On June 6, when Barcelona face Juventus in the UEFA Champions league final in Berlin’s Olympiastadion, millions of fans around the world will gather to watch the match in communal settings like pubs and sports bars. Within the Caribbean, scores of these venues will host thousands of fans who have never visited either Barcelona or Juventus, but will nevertheless cheer for them with the sort of passion that used to be reserved for the West Indies cricket team.
Successful sports franchises have become used to having tens of thousands – occasionally tens of millions – of fans scattered across the globe, passionately debating the merits of new contracts and changes in management, whether the team should have passed or rushed on that final fourth down, or whether banned substances or underinflated balls unfairly improved a rival’s performance. The friendships and loyalties that arise among these diffuse groups are often incomprehensible to a previous generation whose identity was usually tied to local teams and parochial, highly-polarizing issues. And while many members of the new generation have personal reasons for liking a particular player – because he’s Brazilian, or Uruguayan – almost none will take exception to that player’s teammates because of their national origin, or ethnicity.
Soccer wasn’t always like this. In fact not so long ago its confrontations were notorious for stirring up violent passions, largely because the other side was exclusively identified with a definable religious or ethnic group — as still happens when hooligans clash around local derbies like Celtic v Rangers. But we have gradually become accustomed to the peaceful coexistence of widely diverse, and widely dispersed partisan groups who peacefully gather to watch the NBA finals and the NFL Super Bowl in the same locations, often wearing expensive team merchandise and showing off their knowledge of statistics and tactics, even though many of them have never played the sports in question. To so-called “digital natives” — children of the new century — none of this seems strange. Furthermore, although their group identities may be nourished by devotion to a single well-defined entity, little of their obsessive focus interferes with other parts of their lives. If, for example, you belong to Red Sox Nation (and have the necessary disdain for the New York Yankees) nobody within the larger group much cares whether you are Democrat or Republican, pro-choice or pro-guns, nor whether you’re from the mid-West or deep South.
Since these identities tend to form around loose groupings like team-affiliations, there have always been doubts about their usefulness in addressing real-world problems in civic and political life. Critics argue that “weak” ties don’t mobilize young people, because practical matters – like politics – are too remote from their interests. This sounds plausible enough but it fails to explain how, for instance, in 2003 a bulletin board for the fan base of the boy band Dong Bang Shin Ki helped to organize tens of thousands of young South Koreans into massive demonstrations against the importation of US beef; protests that lasted for several weeks. The activism was triggered by the group’s fan base – mainly teenage girls – sharing information about the possible contamination of the US beef. Suddenly an issue that had been at the periphery of their consciousness took centre stage. Commenting on this strange turn of events the writer Clay Shirky has noted that “The dramatically reduced cost of public address, and the dramatically increased size of the population wired together, means that we can now turn massive aggregations of small contributions into things of lasting value. This fact, key to our current era, has been a persistent surprise.”
In ‘Imagined Communities,’ his classic analysis of nationalism, Benedict Anderson observes that nations cross an important threshold when the people in them achieve “a deep, horizontal comradeship” irrespective “of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail.” Somewhat counterintuitively, this sense of solidarity seems to flourish when large groups of people are allowed to embrace several smaller identities. This openness to plural identities allows us to get past what the economist Amartya Sen calls a “solitarist” view of the world – the idea that a single part of your identity such as race, religion or gender, trumps all others. Sen writes that “Violence is fomented by the imposition of singular and belligerent identities on gullible people, championed by proficient artisans of terror.”
If Guyana and the Caribbean ever hope to escape the tyranny of narrow, identity-based politics, to move beyond solitarist views of ourselves and our societies, young people will have to lead the way. We will have to learn that people who share none of our political views, or social backgrounds, may nevertheless share a deep commitment to a foreign team, rock band, athlete, actor or author, and that this diversity of tastes makes the prospect of horizontal comradeship far more appealing than its traditional alternatives. In recent decades our politicians have preferred to play up our divisions, with predictably negative results. Now it is time for the younger, less gullible generation to move beyond these divisions.
