The Power Principle

One of the enduring falsehoods of American politics, and likely human civilization, is "principle." I am of the opinion that very few, if any, people have genuine principles. Pretty much everyone, on the other had, has interests. And if one knows another person's interests, one will be much better able to predict that person's actions than one will by knowing their stated principles. Part of this, I suspect, is that interests never go anywhere. People always have to eat, find shelter from the elements and a place to sleep, et cetera. Principles, on the other hand, as statements of intent, can be thought of as plans. And plans have a way of needing to be revised upon contact with the reality of the situation.

Given this, I'm sometimes impressed by the tenacity with which people hold on to the idea that they are acting on principle and/or that they expect others to act on principle. Politics in the United States is rife with accusations of hypocrisy, broadly defined as pronouncing one's principles at point in time A, and then proceeding to act in one's interests at point in time B. This happens often enough that no-one comes across a genuinely surprised when it happens. Take, for instance, the refusal of Republicans in the United States Senate, lead by Senator McConnell, to fill a seat on the United States Supreme Court that came open at the end of the Obama Administration, citing the nearness of the next election, and then the rush to fill a seat that opened even closer to the general election at the end of the Trump Administration. Democratic politicians, activists and media sympathizers lobbed charge after charge of hypocrisy. But I'm not aware of a single person who actually found the behavior of Senator McConnell the least bit unexpected. And note here that I'm referring to a person, Senator McConnell, and not the Senate Republicans as a body.

As a layperson, I suspect that the charade is maintained mostly due to the idea that it's somehow inappropriate for people to openly act on their interests. In other words, to use the example above, while Republican voters in Kentucky were completely unperturbed by the about-face on filling Supreme Court vacancies, Senator McConnell seemed to think that coming out and saying "We have the ability to do this, and so we will," would have been unacceptable to them. It's possible that people expect others to live up to principle, even when it's (clearly) not going to be reciprocated, and so Senator McConnell admitting to using power in his possession openly would have been seen as a justification for Democrats doing the same. Not, honestly, that it seems to make any sense to expect that they wouldn't, invitation or not. Again, I don't really know who anyone expects is legitimately being fooled by this.

But I guess this is the point of people being told what they want to hear. In reality, people don't tell themselves that they want to hear something that is untrue or concocted for their benefit. Rather they understand that it's true to some degree or another, and even if it's being spun or embellished, it's not because that's what they requested. And in the United States, the open wielding of power, either oneself or on one's behalf, is frowned upon. Which is perhaps odd, in a nation what so often seeks to openly wield power on the international level. And so a choreographed dance has built up, in which higher principles are said to be the driving forces. It appears to me that everyone actually knows better, but then, I'm an admitted cynic, even if I do tend to believe that people act sincerely, even when they aren't being open about it.

And so principle seems like just another in the long series of things that people tell themselves, because they want them to be true, and they don't examine for that same reason. Even when it doesn't seem to matter. But maybe that's unfair. The point behind the story of The Emperor's New Clothes was that while only the guileless child was willing to say the Emperor was naked, the only other people who failed to compliment his clothing for fear of being inept or unintelligent were the swindlers. Everyone in the story, other than the child and the criminals, acted out of fear of the judgments of others. Perhaps in politics, the public's fear of judgment or harming their interests is so great than even when the Emperor is suspected of being a swindler, no one says anything. Or maybe it's due to convincing themselves that's its true, rather than living in fear that it isn't.

Dauntless

The tradition of armed resistance persisted even as the civil-rights movement succeeded by rejecting this fearful symmetry: Martin Luther King Jr., Bayard Rustin, and John Lewis showed that Black people without guns were much more formidable.
Graeme Wood. "A Black Army Rises to Fight the Racist Right"

I call BS. I think that White people in the United States found (generally after the civil rights movement has ended) these figures to be non-threatening, and thus more acceptable. While civil rights icons like Reverend King and Representative Lewis are often credited with forcing White America to make concessions to racial equity and equality, it's likely more accurate to say that they wheedled and cajoled. If power concedes nothing without a demand, the demand did not come from the peaceful protests of Black Americans, but from the willingness of White Americans to push their will on their recalcitrant colleagues.

"Unfortunately, Jay’s answer—create a parallel, quasi-fascist race army with its own flag and homeland—strikes me as a particularly bad case of becoming that which you hate." Mr. Wood relates. And okay, I won't argue with that. Mr. Wood is allowed to rate ideas however way he likes. But that's not a particularly good justification for saying that a less-threatening path would be more effective. If "acknowledging that Black people are uniquely menaced, is to be expected," then it stands to reason that the icons of the civil rights movement were not formidable enough to get the job done. Would one really expect that if Reverend King were alive today, he'd have concluded that he'd attained his goals?

Generally speaking, the point behind the threat of violence is to affect change that the threatened find unwelcome through presenting the potential for even more unwelcome change. In effect, it's offering a choice between paying a little and paying a lot. Mr. Wood reveals a confidence that power can be convinced to pay a little without the threat of paying a lot. Sometimes, people cultivate that confidence because they genuinely believe in the goodness of people's hearts, and sometimes, people cultivate that confidence because while power might not be frightened of what happens if a revolutionary attempts to make good on their threats, they are. When some of my more radical friends speak to the need for revolution to change America, my pushback comes from a place of noting that revolutions really suck. If a revolution is what's needed, then so be it, but if one can find a less bloody way to make the world a better place, I'd like to try that one first.

But that's different than having some magical confidence that it's the more formidable option. Mr. Wood's piece in The Atlantic is calibrated to present its subject as a clown whom no-one should be following. Which is nothing new. His piece on Kyle Rittenhouse paints the young man as a deluded inhabitant of a fantasy world. But he makes an interesting point in that article: "Training yourself to imagine something makes it seem more likely to happen, and primes your instincts to react to it—and, I suspect, initiate that violent reaction and overdo it when circumstances could be resolved more peacefully." Do Black people in America have to train themselves to imagine being uniquely menaced? Are their angry reactions overdoing it?

One aspect of a commitment to peace that is often overlooked is that outside of someone who is simply intent on homicide, acquiescing to injustice is as peaceful a resolution as any. Part of the ethos of peaceful civil disobedience is that people will see the injustice being perpetrated and withdraw their support for the unjust actor, and that said actor desires that social support more than they crave whatever benefits accrue to them from their acts of injustice. I am not a student of history, and so I can't offer any analysis of the overall effectiveness of non-violence. And at the same time this means that I can't contest the people who critique it in the same way that they critique "civility," as something that allows power to avoid concession by refusing to present it with a workable demand.

People turn to violence for any number of reasons, but in the end, I suspect that most people subscribe to what a Libertarian acquaintance of mine terms the "Non-Aggression Principle," which, put simply, is the idea that violence is only justified in the defense of rights. It's one thing to say that any given right can be defended without recourse to violence. It's quite another to demonstrate that any given right is best defended without recourse to violence. For my part, I'm not a revolutionary. I'm a terrible shot, have no intention on spending the range time that it would take to remedy that and am squeamish. I have too much of a distaste for fighting to see it as anything other than a last resort. But more importantly, I'm at a place in my life where I don't have to call upon my last resorts. So I have the luxury of considering violence to be an unpleasant option where others are available. Not everyone believes themselves to be so affluent. If one believes that they are, helping them to come to the same conclusion is more useful than a blind faith in their ineffectiveness.

Stacks

Went to the beach with my camera today. The specific park I found myself at has a surprising amount of driftwood, enough so that I suspect some sort of human intervention. But in any event, there were a number of these scattered around the place today. I suspect that  number of people had quite a good time building them.
 

Breaking the Links

"Mass shootings" have made their way back into the American news cycle, with the shootings in the Atlanta area, then in Colorado and now a shooting in Orange, California. And again it's triggered a debate about "gun control" and "assault weapons." These debates are predictably partisan by this point, because of the various constituencies that the parties represent. Affluent city-dwellers and suburbanites who tend to feel themselves threatened by random acts of violence perpetrated by people with guns tend to vote Democratic, and people who live in rural areas and enjoy shooting sports, fear the breakdown of society or fear the tyranny of (Democratic) government tend to vote Republican. This polarization in the voter demographics tends to drive a similar polarization at the legislative level. (And yes, I did leave out the various non-white groups that have interests here. Mainly because I don't feel that their concerns are at all driving the broader conversation. Republicans may use gang violence in Black and Hispanic communities as something scary to motivate their voters, but neither party is showing publicly any investment in dealing with that particular problem in a way that would drive lasting change.)

The two blocks have divergent interests, brought about by their divergent visions of what a safe (or safer, anyway) world looks like. In broad strokes, the Democratic idea of a safe world is one in which people who wish to be violent lack certain tools with which to commit violence, while the Republican idea of a safe world is one in which people can meet force with greater force, and thus suppress the viability of violence as a tool. As one might have guessed, these are more or less mutually exclusive with one another (as are so many other things in American political discourse), mainly because they understand the problem very differently. And each side understands their particular viewpoint as being backed up, not by some facts, but by the facts. Which, despite the fact that it's often seen as cherry-picking, is reasonable; the entire set of relevant information is quite vast, and most people obtain their information from people who have already chosen a side, and media outlets that understand the desires of their audiences (even if they don't always intentionally cater to them). Information, like water, seeks its level, and in so doing, tends to find those who are most receptive to it.

Where things become muddied is when there is an understanding that rather than a set of facts, allowing or rationalizing a certain set of policies, the facts demand certain policy prescriptions, such that accepting that some given set of facts is accurate is considered an endorsement, if not a mandate, for the policy positions one favors. So, for example, an activist might hold that if one accepts that shootings with guns that were covered by Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act are often mass shootings, then one must also accept that the Act should be reinstated. And this (just like it does for anthropogenic climate change) adds a level of motivation to the differing understandings of the facts, since facts that mandate unwelcome policy changes must be contested.

This stems in part, I would guess, from the idea that there are right and wrong ways to respond to particular facts. So tobacco companies sought to sew doubt about the links between tobacco smoking and cancer, because "I'm willing to accept some risk of a bad outcome in order to partake of this activity" was not seen as a legitimate viewpoint, whereas "in the absence of convincing evidence, this activity may be viewed as risk-free" was. So the question, at least for me, becomes: If it had been more acceptable to smoke, despite the risk of cancer, would there have been a perceived need to cast doubt on the level (or even existence) of risk? Likewise, in the current back-and-forth on firearms and public safety, would a decoupling of facts and policy allow for people to more readily accept different sources of facts?

Not that I think this likely. The last time I had a discussion with someone concerning climate change, they were adamant that someone who acknowledged the changes to the Earth's climate was ethically obligated to accept whatever changes to the economy and people's lifestyles were required to reverse the changes. And while I understand the position, I believe that it makes the discussion over what's actually happening higher-stakes than is useful. And this, I think, lends itself to the idea that people's perceptions of the facts are tainted where they have an interest in certain policy outcomes.

The outcome of all of this is that the status quo becomes the norm, because neither side can marshal broad support for facts that can be evaluated to support change. Each side focuses on the facts that they presume support their case to the exclusion of others, and considers those facts that the other raises to be suspect; either taken out of context, or completely fabricated. Can decoupling facts from policies prevent this? I have no idea. But I suspect that it can't make things worse.

Worry, Worry

There is, I believe, a genre of news story that can be described as speculative nonfiction. In this particular case, National Public Radio rounds up a bunch of experts to basically guess at what the future is going to look like. The story feels like prognostication disaster porn, with its focus on a catastrophe that may or may not come to pass.

I would suspect that a more straightforward piece on why it's still useful to continue the precautionary measures that people have adopted to mitigate the SARS-CoV-2 would have still gotten the point across without appearing to indulge in fearmongering. But in a media environment where clicks are everything, being straightforward doesn't seem to cut it very often.