As future historians reflect on the forces that unraveled the American social fabric between the 1960s and 2020, I hope they save some time for one vice in particular: our fatal impulse to consistency.
This is a good weekend to ponder that impulse, as Super Bowl Sunday caps off a major sports transition that has nearly completed the symbiosis between professional athletics and professional gambling. The gradual legalization of sports betting, the ubiquitous advertisements for online gambling in the football playoffs, the billion dollars the National Football League hopes to soon earn annually from its sports betting deals — wherever you look, the thin wall that games from the gambling industry is being snatched away.
This transformation will separate many millions of non-wealthy Americans from their money, very often harmless but in some cases disastrous, with many lasting gambling addictions falling somewhere in between. And we’ve reached this point, in part because of our reluctance to live with inconsistencies and hypocrisy rather than smooth them out, our inability to take a cautious step or two up a slippery slope without sledding to the bottom.
In the case of gambling, that sledding impulse meant that once we decided that some forms of gambling should be legally available in some places, taking advantage of some people, it became inevitable that restrictions would eventually crumble on a much larger scale. The multi-generational path from Las Vegas and Atlantic City, to Native American casinos, to today’s ubiquitous online gambling looks like one continuous process, with no natural stopover.
But the problem is that social health often depends on laws and customs not be completely consistent, not taking each consent to its logical conclusion.
In the case of gambling, limited permission was always required: betting will always be with us, it is a harmless vice for many people, if you supervise too much, you will get a series of injustices.
But the easier it is to gamble, the more unhappy the results will be. The more money there is in the industry, the stronger the incentives to invent new ways to hook people and then make them bleed and ruin. And all that damage is likely to fall disproportionately on the psychologically vulnerable and economically marginalized, the strong preying on the weak.
So what you want is for society to say: until here and no further, even if the limiting principle is somewhat arbitrary. Did it make rational sense to have the gambling regime of my childhood, where a few American cities were gambling havens for fortuitous historical reasons? Not really: If gambling is bad, it’s bad everywhere, and if it’s good for Nevadans, why wouldn’t it be good for everyone? And did it make constitutional sense that this arbitrary system was supported in part by a federal ban on state-sanctioned sports gambling? No, the Supreme Court ruled in 2018, it does not.
But that conditional, somewhat irrational, arguably unconstitutional system nonetheless struck a useful balance, making gambling available without making it universal, and encouraging Americans to treat the gambling experience as a vacation from the mundane, not seriously bad but still a little embarrassing. or indulgent – that’s why it stays under the table, or in Vegas.
And by moving away from this approach, by rationalizing our gambling regime by making it more and more universal, we are following the same misguided principle that we have followed in other cases. With pornography, for example, where the difficulty of identifying a perfectly consistent rule that would allow the publication of “Lolita” but not Penthouse, has led to a world where online porn also doubles as sex education and the Internet is assumed to be always will be a sewer and we’ll just have to live with it. Whether with marijuana, where the injustice and hypocrisy of the drug war was a good thing for partial decriminalization, stopping at decriminalization may be impossible when the consistent logic of commercialization beckons.
The reliability of this process does not mean that it can never be questioned or reversed. Some of what we’ve seen from #MeToo-era feminism, for example, is a resistance to the brutal logic of an unregulated sexual marketplace, and a quest for an organic form of social regulation, a new set of imperfect, yet -useful scruples and taboos.
But it’s a lot easier to tear down an inconsistent but workable system than to build a new one from scratch – and the impulse to rebuild usually doesn’t get strong until you hit the bottom of the long slope of consistency. have reached.
I’m not sure where we are with the cultural trajectory of gambling. But every time this playoff season turned up a new ad for Caesars Sportsbook, it felt like a sign that we’ve accelerated downward, with a long way to go.