The Chicago cubs, after 108 years of futility, won the World Series. As a San Francisco Giants fan since birth, I had no rooting interest in either team. I had considered backing the Cubs, since I consider the designated hitter in the American League an abomination. Every player should be required to play on both offense and defense as a matter of fairness. Plus, Madison Bumgarner, in the tradition of Giants starting pitchers who could hit, like Rick Reuschel and Don “Caveman” Robinson, put on a commercial this year for allowing pitchers to hit. (We’ll leave aside the other Giants tradition of pitchers hopeless at the plate—e.g., Atlee Hammaker.)

I also flirted with the idea that I should root for the Indians, since the great Giant second baseman and now broadcaster Duane Kuiper was an Indian. But it was National Review’s Jonah Goldberg who solidified my choice in rooting for the Indians.  He wrote:

I want the Cubs to lose… for the same reason I wanted the Red Sox to lose in 2004: I like curses. No I don’t mean in the sense of giving someone the evil eye so that they give birth to a duck or anything like that. I like curses because they are romantic, in the anti-Enlightenment sense. They defy the machine thinking of the Scientific Revolution.

…

[I]f the Curse of the Billy Goat is lifted, a game more attached to superstition than any other I can think of will be somewhat diminished.

Giants fans will recall Aubrey Huff’s “rally thong” as a prime example of baseball’s enduring and endearing superstitions. Therefore the “conservative” position is to root against the Cubs.

Jonah continues:

As a Chestertonian at heart, I like and respect old things. I like it when stuff beats the law of averages for reasons we cannot fathom. The Hayekian in me thinks old things that last often do so for good reasons we just don’t know—and sometimes can’t know.

Unfortunately, we live in an age where we take the razor of reason to every little thing and strain to know the whys of it, as if knowing the why will empower the how.

Jonah is on the right track but fails in the detail. The scientific method can answer the what and the how of a phenomenon, but not the why. I’ll paraphrase Leszek Kolakowski on the enduring nature of myth. Positivism, which is the philosophical ground of the scientific method, is incapable of addressing questions of teleology and providence, hence the necessity of myth to provide meaning to unconditioned experience.

The victory of the Cubs is unfortunately yet another very slight step in the demythologization of society’s institutions. Let us feel happy for the long-suffering Cubs fans, but also lament the diminishment of baseball.