Zayid and Umar live in Columbus,
OH. They hear that on Saturdays in the Fall, a group of cool people meet in
their secret club to drink beer and yell at a television screen. These cool
people are keen to make sure that only other cool people join their club. As
such, they only allow people who wear the right kind of clothes and say the
correct password to enter. Zayid wears scarlet and grey and says something very
ungentlemanly about a woman named Ann Arbor. As such, Zayid is deemed to be
cool enough to enter. Umar wears blue and maize and sings "Hail to the
Victors." He is chased away.
It turns out that the cool
people also have a meeting on Sundays where they sing songs and listen to a
sermon, followed by cake and socializing. Zayid makes sure to wear a cross and
tells the people that Jesus is his Lord and Savior. Umar wears a turban and
says "Allah Akbar." Once again, things go well for Zayid and poorly
for Umar.
The following Tuesday, these
cool people have their biannual go into a booth and fill in the circle next to
some politician get-together. Zayid wears red again and tells the people that we need to
ban critical race theory. Umar wears blue again and declares that the year 1619 was
the true founding of America. Perhaps Umar's luck finally turns around.
It is clear that the cool people hanging out in the first instance are simply fans of Buckeye football. There is nothing ideological about their opposition to Michigan. Even if Umar was the world's greatest expert on football and could talk for hours with charts about the superiority of Wolverine football, it would do little good. If anything, Umar's intellectual defense of Michigan would backfire and convince the Ohio State fans that Michigan represents empty intellectualism rather than the instinctual embrace of the "soul" of football.
If pressed, the
Ohio State fans would likely concede that there is nothing intellectual about
their choosing of Ohio State over Michigan. It is equally reasonable for Michigan
people to choose Michigan. That being said, they will still want Michigan people to
stay in their place "up north" and not force Ohio State fans to hang
out with them. Michigan people may only be pretend stink but that pretend stink still carries a whiff to it.
Once we understand that fandom
exists as something real where people are incredibly passionate about something
completely vacuous, it is hardly obvious that the fandom model is not in
operation in areas that make intellectual claims that sound like they should be
taken seriously such as religion and politics. Do the Buckeye Christians really
have a well-thought-out theology that allows them to reject Islam or does their
clubhouse serve the same function as a church on Sunday as it did as a Buckeye
hangout on Saturday? It is hardly obvious that there is a meaningful difference
between the claims “Jesus is Lord” and “Ann Arbor is a Whore.” The fact that
people around the world might proclaim the former with enthusiasm and without
the benefit of alcohol should matter little. If the Buckeye Christians do not talk about Jesus with a greater level of enthusiasm than their
denunciation of Ann Arbor, why should we not assume that both of them are
equally meaningful to them?
The same goes for politics even
though politics deals with objective facts as opposed to metaphysics and there
are real-world consequences to politicians of one party or the other winning
elections. (This is distinct from whether your vote actually matters.) Despite the fact
that people regularly make statements in politics that should be subject to
refutation, we should not take these claims seriously as something the people
actually believe. Their claims likely function not as truth statements but as
signaling devices to show what team they root for.
From this perspective, the more a
claim is clearly false, the more politically useful it becomes as a signaling
device. Claiming that Trump really won the election or that American police are the
moral equivalent of the Gestapo are both ridiculous. But the fact that they are ridiculous
makes them good signaling devices. Only a true-believing Trumpist or leftist,
who had no interest in being accepted by mainstream society, would ever say
such things.
Peter Boghossian engages in a useful exercise where he has
people line up along a spectrum indicating not whether they support a statement
or not but how strong their position is. One of the things that comes out
strongly from these exercises is that people who take the most extreme
positions are not there because they really have done significant research into
the topic. Instead, their positions are marks of their identity. This causes
them to take challenges to their positions very personally and lash out when
someone questions them. It is almost as if they were sports fans confronting fans of the opposing team.