The answer is a glimpse of the shared humanity we must recover.

By all measures (well, most, or there wouldn’t be a story) there was no rational reason. Other than a handful of known runners, we were not there to root on sports celebrities. We might turn out to cheer a friend and salute their heorics — even though it takes hours of logistics and bodily positioning to deliver a fist pump to a rushing blur. And thousands of spectactors have no one to inspire. How satisfying is that?
In a moment when there are click bait lists that rate productivity apps — turning optimized seconds into badges of personal triumph — why should we squander our time when we are in our our hamster-wheel races?
Yet a million people turned out to watch 50,000 push their personal limits — largely with no one specific to root for. This is in defiance of our typical entertainment-consuming behavior, because whether it’s a matter of traditional sports, or the explosive phenomenon of esports — it is estimated that by 2021, esports will have more viewers than any professional sports league other than the NFL — those viewing moments involve cheering on an individual or a team. Not an abstracted concept.
Moving beyond the rational, there are some emotional drivers of spectatorship that are clear. The NYC marathon is a spectacle, and spectacles are engines of participation, capable of creating instant social connections between strangers who have come together for a single reason.
In this case, those connections cohere around a mass observational event that is a celebration of anonymous acts of endurance. Not novelty endurance, like the depression-era dance marathons (although we are actually in a similar period of manic over-absorption in crazes of every kind), but formal, biological endurance that comes from disciplined training and focus.
It is the simple and pure anonymity of the marathon — and our corresponding ability to to randomly root for people simply because their dedication is so intense and deserving— that I find the most hopeful for our fractured culture.
It reminds me that our shared human story — the “mystic chords of memory”, as Lincoln put it — exists on a powerful level. Behavioral psychology can be ruthless. The availability heuristic tells is that we glom onto individual examples as a cognitive shortcut; it’s why Stalin remarked that while a million deaths are a statistic, a single death is a tragedy.
It challenges our wiring to react passionately to faceless numbers — in a marathon, or especially in refugee camps. Social media amplifies this instinct. When we are wrapped up in our ourselves, when the grimness of the ethos overwhelms our fragile threads of care, immediacy rules.
So when I see a million people cheering for the achieving faceless, it gives me hope for our ability to connect with others from whom we are blinded.
