Slow Burn

Fatal stabbing of Ukrainian refugee in North Carolina ignites crime debate. This is a headline from the BBC, which, as one might guess, is based in Britain. So they can be forgiven for thinking that the stabbing death of Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte Area Transit System train, ignited a debate, when, in fact, this is a fire that's been burning for decades now. That fire being the tendency of "White America" (to the degree that there is such a thing) to regard the Black population of the country as agents of violence and anarchy, who, through their actions, contribute to a sense of lawlessness and unease, and therefore are legitimate targets to be cudgeled with the Rule of Law.

For all that Republican state legislators in the Southeast are railing against law enforcement officials, prosecutors and judges that they perceive as being "woke" (which here is really just another way of saying "soft on crime"), the fact of the matter is that "Prison" is not the correct answer to: "How do we keep the mentally ill, even those with criminal records, from hurting people?" It is, however, a convenient answer, especially given that Donald Trump is currently President of the United States, and Democrats are considered to be insufficiently harsh when it comes to criminals Black Americans, by the stereotypical Trump voter. (Not that Democrats hold a monopoly on this; a Trumpist acquaintance of mine, back during the campaign, sought to induce me to support the President's election by talking up Mr. Trump's moves towards "criminal justice reform," which seemed to be little more than a euphemism for "letting Black people out of jail early.")

The point behind Black Lives Matter was, at least in part, to attempt to shift the perception of Black Americans away from a constant, looming, threat to decent law-abiding people, and to just people, like anyone else. And part of the tragedy of Black Lives Matter was its abject failure in that regard. But, as will most tragedies, more than one failure goes into them, and here, perhaps the biggest failure that lead to the tragedy of Ms. Zarutska's stabbing was the withdrawal of the Federal government from mental health treatment back in the 1980s. President Reagan intended it, at least publicly, to be a devolution of responsibility from Washington D.C., to states and communities. States and communities, it turned out, that had no intention of picking up the tab, and numbers of mentally ill people were left to fend for themselves, or to the sympathies of others.

Black people, like transgender people, are easily-vilified Others, especially for Conservatives, when crimes occur, because they help bolster the narrative of the People being preyed upon by the undeserving Other, who are in turn being abetted by a willfully perverse Élite, who allow the predation in return for ill-gotten votes. And I think that part of the reason for this is that focusing on who commits a crime (so long as it's someone else) offers the possibility of a "low-cost" solution. Mainly because someone else would be paying it. Whether it's a push to keep Black people with criminal records in jail, possibly for life, primarily as a form of incapacitation, or declaring gender dysphoria a serious enough mental illness that it warrants banning transgender people from owning guns, the debate around crime in the United States has tended to want to avoid being about "what" in favor of a focus on "who." And this is a fire that's been burning for a long time. There's no end to the flames in sight.

Turned Around

I’ve related the story before about growing up Roman Catholic, and eventually drifting away from that over the understanding that Satan wasn’t real. One of the side effects of coming to the conclusion that supernatural Evil wasn’t real was questioning its more mundane counterpart, and an arrival at an agreement with Socrates’ belief that no person, knowing good, willingly does evil. And that brings us to this:

I don’t believe that people who understand justice willingly turn a blind eye to injustice, either. And so for me, aphorisms like this encourage people to see themselves as unsafe in situations in which there are differing definitions, or understandings, of justice and injustice, because underlying this is are a number of assumptions. And because this is a two-sentence aphorism, rather than a detailed philosophical examination of theories of justice, there isn't room to surface those assumptions.

But even if we take a very simple definition from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and consider justice to be “what we owe to each other,” it’s not a given that every person has the same understanding of what every other person is owed, and who owes them. Or, perhaps more importantly, whose claims to being owed something come first. For instance, what does it mean to tolerate misconduct, for instance? When I was a freshman in college, it was understood that being a football player came with certain privileges... like the ability to strike another student without being expelled. Looking back on that earlier post, I realize that I said that the player was never disciplined... but I don’t know that they weren’t, simply that it had been communicated to the student body as a whole that assault was grounds for expulsion, and the football player wasn’t expelled. Was this the college “turning a blind eye to injustice,” or deciding that it owed someone else more than it owed the student who the football player had struck? With the benefit of several decades of hindsight, I’ve come to suspect the latter. And the problem with the school, therefore, isn’t that it failed to live up to it’s conception of justice, it’s that the idea of justice it presented to the students was simplified to the point of being inaccurate.

And this is, in part, I suspect, due to not wanting to openly deal with the disagreements over the definitions that it would have caused. Because it’s easy for people do decide that a school should prioritize the rights of the general student body over the football program; making the case that the school’s dependence on that program should be allowed to manifest itself as an openly different set of rules is more difficult. And I suspect that the school didn't see anything unjust in avoiding that disagreement.

I will stand by by understanding that the school felt that it owed someone else more than it owed the student that the football player had assaulted, although I realize the disadvantage I place myself at in not being able to offer any sort of informed opinion of who that other party might be. This is the danger in taking what may look like a cut-and-dried case of injustice, and arguing that there’s more to it than meets the eye.

But still, I make the case that the school did not willingly ignore its obligation to the students as a whole; instead, its obligations were structured in such a way that maintaining the football team was the most important consideration that it faced from that incident.

But since safety is also a concern here, that should be addressed. I left after that freshman year, not over the school’s revealed preference for the football program over other considerations, but because I felt that the academics were garbage, and if I was going to have to suffer through three more years of education, it may as well have been a decent one. For me, it wasn’t a matter of justice; it was that, even on a scholarship, the place didn’t seem to be worth the money.

But I would say that students would be correct in feeling unsafe about the school’s behavior. Not because the school was willing to ignore open injustice, but because it wasn’t willing (or able) to be open and honest about what its understanding of justice actually was. And so to return to the graphic, safety shouldn’t depend on aligned definitions of injustice, but it does depend on known definitions of injustice. It’s like due process of law in a legal setting. A person who goes into a situation with the understanding that their lived experience of an event is going to carry the most weight is unsafe, because their misconception of the hierarchy of obligations will lead them astray.

And in this, the habit of conflict avoidance that “obvious” instances of injustice tend to create works against society as a whole. Concealing, rather than owning, differences with the mainstream over what people are owed creates active misunderstandings of what people should expect. And that is where the danger lies, even though it’s often not what people are told to be on the lookout for. To go back to my college example, the student was let down, not by the school tolerating misconduct, but by not being clear on what constituted misconduct, and that it differed for different students, in the first place. That knowledge would have allowed her, and all of us, really, to make more informed choices concerning education.

P.S.: I never found out if the student who had been assaulted went to the police and sought a legal remedy against the player who struck her. If she did, nothing came of it, for one reason or another.

Staged

Being an ineligible bachelor does have its downsides; every so often I encounter another wild stereotype of single men that I never knew existed previously, and society tends to expect that every adult is a member of a couple and is structured accordingly, but, for the most part, it's an okay lifestyle. I've had plenty of time to grow accustomed to it, and the couple of times I've left it, returning has felt like sliding into a comfortable bed. It's something that I started during college, when I realized that I wanted nothing to do with the dating scene, and it's given me a level of sympathy for women who have decided that they're ready to call it quits on the whole thing.

Not being actively in the dating pool, however, I wind up watching the whole thing from afar or reading about it on the Internet, and the newest complaint that women have is with the vaguely-named "performative male." I'd never heard of it prior to this evening, when I ran across a small piece in The Week, running down a few articles on the topic. The Vox article I didn't read, because it's behind a paywall, but I read through the rest, and it's a familiar story: women being a combination of fed up and suspicious of the male tendency for fakery when they think that there's a chance for sex on the one hand, and the realization that this is kind of the way it always is and not all women are so dim as to be unable to watch out for themselves on the other.

To be sure, I've never been motivated enough by sex to be willing to perform for it. Once 20-year-old me had gotten it into his head that women weren't really interested, I had plenty of other things to be doing with my time. But I've known a lot of men in the interim who did seem to feel a need to be attuned to What Women Want, or, at least, the kind of guy that the needed to pretend to be in order to get a date. And I understand why women have had more than enough of that pretense, because the outcomes can be way worse than simply going on a date with someone who turns out to be inauthentic. I'd become fed up with the dating scene over much lower stakes.

So I legitimately feel for them; feeling the need to try and figure out if the person that one is out on a date with is actually the person they're presenting themselves as must be stressful. Especially when the perceived consequences of getting it wrong can be severe. But part of me is with Alexander Stoffel on this; I think his understanding that suspecting everyone who doesn't fit a certain mold of cynical deceit simply incentivizes a different form of pretense is more accurate than it's given credit for.

It would be nice if society could do away with the posturing and posing, but that would also require not attaching so much status to the ability to attract a desirable partner. I have no illusions about that coming to pass anytime soon. So "performative males" are simply going to be one in a long string of different categories of men to watch out for. Or just deal with, as the case may be. 

Unthought Of

But what if profits weren’t the only, or even primary, incentive? What if we rewarded employee wellbeing, positive community and environmental impact, innovations that reduced suffering or improved health not because they could be commodified but simply because they mattered?

We’ve been in capitalism’s grasp so long that we’ve been trained to think these things are impossible. But why should they be?
Laura Moore "Work is broken: Marx, alienation, and the Great Pretending"

If I had a dollar for every time I saw this description of things, I don't know how many dollars I'd have, but it would be a good number of them. This idea, that living under Capitalism "trains" everyone to think that Capitalism is the only possible system, is common enough to be a cliché. (After all, a book was written about the subject a decade and a half ago.) But if it were true, why are so many people writing about some alternative economic system for it have become a trope unto itself?

The answer, I think, is found not much later in the essay:

To upend what sits at the root of everything would mean pain and havoc, not just for those at the top but for everyone.

And so I suspect that people understand that change is possible. But that it's not painless. But I think that pointing this out, noting that what stands between people and the better world they want to come into existence is their own pain tolerance, isn't affirming. And in a world where creating a Substack is no more difficult than having a blog, cutting through the noise means being really, really, attractive to people. And sometimes, that means being willing to tell them what one understands they want to hear.

And blaming a factor external to the reader, like "Capitalism" can be attractive. Because it casts them as not being an agent of their own dissatisfaction. Which I understand, because taking the blame sucks. No-one wants to feel, for instance, that the reason why young people can't afford a home in their area is their attachment to all of the equity that rising home prices have given them. Or that the reason why fast food workers are so poorly paid is that theirs is an industry driven almost entirely by discretionary purchases, and their price sensitivity is part of what keeps prices low. While the media loves to tout companies "reaping record profits," little is said about the fact that this is what puts money into the 401k and IRA funds of the middle class.

And, I'll be honest, this is the world as I prefer to see it, but I think that the real problem with Capitalism is that it's a convenient scapegoat for the fact that in many Western nations, and especially the United States, caring for one another simply isn't en vogue. People's sense of poverty drives them to place themselves ahead of the employees of the businesses they patronize, their communities, the environment or the health of strangers. But it's a sense of social desirability that can prevent people from acknowledging that. And Capitalism accepts the blame without complaint, just like any other inanimate object would.

Self-Definition

I don't have to search for meaning in my life. All I need to do is tell certain people:

• I don't find life to be meaningful
• I don't suffer from crippling depression

And they will stop at nothing to find the meaning in it all and force me to acknowledge it.

I know that it's something of a troll on my part, and therefore, I shouldn't do it, but I find it interesting the degree to which there are certain things that it is presumed must be true of all people. Personally, I'm dubious about meaning specifically because I've done a lot of reading on the topic, and find it somewhat broader than many people give it credit for. Not in the sense that some everyday activity counts as "meaning," and therefore everyone is necessarily finding it on a day-to-day basis, but in the sense that it can lead people to do negative things just as much as positive ones.

Many definitions of "meaning in life" that I've come across mention significance. And while people often point to things like helping others, or raising children as a way of being significant, a mass shooter who makes national or international headlines is often more significant. And it doesn't even take a mass casualty event... Luigi Mangione have certainly racked up a huge number of significance points, merely for being willing to ambush and kill a man that many people hadn't even heard of prior to the shooting, immediately rocketing to a level of fame, and sparking a national conversation, that surely rates highly enough to count as meaningful.

The fact that things like this are often swept under the rug speaks to the idea that meaning, even in a person's own life, isn't really something that they decide for themselves. Society seeks to retain a veto on whether or not a person's life is genuinely meaningful, in part, I think, to try to steer people towards socially-valuable activities in their pursuit.of meaning. I'm not sure that it's working, but I understand the logic being employed.