Each March, the college basketball aristocracy are paired off with their plebeian counterparts for all of the first round games via a politically charged, pseudo-objective seeding process; when CBS is paying billions in rights fees to broadcast the tournament, the “brackets” are about as objective as the Immunity Challenges on that other CBS franchise, Survivor. The seeding arrangements make the tournament the most reliable opportunity for witnessing one of the most interesting sports fan behaviors: we always root for the underdog, unless they are playing our team.
Let’s begin with the first part of the equation, the fact that we (almost) always root for the underdog. There is, admittedly, a little of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” involved in this. As a Tar Heel fan, I always cheer for whichever team in the tournament is playing Duke. I want the Tar Heels to go as far in the tournament as possible, and, just as importantly, this needs to be at least one game further than the Blue Devils. I was just talking to my (96 year-old) grandmother, Bucky, today, and chatting about the Tar Heels’ relatively disappointing 2nd round loss in the tournament. Without missing a beat, and without any prompting from me, Bucky pointed out that while the Heels hadn’t gone far, at least Duke had done even worse, losing in the first round, sparing her from having to hear any gate mouth from the Dukies in her retirement community. Which retirement community is inconveniently located in Durham, i.e. Bucky lives on their turf. Good thing Bucky is tough as nails, in the best possible way.
College basketball, like the rest of America, is a landscape of haves and have-nots. The advantages held by college hoops blue bloods, the Carolinas, Dukes, and Kentuckies of the world, are legion: outsized athletic department budgets, deep pocketed boosters, constant television exposure, broad and deep fan bases, and home court cathedrals, just to name a few. In short, elite college basketball programs have a surfeit of power, and it is the responsibility of the head coach, with the full support of his athletic director and university president, to wield this power effectively enough to continually dominate the opposition. In other words, power is deployed in college basketball as it always has been in almost every chapter of human history. Cheering for the underdog, then, is an outlet for our collective instinct that this neverending story of power and its application is plain wrong. Carolina, Duke, and Kentucky aren’t evil (though we Carolina fans have fun pretending Duke is), but, in harnessing every resource to shock and awe their overwhelmed opponents, they are perfect stand-ins. (Evil = 500,000 dead in the Iraq War, all in the name of a lie. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/15/iraq-death-toll_n_4102855.html) Lest I be accused of “anti-Americanism,” I would ask America “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your eye?”) In always cheering for the underdog, we are constantly reimagining the world as a place where the last are, finally, first.
Except when we don’t cheer for the underdog, which is whenever they stand in the way of us finishing first. You may object that of course we root for our favorite teams against the opposition, including underdogs, because, duh, they’re our favorites. Suggesting that one refrain from cheering for one’s favorite team sounds like utter nonsense. But the fact that it sounds so nonsensical is, indeed, the crux of the problem. We so take for granted favoring our favorites (which I suppose is the very meaning of the word favorite) that we can’t even imagine doing otherwise. Which is all well and good in a basketball tournament, but which takes on new meaning when we realize that our absolute favorites, of course, are our very selves. So go ahead and cheer for whomever you please in March Madness; I would have turned on Dayton in a second if they had encountered the Tar Heels in their half of the bracket, Kim Deal notwithstanding. But understand that cheering for the underdog unless they are playing one’s favorite team is a reminder that we instinctively crave justice and equality right up to the point that it costs us something. With humans, the universal is (almost) always trumped by the particular, and “as above, so below” is replaced by “not in my back yard.” When we say “all politics is local,” we are really asking “What’s in it for me?”
We find the perfect exemplar of the tension between our intuition of the good and our instinct for self aggrandizement ready at hand in American history in the person of Thomas Jefferson, who famously wrote the following in our nation’s Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” And who just as famously proved unable to give up his slaves and the wealth and sexual access they provided. Self interest blinds us to the self evident truth. The very same dynamic is in play re: climate change, where the two possible responses in play for American power brokers are 1) denial or 2) hand wringing, neither of which costs anyone anything.
Organized religion has been something of a mixed bag down through the ages, though, from where I’m standing, we are, on balance, better for it. Exactly how much better is a more interesting question. The persistence of religious belief combined with the failure of the world’s great religious traditions to collectively bring about what my faith tradition would call the coming of the Kingdom (feel welcome to substitute your own tradition’s terminology for the happily-ever-after) tells us two important things. First, that our intuition of basic universal goodness is, like the State of the Union, strong. Strong enough that the world boasts 5.8 billion religious adherents, an amazing fidelity to the good given everything we know about suffering. (Though all brands of religion miss the mark, each to a varying degree in different historical moments, they also each always aim for goodness. I take this as an article of faith, which, somewhat ironically, decreases my own faith, i.e. I no longer feel about my own religion the way I feel about my children, who I know are the best. Short of feeling this way about one’s children I don’t know how it could be possible to do everything that needs to be done for them, and, just so, short of feeling just that way about one’s religion I don’t know how one is supposed to get one’s self to church, temple, mosque, meditation center, etc. Religion that loves its neighbor’s religion as devoutly as it loves itself cannot, seemingly, survive.) And second, that however strong our sense of the good may be, our sense of self, and all of the attendant self interest, is yet far stronger. We always cheer for our favorite team. Religion may be good enough and true enough, which explains why we all believe in the good, but it just isn’t strong enough. As in strong enough to make us do the right thing when it costs us something. Because if 5.8 billion people were doing the right thing, at whatever price, the Kingdom (or whatever you want to call it) would assuredly have already come. (I use the word assuredly because almost everyone almost always doing the right thing is, to my ears, the actual definition of “the Kingdom”; it is the only conceivable “best of all possible worlds.”)
The great tragedy of religion is that it has lost its great gamble that it could, indeed, prove strong enough. Religion would remake us, one by one, as individuals and communities willing to pay the price of righteousness (funny how tainted that word sounds, as if the idea of doing the right thing has gone rancid in the sun), or, as the Quakers put it on the banners above their meeting houses, willing to take the risks of peace. A significant chunk of religious life is practice for just these risks and sacrifices, e.g. fasting on Ramadan or Yom Kippur, observing Lent, or giving away one’s good fortune to others with the out breath in the Tibetan Buddhist practice of Tonglen meditation. Each of these is rehearsal for craving justice and equality deeply enough to break on through to the other side of self interest. But instead, like Jim Morrison himself overdosing on heroin, we continually hit a wall. And, we should note, we hit the very same wall, perhaps even harder, under the auspices of that religion for seculars, Marxism, the central tenet of which, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” requires at least as much selflessness as any of the aforementioned religions.
There is an old idea making the rounds again which holds that “it's institutions -- not people -- that are evil.” (http://www.salon.com/2014/04/23/noam_chomsky_was_right_why_the_koch_brothers_are_obscuring_the_real_enemy/) This observation is just slightly wide of the mark. I would say instead that 1) institutions aren’t selfish, people are, but 2) institutions leverage self interest so efficiently that they perform something of an anti-miracle, the transformation of water into wine replaced by the mutation of garden variety selfishness into evil. This distinction is critical because it informs another set of solutions. Because attempting to construct or reconstruct institutions which aren’t evil is nearly as hopeless as trying to raise entire generations of selfless individuals. We must recognize the intractable difficulty of both, grounding this insight in an understanding that the inevitability of selfish humans makes the existence of institutions that feed off of that selfishness, i.e. evil institutions, incredibly likely. But note that while human selfishness is, for the foreseeable future, inevitable, we are merely at incredibly high risk of evil institutions. We are, effectively, Jim Carey being told by the girl of his dreams in Dumb & Dumber that his odds with her are “like one out of a million.” Carey sublimely responds “So you’re telling me there’s a chance…YEAH!” So must we. Even if it makes us look dumb. The only alternatives are despair or Rhett Butler’s “I’ve always had a weakness for lost causes once they’re really lost,” though it is unclear whether the lost cause is us, religion, or both.
Our last, best, slim chance is building institutions that are neither good nor evil. Because all of the good institutions, which have tried to carry us past the threshold of self interest, tend to fail, and all of the evil institutions, which simply harness that self interest, tend to succeed. It is said that Buddhism’s First Noble Truth, which holds that life is suffering, is neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but realistic. We need institutions that are realistic in just this way. Realistic about both the limits of human selflessness, and the tendencies of institutions to exploit these very limits. There is at least one such human institution, namely the Potlatch:
'“In the potlatch, the host in effect challenged a guest chieftain to exceed him in his 'power' to give away or to destroy goods. If the guest did not return 100 percent on the gifts received and destroy even more wealth in a bigger and better bonfire, he and his people lost face and so his 'power' was diminished" Hierarchical relations within and between clans, villages, and nations, were observed and reinforced through the distribution or sometimes destruction of wealth, dance performances, and other ceremonies. The status of any given family is raised not by who has the most resources, but by who distributes the most resources. The hosts demonstrate their wealth and prominence through giving away goods.'(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potlatch)
The Potlatch, of course, is no miracle cure. But in bending self interest to the good, in stark contrast to the doomed effort to transcend self interest in the name of the good, it gives us a place to start. If we can build just such realistic human institutions, I’d say our odds are at least two out of a million.
So I’m telling you there’s a chance… YEAH!!!
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