All the Wrong Reasons

When I descended into Waka Commons—Winthrop House’s subterranean, vinyl-couch-and-broken-ping-pong-table-lined, industrial-carpeted wide-screen television den—to watch what would be the Red Sox’s final playoff game, I knew at once that something was amiss.

As Bill Mueller grounded out to second in Yankee Stadium, the few dozen Winthropians adhered to Waka’s red vinyl couches contorted their mouths into rictuses of despair and groaned theatrically. It wasn’t the Sox’s choking that troubled me; I don’t much like the Red Sox, and anyhow 20 years’ residency in Massachusetts has accustomed me to the self-pity-drenched meltdown that is a Red Sox postseason.

No, what bothered me was the fact that most of the groaning spectators were non-native. When cheering and berating, they pronounced the terminal “r” in “Nomar” and “Mueller.” On the Red Sox hats they’d folded into rally caps, each “B” shone, gules, against dark-blue backgrounds. Disgusted, I turned on my heel and ascended from Waka. “Never trust a man with a new baseball cap” is an axiom I’ve just made up. I hope it gains currency.

I know it must seem odd—my finding these newly-minted Red Sox fans so repugnant. After all, college is a time of new and transient loyalties. For those of us who aren’t Harvard legacies, our allegiance to Harvard—an allegiance that the development office will bank on for the rest of our lives—has no stronger foundation than the whim of an admissions officer and perhaps the good time we had pre-frosh weekend. Post-randomization, our allegiance to our Houses is even less deeply rooted.

Despite the arbitrariness of our loyalties to Harvard and House, these loyalties quickly become deeply held and fiercely defended. Harvard is littered with buildings bearing the names of loyal alumni; the Coop devotes its entire first floor to sweatshirts, visors and Nalgene bottles to vend to the Harvard faithful. In cities worldwide, Harvard clubs have healthy membership lists. And our loyalties to our Houses run as deep. With the willful blindness of zealotry, Quadlings defend their Garden Street gulag; House Committees do brisk trade in crest-emblazoned beer steins and shot glasses; in the spring, upperclassmen, one of whom will be dressed as a leveret, will gather outside Annenberg and—shouting, waving posters and distributing t-shirts—welcome first-years into the Houses they’ve just been assigned. And I don’t find any of that particularly objectionable.

Neither do I object to changes of allegiance. College, and in particular, this College, ought to make us examine the beliefs we’ve taken for granted—whether political, religious or philosophical. Adolescence is an ideal time for apostasy.

But—and this is where the new baseball caps come in—we ought not to abandon blindly-held beliefs for other, more fashionable, blindly-held beliefs. In “Corn-Pone Opinions,” a short piece in Europe and Elsewhere, Mark Twain writes that there is “hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, politics, or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies.”

Conformity, Twain writes, “is born of the human being’s natural yearning to stand well with his fellows and have their inspiring approval and praise—a yearning which is commonly so strong and so insistent that it cannot be effectually resisted and must have its way.” Conformity is the recourse of the man who “can’t bear to be in disfavor, can’t endure the averted face and the cold shoulder, wants to stand well with his friends, wants to be smiled upon, wants to be welcome, wants to hear the precious words, ‘He’s on the right track!’ Uttered perhaps by an ass, but still an ass of high degree, an ass whose approval is gold and diamonds to a smaller ass, and confers glory and honor and happiness and membership in the herd. For these gauds many a man will dump his life-long principles into the street, and his conscience along with them. We have seen it happen. In some millions of instances.”

If ever such a gaud took material form, then that gaud is a new Red Sox baseball cap. Yes, standing well with one’s friends is pleasant; yes, there is a satisfying sense of community wherever a television is tuned to a Red Sox game. But is membership in that herd really pleasant enough to make us forsake life-long (and in many instances, generations-long) allegiances to other (and in many instances, better) baseball teams? College should be about acquiring new allegiances, and also about examining old ones. It should never be about cheering for the Sox to please a herd of asses.

Phoebe Kosman ’05 is a history and literature concentrator in Winthrop House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.