MCAM seems more in line with human nature than ACAB

I've loved Lebron James since I first saw him put on a Cleveland Cavaliers uniform, and it confounds me how many people seem to hate the guy. More than just the fact that he has haters, what gets me is who the haters are. I get it if you're a fan of a team he's taking apart and you're sick of seeing him score against you. I hated Michael Jordan in a limited sense back when he used to tear up the Cavs. But fans who rip on him for everything from his hairline to how square he is to how he's 3-6 lifetime in the finals--never mind how without him, none of those teams would have even been in a finals--make no sense to me. Lebron James should never be getting real hate from his own community, whether than community is Black people, people from Ohio, or basketball fans. 

Lately, he's also been getting some hate from outside his community, namely whatever politically conservative pseudo-celebrity Fox News can get to say something negative about James in front of a microphone. James, if you don't know, has been mildly critical of police and American systemic racism in general. He isn't really that radical in what he's said. For example, he doesn't condone violence toward police at a time when some really are claiming it's time for violent struggle against the enforcers of state control. Still, because James is the best player of his generation, when he takes a stand like criticizing the police who shot Breonna Taylor, people pay attention to him more than they do to other players. Which means when some UFC fighter wants to play to his base, he goes after James, calling James a spineless coward for being woke. (I'm not linking to a story about this idiot. James has dealt with it with the same dogged perseverance and ability to ignore haters that have made him the best.) 

I don't understand why any politically conservative person would attack James. If you're conservative, you have no beef with James. He's the opposite of everything you worry about. He's a family man. He respects women. He doesn't wear his pants low. (These are, by the way, all reasons he sometimes gets grief from his own community.) He might disagree with you politically, but if you are on the side of maintaining order, you want people who disagree the way James disagrees. You ought to promote James, ask why more people objecting to police can't do it in the civil way he does. 

Why some white people are so incensed with James

I was just talking to a relative from Ohio who said she was more concerned about racial tension in America than coronavirus. She told me she "hates Lebron James" and hates all athletes, because she's tired of athletics being a platform for athletes to make political statements. I think the hatred comes from two places. First is the maybe understandable and instinctive dislike for what sounds like complaint from people who are better-off, financially, than the fans watching the sport. But that's always been true, and it's only now some people are suddenly waking up to it. The second reason, though, is deeper, more convoluted, and based on assumptions that are harder to confront head-on.

Okay, Lebron maybe works the refs a lot, although maybe his feelings of being picked on on the court are an overflow of how picked on he is off the court. 

Traditionally, we have rightfully respected those who do dangerous jobs on our behalf. That healthy respect, though, has occasionally broken containment and gone right into hero worship. First responders are heroes, and the thing about a hero is that if you say anything bad about heroes, they can't be heroes anymore, which means to make any kind of criticism doesn't just mean you're saying they're human, you're saying there is nothing about them to admire at all. 

The prevalence of slogans these days like ACAB ("all cops are bastards") is itself an unintended consequence of our culture's long worship of first responders. When people learn, through ubiquitous video footage previously unavailable, that police aren't perfect, the way we expect heroes to be, they sometimes assume that only the opposite pole is possible: if cops aren't heroes, they must be evil. 

That flies in the fact of human nature

But any kind of assumption that follows the formula "all _____ are ___" is likely to be untrue. I don't have to be either naïve or an apologist for police to think this. It's not an ideologically extreme position; it's a position that comes from even the most casual observance of human nature and the most basic understanding of statistics. 

What is true about human nature is that most people are somewhere in the statistical middle of ability and effort that combine together to give output. They exhibit average amounts of moral courage and ethical integrity. That's just mathematical reality. It's tautological, even. An average human is average at most things. All cops aren't bastards. All cops aren't anything. But most cops are mediocre, just like most people are. 

You can sometimes cheat statistics by providing an environment where you only attract those who are good at certain functions. The New York Philharmonic doesn't have 100 members of average ability such that only one of them can play anywhere near well enough to perform at the level needed. They have screened for the best of the best of the best, music-wise, and even a bad player in the Philharmonic is better than almost anyone else in the world. It's like that in the NBA, too. The guys Lebron makes fools of every night are people who would destroy an average division-one college player. They'd score on me without even knowing I was there trying to stop them. "Average" in the NBA isn't "average" in absolute terms. 

Ideally, we'd like it to be that way in all professions, but I'm guessing it isn't like that in the profession you, gentle reader, work in. It's certainly not true in mine, although I work for a company that does a lot more screening than most. Most of us have at least a few truly average people at our work, people who aren't any more suited for what we do than a person randomly picked up off the street might be. 

What kind of "average" are the police? 

If the police don't do a good job of screening, then an average police officer is more or less an average person, which is to say, pretty mediocre. That's not the case, though, because the police screen candidates. The question, then, is how tough the supply of officers relative to the demand allows police departments to make the screening. Are the police like the NBA, where even their worst are so much better than normal people at the skills that go into police work we regular folks couldn't even begin to question their ability to do the work?

I doubt it. There are a few hundred NBA players. There are a few thousand professional musicians in city orchestras in the country. But there are about 800,000 sworn police officers. It's hard to image that many people spent their whole childhoods trying to perfect the skills that go into police work the way pro basketball players or musicians did. With greater repercussions for screwing up than most of us face and pay that is a living wage but not enough to get past mid-middle-class, the police just aren't going to be able to make "average" for a cop mean what "average" for an NBA player means.

I've heard a lot of folks these days who are critical of police compare police to airline pilots. They say that the repercussions of a police office making a critical mistake are so dire--involving human lives as they do--that we have to get to a place where no critical mistakes are made. 

I understand where this thinking is coming from, but it also runs against facts, facts having to do with sticky things like averages. An average airline pilot can go her whole life without a fatal accident. An average police officer, however, is less able to avoid mistakes. This isn't a judgment of police, it's just a very obvious statement of facts. There are many more accidental shootings of people who weren't a threat than there are airplane crashes. 

When I explain what systemic racism means to me, I say that for me to go to college and end up in the middle class means I just did what nearly everyone I went to high school did, but for the students Mrs. Heretic taught to do that means they'd have to do what almost nobody they knew did. You can't use a few high performers who beat the odds as examples and say that proves there isn't a problem with the system. Your system is only working if it works for most people, if an "average" person can succeed in it. 

The same is true of police work. If an average cop has to do work that requires more than he can deliver, is the fault really with the officer? Or is the fault with a society that sets up an average police officer to fail? Have we tried to fix issues in our society with the cheap band-aid of police work, then ended up wringing our hands when our cheap fix doesn't work? 

We can criticize cops like this, but don't we all have days at our work like this? And don't most of us still succeed? Police work has to be such that an average officer can succeed at it, just like our work is. 

The effect of average cops on good ones

The police try to set themselves up so that an "average" officer can succeed through regulations and rules. There is a standard procedure for everything. But the procedures are meant for the mediocre police, and even more for the bad ones. For good police--and there are good ones, just like there are high performers in everything--the rules are just another impediment to doing work well. They're there because some dumb guy ruined it for everyone. We all face this in whatever work we do. Of the many things a good police officer likely has to deal with, bad co-workers are probably at the top of the list. 

I've heard a lot of people claiming that good police are just as complicit as bad ones if they don't spend their whole lives trying to stop the bad ones, but I don't find this realistic. It's one thing to report clear bad behavior when you see it, but trying to change an entire culture that's not really working (and does anyone work in a job where the culture doesn't seem set up to keep everyone from accomplishing the main objective?) is a lot to ask of someone. To be able to both perform well at one's core function in a system that makes it difficult, then also to pay attention to all the other bad performers who are a big reason why your job is so hard, well, that's something only the very best of humanity can accomplish. And we've already established that people like that are going to be rare in a police force. They're rare anywhere. We can't criticize cops for not being the superheroes our society has always claimed they are. The idea isn't to have a job only heroes can do. It's to set up the work so an average worker in that field can do it. Ideally, you'd like to have the average ones succeed while not messing everything up so the good ones can't do it better. 

That's the society people are really calling for when they're advocating for police reform. Not one in which police are unrealistically forced to be heroic everyday, but one where they can do the work needed at a sustainable level for the average person the police are capable of recruiting. This probably would mean fundamental change all over society. It could mean reimagining whole facets of civil society. It will almost certainly mean higher taxes. 

Simply calling for greater accountability won't cut it. That's like demanding your city's basketball team play better when I'm the point guard.  

Pulled in too many directions

I've probably posted the "I'm done with writing" thing a half dozen times in the last few years, and so far, it's never stuck. This isn't that post, because I don't think it's going to stick now, either. This is just to let folks know why I'm not posting much nor will be posting much. 

About six years ago, when I wrote the first of a few "I quit" posts, I referred to a monumental decision I thought I'd made in my twenties, one I later repented of. I vowed then that I'd care more about making great art than about having a family, because anyone can have a family but only a rare few can make great art. Or something like that. I don't really know what I said, because the text in question no longer exists, which is probably for the good. I wrote a lot of strange things in the years after I got out of the Marine Corps. The Marines scrambled my brain a bit, and it took me a few years to get it scrambled back. 

Anyhow, what I'd decided by my thirties was that the "art first, family second" philosophy was morally bankrupt. I'm not totally sure what changed my mind. Maybe it was several things. For one, yes, the people who produce art are rarer than the people who produce human beings, but there's still plenty of art to go around. There's not a shortage of supply relative to demand. Or maybe it's just that I didn't want to be like William Faulkner, drinking on my daughter's birthday when she'd asked me not to because, "Nobody remembers Shakespeare's daughter." Or maybe I just thought that I have a limited time on Earth, and being good to the people around me is a more guaranteed way to use that time well than writing a novel is. Whatever the reason, while I have occasionally had to fudge family responsibilities in order to write, I've never forgotten that family is more important. If I write a novel people are still talking about in a thousand years but fail as a father, then I've wasted my time.

Given that those are the rules I've set up for myself, it's been really hard to find time to write. Not just write, really. Anyone can probably carve out a few hours a week to slap down some kind of prose. Finding time to write seriously is what's hard, meaning to not just write but read good writing, think about good writing, write about good writing, make drafts of my own writing that I strive to make as good as the best of what I'm reading. Maybe even participate in the literary community a bit and also pay attention to some advice on the best way to find places to publish what I've written. It's a lot. Professors are always grousing about not having time to write, which I understand, but it's family, not work, that is the real strain on a writer. 

I've avoided putting this out there for the public to see, but now that COVID-19 has all children in America home-schooling, I don't worry so much about it now. We pulled our son from school at the end of the 2018-2019 school year, and we've been home schooling him since. He was massively under-performing relative to what standardized tests said he should be able to do. A lot of it had to do with him being bored, and therefore not paying attention to what he was supposed to do, then when I emailed teachers to find out what he was supposed to be doing, not getting answers so I didn't know how to make sure he stayed on task. I figured however hard it would be to do it myself, at least I'd know what he his work was.

So for a year and half, when I get home from work, I spend a few hours working with him. He still doesn't do the greatest work for me, but occasionally, he does something that lets me know the lights are still on up there for him. I'm relatively certain he'll be able to pass a GED in a few months when he turns sixteen, and then he can be free to find his own path a little bit. At least, that's the dream. 

Until then, I'm still really straining to keep up. We can't work a full 5-6 hour day every day, so I have to settle for 2-3 hours days that we also do on weekends and holidays (and the summer). We just do a little bit every day, and in that manner, we've kept up with more or less a high school workload. 

Add to my family responsibilities that I have begun to feel lately that I haven't focused enough on my skill as a translator, meaning I've been reading Korean texts instead of fiction in English, and you can see why I don't feel like I'm really working as hard as I need to with writing to get anywhere. Yes, reading Korean literature is probably helpful to me as a writer, because it makes me think outside my own linguistic box, but it takes me a long time to get through Korean literature. My reading time is more than double in Korean what it is in English, and I'm not a fast reader in English. 

Which is why this is just to say I'm not really quitting, but since half-assing it isn't any better than quitting, I don't know what I'm doing with writing, either. I've had to stop my analyses of Pushcart stories. When Best American Short Stories come out in a few months, I don't know if I'll do those, either. 

That's a shame, because I really like doing it. I think it's an important contribution to the literary world, because there's a paucity of online resources for people to go to for help when they feel a little lost by the stories they read in the top anthologies. More than that, I know it's been good for my own fiction writing to focus so deeply on some of the best writing that's out there. Even when I don't like a story, that helps me refine my own ideas of what it is I do like and what I want to do as a writer. 

That's all just a long way of explaining why I haven't been around much and might not be for a while. Maybe it'll get better when the boy passes his GED. Or maybe I'm so into Korean things now, I never get back into writing. I don't know. I'll at least help the world to a gratuitous political rant now and again in the next few months, no doubt. 

It's been great how many people have tuned in for stuff I've written about short stories, especially BASS. Even if those folks just help themselves to an explanation or two and then run off without saying high, it's always great to me to see that a hundred or so folks stop by every day, mostly for short story explanations. Something I wrote became a part of the day of people I don't know. That makes me happy, and probably will never stop making me happy.  

Cancel culture isn't new, but it does feel different

I lurk on a lot of writers on Twitter, usually to my own great sadness. Writing-community-Twitter isn't any less stupid than the rest of Twitter, and it's maybe even sadder to see certain social pathologies you'd expect of dumber people being repeated by those I'd hope would know better. There are exceptions. I'm happy to say Danielle Evans, who has written two of my top five favorite short stories I've looked at on this blog, has never written a dumb tweet. But a lot of people whose writing I admire or who are icons post ignorant stuff all the time. 

The subject of cancel culture comes up a lot on Twitter. The consensus of the writing community is that it's neither new nor a violation of anyone's rights. It's just, as a friend of mine put it the other day, "voting with your wallet with better alliteration." And in a sense, she's right. There have been books banned and records burned and tea dumped for a very long time. 

Something does feel different, though, about some cycles of cancellation that go on, and I think it's related to a more fundamental change in our culture. We have less tolerance now, I believe, for what my law school (that I attended for three weeks before dropping out) referred to as "things reasonable people might disagree on." 

There are a lot of terms in law where the definition seems a bit circular, but with no word is this more prevalent than "reasonable." Essentially, the definition of "reasonable" in law comes down to "thoughts or actions that reasonable people might hold or do." Well, how do you know if someone is reasonable, then? Because other reasonable people hold them to be so. It's one of the most frustratingly tautological merry-go-rounds I've ever experienced. 

The difficulty of defining the word doesn't mean we don't have some practical sense of what we mean by it, though. A belief is reasonable if one can explain why one believes it with inferences from facts. I take a pretty broad interpretation of reasonableness, at least for issues that concern shared life with others in a democracy. Beliefs I'd call "reasonable" include a lot of beliefs I think are pretty obviously false, but for which one can at least construct some kind of string of logic. For example, a Christian who thinks Christ literally rose from the dead, and who uses some form of apologetics to defend that belief. A more fundamentalist Christian who thinks the universe is 7,000 years old strains reasonableness a good deal further, but even then, I'm not sure I'm willing to say the person who believes such a thing could never be reasonable. There are probably Young Earthers out there who could score higher than I have on cognitive tests. I'm sure there are Young Earthers who make good doctors or engineers or mechanics, things that take a good deal of logical deduction. 

What I'm getting at is that there is a difference between an unreasonable belief and a belief I happen to think is wrong, even if I think it's really obvious it's wrong. In a civil society, we probably need to maintain a fairly broad view of what is reasonable to believe. 

Alas, I think we're headed in the opposite direction. People are tired of arguing for their views and having others reject them, so we're now much less tolerant of even countenancing the existence of those who think differently from us. Their very existence is an affront to us: We've given our best argument, and still they aren't convinced! Clearly, something is wrong with them!  

The latest "cancel Netflix" flare-up is a good example. Some people thought the movie sexualized young girls, while some critics loved it. Clearly, if people who make a living evaluating the quality of movies, people who have earned financial support from the community for their ability to evaluate those movies, think something had merit, then it is at least a reasonable thing to think it has merit. That doesn't mean they're right, only that they are not insane to think so. For someone who disagrees, the proper action is to raise your own argument that the movie sexualizes girls, not to demand that others take action. Calls to action should be reserved for clear wrongs, when something is going on that defies reason. A movie that reasonable people disagree about is not a place for such a call to action. 

A lot of people were especially upset about this ad for the movie. I can understand that, although there are girls this age sexualizing themselves much more flagrantly on Instagram. 

I suppose one could say that by such a standard, nobody would ever act on anything. One problem in the Internet age is that every belief, no matter how cockamamie, has its defenders. You can find YouTube channels full of people arguing for a flat Earth. Does that mean those people are reasonable, since they are at least arguing from logic, albeit badly, for their position? Should we not work to enact environmental legislation because some people out there produce "evidence" for why climate change is a hoax? 

That's essentially just saying, though, that defining reasonableness is hard. The existence of an argument doesn't guarantee reasonableness. But just because something is hard to identify doesn't mean it doesn't exist. That's why serious analysis of art is so useful, because it's all about terms--beauty, insight, excellence, hell, even whether a movie or book is "good"--that are difficult to define but that we understand in some way. Analysis of art teaches us how to think about these kinds of concepts, but in a sandbox environment where nobody gets hurt. We can then use what we learn from analyzing art to deal with real-world problems. 

The way to deal with the difficulty of establishing reasonableness is to patiently keep explaining one's view. That's what the best arguers do. A sign of someone who really knows something is that they are confident enough in what they believe that the existence of doubters does not trouble them. They don't need to call to get rid of doubters. 

All of American society seems to me to be acting a lot like the church youth group I was in as a teenager. We see those who think differently from us primarily as opportunities to evangelize, but once they reject our evangelism, our attitude is that we shouldn't cast our pearls before swine, that we should come out and be separate from them. What we have, then, is a nation intellectually balkanized into camps that not only don't talk to each other, that just don't like each other. 

The stupidest comment I've seen on writing Twitter lately was this: "Do Republicans even write poetry?" As if a moderate Republican who generally thinks market-based solutions are preferable to government-directed ones is incapable of being dumbstruck by the sublime. If it's true that conservatives don't appear much in the poetry world now, that says more to me about problems with the poetry world than it does about Republicans. 

If we think those who disagree with us are so fundamentally broken they can't even understand and love poetry, how can we ever respect one another enough to run something as complicated as a democracy?