A WHILE AGO I signed up to teach at the City University of New York for a semester each year. When I announced this new appointment on Facebook, I added that it probably meant I’d become a Yankees fan.
This prompted an animated email from my philosophical acquaintance Alva Noë:
“There is something you need to know. All decent, true, right-thinking, generous, progressive, beautiful people from New York are Mets fans. We repudiate the Yankees and everything they stand for. I can understand how, from afar, this might not be clear. But the Yankees are to New York as the Republican Party is to America—Loud, Rich, All-Too-Victorious, and Very Very Bad.
“As a fellow philosopher, as a born-and-bred New Yorker, I invite you, I urge you, I implore you, do not turn toward the New York Dark Side up there in the Bronx, but open yourself to the Light in Queens, the hapless, loveable, New York Mets. Supporting the Mets, following the Mets, will enrich your life, and heart, and soul.”
Well, I thanked Alva for the information, and expressed sympathy with his sentiments. But his email didn’t do the trick. Not that I disbelieved what he said. But it didn’t turn me into a Mets fan, or even rule out becoming a Yankees one.
This set me wondering. What makes someone a fan, beyond appreciating the objective merits of a team? On reflection the answer is obvious enough. Fans are partisan. They attach more importance to the success of their team than is warranted by their real virtues—or lack thereof, if Alva is right about the Yankees.
Put this way, you might wonder whether supporting a team is fully rational. How can fans sensibly suppose that it is important for their side to win, even when there is no objective basis for their favouritism? Sometimes fans pray for their team’s victory. What can they be thinking? Why should an all-wise God, who presumably dispenses reward in proportion to desert, attach any weight to their partisan enthusiasms?
This is a question about value and the perception of value. Arsenal fans attach great value to their team beating Spurs, while the Spurs fans see it just the other way round. It looks as if at least one faction has lost touch with reality, or at least with any reality that might carry any weight with God.
Is there really a problem here? Don’t the two sets of supporters simply have different sets of desires, just as I desire chocolate ice-cream while you desire strawberry? And doesn’t that in turn show why their appeals to God make sense after all? Won’t God agree that it is objectively good, other things being equal, that human desires be satisfied? The different fans are simply reminding God that satisfying their respective wishes will add to the stock of human good.
Plausible as it is, this account of fandom does not hold water. It’s just not true that satisfying desires is always a good thing. Imagine a woman who finds herself with a strange compulsion to eat a plate of mud. When asked about this, she can’t explain how it would benefit her. It’s not going to taste nice, she won’t feel good after eating it, she’s not going to win a bet, there’s nothing uncomfortable about leaving the urge unsatisfied. It’s just that somehow she feels pulled towards the mud. In this case, the mere fact that the woman desires the mud doesn’t make it good that she gets it. The world will be just as good a place if she doesn’t. Even from her own point of view, there is nothing at all worthwhile in the outcome.
In fact, there are real-life cases that aren’t far off this. Consider people with an eighty-a-day cigarette habit. As soon as they have finished one fag, they have a yen for another. But they may well know that they won’t enjoy it at all when they get it (it will turn to ashes in their mouth). They themselves can see that they will get nothing valuable from the next smoke. They are just compelled to have it.
These examples show that explaining value in terms of desire-satisfaction has things back to front. A healthy person will desire what they take to be valuable, not take it to be valuable because they desire it. If you do find yourself desiring something that you don’t take to be valuable, as with the plate-of-mud woman or the cigarette addict, then you can see that you are in a bit of a mess. We want our desires to aim at what’s independently worthwhile, not to be floating in thin air.
That’s how it is with the Arsenal and Spurs supporters. They don’t think that they are in a mess. They think that what they desire is really worthwhile, namely the Gunners thrashing Spurs, or vice versa, as the case may be. And when they pray to God, they aren’t just petitioning for a general increase in the level of human desire satisfaction—for after all that could be achieved just as well by satisfying their opponents’ desires—but to foster what is objectively important, their own side winning, and their unworthy opponents losing.
But this now looks close to incoherent again. How can a grown-up person seriously think that it is objectively valuable that their side win, when the opposing fans have just as good a claim?
Still, before we condemn fandom to the dustbin of irrationality, it’s worth noting that this kind of partisanship runs deep through human life. I am devoted to the welfare of my two wonderful children, but I am not so blind as to think that in the greater scheme of things they are more deserving than everybody else’s offspring. I am ready to do things for my friends that I wouldn’t dream of doing for equally worthy strangers. I am delighted when my philosophy departments trounce others in the rankings tables, for no other reason than that I am in them. And so on.
Still, even if partisanship is rife, there remains something puzzling about it. If everyone’s children are equally valuable, then how can it be right to think that your own are more important? More generally, how can certain outcomes be valuable from some perspectives, but not from others? Many philosophers are deeply suspicious of such “agent-relative values”. They feel that they are inconsistent with the idea that healthy desires ought to aim at what is objectively worthwhile, not just at partisan fancies.
Some theorists argue that the only way out of this tangle is to stop thinking about outcomes and start thinking about duties. In philosophy, it is normal to distinguish between “teleological” and “deontological” theories of moral correctness. Where teleological theories assess actions in terms of outcomes, deontological theories focus on rules, on what’s required and what’s allowed.
The difference between the two theories is not always obvious, but there are cases that bring it out. Imagine that you see an advertisement for a job supervising slaves in some foreign country. You can’t do anything to stop the country practising slavery. You are unemployed and need a job to support your family. If you don’t take it, there are plenty of others who will, most of whom will undoubtedly treat the slaves much worse than you would.
As far as outcomes go, this looks like a no-brainer. Your family’s poverty is alleviated, and the slaves are better off. Where’s the bad bit? Go for it, say the teleologists.
But deontologists will hold that complicity in slavery is always wrong, whatever the consequences. Even if the world would be a better place overall, it still wouldn’t be right for you to take the job. The wrongness of supervising slaves isn’t washed out by the benefits. Deontologists think that there are basic principles about right and wrong actions, quite independently of whether they lead to good results. The end does not always justify the means.
Whatever you think about this general issue, deontology certainly seems to have an advantage over teleology when it comes to partisanship. The reason I should care about my children more than yours, says the deontologist, is not that this leads to better net outcomes all round—after all, my children are no more important than yours—but simply that we all have a duty to look after our own children.
More generally, once you start thinking in terms of right rather than good, say the deontologists, the problem of partisanship simply goes away. Of course humans owe special duties to their nearest and dearest, just because they are near and dear, and not because they are otherwise special.
Well, this may work fine for children, and friends, and maybe even for university departments. But it seems to fall down for sports fans. Duty doesn’t seem to come into it. Not even the most enthusiastic deontologist would say that Arsenal fans have a duty to support their team. Even if you grew up in an Arsenal household, you just might not find soccer interesting. Or your enthusiasm for your team might fade away. We look askance at parents who neglect their children, or at people who drop their friends, but there seems nothing wrong with losing interest in a soccer team.
Fandom can only be understood in terms of outcomes, not duties. So it only makes sense if we acknowledge the legitimacy of agent-relative values, recognizing that some outcomes can be genuinely valuable from one perspective but not others. Supporting a team isn’t a matter of duty, but of viewing importance through partisan spectacles. A Gunners victory is valuable from the standpoint of the Arsenal supporter, but not of course from the Spurs angle. To appreciate the logic of fandom we have to accept that the worth of some things is irreducibly parochial.
If fandom were an isolated case, then perhaps the right conclusion would be that it really doesn’t make sense to be a sports fan. But in truth there are many other personal values that similarly can’t be explained in terms of duties. I value, in ways you might not, the environment in the Dengie peninsula of Essex, the music of New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta, the niceties of English grammar, the fate of the European Ryder Cup team, and so on. It’s not that I think everybody has a duty to foster and appreciate these things. But for me they are part of what makes life worthwhile.
I would say that such things are valuable for me because they form part of my identity. I have taken them on, made them part of my life’s projects. This involves more than just desiring them. As we saw earlier, you can desire something without viewing it as in any way valuable. But here I do regard these things as valuable. I have signed up to the mission.
We humans give meaning to our lives by adopting projects and working to achieve them. We care about our villages, schools, reputations, careers, houses, gardens, and hobbies. Some of these are individual commitments, while others are collective. But what they have in common is that they create agent-relative values. Once you have embraced a project, it comes to have a special importance for you, but not for those who lack it, in a way it didn’t before. So it is with supporting a team. Once you become a fan, the success of the team becomes one of your projects.
Does it have to be such a big deal? How much of a project is it to check your team’s scores on the Sunday sports pages? But it is not hard to discern ambitions and plans in ordinary fandom. Once you support a team, you take on a kind of responsibility for its welfare.
For a couple of years my son Louis and I had tickets at the Emirates. I am no Arsenal supporter. (I remember “boring Arsenal” from the 1970s.) But Louis and his friends very much are. In the pub before the game, the conversation went like this. “How do you think we’ll do today?” “I hope we’re not playing Chamakh.” “Yeah, we badly need another striker.” My silence was awkward, but I couldn’t bring myself to say “we”. Once I tried to join in and started by saying “Arsenal will…”. The whole pub turned to look at me.
Louis and his friends are typical sports fans. They aspire to shape the destiny of their teams. They think about strategy and team selection, and they do what they can to make their views known. They debate with other fans, contribute to websites and phone-ins, and scream encouragement and advice during games—even if they are only watching on television. They may have no real influence, of course, but that doesn’t stop them feeling involved.
Can’t you root for a team or player even if you haven’t adopted them as a project? Certainly. You can want them to win because they deserve to, not because you follow them. I had no axe to grind when Muhammad Ali recaptured his stolen title in the jungle, or when Usain Bolt joyfully ran away from the field in the 2008 Olympics 100 metres. I was delighted simply because excellence had prevailed. Any right-thinking person would have felt the same.
I am not saying that it is terribly difficult to start supporting a team. It’s just that it demands more than an impartial approval of the team’s merits. You need to sign up. You need to add a new commitment to the other projects that define you. I’m not sure that there is any logic to how we acquire the projects that add extra value to our lives. Many of them come with growing up. Later in life we may lose old ones and find new ones. It depends on what interests and attracts us, on where and how we live, on whom we hang out with.
The contingency of sporting affiliations is illustrated by a story I was told by a friend, the psychologist Tony Marcel. “My cousin and I were at my mother’s bedside when she was in a seemingly terminal coma shortly before her death. We fell to discussing when we had become Arsenal supporters. I remembered a photo of me at about three in an Arsenal strip, and wondered if it was a present from a family member. Suddenly, without opening her eyes, my mother said, ‘No, your uncle’s friend Peter gave it to you to spite us. We were all Spurs supporters.’ Apart from amazement at my mother’s capacity, this has caused a continuing identity crisis for me.”
Some of our sporting attachments may be haphazardly acquired, like Tony’s, but this doesn’t stop them from adding meaning to our lives. Along with other agent-relative values, they are products of the projects and commitments we use to define ourselves. Without affiliations of these kinds, the world would be a thinner place. We would be constrained by the duties we share with other moral agents, but we would have no basis for the particular enthusiasms that animate us. Agent-relative values add a kaleidoscope of varying passions to the black-and-white uniformity of duty.
When I arrived in New York in the spring of 2015, I tried out both the Yankees and the Mets.
Alva was right. Yankee Stadium was a big disappointment. I’d been to watch the Yankees before—back in 1975, when I’d seen Catfish Hunter pitching and the late Thurman Munson catching (I still have a Yankees T-shirt with Munson’s retired number 15)—and I’d had a great time. But that was a different era.
The new modern stadium, opened in 2009, was just as Alva said—noisy, brash, and all-round unpleasant. We were drowned in a flood of raucous music, sponsors’ jingles, and novelty events. I’d gone with a friend, but conversation was impossible. The only time the cacophony stopped was during actual play—which was the one time we wanted to watch, not talk.
The Mets’ Citi Field Stadium was better. There were still big screens and sponsors’ promotions, but it was much quieter, suburban, almost rural. I liked it a lot, and quickly warmed to the hapless Mets, riding out to Citi Field whenever I could.
Except that year they weren’t hapless at all. They went from strength to strength as the season unfolded, and their roster of young pitchers took them all the way to the World Series, brushing aside the Dodgers and the Cubs in the play-offs.
But it wasn’t to be. The Kansas City Royals, steeled by their experience of losing the Series the year before, hustled the Mets out of it. I was back in England by then, but I watched every game on television.
The final game of the Series summed it up. The Mets were up 2–0 going into the top of the ninth, but then Eric Hosmer drove in a Royals run with a double, and then advanced to third with one out. The next man up hit a weak ground ball to third baseman David Wright. Now, in this situation, as we saw in Chapter 2, “you must first pause momentarily to hold the runner on third before you throw to first”. And Wright did exactly that. But Hosmer must not have read the manual, or maybe he just fancied his chances, for as soon as Wright let it go he took off for home, and tied up the score when Lucas Duda’s throw to the plate from first went a few feet wide.
So it goes. That was pretty much it. The Royals took the Series when they ran up five runs in the twelfth inning. I was gutted. Still, it was fun while it lasted. There’ll be more seasons. I’m glad I’m a Mets fan.