In 1990, at the height of his popularity, Michael Jordan was asked to make an endorsement in a divisive U.S. Senate race in North Carolina between Republican Jesse Helms and Democratic challenger Harvey Gantt. While he made a contribution to Gantt, Jordan declined to involve himself in the election. “Republicans buy sneakers, too,” the basketball legend and the face of Nike’s Air Jordan shoes quipped to his teammates.
Jordan was criticized for putting personal profit ahead of politics, but with another election season in full swing and celebrity activism galore, I think there is wisdom in Jordan’s jest. To paraphrase Ecclesiastes: There’s a time for politics, and there’s a time just to enjoy a basketball game.
Jordan responded to critics by saying that his craft was basketball, not activism. By declining to wade into politics, Jordan dodged a sin medieval theologians referred to as “presumption.” It’s a vice we don’t hear much about today, perhaps because it’s so pervasive. Often enough, people can sniff out presumption, even if they cannot name it. Understanding the dynamics of presumption, however, can go a long way toward explaining many of the tensions and resentments characteristic of our political and social moment.
For St. Thomas Aquinas, presumption had two meanings. One was specifically Christian: As a sin against the virtue of hope, it meant taking salvation for granted, opening the door to laziness and arrogance. Presumption’s evil twin was despair—giving up on the possibility of salvation. Both are spiritual quicksand. But, according to Aquinas, presumption has a second, more general meaning, not specifically related to the Christian hope of heaven. It means simply imagining yourself more of an expert than you really are.
The Angelic Doctor never used the word “celebrity” when talking about presumption, but the examples of the vice that he gives in the Summa Theologica might have been written with the social media feeds of celebrities in election years in mind.
Receiving the attention and adulation of others, Aquinas observes, can cause the presumptuous to overestimate their own abilities (ST II-II, q. 130). Sometimes this attention and adulation is well-earned, though some celebrities—think of “influencers”—seem famous just for being famous. Michael Jordan, on the other hand, was more than an influencer. Drive and dynamism, grace and power made him the greatest basketball player—perhaps the greatest athlete—of all time. Charisma made him the greatest sneaker salesman, too. But neither of those triumphs translates into any particular insights into social policy or lawmaking, and it is presumptuous to imagine that they do.
Presumption is not limited to celebrities. Aquinas thought that the rich are particularly vulnerable to presumption because their wealth tempts them to assume that they must also possess other goods, such as intelligence and virtue. Today, the word entitlement captures much of what presumption entails. In a society flush with material abundance, entitlement is a vice that stalks us all. We might forget the sacrifices of previous generations that made present prosperity possible. Or we might assume that technological and material advancement equate with moral superiority.
Even the church is not immune to these dynamics, as the preoccupations of wealthy European churches often set the agenda for global Catholicism while African and Asian churches—by other measures more energetic and devout—are ignored.
Scientific overreach
One of the most subtle forms of presumption is “scientism,” defined by the political scientist Jason Blakely as “the overextension of scientific authority.” The scientific method aspires to objectivity and treats only those questions that can be verified through experiment and observation. Public policy, however, requires value judgments and the balancing of interests. Science can provide information to policymakers, but value judgments are beyond its ken.
Scientists—and policymakers keen to assume the mantle of science—are as human as any of the rest of us. They have values and interests that derive from their upbringing, social circles and psychological strengths and insecurities. These carry no particular scientific weight, and it is presumptuous to think they do. The discipline of science, in fact, tacitly requires its practitioners to exclude questions of meaning. While this limitation doesn’t mean that scientists are incapable of profound religious and ethical insights, the habit of science is not particularly conducive to answering the types of questions posed by philosophers or theologians.
Some of the greatest moral disasters in history, in fact, are the result of elementary philosophical errors made by the enthusiasts of scientific discoveries: for example, leaping from the description of a scientific process to a prescription for human behavior—the jump from is to ought—as happened when early 20th-century progressives enthusiastic about evolution embraced social Darwinism.
Evolution, however, is a description of how species change over time, not a code of ethics. Social Darwinism proved a recipe for cruelty, and similar overreach played into the equally appalling eugenics movement and theories of racial superiority. These were not the inevitable product of Darwin’s theory but of Darwinism mixed with presumption.
Pandemic presumptions
In an August 2023 article in Harper’s, Blakely engaged in some necessary soul searching about the role of scientism during the pandemic. Too often the language of science—the mantra “follow the data”—was used to dodge discussions of social values and competing interests, he wrote. The rightness or wrongness of California Governor Gavin Newsom’s decision to close houses of worship while allowing the film industry to operate, for example, is not the sort of question that science can adjudicate, but involves a judgment about whether economic growth is of greater or lesser value than the worship of God.
As Blakely rightly pointed out, “There is no science that can determine what is meaningful, no way for experts to quantify what values we ought to prioritize.”
I suspect that much of the resistance to vaccines at the end of the Covid-19 pandemic came from suspicions created by the manipulative use of scientific language to justify what were, in fact, value judgments. Health officials who insisted on social distancing but made an exception for the Black Lives Matter protests, for example, proved themselves untrustworthy by invoking their medical authority to advance contestable political preferences.
One of the most noteworthy dynamics of this election season—and the past several elections—is the increasing distrust and resentment felt by large segments of the population toward elites and authorities. A great deal of this resentment, it seems to me, is the result of being on the receiving end of presumptuous behavior but not quite having the vocabulary to describe it.
Scientism is but one example of presumption. Bud Light’s ill-advised venture into gender politics is another. And Hulk Hogan tearing his shirt off at the Republican National Convention or Robert DeNiro forecasting the destruction of the world if Donald J. Trump is elected are still others.
To such political hot air, I prefer Air Jordans.
Humility
The end result of such presumption is the politicization of just about everything, leading to a mediocre discourse dominated by those who literally don’t know what they’re talking about. It is not selfish to do what you are good at and then to show a degree of humility about other things. Politics is important, and celebrities—like every other American citizen—have a right to their opinions. But the common good involves more than politics, and our politics becomes distorted when we devalue all non-political goods and lose sight of what is common.
This election year, we might be better off if everyone took a break from polls and punditry and watched “Meet the Fockers” or an hour or two of wrestling (whichever floats your boat) rather than turning the art of governing into, well, wrestling the Fockers. We would do even better to watch reruns of the 1998 NBA Finals—because whether you were a trucker from Nebraska or a San Francisco socialite, a Republican or a Democrat, you had to marvel when Michael Jordan took the court.
Perhaps there is even some faint echo of Christianity—of doing good to those who harm us—in passing up the chance to dunk on our political opponents. In any case, we would have been poorer as a country if Michael Jordan had belonged only to the Blue Team or only to the Red Team. For just playing basketball, I still like Mike.
