Assume a Hypocrite

Can you imagine the outrage of [Wayne] Grudem and other Trump supporters if, in 2012, Barack Obama had coerced, say, China into announcing an investigation into and digging up dirt on Mitt Romney, and then justified it by saying that a president has the power to ask any nation to undertake any investigation?
Peter Wehner "There Is No Christian Case for Trump"

To borrow a line from Han Solo: "I can imagine quite a lot." But the problem with imagined hypotheticals is that they are just that, imagined hypotheticals. For all that Mr. Wehner believes that Professor Grudem and other backers of President Trump would have howled in outrage if President Obama had sought to coerce a foreign nation into assisting them politically through illegally withholding aid payments, the fact remains that because President Obama did no such thing, there's was nothing for them to be outraged about. And so while their political biases may appear to be obvious, there is no valid avenue for accountability. Claiming that, in the name of consistency, that people should behave in a real situation in a manner that comports with an imagined one is pointless at best.

Calls for consistency in matters of politics like this are almost universally wastes of time. In large part because most people don't start with a principle and then derive an understanding of whom they should support. Rather they start with their interests, and derive their principles in a manner than supports those interests, regardless of the compromises or inconsistencies that this causes. This is in large part, I believe, because people don't view concepts of right and wrong independently of what is good and bad for them. In other words, people tend to lean towards conceptualizations of right that align with their perceived interests, at least over the long term. I don't know of anyone who signs up for an idea of right that consigns them to a lifetime of uncompensated misery and loss.

If all is fair in love and war, it's possible that a lot of President Trump's support can be chalked up to the "Culture Wars" in the United States. And for all that the Culture Wars come across as a sideline in the broader contexts of American political, civic and economic life, for those people who see themselves as dedicated culture warriors, it's a high-stakes conflict where the consequences of losing are indistinguishable from fatal. And as the perceived stakes increase, so does the perceived need to come out on top of the conflict.

A general dislike of being open about one's interests, and one's willingness to do what it appears to take to protect or advance them, is perhaps the largest driver of apparent hypocrisy in public life today. A lessening of public piety concerning letting the chips fall where they may in the name of "principle" would do a lot to release people from the need to pretend that they have higher priorities than looking out for themselves and their futures.

In Session

According to The Daily Beast, back in the 1970s now-Senator and Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders compared working people to the Black slaves of the past. The site also notes:

[...]Sanders’ previously unreported comparisons between the conditions of Vermont workers and that of enslaved people evoke a different element of his campaign—assertions by critics that he tends to view systemic racism primarily through the lens of economic disenfranchisement.

This is nothing new. But it's also not completely unreasonable. The assessment that when resources are scarce, people turn on one another and scapegoat those different from them, while it may not be correct in many (or even any) cases, isn't obviously broken. So why beat Senator Sanders up for believing it?

Part of the problem is the referencing of "systemic racism." This can be understood as a sort of free-floating racism that's unmoored from any given individual's personal feelings. The fact that Black families have less wealth and tend to be in poorer health than White families, for instance, tends to be the sort of thing that's cited as systemic or institutional racism. But it's worthwhile to note that it's rational to view that phenomenon through the lens of economic disenfranchisement to the degree that the perpetuation of systemic racism can be said to rise from opportunity hoarding, which effectively results in "them that has" receiving still more. In the absence of malice or spite, it doesn't make sense for a person who is secure in the level of opportunity they can access to spend time and energy on simply preventing other people from accessing opportunities. And while it can be argued that disadvantaged people need a disproportionate share of the available opportunities to make up the differences between them and their better-off peers, if opportunities are common enough to be there for the asking and there isn't a specific drive to hold them back, eventually, one would expect that they'll close the gap.

And it's worth noting that Senator Sanders isn't the only person to push the idea that Americans should unite over class, rather than divide themselves over race. It's a fairly common argument. The band Arrested Development makes the point in Give A Man A Fish, and I've heard it repeated several times in the intervening decades.

I'm also uncertain that it actually matters how Senator Sanders views systemic racism. He leans substantially further Left than I do, so I have no plans to vote for him, but his views on racism aren't a factor in that calculation. If Senator Sanders were able to remake the nation into something more to his liking, I have little doubt that many Black people in the country would be much better off than they are now, even if he's incorrect about the nature of systemic racism.

This, however, is simply the nature of campaign season, especially one with so many currently viable candidates running for the Democratic nomination. Seeking to sow Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about other candidates becomes easier than attempting to increase support for one's own, and so critics are everywhere, and the media picks up their complaints because, well, the internet has a lot of room so there's always space for another story.

Water, Water, Everywhere

For all that the Seattle area is (in)famous for being rainy, it doesn't actually rain all that much. Locally, a quarter of an inch of actual precipitation in a day is considered a lot. For those of us who come from locales where rainfall is sometimes measured in inches per hour, it's merely a passive-aggressive drizzle.

One of the side effects of the fact that rain is often very light is that when it does actually rain for any length of time, whole sections of the place become waterlogged. The ground become saturated, and standing water can cover quite large areas. These tend to be out away from the city proper, but since the metropolitan area isn't very expansive, a twenty-minute drive can place you on the shores of a lake that hadn't been there a month or so ago.

Unending

This, I believe, should be funny. At least, that's the spirit that I believe motivated the post. I, however, simply find it to be sad. Or, to be more accurate, it makes me tired. I'm not sure that I can place a finger on why. This is, after all, simply one guy in an airport, interacting with someone I'd never heard of before reading this.

On second thought, maybe I do understand why. For all that this is a single interaction, it takes on the role of proof that some things never change. It becomes a link in what seems like a single chain of societal sexism, starting in the distant past and reaching beyond the foreseeable future. It takes all of the progress that people tell me that we've made and casually sweeps it aside, in favor of the bleak assessment that nothing ever actually changes.

Which is a dangerous thought, I believe. When something becomes permanent in the mind, does it acquire a sense of invulnerability? One that says that efforts at change are foolish, because they are futile?

For all that I appreciate "zero tolerance" sensibilities, I wonder if they also give rise to the idea that there is no such thing as progress towards a goal. That one is either past the finish line or still in the starting blocks. I don't know.

There will always be clueless guys out there. Detaching that cluelessness from history is difficult. In part, perhaps, because it feels like it allows a place in which the evils of the past can hide themselves to avoid destruction. But there is a chance that part of the way that we rid ourselves of the evils of the past is to refuse to grant them access to the present. And sometimes, this is done by not seeing them unless they go out of their way to make themselves known.

Torque

Seth Godin makes an excellent point today, in a blog post about the quote: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."

But it’s not bending itself. And it’s not waiting for someone from away to bend it either.

His point is a simple one; the arc of the moral universe bends because people chose to bend it. And, as a result, it bends towards their understanding of what justice is. While Mr. Godin's point is to caution against passivity, thinking that since the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice that people need to nothing, it's also worth understanding that the universe has no understanding of what justice is. "Justice" is a concept, and not a physical characteristic of the Universe, either the material one or the moral one. The idea that our society is more just today than it was a century ago means only that we modern people agree with what we have now more than we do with what they had then. In this sense, the bend of the arc of the moral universe is automatic, it bends because it always points to the controlling (if not the prevailing) concept of justice for the time and place under consideration. The people who are capable of having their concept of justice prevail find that the arc of the moral universe has come to meet them where they are.

Our culture is the result of a trillion tiny acts, taken by billions of people, every day. Each of them can seem insignificant, but all of them add up, one way or the other, to the change we each live through.

This is simply how societies work. When thousands of firearms owners rallied in Richmond, Virginia, today to protest new laws working their way through the state legislature, they hoped to influence that set of a trillion tiny acts. Whether it was to inspire the like-minded to act as they had, or to encourage the opposition to give up on their goals, they understood that the moral arc of the universe is bent by the force applied to it via human action.