I don’t write about sports much for much the same reason my dog doesn’t play the piano. It’s not that I am completely ill-equipped or untrainable in this regard, but even my best effort would only impress those with very low expectations. Nevertheless, there are some sports stories that can’t be ignored.
On October 8, 2003 the New York Times–which still claims to be the hometown paper of New York (hence the reason it’s not called “The Boston Times”)–editorially endorsed the Boston Red Sox over the New York Yankees in the hope of a World Series match-up between the Sox and the Chicago Cubs–two teams God put on this earth to teach their fans that life isn’t fair. In case you didn’t know, the Red Sox have been denied a victory in the World Series ever since Harry Frazee, the owner of the Red Sox, sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees in order to raise money for the musical production No, No, Nanette.
The Babe went to the Yankees and the Yankees won nine bazillion (or 26) World Series titles. The Red Sox have since won exactly none.
Even the most diehard fans of No, No, Nanette are today willing to concede that perhaps–perhaps–Frazee made a mistake.
After first offering “all due respect to our New York readers”–as if New York readers were no different from Montana or Paris readers–the Times rationalized its editorial on the grounds of “warm sentiment.” It would just be very nice and neat to see these two cursed teams–which have been disappointing fans for a combined total of 180 years–face each other. It just so happens that the only “hurdle” left for the Red Sox is the need to beat the hometown team of the New York Times. So, if the Yankees have to lose for the greater joy of humanity, so be it. Making such sacrifices is what the Times is for.
This is vexing for three very different reasons. First, who says that victory would make either Chicago or Boston better places? Perhaps adversity and disappointment add more to the character of both cities than victory ever could.
Second, it should be familiar news to everyone that the New York Times is a leader of full-disclosure fanaticism. The Times has–often rightly–gone after politicians, corporate executives, journalists, and other publications for failing fully to disclose their conflicts of interest. The Times has tsk-tsked medical journals about how they permit scientists with commercial ties to the pharmaceutical industry to contribute their findings. They skewered Reagan- and Clinton-administration members alike for what they deemed to be outrageous conflicts of interest. They are one of the culture’s leading advocates of the view that the appearance of a conflict can disqualify a public servant from doing his work just as much as an actual conflict.
Fair enough. That’s their view and it’s even often correct. But how the Times could have failed to inform readers that they are part owners of the Boston Red Sox is beyond me. Their website boasts the fact that Business Ethics Magazine listed the Times as one of the top 100 corporate citizens in 2003, but for some reason the Times’s editors couldn’t mention that they partially own the Red Sox and Fenway Park too?
I have no doubt that the editors of the Times were working from “warm sentiment” alone, but that does not erase the appearance of a conflict, now, does it?
THE COSMOPOLITAN TIMES
But enough about that. Either this will make you mad, or it won’t. Scouring newspaper archives for arrogant and high-minded quotes about conflict-of-interest and full disclosure won’t make a difference. What I actually find most troubling is the Times’s “warm sentiment” itself. Or rather, their elevation of warm sentiment over a newspaper’s proper attachment to its own local institutions.
One of the central tenets of conservatism is a respect for, and loyalty to, the familiar, the particular, the local. The conservative view of culture is that one should be a jealous, though not necessarily absolutist, defender of one’s own things. Southern conservatives understand this more implicitly than many ideological conservatives of the northeast (John Derbyshire calls them “Metrocons“). An attachment to home and soil, to one’s way of life, and to the traditional order which gives that life meaning and context is an essential part of what it means to be a conservative.
But it is not only conservatives who appreciate–or who should appreciate–the value and appeal of the familiar. The tug of loyalty to tribe, to team, to community, to faith, to country–is a central theme of human culture regardless of ideology. Fraternity brothers feel loyalty to their house. Leftists feel allegiance to class. Soldiers feel loyal to their platoon.
Of course, you can surely take such attachments too far, shifting from pride to chauvinism, jingoism, or racism. And, of course, you can also form attachments to immoral communities or to plain old asininity.
Now, I could go on about how the Greeks, the Founders, Edmund Burke, Robert Nisbet, or Ward Cleaver understood that humans could only be nurtured into citizens by first being shaped by local and particular communities. But, I’m trying to keep this column short (“too late,” quoth the Couch).
So let’s go at this from the other direction. Whenever Diogenes the Cynic (not to be confused with Diogenes the CPA or Diogenes: The Guy Who Ate 52 Chicken McNuggets) was asked where he was from, he responded he wasn’t from anywhere. Rather, he was a “citizen of the world.” In other words, he held no loyalty to any city-state but only to humanity in toto. This is the root idea of cosmopolitanism, the belief or–more accurately–the pose which holds that one is at home everywhere in the world (for a more complex and contrary view see Lee Harris’s essay).
Now as a matter of lifestyle, cosmopolitanism has a lot going for it. As a city-dweller I’m delighted to have a menu which includes tasty goodness from every corner of the globe. Indeed, Americans are by nature a lot more cosmopolitan than our detractors give us credit for. The crust of our culture is British (perhaps the most open and inquisitive culture ever known, particularly if you drain out the class warfare and substitute the Scottish enlightenment). Subsequently, we’ve sprinkled ingredients from every other culture on the globe on top of it.
But there’s a downside too. Believing that there is nothing special about your own place, your own culture, your own side is an invitation to meander rudderlessly through events, mistaking the conviction of others for a new North Star. Just as Chesterton noted that the purely rational man will not marry and the purely rational soldier will not fight, the purely rational cosmopolitan sees any particular allegiance as silly. He will look at tradition and culture not as something which binds one man to many but as a fashion or fad, or perhaps as a quaint custom worthy of becoming acquainted with solely for the fodder it might provide for cocktail banter. He will use his finger-in-the-wind morality to say one group is a victim and another is an oppressor. He will confuse power with oppression (the late Edward Said’s biggest failure) and forget that if power made one evil, then God would be the Devil.
Needless to say, the Cosmopolitan sees patriotic attachment as irrational, unnecessary, even silly. Hence the sillier peoples will get a free pass while the “enlightened” who still feel some loyalty to the old ways will face scorn. Tribes who eat endangered whales or lions, for example, are treated with reverence and condescension (which Cosmopolitans often confuse with respect), but societies with indoor plumbing and the rule of law are vilified as barbaric for maintaining, say, foxhunting.
The Left, particularly the academic Left, teems with a certain breed of Cosmopolitan (which makes sense given, for one thing, the universality of Marxism). Katha Pollitt trembled, when her daughter suggested hanging the American flag out her window after 9/11, said, “The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war.” Ever the Cosmopolitan, she declared: “The globe, not the flag, is the symbol that’s wanted now.” A professor from Columbia University declared that he dreams of a “million Mogadishus.”
It should hardly surprise anyone that the Cosmopolitan who salutes the globe instead of the flag would want the U.N. to succeed, even if–or perhaps especially if–it means the United States fails. Not too long ago, I wrote about how faith in the United Nations can be very relevant evidence of a lack of patriotism. I still believe that. That doesn’t mean you can’t be a patriot and wish for the U.N.’s success. It just means that if you are a patriot and wish for the U.N.’s success, you’re confused.
Which brings us back to the New York Times. The Times is a thoroughly cosmopolitan newspaper. It constantly editorializes in favor of the United States being “more humble,” “less arrogant,” and more willing to surrender some sovereignty to Brussels or the U.N. or to Kyoto. I don’t wish to sound condescending, but many Americans–many very intelligent Americans–take these proposals on good faith. They assume that the New York Times is arguing on the merits, that it is rationally weighing the stakes and deciding what is best for America.
But it isn’t.
The Times is deciding what is best for the world–as they see it. That’s fine. Indeed, it may be exactly what a newspaper like the Times should be doing. But it’s not patriotic, because its editors are writing from Olympus, not America–or New York.
But if I rant and rave about all that, lots of people may think: What the hell are you talking about? But, if I say: “Look: The New York Times rooted for the Red Sox over the New York Yankees,” they might see what I’m getting at.