A Team from Fuzhou University Was Disqualified from the Chinese Women’s Football League

Because the players’ hair was not black enough.

Europe can spend weeks marvelling at Chinese rules in sport. But it should remember that it was—and remains—the source of many other, equally ‘obvious’ regulations governing behaviour.

In the very heart of green England, the émigré philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, irritated by his neighbours’ comments, wrote a short, ironic—take note, islanders—treatise entitled ‘The General Theory of Not-Gardening’. (The English version was published in the Journal of the Anthropological Society in Oxford, vol. XV, no. 1; the author’s Polish translation, ‘Ogólna teoria nie-uprawiania ogrodów’, appeared in Zeszyty Literackie in Paris, no. 18, 1986.)

Let us consider the source of the self-evident superiority of beliefs about the correct length of grass over equally strong beliefs about the correct colour of female footballers’ hair. Kołakowski’s treatise is so short and clearly expressed that it could offer many Europeans of venerable ancestry an ideal opportunity to begin reading philosophical texts. If we want to protect our way of life in the twenty-first century, we should genuinely settle down to such common reading. We still have a little time before new and indisputably binding legislation prohibits these strange and non-standard readings, out of concern for the world’s general neatness. There can be no doubt: the future should be neat and generally respectable. We see it in black.