Making A Difference

LinkedIn asks: "Are firms making a difference?" They note that companies have lined up to make their statements of support for anti-racism and social justice, and wonder how the public is taking these. Personally, if I see another random "Black Lives Matter" banner slapped on a random company homepage, I'll want to put my eyes out. But I get it. Companies have to be seen expressing concern and care. At least for the time being.

The Harris Poll "asked Americans how important it is that companies work to truly make a positive difference on specific societal issues and how much of a positive impact they have seen from corporate America." The present data on a wide-ranging basket of concerns, from "Good health and well being" to "Drug addiction," and show the percentages of respondents that said that it was "Very important that companies work to truly make a positive difference" and who said they were seeing a "Very Positive Corporate Impact." And they say that the primary takeaway is that: "What a company does is more important than what it says."

But in the end, the question isn't what companies are going to do. It's what we're going to do.

There has been a long-running debate in the United States over which is the chicken and which is the egg: Are social justice disparities driven by economic disparities, or the reverse? While, most likely, the correct answer at this stage of the game is that the two are inextricably intertwined, there is some ability to engage them separately. And there is some ability to lessen economic disparities, via increased domestic hiring. Companies can certainly do this. But that doesn't answer the question of why they would. Companies aren't going to spend money "to truly make a positive difference" in the country simply because the public at large doesn't want to. To a certain degree, the wealth of affluent Americans has been transferred from less well-off Americans whose jobs have been off-shored or simply eliminated. Advancing them to being better off than they are, let alone something approaching parity, would require redistribution. But if the pie isn't made any larger, than a redistribution of wealth is also a redistribution of poverty. And many people in the United States don't want an iota more than they already have. And the owners and shareholders of companies in the United States are most certainly in that camp.

Capital can flee from taxes and regulations, but it can't run from the simple costs of doing business if it wants to, well, do business. And increasing the costs of accessing the American public, and the money that they spend on goods and services is not a simple task. It takes a level of coordination and cooperation that it hard for a large and heterogeneous nation to manage. It's part of the reason the United States finds itself in the position it is now. And the wealthy capitalist class can afford to wait for the current consensus to break down, given that history shows that it's unlikely to last indefinitely. And if that changes, and the United States does manage to pull together, and stay together, long enough to drive genuine accountability, it won't be companies that have made the positive difference. It will be the public.

Self-Fulfilling

I was speaking with someone about the ongoing SARS-2 Coronavirus outbreak today, and they were lamenting the lack of care that people have for one another, citing the recent rise in cases attributed to states loosening restrictions on businesses and public gatherings, and the widely shared images of people being out in public without masks. During this part of the conversation it occurred to me that I’ve often heard American society described as “dog-eat-dog,” “cutthroat” and/or “every person for themselves.” And if the United States is thought to be oriented around an understanding of “personal responsibility” that tends to translate into “individual self-reliance,” isn’t it be expected that many people take that to heart? For all that it is said that looking out for oneself needn’t mean being unwilling to look out for others, if people understand that the only resource they can count on is themselves, it’s perfectly reasonable to expect that they’d concern themselves with themselves. As the ability to both see to one’s own needs and also take care of others is seen as a luxury that accrues mainly to the “privileged,” others are encouraged to see themselves as too poor to be magnanimous.

Likewise, I often wonder if the framing of the epidemic is overly apocalyptic at times. “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” is not exactly conducive to long-term thinking about the health of the community as a whole, and the often dire pronouncements of the impacts of the coronavirus outbreak may be contributing to that. Not in the sense that everyone is going to die (although I wonder what things would look like if something closer to the Plague was in play), but in the sense that this will be a seismic, and permanent, shift in that way people live their lives. If this disease is going to force the world to change, people who enjoyed it the way it was are pretty much out of time to savor the old paradigm. I suspect that this drives a certain amount of behavior that people consider reckless. Fear of missing out is the force that it is due more to active (if unintentional) cultivation than to accident.

The messages of “people will take care of one another” and “the world isn’t coming to an end” are not particularly difficult messages to craft, but given the general social climate, they can be very difficult to land. Expressing concern over people’s selfishness and the consequences of same often feels like doing the important work of trying to make the world a better place. But that can create a situation in which “taking things seriously” is often equated with “panicking.” And I think that this panic is not as useful as it’s made out to be.

Injustice for Sale

Recently, I've heard two different stories about the relationship between privately-run, for-profit prisons and the justice system in the United States. The first said that the justice system as a whole was actively working for the prison operators; that the wheels of justice, as it were, were designed to funnel innocent people into a form of modern-day slavery at the behest of rapacious capitalists. The second was the story of a specific judge, who accepted bribes from a local prison operator, to be paid every time the judge sentenced someone to prison. This second one, it turned out, was the Kids for Cash scandal of a decade ago.

The two stories were broadly similar, and point to related, yet distinct problems within the justice system. One says that the system is corrupt in a moral sense, the other is that an individual within the system is corrupt in a legal sense. Both of these can be said to be conspiracy theories; it's the depth and the nature of the alleged conspiracies that differ. Interestingly, the NPR story was updated last year, noting that the story had been circulating on Facebook with an altered headline. I wonder if I haven't heard two versions of the same story, one having been through the social media grinder, and one from memory.

As related to me, the stories carried different themes; one warned of the dangers of a system that operated at the behest of shadowy élites and the other expressed anger at how those who wield the power of the state use it to protect themselves from accountability. Each story reflected the concerns of the people who related them to me. And interestingly, seemed geared towards prompting me to share those concerns.

There is a worry about misinformation in academic circles, with a never ending series of alarms being sounded about false information circulating online. But maybe the worry would be better placed (to the degree that worry can ever be well-placed) if it were concerned with people's worries. If a significant portion of misinformation is driven by people's fears, perhaps working with those fears would kill two birds with one stone.

But What About

I’ve not talked to a single officer who supported what happened in Minneapolis, yet every one of us is being painted with that broad brush. Everyone’s screaming about racism and racial inequality—but is that not what everybody is doing to law enforcement? With racism, people get in power and use that power against another ethnicity. Now, [activists] have a voice because of what happened to Floyd, but they’re using that power against another group. That group happens to be law enforcement.

We understand it’s not all of you, but you wanna sit there—I’m sure you’ve seen memes that people have sent around about 1,000 good cops, but if you have 10 bad cops, you have 1,100[sic] bad cops because we’re not holding one another accountable. The same could be flipped, with 1,000 protesters and 10 agitators.
“In One Day, We Became the Worst Things in the Country” Slate Magazine

The quotes above illustrate for me the idea that suffering does not create empathy for others who suffer. If we take the officers at face value, they clearly feel that the people who protest them, who they feel have been the targets prejudice and the whims of people in power, are more than happy to turn the tables when given the chance. And they are, to some degree, likely correct in that assessment. Yet it's also clear that they're just as willing to paint with broad brushes themselves. Doing unto others as has been done unto them becomes the watchword.

When people suffer, many of them see only their own suffering, and the keen feeling that it is undeserved. And this is often felt more strongly than any identification with others who suffer, even when the sufferers know who those people are, and can name their suffering.

And so the cycle of inflicting pain continues. Philospher Thomas Nagel once noted that people feel that their own pains are morally important, to the point that other people should care about them. Those who claimed otherwise, Professor Nagel claimed, were either dishonest or mentally ill. While I personally feel that he is incorrect in such a blanket assessment, it's understandable how he came to such a conclusion. But perhaps more importantly, for people who do feel that what happens to them is of universal moral significance, it often appears that they see it as the primary thing that others should be concerned with, and when they see others as being dissimilar to themselves, they don't see their pains as being of equal moral weight. And inflicting more pain on them doesn't change that.

Un Together Now

So this collage was shared as evidence that leadership in the United States (At least from the White House) was failing to rally the nation to put an end to the COVID-19 epidemic. Which is fair enough, I suppose, but for me, that assessment relies on the idea that all other things are equal, which I don't really suspect they are.

A strong nationwide response to something like the SARS-2 Coronavirus requires a very high level of social trust. While some 60% to 70% of Americans report that they wear masks and take other precautions when out and around, that still leaves tens of millions of people who aren't. But even getting the level of cooperation into the 60s is quite a feat. Pushing it higher is going to be remarkably difficult.

And I don't know that it's realistic to expect a President who was elected through working the divisions that have grown up between Americans for at least the past 30+ years to suddenly turn around and have everyone pulling in the same direction over the course of a couple of months. Even if he were inclined to operate in that way, and there's little evidence that he is, it would be a nearly impossible task. Leadership is all find and good, but people have to want to follow.