Not back on it, John, still on it

HBomberGuy, a YouTuber my son watches and therefore--because my son likes to watch on the good TV in the living room--I watch, too, often cracks jokes about how every video he does ends up descending at some point into a critique of capitalism. Maybe anyone who posts content regularly will inevitably end up circling back to the same points over and over again. That's my explanation, anyway, for why I'm about to lodge another lament about how I don't feel at home intellectually or emotionally with either of the two main political camps in my country at the moment. Even though I disagree with one side more than I do the other, even the one I tentatively cling to tends to arrive at its positions and push its agenda in ways I don't recognize as legitimate.

Here's a meme from the past two weeks that I've seen several people on Twitter post:

Contrast the language in that meme and the certainty with which it presents its conclusions with two other documents I read this last week. One was the statistical analysis on racial differences in police force from a few years ago by Roland Fryer, the one that made headlines when the media reported that it showed police did not show bias when it came to shooting suspects. The other was a piece by Vox critical of Fryer's paper.

I'm not a frequent viewer of The Daily Show, but when I watch it, I think Trevor Noah's usually sharp, funny, and insightful, and the Daily Show has always been good at demonstrating the weaknesses of media in getting stories right. But this idea, that the police are looting black bodies, contrasts in tone with the papers I read by Fryer and Dara Lind on Vox. Here's about as strong as Fryer gets in presenting his thesis: 

Interestingly, as the intensity of force increases (e.g. handcuffing civilians without arrest, drawing or pointing a weapon, or using pepper spray or a baton), the probability that any civilian is subjected to such treatment is small, but the racial difference remains surprisingly constant. For instance, 0.26 percent of interactions between police and civilians involve an officer drawing a weapon; 0.02 percent involve using a baton. These are rare events. Yet, the results indicate that they are significantly more rare for whites than blacks. 

(Lost in the hub-bub over the paper suggesting there isn't much bias in police shootings was the other conclusion, which is that there was evidence of bias in every kind of force except for shootings.)

Lind, attacking Fryer's work, is somewhat more blunt, but not much. She is critical of how Fryer claimed to be doing pioneering work in a field that actually already had a lot of statistical work done, but she doesn't blast the work indiscriminately. She characterizes it as "definitely useful in some regards," and separates what Fryer's work might tell us from what it leaves out.

Ultimately, I find myself agreeing with Lind somewhat. Reading Fryer's work, it's clear he's uncomfortable with a bigger question of why police have MORE interactions with blacks and Latinos than whites to begin with. Even in his edited version of his paper, the one that he published after first dealing with criticism for his original "working paper" (the one the media reported on back in 2016), Fryer is not sure how to handle this question, referring vaguely to "race-specific crime participation rates," and describing an ideal experiment that would be impossible to carry out.

But what really struck me reading both Fryer's work and Lind's reply was how different academic discourse is from political discourse. Academic discourse is careful. It avoids being provocative or overstating its findings. It attempts to be precise about what the possible implications of a conclusion are and are not.

While I've been plenty frustrated over the years with how some academic discourse seems indifferent to its relevance to the world and the people who live in it (namely, the literary theory I was subject to as an English student), I'm at least as frustrated by political discourse that seems only concerned with getting the effect it is looking for, and not tying that push for an effect to some intellectual basis. Anytime there is a move from proposition to policy, there is a loss of precision. That's inevitable, perhaps, but not an excuse to abandon a commitment to intellectual rigorousness altogether.

I used to believe that the political left had a greater commitment to intellectual rigor than the right did. We used to console ourselves after our frequent political setbacks by telling ourselves how hard it was to convince people we were right when our arguments required a great deal more nuance than was practicable for moving the masses. It now feels like we've decided to alleviate those concerns by just ditching our inconvenient attachment to high-minded ideals like truth. It's like how Ohio State used to whine that it couldn't compete with the SEC in football because of its tougher academic standards and fussiness over rules, so it decided to just become as corrupt as the other schools, thereby eliminating the problem it had competing.

The left might still have some greater degree of intellectual gravitas as a legacy, but it's quickly eroding. This was brought home to me recently by another meme I saw circulating, one that was re-posted by some writers I admire:

Since when did a preference for facts over feelings become "white noise"? When did "facts don't care about your feelings" become as illegitimate a trope as "just obey and you won't get hurt"? I realize any rhetorical tactic can be used for evil, including one that calls for a rigorous approach over an emotional one, but are we really ready to just hand this argument over to people we disagree with concerning police violence?

There is, of course, more than one kind of truth. There is emotional truth and there is statistical truth. There are numbers on police violence and there are actual stories about real suffering of real people, many of which have been captured on video. There's a reason politicians like to give vignettes during speeches, and why every news story ever on a big topic starts off with the individual story of a single person. We react differently to stories and their emotional tug than we do to facts.

That's fine. There's a place for both. But I feel more and more like the left is only a place for emotional truth. We're so obsessed with winning, we continually rely on the political tactic of overstatement to the intellectual discipline of precise statement. We only focus on emotional truths at the expense of logical ones.

There's a place for the emotional logic of narrative in the national dialogue over how to reform the police. But narrative logic, like academic discourse, can be either shrill or measured, can be either precise or wildly imprecise.  I've been very disappointed sometimes to see that fiction writers I admire aren't terribly impressive when it comes to precision with their online activism. One writer in particular whose stories I love often responds to Trump Tweets with nothing more creative than "fuck you."

There's a time for fuck-you, just as there is a time to indulge in emotional logic at the expense of precision. If we all went to see comedians perform expecting precision, we wouldn't have much fun. It's fine to bend the truth for a specific reason, but only if we all keep in mind that the truth is being bent, and our indulgence of this is temporary. It sometimes seems to me, though, that we've been indulging a type of imprecision in the name of activism for so long, we've forgotten that's not actually the right way to think all the time.

There are some good ideas out there. One of the things I realized this week when trying to educate myself about statistics on police violence was how hard it is to get good data. One of the calls right now is for a national database to help fix this problem. It would be a great start, because it would improve the logic we use to try to figure out what problems we even need to solve in the first place. But there are much deeper problems to solve than we will be able to deal with during a season of protest.

The reason Fryer was reluctant to dive into the question of why the police are more likely to come into contact with black and Latino people in the first place is the same reason we're all reluctant to deal with it. If we just blame the police for being assholes and focus on the dramatic confrontations we see on video, we don't have to confront a much more difficult truth. Blacks and Latinos are more likely to commit crimes that bring them into contact with police, and that's a result of years of bad policy.

That policy was something everyone contributed to. We all tolerated bad policy. We now all tolerate unequal opportunity that leads to greater criminality in some communities. When Mrs. Heretic's students tried to get jobs in Baltimore, they found there were few to get, and any there were took hours by bus to get to. With adult responsibilities thrust upon them at a young age, many decided to get into selling drugs, at which point a long string of police interactions became a certainty. To increase opportunity would take an enormous investment on our part. Instead, we tend to just throw the problem in the laps of moderately paid teachers and police. When they aren't up to the impossible job, we decide the solution is for politicians to "hold them accountable." It's an insane approach to deep social problems, and it's no wonder it never works. It's no wonder we keep ending up at the same place.

We do have to fix the police, but that won't solve the problems that made us want the police to fix in the first place. Defunding the police only works with massive funding in other areas. When we reallocate that funding, we need it to be based on cold, rigorous findings that tell us what will work. I'm increasingly skeptical, though, that we even have the ability as a people anymore to do that kind of thinking.