Matt,

Thank you for your thoughtful and compelling response, as well as your nice words about The Situationist. We can certainly see how your experience would make you particularly sensitive to the phenomenon we described (the potentially destructive and often overlooked power of group associations common in sports) and how, with that fatal shooting in mind, our post would have seemed too weak in its condemnation of certain team-based behaviors.

In any event, we’re grateful to receive such substantive reader commentary, as they make this forum so much more engaging and illuminating for everyone. Thanks again. We look forward to further discussions.

I agree with the substance of everything you say in your response, including the suggestion that we seem to differ in our degree of empathy toward sports fans. My lack of empathy, and my emotional reaction to your article, no doubt stem from my own experiences with sports and violence, including the fatal shooting of my high school basketball team’s captain and his girlfriend by students from a rival school over an issue of team rivalry. The connection between competitive sports, tribalism, and violence has always been clear in my mind, and it’s exactly the “conventional understandings” by which you judge my statements “farfetched” that have always struck me as deeply in denial about the inseparability of these horribly destructive human tendencies from their expression in the form of athletic competition and group identification based on the structure of that competition.

That being said, of course I understand that in-group and out-group dynamics are universal in human psychology, and that not only do I myself engage in these behaviors in various forms, but that were my situation different I would be painting my face and kicking in teeth with the best of them. My understanding of situationism is that it is not a fatalistic, but a hopeful, enterprise; that it hopes not just to understand the social and neurological structures underlying human behavior but to leverage this understanding to avoid placing people in situations that result in socially destructive behavior. To that end, I would hope that you would endorse a proposal to limit the scope of sports fandom in our culture and to stigmatize overidentification with arbitrary tribal groups of the kind that inevitably leads to dehumanization of members of the opposing tribe. It is no doubt true, as you point out, that in-group dynamics are unavoidable; but through legal regulation and social disapproval we can limit their impact, just as we have worked hard over the last 150 years to limit the impact of racial in-group identification. Lynching and slavery are way down from 1857, and I’m happy about that. I’d love to see the same thing happen to hooliganism and shootings at high schools.

It is precisely because, as you say, these “immoral behaviors” are not necessarily perpetrated by “immoral people” that it is so important that we act to change our social, political, and legal attitudes toward sports fandom. After all, if I believed the actors to be immoral, then why would I concern myself with their sports fandom, which could only be peripheral to their directly, intentionally destructive acts?

You also express some disbelief that apologies for slavery have been written with the same tone as your article. I was, perhaps, more abstract than I should have been in my assertion. What I meant to allude to was a form of social commentary wherein the writer proposes some controversial radical position – that women might deserve the vote, that slavery might be wrong, that sports might be inextricably linked to nationalism and violence – and then winks at his audience throughout the piece to let them know that he is speaking highly speculatively, and that if called upon would of course defend the “conventional understandings” of these issues if forced to choose. In the domain of gender, this kind of thing was ubiquitous in the pre-PC era and continues to haunt the modern media landscape: the “Maybe the little ladies have a point”-style editorial, or the verbal skewering of some bit of male chauvinism on The Honeymooners followed by a reassuring “One of these days, Alice…”. We write these pieces in large part, I think, to explore troubling social realities while reassuring our audience and ourselves that such exploration does not render us fags, or nigger-lovers, or pussy-whipped losers, or pencil-necked geeks who always got picked last for basketball.

I empathize with your choice of this rhetorical device; this is a delicate topic and self-righteousness would probably be counterproductive for the task of raising readers’ awareness of it. I never believed that either of you harbored serious tendencies toward racism, sexism, nationalism, or any of the other cognitive biases that have become such sources of shame and guilt in our culture. Nonetheless, I think that you might have safely conveyed your nonjudgmental tone without quite so much reassurance (Go Hoyas!) to those readers sentimentally attached to the conventions of sports fandom. As it is, the piece risks alienating those who do not share this sentimental attachment, much as a modern reader is alienated by Jefferson’s or Washington’s half-hearted condemnations of slavery. You seem unable to conceive of a world in which some amount of sports-based tribal identification is not practiced; but some of us can, and it seems to me that the onus is on you to defend the practice rationally after having pointed out its unfortunate consequences. If you admit that such a defense is impossible, it doesn’t of course make you a bad person for being attached to the tradition, but it should make you question the appropriateness of leavening your article with shout-outs to your homies.

In closing, I should say that I got a lot out of the article, and I’m glad that it’s an issue people are talking about, especially in a forum as full of promise as The Situationist. So please don’t take my comments as purely critical. Go Redskins! (Ha.)

- Matt Norwood

Thanks for the comments and link. To be clear, we are not social psychologists (though many of the contributors to The Situationist are). We’re legal scholars with a deep interest in the implications of social psychology and related fields for law, legal theory, and other social institutions.

Regarding your comment, perhaps it’s fair and accurate to compare us to apologists for slavery. Our own sense, however, is that you’ve misread us, missed our point, or maybe you and we just fundamentally disagree.

To summarize our post in one sentence: There is a downside of sports that is being ignored and that ought not to be.

Your comment seems to suggest that, in part because of our occasionally flip tone, we are making a bad problem worse. Perhaps so, but we’re interested in at least raising the problem to an audience that is often unaware of it. And the implicit message we meant to send with our tone was not that we think the problems we raise are trivial – quite the contrary – but that we do not sit in self-righteous judgment of those who are painting team logos on their foreheads for the sake of team spirit. We understand that tendency – even if, as we highlight, it is an odd, difficult-to-rationalize, and potentially troubling practice. We also like humor because, if you’ll excuse our erudite literary illusion, “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” Though we did try to keep our post light, our aim was not to tell a few good ones and then encourage our readers to return to their beer and remote.

Your comment also seems to suggest that a human tendency that might manifest itself in numerous ways is in all circumstances, immoral (“the psychological phenomenon of sports fandom is no different in its foundations from the psychological phenomenon that gives rise to genocide”). (This is part of what Mr. Kotter is responding to.) Such a position strikes us as, not just extreme (which we might otherwise be ok with), but wrong.

In our view, many of the bad things that happen in this world result from our not critically examining these strong tendencies. It is not our position that those tendencies are themselves necessarily immoral. Just as, say, knowledge structures (that is, the schemas and categories we use to make sense of the endless information we face at every moment) are inevitable and often useful, they are also the source of much stereotyping and prejudice, among other harmful consequences. Still, knowledge structures are not, in themselves, immoral. In our view, the immorality kicks in from not understanding the power and influence of our knowledge structures and not looking for their harmful consequences. The same can be said, we believe, of our often mindless tendencies to form, identify with (or not), and be loyal to or (in opposition with) certain groups. Morality, we think, requires, as a starting point, examining the subconscious sources of our behavior and its consequences – good and bad.

Roughly, that is the project that many scholars in law, psychology, and philosophy (including but not limited to the contributors to The Situationist) have been turning to. It’s too easy to point to the “immoral people” and their “immoral behaviors” while ignoring the situation within and around them. The more difficult challenges involve taking seriously the possibilities that good and bad tendencies are hidden even to ourselves, are linked and causally intertwined in all of us, and are subject to hard-to-see forces in ways that are not captured by traditional conceptions of the person or of morality. As we write in the post: “Sports reflect and exploit tendencies that have both good and bad effects. Why not dwell a little less on the former and focus a bit more on the latter?”

Additionally, we want to suggest a possible difference in your starting point from ours. We start from a position of empathy with sports fans — which, of course, is part of our message. “Us” is “Them.” You seem not to. Instead, you seem to divide the world into two camps — the moral and the immoral. We prefer our starting point.

Finally, you may well be right to suggest that the roots of “racism and misogyny” are to be found in our post. In important ways, “Us” is “Them” for those issues as well. And those roots are to be found virtually everywhere, including within each of us. Perhaps analogizing our post to “how social commentators used to write about slavery, lynching, and the denial of basic civil rights to racial minorities and women” is a useful reminder of that sad fact. But, by conventional understandings, the analogy strikes us as farfetched.

In any event, we’d be interested in some examples of the phenomenon you describe: “acknowledge that all rational evidence points toward th[e]se things being morally unpardonable, then fall back on social convention and back-slapping flipness about how no one could actually believe that such racism or misogyny is actually morally wrong.” To be sure, “custom” seems a powerful source of legitimating authority and racist and sexist jokes seem to serve a kind of dissonance-reducing role (a major source of their popularity in many circles to this day, we suspect), but we cannot recall reading any sort of apology for slavery that had anything close to the tone or message that our post has. This is a topic we’re interested in, and we’re quite sincere in asking for some examples. (In case you’re interested, one of us has written about slavery, lynching, civil rights, and some of their psychological sources and justifications in several articles, including the following: http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/crcl/vol41_2/hanson.pdf)
To conclude, let us get back to our main point. We think that sports might be a vehicle for better understanding the roots or racism, misogyny, etc. and addressing them – and not just a means of ignoring or, worse, nourishing those roots.