Don't Ever Judge Me By Your Standards, Collectivist Football Edition

(Because the Doctor is relevant to absolutely everything.)

George Will apparently wrote a column in the past couple of days arguing that football, and college football in particular, is part of an effort by progressives to turn higher education into a cauldron of collectivism. There's a lot about it that's really silly, but since I'm not a football guy I'd just like to focus on this line in particular:

"Football taught the progressive virtue of subordinating the individual to the collectivity."

That segues into something about how much attention (and money!) gets paid to the coaches of college football teams. Whatever. "The progressive virtue of subordinating the individual to the collectivity"? What? That's, um, not a progressive virtue. So, is Mr. Will just making stuff up here? Is he just delusional? No, I think there's a pretty specific effect at work here, and it's basically projection, or, as the Doctor would put it, judging us by his own side's standards.

Because, you see, when conservatives do collectivism--and yes, conservatives do collectivism!--it is about subordinating the individual to the collectivity. We can see this in a lot of areas, but I think the best example is war. The military, of course, is about subordinating the individual to the collectivity. Hell, "insubordination" is practically a criminal offense. And while there are certainly lots of military persons who are left-wing and lots of left-wingers who like to talk about how awesome the military is, I think it's fair to say that the American conservative movement is much more devoted to the militaristic worldview and way of thinking than American liberalism is. One can see a similar sort of subordinating collectivism in various other things, again, not things that are the exclusive province of conservatives but that are disproportionately conservative. Things like patriotism, and other hierarchical social structures, for example, and to various extents religion.

So, why does that matter? Because that military ethos, which is, again, very much about subordinating the individual to the collectivity, informs a conservative's view of what collectivism is, and must be. So when liberals extol the virtues of collective enterprise, and community, and so on and so forth, conservatives assume they mean something like the spirit of the military. But it's not that at all. It's really the other way around: liberals believe that the collectivity can be harnessed to do good things for the sake of its constituent individuals, in ways that those individuals acting individually could not. That's very different from the team-sport mentality where the welfare of individual team members only matters insofar as it contributes to the team's future success. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find any issue where modern American liberalism favors such "subordination," although certainly liberalism is not just hedonism and often thinks that people need to be prevented from doing exactly what they want in every way at every time to advance some commonly-beneficial goal.

And note the difference in how Democrats and Republicans treat the military. Republicans love to attack Democrats for not supporting the troops, but then don't give those troops sufficient battle armor while they're abroad "fighting for our freedom," and don't provide much in the way of veterans' benefits. It's Democrats who want to do that stuff. Republicans like to talk about how "freedom isn't free," i.e., a whole bunch of individuals must sacrifice so that the nation (a collectivity!) can enjoy freedom. Democrats want to do everything they can to enhance the well-being of those individuals who have made those sacrifices, during their active duty and thereafter.

So the "progressive value" Will describes is anything but. He's describing the Republican approach to collectivism, and then assuming that when Democrats promote various collectivist ideas they have the same sort of thing in mind. And then attacking them for it. I'm not sure why; I'm sure he's written columns over the years about how much better everything would be if the world had a more militaristic ethos, or if those damn kids would just learn some respect for authority. Maybe he's just saying it because it sounds scary.

Another interpretation, of course, is that he really does just mean that Democrats want people, especially rich ones, to pay somewhat more in taxes than Republicans do, and that this constitutes a desire to "subordinate" the individual to the collectivity. In which case, we just have the same old philosophical overreaching on taxes. Ho hum.