Why We Need CIT
From a purely utilitarian standpoint, watching sports is a pointless pastime. Or at least this is what I believed when I was nine.
Throughout my childhood, there were many Sundays in fall when my brother would invite approximately 12 of his friends over to watch football games, and they would all be in the living room, screaming, crying, and being sweaty, and for what. What was the cosmic significance of watching football? And more importantly, why were they allowed to watch football on the big TV while I have to watch iCarly on the little TV? (Times were tough.)
As someone who generally tried to avoid conflict, sports seemed like a headfirst dive into conflict that could just be completely avoided. At the end of those fateful games, about half of the Football Watching Pubescent Boys would be pretty bummed and the other half would be pretty pleased. Strangely enough after the emotionally charged fist pumping and all that jazz, they would go outside and play basketball together. Everything would be fine. In most situations, they would watch the game, leave a little happy or a little sad, and all would be well. Maybe the cosmic significance of Sunday football was manufactured disappointment so actual disappointment would not be as surprising.
However, I think it was a little more than that. These guys weren’t gathering in my living room, wielding chicken wings, wearing jerseys, and rehashing the past week’s fantasy football scores with the intention to lose. Absolutely not. They came to win.
Attending with the intention to win is kind of the whole purpose of being a fan. During whatever game you may be attending, you’re probably doing basically what those guys in my living room were doing: you’re dressing up, you’re yelling, etc. But the important thing is you’re not doing it alone. That would be weird. You’re doing it with a group. No matter how arbitrary your reason is for choosing a team to cheer for, you are now in communion with a lot of people who want the same thing as you: to win. And the crazy thing about it is, arbitrary togetherness can lead to actual togetherness really quickly when there’s 30 seconds left in the fourth quarter and you’re down by two (or insert another sports analogy here, I don’t care). It is tribal. It is ordered chaos. It is manufactured togetherness.
The term for this manufactured togetherness, for this uniting with a group to accomplish a single goal, may be referred to as “collective effervescence.” This was a term coined by Emile Durkheim, who was famously very good at being a sociologist. When you’re barking at people, or making your hand look like a little bulldog, as you watch the same game as everyone else, with the same goal in mind, it makes you feel a part of something. And, as humans, we really do need to feel that we’re a part of something.
So, imagine you’re in this group of spectators that really wants to win. It’s the end of January. You’re in a small, sweaty gym. You’ve traveled anywhere from 4 to 10 hours to be here. You’re holding a sign, you’re sweaty, your legs are tired from standing and your voice is hoarse from screaming. Your face is painted, you're wearing all of your respective Concordia regalia. You just won or lost your game, and you, along with your team, are experiencing different shades of the same emotion: a little happy or a little sad. After that, rather than just going home, everyone starts singing the Doxology together. The manufactured togetherness of sports gives way to something that is actually sacred. Did you really drive 10 hours just to get in a sweaty gym and sing the Doxology? I can’t be sure, but I think that very well may be part of it.
Maybe sports are just a big way to manufacture togetherness. And if that’s really all there is to it, I think that’s okay, because manufactured togetherness may be one of the most important things we have right now. Losing CIT means losing an over 70 year standing event that made people feel like they were a part of something bigger than themselves. Unless CIT is going to be replaced by something else that can recreate something as meaningful and purposeful as that, it’s really no surprise that before our one collective voice was singing the Doxology, it was chanting, “KEEP CIT.”
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