Choices

I was reading a review of the new Netflix science-fiction movie, Stowaway. The review was unusual in how little time it spent on Stowaway itself. Instead it's mostly a second-hand takedown of The Cold Equations, a clear influence on the plot of Stowaway. What little time the reviewer spent on Stowaway was mainly to point out the parallels.

Unsurprisingly, there was a mention of the Trolley Problem, and as I read through the review, I realized that a lot of what was going on was shaped by the author's opinion of the problem. While the Trolley Problem is said to highlight the difference between deontological and consequentialist ethical systems, it also highlights the difference between people who accept, and those who reject, hard choices. One of the critiques of The Cold Equations, the Trolley Problem and Stowaway is that they are contrived to force a choice that technically should never arise in the first place. For the two science-fiction stories, the contention is that the spacecraft involved should, and therefore could, have been designed in such a way that the unexpected presence of another person on board should have been solvable by the crews in each case. Likewise, a common line of attack on the Trolley Problem is that no-one would ever be in a situation in which the only viable choices concern who dies, in reality, saving all of the supposedly at-risk lives would be simple.

I was reminded of this story that I'd read a year ago, in The Atlantic: My Husband Would Not Survive a Triage Decision. Oregon State Philosophy Professor Kathleen Dean Moore, faced with the realization that the brand of utilitarian ethics that she taught her students would mean that in a shortage medical care, her husband would not be selected for treatment, laid out a simple conclusion:

Deciding who lives or dies is a false dichotomy. There’s a third path: a proper health-care system that doesn’t require these terrible choices.

And you often see this in people's reactions to the Trolley Problem. There are those people who embark on the task of attempting to come to a rational conclusion as to which life or lives to safe, and these are those people who refuse to concede that there is any terrible choice to be made. And perhaps, they see the whole exercise as nothing more than a means to push people into denying that all lives are worth saving, and thus can be saved.

I tend to draw a distinction between the intrinsic value that we place on human life, and its instrumental value in practice. Every individual may be infinitely precious, but when push comes to shove, a life is worth precisely what someone will pay to preserve it, and no more. And part of the pushback against the Trolley Problem, made explicit in the critiques of The Cold Equations and Stowaway is that we have the resources to preserve lives, and that is only forced contrivance that constrains people from simply doing what needs to be done to keep people alive; whether that's interfering editors or governments that a certain professor of philosophy believes are too stingy to avoid unnecessary triage decisions.

I was watching a playthrough of the video game The Banner Saga, and there was a character in it, Rugga by name, who struck me as a stand-in for that person who makes the case that decisions in favor of the greater good are all simply covers for depriving others of what is rightfully theirs. Resistance to the Trolley Problem (and its many and varied incarnations) seems to be in the same vein. Why, one might ask, should people learn how to make life-or-death decisions, when the actual question is how does our society structure itself such that those decisions need not be made.

For my part, I'm dubious that the instrumental realities of life can ever be made to line up with our desires for the intrinsic value of all people. But maybe that simply means that I'm part of the problem.

Odd Bloom Out

Acculturated

Given that the end of the Derek Chauvin trial has been in the news, it came up online. And one member of an online forum that I participate in triggered a heated, long-running argument when they submitted (among other things) the following:

[George Floyd's] parents split up when he was 2. He got into college on a football scholarship, but dropped out. He was involved in several rap groups. Between 1997 and 2005 he served 8 jail terms. In 2009 he pled to 5 years for being part of an armed home invasion. After prison he joined a Christian rehab group and church. He was apparently addicted to an opioid called fentanyl. He was arrested for passing counterfeit money. He had 5 children--wikipedia doesn't mention him ever being married.

If many Q conspiracy theorists and Marjorie Taylor Greene seem to fit within a certain American culture, it's because they do. George Floyd appears to fit into another one. It's just that it is very risky to mention that he does. But he does.

So this raises some interesting questions. What is "culture?" How are cultures defined? What defines a person as "fitting within" a specific culture?

Part of the problem with speaking of culture and Black America is twofold: First, for many White Americans, Black people are all the same; they're effectively a monoculture. This has the result of coding "culture" directly with "all Black people." And it's a strange thing to be on the receiving end of. I am considered to have more in common with people I've never met from the other literal other side of the continent than I do with people I've known for decades, on the strength of a perceived similarity in our skin tones. People may talk about "East-coast hip-hop" versus "West-coast hip hop," but the idea that Black people living in Seattle's Rainier Beach might have a completely different culture than, say those living in Atlanta's Sweet Auburn neighborhood seems unintuitive to many Americans. At the same time, the idea that people from Broadmoor in Seattle and Buckhead in Atlanta would have similar cultural experiences would strike many people as ridiculous.

Secondly, concepts like "Rap culture," "Hip-hop culture," "Gang culture," "Street culture" and other terms that for the reason I noted above tend to be considered synonyms for "Black culture" are defined mainly in terms of how they differ negatively from what one might call "Mainstream White culture." (Something that I'm not sure actually exists, except as a concept used to compare other cultures.) To be sure, this tends to be the nature of comparisons with the mainstream, almost any deviation from the accepted norm is considered a negative in one way or another, with only a few exceptions. But when was the last time you heard someone refer to "R&B culture" to refer to a subset of the Black community? Or used any sort of "culture" designation to refer to something positive in a non-White group of people?

This tends to lend discussions of "culture," as pertains to Black Americans a cast of "all Black people." This creates the sense that "it is very risky to mention that George Floyd appears to fit into a another 'American culture'," because if there is no perceived difference between "another 'American culture'" and "the Black population of the United States" in the Venn diagram, the former is very easily taken as simply a code for the latter. And once culture is seen as merely a coded means of racist speech, the big guns come out.

Now, to a degree, this is also due to the fact that, generally speaking, culture is a subset of race; common discourse in the United States does not typically recognize any cultures, outside of perhaps some professional cultures, that cross racial definitions. Even though the definition of "gang" is not itself racially coded, a list of "Famous People That Openly Display The Gang Culture" from this Annapolis, Maryland, web page is exclusively of Black and mixed-race Black people. Likewise, while I'm pretty sure that there are Black people who live in New England, for instance, "New England culture" is generally considered the exclusive province of White New Englanders. This subordination of culture to assigned racial identity exacerbates the problem.

The person who wrote this noted that "it is very risky to mention that he," meaning George Floyd, fits into a specific culture, because lacking the words, or the willingness to define the culture they were referring to with any sort of precision, they simply came across as racist. Hence the argument that promptly started, which, in the end, was born of someone feeling a need to comment on something that they couldn't (or didn't bother to) be specific about. There should be nothing "very risky" about simply acknowledging the fact that the United States has a number of different cultures within its borders. But until the average person on the street to speak about the cultures that include non-White Americans with the same level of nuance and detail that they can bring to White American cultures that they aren't personally participants in, they're going to continue to sound as if they're clumsily blowing into a dog whistle.

Scarecrow

I came across a couple of articles in the aftermath of the trial of Derek Chauvin, namely “Why A Guilty Verdict For Derek Chauvin Doesn’t Change The Reality Of Police Violence” and “There Will Be More Derek Chauvins.”

The basic theses of each piece are, respectively:

In short, Chauvin’s indictment is not evidence that police violence will stop or that police reform will suddenly be widespread.

and

There will be more Derek Chauvins, because his conviction alters nothing about this system.

It's clear when one reads them that both of these articles have, as their central premise, the idea that there should be no expectation that, for all that it was a public spectacle, the trial and conviction of Derek Chauvin will lead to a reduction in, let alone the end of, police killings of civilians that are, or are widely believed believed to be, unjustified. To which my question is: Who honestly thinks that it will? The lack of an answer in either article left me with the suspicion of a straw man, but I presume that I can imagine someone who might think that some momentous corner has been turned. I’m simply unaccustomed, I suppose, to major news and commentary outlets catering to imaginary readers.

What struck me as odd about these pieces, from the moment I read their headlines, was how uncontroversial the point seemed. Why would anyone expect that this one conviction, in this one case, would noticeably move the needle? Consider this quote, from Alex Samuels’ FiveThirtyEight piece:

“Criminal prosecution is not an effective way to change policing,” Rachel Harmon, a professor of law and director of the Center for Criminal Justice at the University of Virginia, told me. “It’s individualistic, whereas most of the problems in policing are institutional.” In short: An individual verdict “doesn’t particularly contribute to broader reform,” she said.

But isn't this true of all other crimes? The United States has consistently been at or near the top of incarceration statistics worldwide for years, if not decades. I am not aware of any single sort of criminal activity that the nation has managed to eradicate by convicting people of crimes. If “you can't arrest your way out of [fill in the blank]” has effectively become a mantra in criminal-justice circles, why would any expect that poor police practices/police brutality would be an exception? The clearance rate for bank robberies is pretty good; Arizona State University reported it as being in the area of 60%, with many bank robbers being caught the day of the crime. Despite this, there are a couple thousand attempts annually. And criminal prosecution for bank robbery is an individualistic attempt to answer a broader societal problem. While many of the bank robbers that make their way into the news might be relatively well-off people looking to score large amounts of money for some or another reason, most people who try to rob banks are simply hard up, and banks are where the money is. If a better-than-even chance of being caught and sent to prison isn't a deterrent there, why would it be for anything else?

As I said before, I can imagine people who would attach some great significance to the trial of Derek Chauvin and its verdict. But there are always going to be people who look at progress in combating a long-standing problem, and eager to put it behind them, declare victory. When I was in high school some of my classmates were so quick to declare that the Civil Rights Movement had put an end to racism and so willing to repeat the claim that I started to wonder what planet they were from. (And where I could book a tour of the place.) But are there really so many people out there that believe this, and read left-learning news and commentary sites, that they’re going to encounter one of these articles? It seems more likely to me that both of these stories are preaching to the choir, telling a group of people something that they already know to be true. Whether they’re useful as reminders is a different question, one that I don’t have the answer to.

Impassed

It occurs to me that there are times when a conflict boils down to neither person wanting to take the first step, out of fear of being taken advantage of. Consider the following impasse.

I will forgive you, once you have shown genuine repentance for the harm you have done me.

I will repent the harm I have done you, once you have shown genuine forgiveness.

I've come to understand a lack of social trust to lie at the root of any number of problems in the United States. To be certain, I've become somewhat suspicious of the concept, given how easily it explains things, but still "seems a bit too easy" and "lacks explanatory power" are not one in the same, and one shouldn't do things the hard way, just for the sake of expending effort, if the destination is the same.

Still, I think that something a bit more complex is at work here, because of another favorite hobgoblin of mine, insecurity. If the person who cannot afford to be cheated cannot afford to be trusting, social trust might explain a lot of things, but it also has an explanation itself.

For living in what is described as one of the wealthiest nations on Earth, many Americans, regardless of their social and economic status, strike me as desperately insecure. People have enough to realize that they could be much worse off, but not enough to understand themselves as safe from that happening. And, seeing themselves in a zero-sum game, they jealously guard what they have and see the benefits that others receive as coming at their expense.

But if insecurity feeds distrust, distrust also feeds insecurity. I don't think that many people understand themselves to be completely able to weather their vagaries of life entirely on their own, as individuals or as nuclear families. Thus, a feeling that others are competitors, rather than compatriots can heighten that sense of ever present danger. Which leads to a mode of dealing with other people that tends to request the other be the first to show vulnerability. Something that itself can sow distrust.

There are millions of people who understand the way things work in the modern United States to be completely, and self-evidently, broken. This also sows distrust and insecurity, especially when there is a conclusion that things can't become "this bad" on their own, so some malicious party must have engineered it for their own benefit. But I've come to think that maybe the kludgy system that exists here endures specifically because it can function (at least after a fashion) in a society where distrust and insecurity are the norm. It may not make the best of a bad situation, but it isn't terrible, either. And so it sustains itself because it doesn't disturb the status quo; American society and politics don't make citizens more trusting and more secure, and so the don't open the avenues for their replacement with something that might serve everyone better, but at the same time require more from everyone in the bargain.

Therefore, the impasse remains, and is the only winner.