Quite So

Responding to an assertion that the Women's Soccer team had "Nothing given, everything earned," a writer notes that most everything is unearned -- existence itself is, for example, as are any advantages that come from your particular genetics -- but that 'privilege theory' masks what is really owed behind a cartoon idea of who has (or hasn't) got 'privilege.'

In this case I am reminded of the brief discussion with LR1 in which a comment teased out a very privileged relationship at work here:

Almost no country in the world funds women's soccer to any serious degree. Our team is so great because it is drawn from feeder teams that are drawn from college programs that are hugely funded because -- via Title IX -- the colleges have to fund women's sports programs in order to justify their expenditures on their money-making college football teams.

It's doubly ironic, then, that the women's team is piggybacking off the greater popularity of another sport twice over. The college teams underlying their success wouldn't mostly exist except for government mandates for 'equal' spending, which they are now trying to replicate at the professional level.

They're privileged because they live in a country that values women's equality to such a degree that it mandates colleges spend vast resources on female athletics, even though those colleges often lose money doing it. But they do it anyway, in order to be able to make money off college football. That process is what gives the WNT the talent pool that sets it above the rest of the world, which lacks such processes on anything like that scale.

A lot was given. It was given explicitly to favor these women and develop their talents. They've been carefully taught not to see it, nor to express any gratitude to their society and culture for having nurtured them in this way.

In this way they are the opposites of Socrates:

Soc. "Tell us what complaint you have to make against us which justifies you in attempting to destroy us and the State? In the first place did we not bring you into existence? Your father married your mother by our aid and begat you. Say whether you have any objection to urge against those of us who regulate marriage?" None, I should reply. "Or against those of us who regulate the system of nurture and education of children in which you were trained? Were not the laws, who have the charge of this, right in commanding your father to train you in music and gymnastic?"

Socrates goes on to posit that this creates a master/slave relationship between the polis and the citizen, which any true American would reject. We would say that we created the state to do these things, and if it does them well, it is only doing a servant's work; if it does not, it is the state that can be fired and replaced, or 'destroyed' on Socrates' terms.

Still, some sense of gratitude for what was given is wise and appropriate. A lot of people worked hard to create the system that made it possible for these particular individuals to excel. They were then sent forward as representatives of that system, and they might be expected to show by their conduct love and gratitude for the help they received in attaining their particular excellences. We might once have called such gratitude "patriotism," but whatever you call it, it is surely a duty of justice. The failure to be grateful is injustice, then; and like all vices, injustice (and ingratitude) harms the self as well as the others. It is a kind of poison.