On Time, Sporting Statistics, and a Bad Metaphor

As one of the great minds of the 20th century* once said, I don’t believe in Time. Time isn’t a real, tangible thing. Not the way that gravity and rocks and especially rocks under the influence of gravity are tangible things. To quote a Doctor, people assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a nonlinear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey . . . stuff.

Time isn’t so much a thing as it is a convenient way to talk about our experience of life, the way a given person has existential awareness only at a single given point on the spacetime continuum rendering all other points either before or after: lame.

Sure, as far as chronologically reductive experiences go, we humans have it way better than literally every other thing in the known universe. The sweet quasi-quantum computing engines we call our brains are several orders of magnitude more awesome than anything else we have ever found anywhere, and mostly because of the way they function as personal pseudo-time machines. Our memories enable us to revisit our personal past, and our imaginations enable us extrapolate from those experiences to explore any other pasts, or any possible futures.

Of course, our time machines aren’t perfect. As Proust said, the remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were. That’s fine. The precision of our time machines is less important than the way the existence of those time machines changes the way we experience our present: humans are inescapably aware that times other than our present exist, and that life would be experienced differently in those times.

The English language has a bunch of awesome words to talk about our perception of things that feel like they would be better suited, more comfortable, or a better aesthetic fit in a different era: vintage, futuristic, retro, next, outdated, premature, obsolete, ahead-of-their-time, anachronistic, etc . . .

Being limited in our experience of time and being aware of other times combine to produce a fascination with imagining comparisons across ages, an imagination that has only been fueled by the somewhat recent development of our statistical obsession with quantifying sport. Championships might determine who is the best in a given year, or at a given moment, but statistics give us points of reference to argue about who is the best of all time.

I’ll try to delve deeper into the beauty and benefit of Bayesian statistics in another post. For now, I’ll just note that statistics can only ever have so much comparative power because all games exist within a social fabric that is constantly being rewoven. That is, all the off-court contexts for every game keep changing, so even if the rules of a given game itself remain constant over the course of decades (and none of them do), it is difficult to just compare the stats.

Having to have multiple jobs because being an athlete doesn’t pay enough to feed your children is a different context within which to compete than owning several businesses because you want to diversify the millions of dollars you made as an athlete. Stats don’t allow direct comparisons across eras, so much as stats are a tool to allow us to imagine such comparisons better. However rich one’s imagination, though, it would be way more fun to get to see the athletes from different eras compete on the good old material plane.

The list of past sporting heroes that it would be fascinating to see competing against the legends of today is too long to do justice. Who wouldn’t want to see what Jordan would do without hand checking rules? (He’d average over 40 a game, by the way.) Want to see how Wilt and Russel stack up against Shaq, Olajuwon, KG, Duncan, or the Brow? Gretzky vs Crosby? Maradona playing in an age of personal trainers and diets instead of straight amphetamines?

Of all the legends of days gone by, though, there might be none that were more diminished by their era than the Pistol.

It has been a blast the last decade watching Steph Curry mature into the Warrior Wizard of Oracle, crossing fools up and dropping off the dribble threes from absolutely wherever he feels like. A bunch of the kids who have been mimicking his game on playgrounds across the country are now reaching the spotlight of primetime college hoops and these ballers are delightful.

The game is just getting more dynamic and exciting as the years progress, but this one point has to be made. Every single ‘record’ that is set by players like Trae Young should come with an asterisk: freshman records and three point records will never be perfect because neither of them can allow functional comparison to Pistol Pete Maravich who, through the most unlucky of chronological coincidences, was forced to play at a time when freshmen couldn’t play, all field goals were worth the same amount of points, and the shot clock hadn’t come to save college basketball, yet.

Much the way all our lives would be improved if Pistol Pete was dropping 50 every night and killing all the social media channels, our societal discourse about religion would be much improved if Karl Marx had been fortunate enough to be born after the invention of microprocessors. Not because Karl would be able to see some of the shortcomings of his theories with the hindsight clarity of their failed applications, and not because he would have thrived in the Great Hipster Beard Revival.

At least, not only for those reasons.

Unfortunately, we don’t have the same kind of statistical analysis of philosophers that we have for athletes. We can look at Pistol Pete’s shooting percentages from various distances and imagine how he would have done with a three point line without straining our quasi-quantum processors too much. We don’t have conceptual statistical parallels to illustrate how being born in the digital age would have given Karl access to a wealth of concepts that could have rescued him from a bad metaphor that has been abused to no end ever since.

The fact that Marx’s bad metaphor is maybe the most well known of his aphorisms is as sad as the fact that most Americans only know Zinedine Zidane as the guy who cracked a dude’s sternum with his dome in game during the World Cup. It’s like knowing Jordan as that tall awkward outfielder for the White Sox in the mid 90’s, or referring to Shaq as the acting genius responsible for Kazaam.

Actually, I’m kinda comfortable with that last one.

The point is, it’s a little sad when titans in a given field are best known for ignominious moments or declarations, but such is the risk in writing in aphorisms or living in the modern media spotlight. As another brilliant thinker who is often reduced to his hottest and pithiest take observed, the aphorism is the mountaintop of writing. Powerful, concise statements gain the weight of ‘proverb’ when they convey practical wisdom, maturing into adages through usage over time. Often, when looking back on the wisdom of our forebears, all we can discern are the series of peaks standing tall above the mists of time.

Which is how we arrive at a moment where the most insightful and relevant critic of capitalism is most quoted for his snappy one-liner equating religion to a narcotic.

“Religion is the opiate of the masses” is a brilliant aphorism because it paints a visceral picture of one of the very real societal functions of religion, namely, the way religion makes it easier for large groups of people to accept circumstances they would not prefer. The declaration isn’t wrong, per se, but it also isn’t precise or complete, which is why is part of why it is so popular.

The relatively recent development of a strong stigmatization of narcotics has added a strain of condemnation to the original statement that is in no way reflected by the context of the piece. If Karl had grown up in a digital culture he could have chosen a different metaphor, and his theory would have been better for it. A metaphor that DigiMarx might have used is something like this:

Religion is a part of the core operating system responsible for force-underclocking cpu’s across our societal network to stave off the singularity.

Not as concise and catchy, sure, but that might not be the worst thing. There is a significant body of evidence indicating a direct relationship between pith and bullshit. As evidenced by Karl’s metaphor.

Athletes don’t exist within a vacuum. Especially in team sports, the individual athlete is largely inseparable from the context of their teammates and the style of play the coaches choose to employ. Simple statistics can’t account for these sort of stylistic differences. James Harden’s 35 points per game doesn’t mention that his team takes more three point shots than any other team in basketball history, where Michael Jordan put up 36 points per game while not shooting the long ball practically at all. The struggle to understand the value of an individual athlete within a system like the struggle to differentiate relative influence of political, religious, and economic structures within a society. Marx tried to talk about religion in relationship to economic and political contexts, but chose a poor metaphor that has become even less apt as it has aged.

In any event, the firmware-software distinction would have been a tremendous boon to the construction of Marxist theory. Like many Americans, Marx conflated a lot of democracy, capitalism, and religion, suggesting his idea as the solitary solution to all the problems. This isn’t an uncommon phenomenon. Every good idea wants to be the best idea ever. If he was aware of modern systems theory, however, Marx might have been able to see that socialism and democracy aren’t mutually exclusive, and that communism needed to replace the religious functionality with something in order to stay viable.

Capitalism and democracy were both developed on top of an existing religious firmware, and the former, at least, depends on some kind of underclocking in the opiate sense, which was Marx’s original point all along. After his famous bad metaphor Karl went on to say that the illusory hope offered by religion was necessary, and that people would not be able to give up that manufactured hope until they had circumstances that didn’t demand such an eternal wellspring.

Concurrent with the collapse of most of the global communist experiments, though, western society saw a drastic decline in the popularity of religion, leading to a unique opportunity to see what would happen to the capitalist system if it was deprived of the lubricant-opiate that kept it running. Religion is declining in America, as only 30% of those under forty years of age find religion to be critical to their lives, contrasted with 67% of those over the age of 55. Spirituality is rising, but there is a distinct difference between the two, and spirituality is not, at the moment, robust enough to fill all the ways that religion had functioned as a social firmware.

Now, if Karl was correct in his assertion that inherent unsustainability of capitalist system demanded a systemic control function like his opiate-interpretation of religion-at-large then the decline of religion in a capitalist social structure would inevitably see the rise of a similarly pacifying/distracting/indoctrinating culture.

A cynic might say that Capitalist America has born proof to that prediction, in part, as the decreasing prevalence of Marx’s Metaphorical Opiate has seen the epidemic rise of very literal opiates, but that’s just more pithy bullshit. The problem is that there is an invisible (only) in most declarative statements, a socio-linguistic phenomenon in which religion-at-large is complicit, but that is a topic for a later date. That invisible (only) is another area where Karl’s bad metaphor is misleading. The opioid epidemic might only be the fallout from the popular religious decline, if the opiatic-underclocking function of religion was the only function of religion in society.

It has become popular in some circles to weaponize the narco-stigma latent in Karl’s metaphor to criticize the modern media age, bemoaning the hours in front of a television, then a computer monitor, then a touchscreen. In the ‘opiate as cowardly, lazy, delusional escapism’ vein, this criticism is underwhelming, but in the ‘opiate as bad metaphor for firmware in the social machine’ vein this criticism falls even flatter. Media developments like telegraph, radio, television, internet, mobile internet, in this social machine metaphor, serve more as a hardware upgrade than firmware.

The current video-rich, interactive, 24/7 media whirlwind is an additional dimensional depth that would be difficult to even describe to the vast majority of history. Religious institutions, individuals, and cultures have extended into this digital dimension, not been replaced, displaced, or in any way supplanted by the media infrastructure.

What is fascinating, though, is that the development of this new infrastructure has enabled unique subsets of contemporary Americana to evolve to fill many of the social needs being left unmet in the face of the decline of American Religious Ubiquity. This evolution has been messy, uneven, and painful. Much like the way firmware updates don’t all hit all the servers in a network at the same time, the transition from the older religion-intensive, analog firmware to the newer media-rich, digital firmware isn’t a thing that just happened over night, or is even finished happening.

It is tempting, always, to try and identify the singular moment when a particular path was defined, for a person, for a society. We establish dates, and commemorate them as anniversaries. We spent centuries trying to define the one link between humanity and her neanderthalean forbears, when the fact of the matter is that such change is a gradual thing, for species, societies, and individuals.

All of the little details that define an era create a general cluster in the concept space, which we try to identify by the most relevant common characteristic, or general impression. Take childhood, as an example. We can all agree that there is a difference between being an infant and a toddler, and the collection of characteristics that we call ‘toddler’ do not all happen at the same time.

Over time, the gradual chaos of life and entropy flip some of the details that define a given cluster in the concept space, adding new ones, deleting the obsolete until the previous name for the cluster no longer obtains and we need to find a new one. Did this last piece of information, the one that lost the critical mass for the previous concept, define or make the change happen? Did taking a first step ‘transform’ an infant into a toddler?

No. But it is convenient to talk about change in such way, much same same way that it is easier to say that religion is the opiate of the masses and that God is dead than it is to say that the analog religious firmware of the contemporary western social machine is being phased out as new digital media firmware is being developed and deployed.

That most successful part of that new, non-religious firmware is the part that has grafted onto one of our older cultural traditions, a tradition that has warped and wefted through our social fabric with varying prominence since before we even had enough media savvy to make records of it: our vibrant and dynamic sporting culture.

The case I am going to try and make over a series of posts is that sport, in today’s culture, has come to fill a large number of the societal roles religion used to fill. This is not to say that sport is a religion, just that it has similar functions in society.

* It’s Hootie. I’m talking about Hootie.