I will feel what you cannot

Undeserving You – Holy Roman Empire

Scott Lemieux, who I normally agree with on basically everything, makes one of my all-time least favorite arguments regarding the France-Ireland match:

The blame for being eliminated from the World Cup belongs, in its entirety, to the players of the Irish team. They put themselves in the place in which a single bad break could eliminate them by 1)losing the first game and 2)blowing failing to extend a lead in the second game.

This is just boilerplate conservatism laundered through the metaphor of sports. It stems from the idea that individual virtue is the sole basic for distributing goods. It’s not enough to meet the threshold for victory that was established prior to the game – you don’t really deserve to win unless you obliterate your opponent. Doing a sufficient amount to win given the established system gets tossed out the window in favor of individual, subjective judgments about who is truly worthy.

This is really kind of troubling, insofar as it implies that cheating is only bad if it causes material harm to someone worthy. Ireland, in this approach, lost all right to demand justice because they didn’t meet the Lemieux standard for beating the opponent so badly that ref malfeasance couldn’t hurt them. That is the kind of toxic individualism that frames the way our society thinks about things like affirmative action. “We’ve hired three black people which prove we’re not racists – if we didn’t hire someone else it must just be that they didn’t meet our standards.” This amounts to excusing discrimination when it happens against a class – because any particular person can always overcome it by being just a little more exceptional.

You get the exact same argument about the 2000 election. Sure, if Gore had run a ‘better’ campaign he probably could have made it so that the race wasn’t close enough to come down to Florida. But that doesn’t make Bush v. Gore fair.

Effectively, it’s a way of thinking about the world where justice is wholly determined by subjective assessment of who is worthy. It completely forecloses the capacity to allow for nuance: that the CAUSE of the loss was BOTH a failure by Ireland to win the match in regular time AND the mistake made by the referee. Lemieux refuses to see this, insisting that “The blame for being eliminated from the World Cup belongs, in its entirety, to the players of the Irish team.” Of course, a more exceptional performance could have alleviated the ability of Henry and the ref to knock them out. However, even accounting for that, they did what was necessary to go to penalties. That they had this taken from them remains an injustice.

The need to assign blame in absolute terms is nothing more than a way to tell stories such that institutional reforms are never necessary. The individuals involved could always have done things a little bit better, so why mess with the system? Random events are inevitable…what are you gonna do? That’s fatalistic and depressing. Yes, random events are inevitable. If Ireland loses because the ball hit a divot and went in, that’s one thing. But if they go out as the direct product of an act in VIOLATION of the rules, it’s entirely different.

Some mistakes are inevitable. But correctable mistakes should be corrected.

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