Our Draymond Green problem

Draymond Green is probably one of the most disliked players in the NBA right now. It’s not that he plays for the once-dominant Golden State Warriors. It’s that he plays dirty and has been for some time. He doesn’t talk a little trash like Reggie Miller did or antagonize opponents in silly ways, like when Lance Stephenson blew in LeBron’s ear. Green has been suspended more than most players. In 2023, he had a suspension that was indefinite but became sixteen games. What has he done?  Among other incidents, he has been in trouble for stepping on/stomping on Domantas Sabonis, for putting Rudy Gobert in a chokehold, and he’s also been filmed punching his teammate, Jordan Poole.

You might think that with a record like that, Draymond Green would be out of the league. Actually, some people were surprised he wasn’t on the initial Olympics roster this year. You might think that his teammates, respected guys like Steph Curry, might not want to play with him. In fact, Curry can’t imagine not playing with Draymond Green and Klay Thompson. Many people who don’t play in the NBA can imagine playing on a team without a teammate who punches others and whose suspensions add unnecessary drama to the regular season. That is probably because Draymond Green is not our teammate.

It is very easy to be blind to the faults of our perceived team and alert to the faults of groups we don’t see ourselves in. Consider any old protest you’d like. Someone you know will say something like, “I’d take them a lot more seriously if they’d first/also denounce XYZ.” XYZ is some sin connected with people the protesters associate with or care about or are linked to by the general public. Of course, even if they did denounce XYZ, we might not know about it. Now, sometimes the thing we’d like to have denounced does definitely deserve being denounced. But it’s somewhat odd that our complaints never need to be accompanied by denunciation of our allies or ideological neighbors. For ourselves, we see a vast distance between us and those who may be loosely fellow travelers for our ideas and causes. We don’t assume that could also be the case for others.

Even if we see problems within our team, it is notoriously difficult to go against your own group, whatever that group is. Two famous examples would be the police and teachers. There are “bad apple” cops out there, but somehow the “good apples” don’t say much about it. There are teachers who are lousy, but somehow never get ostracized, much less let go. Some of this is the protection of those two very powerful unions, some of it is psychology. Social conformity is extremely powerful. So is the general societal consensus against snitching. Harvard Business Review has advice for what to do when stuck with a slacker co-worker who is dragging you down. That advice includes the reminder that “you really shouldn’t complain to a supervisor about your colleague.” Why? Your boss won’t like you. 

In some ways, it is good that we typically develop some kind of basic loyalty to those we work with, even if we don’t like them all. Loyalty is an admirable human trait. In other ways, it can be a disservice to the rest of humanity. Are we so loyal to our colleagues that we let them fail or harm others? Do we sacrifice decades of students going through the school and receiving inadequate education for the sake of a comfortable relationship with a co-worker? This might seem extreme. Try this: imagine your organization was being sued because of the behavior of an employee. Who would be the culprit? You probably have a ready answer. Why is that?

You might argue that our complicity with co-workers or religious or political allies is about the importance of humans over abstractions. But it’s rare that the protected ally is actually being defended against “efficiency” or “groupthink.” More often it comes down to a preference for our ally over the unknown victim of their inadequacies or bad behavior. And sometimes it just comes down to our preference for an easy life without confrontation and conflict. Sometimes we feel less bad about the negative outcomes of our bad allies than we would about having to break with our allies. 

It is fairly common these days to blame politics for everything. Has polarization made this worse? Do we excessively protect our friends and allies because of the extreme environment we are in? I “have” to stick up for this group/person because the “other side” is so intolerable. Now, I “have” to do things like this because politics has corrupted everything. That could just be another way of assuaging our guilt and ignoring our agency. It’s unlikely that we’d be taking a stand in some other scenario that we are not taking now.

Hannah Arendt offers us an interesting analysis and solution. In “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility,” Arendt writes about the participants in the Holocaust who were not especially anti-Semitic or enthralled with Nazism, who did their work as functionaries, as people who had to pay the bills, as people who followed orders. Where did such people come from? Well, they are everywhere. She writes: “They felt (after they no longer needed to fear God, their conscience cleared through the bureaucratic organization of their acts) only the responsibility toward their own families. The transformation of the family man from a responsible member of society, interested in all public affairs, to a “bourgeois” concerned only with his private existence and knowing no civic virtue, is an international modern phenomenon.” 

What we need then is not exactly less politics, it is more “civic virtue,” which will involve a kind of politics. We actually have to care more about the world beyond our doorstep, but we have to care differently than most of what we are witnessing. As Arendt also recognizes, “courage” is what we will need most to operate well in the polis. We could use it in the workplace and at the protest and at lunch and anywhere else we’d rather blend in than take up some civic virtue and do something about co-workers and allies and friends. Until then, it’s probably wrong for us to complain about Draymond Green still being in the league when we know what we haven’t said or done about the people on our teams.