The tricky "what good will this do" question

The most surprising thing to me every time there's a crisis isn't the panoply of opinions I see expressed, it's the certainty with which people hold those opinions. I don't claim to be the smartest or the most informed about any issue out there, but I've certainly put in more work than a lot of the people I see posting opinions that start with "What you need to understand..." or words to that effect. Everyone's a guru.

I suppose I can understand the impulse toward certainty; nobody wants to be caught idling during an important moment, and uncertainty is the enemy of action. Nobody can ever be fully certain of anything, but there are times when the need is so urgent, we simply must act based on the best information available.

Fair enough, although I believe "action" for many people begins and ends with social media slacktivism. Those who are doing more, who are out there on the front lines, are welcome to accuse me of dithering. It's in my nature to be too willing to keep thinking after the time for action is at hand. For both good and evil, I'm indecisive by nature. I will accept the criticism that comes with that.

But it's also true that even in a war, there is a time after the first bullets start flying to take a step back and evaluate how the attack is going. Based on watching the media for the last week, both news and social, I think one can broadly categorize the reactions to the anti-police-brutality demonstrations (APBD) and the looting that has followed in its wake as follows:

1. This is good and long overdue, without qualifications. We don't need no water, let the motherfucker burn.
2. There are valid concerns here that have gone unaddressed for too long. Destroying property of innocent people, especially in the communities of those most affected by police brutality, is of course a bad thing, but just like police supporters feel a few bad cops shouldn't tar all police, APBD supporters say we should listen to the valid concerns and not be distracted by the few vandals.
3. Often quoting Dr. King, some point out that even the vandalism is the "cry of the unheard," and therefore should be understood, if not condoned. 

Conservative responses are somewhat mirrors of the first three

1A. Black lives have been improving, if you get past the media always whipping everyone up into a froth over isolated incidents. Life for black Americans is not as bad as the media wants us to believe. (And here there is a possible branch of this argument saying that the people taking advantage of this are operatives or outsiders with their own political objectives.)
2A. Just like there are some bad apples among the demonstrators, there are some bad apples among cops. Being a cop is hard, and there will always be some people who don't do it well.
3A. Perceived injustices should be taken care of within the system. Whatever your complaint, you cannot seek redress from a system you are actively undoing through contempt for basic property rights. And more importantly, this won't solve anything, it will only make things worse.


(And then there's a stand-alone reaction, one that worries about the possible effect of these demonstrations on the spread of coronavirus.)

I wonder if anyone has ever coined the malaphor "Fiddler on the Roof is on Fire," because that would be Donald Trump to a tee right now. 

Saying "they all have a point" isn't the same as saying they're all equally valid

I'm already indecisive, so when I say things like, "Well, there's some truth in all of these things," I fear I'm opening myself up to the double-whammy of being both indecisive and conciliatory. But saying there is some truth in them all doesn't mean there's equal truth. Generally, the APBD supporters are in the right. But conservatives, as they are wont to do, do come equipped with some annoying truths. The reconciliation of these disparate viewpoints seems to me to run something like the following.

Of course, policing is unfairly carried out on communities of color, and this unfair policing is taking place within the context of a thousand other injustices, all of which were viscerally on display when an officer kept his knee on the neck of a man who didn't seem to be resisting. These unfairnesses are the direct result of history and policy. As Ta-Nehisi Coates keeps pointing out, if aliens came to Earth, and they studied American history and then looked at the current situation of black Americans, they would not be confused about why black Americans are in the situation they are in. Given this historical injustice and its link to the present, a present which just got a very palpable illustration, the peaceful demonstrations are completely valid, and even some of the violence is understandable.

But I'd like to look at the end of argument 3A: "it won't do any good." Supporters of APBD will say that's not the point, that this is the natural expression of trauma, and the point isn't to "do good," but to express what cannot be bottled up any longer. Okay, I can understand that. But how long does the exemption from results last?

The fact is that violence can be an extremely useful political tool, although it's a difficult one to wield. As Coates has pointed out, those who laud the approach of a Dr. King over Malcolm X forget that King's camp was happy to use Malcolm X to get concessions out of LBJ. King would ask for something, and if he didn't get it, he would say, "Well, you can always try to deal with Malcolm X," at which point LBJ would give in. We can praise King's non-violence, and we should, but his non-violence was partly effective because it was better than the other option for a government that had a war in Vietnam to worry about.

Of course the vandalism--some of which is probably coming from outsiders with their own agendas-- can be understood to a large degree as the spontaneous outcry of anguish, but what if the violence stopped being random targets that happened to be in the way, and took on a more strategic flavor? What if it changed from mob violence to political violence?

Why is spontaneous violence tolerated more than planned violence? 

This whole "you have to understand this violence as the inescapable outcry of the injured" response, when continued in perpetuity, is in danger of becoming irresponsible. We've been having these kinds of demonstrations for a long time now, every time some emblem of what people of color feel to be their every day reality is goes viral. Why has there not been a more effective planned and political response, one that persists over time? Could it be that the very effort on behalf of some well-meaning people to just understand the anger and not pass judgment upon some manifestations of it is part of the problem? I'm seeing a lot of white people anxious to signal their own sympathies with the protesters talk coddlingly of the traumatized, as though they were children unable to control their own rage. It's a non-threatening kind of sympathy, because spontaneous violence doesn't lead to change. It doesn't "do any good," as the conservatives would say, but for a particular breed of social media liberal who only wants to demonstrate that their feelings are on the right side, that's just fine. "Doing good" isn't the point. We're here to pat people of color on the head and tell them we understand their feelings.

But what if spontaneous violence became planned violence? At present, one of the weaknesses of APBD is that there is no central leadership. This is also true of Black Lives Matter. There are many local chapters, but no centralized hierarchy. This means the protesters have no list of demands to be met. There's no agenda for the government to respond to. Much like the government now has a power vacuum because the president is largely absent or ineffective during the protests, the protesters themselves present no figure with whom the government could negotiate even if they wanted to. Those attending the protests have no unified platform. There is no organized political movement taking place, at least not one of any consequence.

Say that changed, and a central organization with a centralized leadership formed, and that leadership decided to hit certain, strategic targets, minimizing loss of human life but maximizing economic and political impact? Say this group kept this up for a while, then pulled back and offered talks. Even if the government refused, because it doesn't negotiate with terrorists, it would still offer a lot of strength to other groups outside of the one committing the violence. If a credible threat presented itself, it could change the complexion of politics, and it could actually "do good" to the group with the grievance.

Naturally, the local nature of police force is one of the reasons it's hard to create a national movement. There are a lot of issues no president could solve, because they involve working with governors or mayors or city councils. But an organized national movement could effectively mobilize to make change in one location at a time, as happened during the Civil Rights Movement. The Democratic Party could be part of this, but its leaders seem happy to just say the right sentiments during times of crisis. When we say that questions of utility miss the point, we absolve political forces on the left from the responsibility to organize effectively. Our attitudes about violence are a symbol of this absolution.

For some reason, we seem as a society far more tolerant of ineffective and temporary shows of violence than considered and long-term ones. We call the former "the cry of the unheard" and the latter terrorism. It's an extension of the criminal distinction between crimes of passion and pre-meditated murder, as though it's less awful to murder someone when you've found out they're leaving you than it is to murder them for the insurance money.

I'm too indecisive to actually be recommending violence. I'm asking a question

I'm not talking about the utility of violence to recommend violence, I'm talking about it because there is so little talk generally about what kinds of actions might be useful, which says a lot about why we continue this cycle of incidents and disorganized responses. The outright assumptions we make about violence without even discussing those assumptions reveals a lack of seriousness about attaining the desired ends.

Why are so many liberals at the moment willing to brush aside the question of whether the violence will "do any good"? Whence this liberal pessimism about our ability to change the political course of the country? And what does our over-confident assurance that the question isn't what's important say about the lack of actual political goals on the left? Why are we willing to tolerate sporadic acts of violence with no end in mind but we completely shut off the idea of violence as a potential tool in organized political activity? Is it because we are so shocked by intentionally using violence to achieve an end, or because disorganized violence mirrors our own disorganized political approach?

Myself, I'm not going to pretend I'm excited to go storming buildings to see change. Generally, I think the change that needs to happen will take time and concerted, slow effort. It will take people being useful day-to-day. My political action isn't radical or violent; it's to try to do little things. We vote for change. We support black businesses. Mrs. Heretic has taught for a decade in some of the populations that are affected by injustice. We try to help those kids when we can. One of the ways we help them is with the money I make in my day job, a job that is, without a doubt, the opposite of anything radical. I've adapted to the world as it is in order to try to make living in the world as it is a little easier for a few people.

That leaves me stumped about how to respond to a crisis like this. Do more little things? I'd like there to be an identifiable political or activist movement with goals I mostly agreed with to join, but there isn't. There have been multiple instances of anger boiling up into spontaneous action in the last decade, but no lasting political movements with an agenda to capitalize on that anger.

For those still willing to dream big, I don't know why we think asking about the effectiveness of the tactics being used to bring about the world of tomorrow isn't a valid question. What does that say about us if we brush aside questions of utility because we don't even think the oppressed are capable of effectively organizing a political resistance to the oppression?

Violence is an incredibly difficult tool to wield well. No matter how focused you try to make the violence, there will be collateral damage, as the government finds out every time it tries to surgically strike terrorist leaders. I'd be happy if nobody needed to go down that path, if we were able to find a peaceful way to greater equality. 

But absent that, we should stop insisting the efficacy of the protests is a moot question. If we shouldn't be asking "what good will it do?" of random acts of violence, then we certainly have a responsibility to be asking, "What will do good?" I'd like an efficient political left. I've been making do with a disorganized, chaotic Democratic Party since I changed sides in my twenties. I'd love something with more focus, something I could even see myself being an active part of instead of just a default voter for.

All of this concern for sadness among liberal well-wishers, both our own and the sadness of the oppressed as we imagine it, seems to me misplaced. It's an abstract "won't someone please think of the children" kind of concern. The question isn't about caring enough or feeling the right thing. It's about what we want to accomplish and how to do it. Taking the protests and the issues that are behind them seriously seems to me to include questions of efficacy, namely why the left seems to find it so hard to muster any.