critical voice, we must be able to see the errors first before we can
respond constructively to them. Over time and with greater experience of the therapeutic
process, the patient begins to note certain regularities in her behaviour and how she and
the world respond to her various modes of engagement. As time goes on in therapy,
certain kinds of preferred ways of being should become ‘second nature’. That is, in
therapy, and over time, we replace existing maladaptive dispositional states with
beneficial dispositional states in such a manner that we ultimately require absolutely no
conscious awareness of those states.
13 As remarks made in further footnotes make clear, the extended analysis of such
divergent social practices such as therapy, golf, baseball and law goes beyond the notion of
‘practice makes perfect’ or ‘instrumental reasoning’. These practices are practices, not
mere analogous activities – and theory and practice in both take largely the same shape.
My respondents contend that the practice of golf is only concerned with putting the ball
in the hole, and that theory only relates to improving a score. That proposition is
fundamentally false. As already explained, golf happens to be extremely norm-governed
(around the principle of fairness). More importantly for the purposes of this exchange,
it is both a norm-creating and ethically-engaged social practice.