Resolving Racism: an Alternative to BLM & "Defund the Police"

in music there are some genres
that only make sense when performed at a small scale in the intimacy of a chamber of a tiny recital hall where the number of people in the audience may barely outnumber the musicians there are some forms of music that only seem to make sense in a dance club with hundreds or thousands of people jumping up and down beneath blinking lights and there are some forms of music that are specially composed to be performed in a stadium over huge speakers with a certain amount of echo and a certain amount of reverb and a certain amount of delay it only makes sense in that format for that audience in the same way implicitly there are modes of political reasoning that only make sense or only make sense to the enthusiasts who believe in them at a small scale at a medium scale and at an enormous scale and it's really important to challenge people by switching between those frames of reference by saying yes you believe in this towering abstraction when it's applied to this notion of society or the whole world but can you make sense of it on the scale of a single household of a single neighborhood of a single city or of a small country it's a great deal of grandstanding right now in the aftermath of the death of george floyd the rise and fall of the black lives matter protest everyone wants to be on the right side of history this is the phrase we'd like to imagine it's associated with great courage right stepping forward to be on the right side of history sacrificing yourself for your comfortable bourgeois existence to make sure you're on the right side of history but what i see in the year 2020 is a great deal of cowardice what i see are political commentators and analysts who've managed to go the whole way through the year 2020 without making a single simple statement about george floyd and black lives matter there are a whole lot of people who see what's wrong with the defund the police movement it's myriad incarnations the police abolitionist movement as it's now called and they are not stepping forward to let their voices appear they are not engaging in constructive criticism they are not engaging in public education or debate not even when that's their full-time job as an author as an analyst as a commentator as a youtuber i am aghast to see that jj mccullough supposedly conservative uh commentator here on youtube all these months have gone by seems like he just has just has nothing to say about the death of george floyd the the rise and fall of uh black lives matter movement and here he's in the same part of canada i mean here in the pacific northwest we're just not that far away from seattle and portland oregon we feel the reverberations of these things in that part of the united states of america quite quite keenly and there's a great deal to say and there's a great deal to be learned from mutual analysis frankly there's a great deal to be learned from being wrong and then later noticing that you were wrong and learning from your mistakes and there is absolutely nothing to be learned from silence and uh this kind of defensive silence i see across the whole moderate middle of the political spectrum all the pragmatists terrified to be on the wrong side of history on this issue it's really especially shameful it's really especially blameworthy what would i say if i had a friend who supported police abolitionism who supported defunding the place i talked through a few different hypotheticals and these hypothetical exercises would challenge them not to think about this issue on the largest scale imaginable on this kind of stunning grandiose scale of you know they will say things like the whole world will be better if there were no police and there were no prisons and there were no oppression right so that's everything is as abstract and generalized as possible and yet it's much more difficult for them to think it through and come to positive conclusions when we think of the level of a household a neighborhood a small country so on and so forth what if we had a law saying that within every household within every home no policeman shall set foot no law shall apply no laws shall ever be enforced that within the privacy of a home of a household the father and mother make up their own sense of right and wrong carry out their own rules of justice and uh you know the people's court has no business in the bedrooms of the nation all right this is a very ancient notion of how to organize a society and right away you can think through the terrible implications this would have what if a family just decides they don't want to put their kids into school that want to raise their kids illiterate they're crazy religious fundamentalists they don't want their kids going to public school no no no then we want the government to step in intervene what if the father is just an alcoholic who beats up his wife and kids no no no then we want the government to intervene in fact for most people the center the pragmatic middle of the political spectrum even more so on the far left wing they want all kinds of constant government intervention all kinds of intrusion of the law and police authority into the privacy of the home on this smaller scale how about private businesses what if we just abolished the police or defunded the police within the four walls of every shop of every restaurant of every private business you say hey look it's up to the employer and them the employees to sort of their own sense of justice their own sense of right and wrong have their own negotiations and their own conflict resolution mechanisms and the government and the courts and the police have have no place in it the police officers will never step in you don't think there are some businesses that would refuse to hire people because they're black there aren't some businesses that would be racially prejudiced in their hiring practices you don't think there are some businesses that would refuse customers because they're black again the whole moderate middle of the political spectrum and even more on the left wing actually wants a very active police presence governing all the things corporations and companies do they don't want to live in a world where black people walk into a car rental business and the owner of the car rental business just says look um i've had a lot of bad experiences with black customers and i'm not interested in renting to black people anymore where and where they have the freedom to say that and do that say hey it's a private business the government doesn't regulate this sort of thing they're at liberty to do business with whomever they choose and to refuse anyone they choose and if that's on the basis of racial prejudice of racism then that's that's their right it's their freedom nobody i can't say nobody wants this there's a radical element of the right wing that wants this kind of lawlessness there were anarcho-capitalists there were right-wing libertarians or there are neo-nazis who want this but these left-wing people that's not the kind of society they want to live in so why are you talking about abolishing the police why are you talking about abolishing prisons why are you talking about even at this small scale it's unthinkable and as you scale it up and scale it up in fact the problems become worse and worse not better but somehow you the hypothetical left-wing person who's bought into this police abolitionism defund the police black lives matter movement they manage to think in the most flattering way possible about this parallel universe in which there are no police and there is no uh there was no prison system there's no punishment there's no oppression by just describing it as being for all mankind for all the world or for that most abstract notion of all for society that society would be a better place policing now there's also a cultural and national level of abstraction here the internet has changed the world when i was a kid in toronto i knew a lot of immigrants probably most people i knew were new immigrants um and a lot of them said things like back in their own home country there was no crime of this sword so you could meet people from all over the world they'd say oh here in toronto you have graffiti back in my old home country there's no graffiti um hungarians would say oh all this stuff you have here with gays and lesbians we don't have that back in hungary there are no gays they really believed this you know they had this memory of of the old country okay what if you met someone who was a turkish immigrant to canada and they told you you know in turkey we don't need to have police and force the law at all we don't need to have prisons we don't need you would be dumbfounded you would say what what are you saying what are you saying about the turkish people you think they're angels what are you saying about turkish culture how can turkey be so fundamentally different from the rest of the world are you saying there are no crimes committed whether that be burglary or theft or rape or revenge or honor killings i mean this is the thing even in countries where people adhere to incredibly strict religious and cultural codes of conduct by that same token there's violence and conflict whenever those codes of conduct are are broken do you think nobody in turkey ever disputes who should inherit their father's fortune when their father dies you don't think there's any role for the government getting involved in settling a case like that if you pass this law that the government shall have no will never set foot into people's private businesses way just just to restrict the scope of the police state that much the authority of the police and government-written laws people are going to kill each other just as they did in medieval times in ancient times they're going to kill each other over who inherits uh their father's fortune or could be a tiny amount it could be who inherits their father's car or their father's corner store or whatever there was to be inherited family disputes of that kind the fact that in the medieval and ancient past they weren't resolved by police or by courts of law in many cultures around the world doesn't mean that they were resolved peaceably or amiably if it's inconceivable that this notion of abolishing the police could work on the scale of the family of the city of even a country the size of turkey if talking it through this way it's inconceivable why is it conceivable to you in the realm of these towering abstractions and it's because these people have trained themselves to think in terms of abstractions only and that's the most fundamental conflict in politics in the 21st century it's not the conflict between left and right it's the conflict between pragmatists and abstractionists there are those of us who are reasoning from the ground up in the world of tangible things and there are people who are reasoning from the chalkboard from abstract equations and formulas drawn on a chalkboard and then they're trying to take these abstract things and make them real in the real world and those people the people who believe in lines on a chalkboard even if they think they're atheists even if they think they're secular they're actually engaging in a religious mindset they're drawing up ideals they're then idealizing the world and asking if only the world could live up to these idealized expectations and down that road is the spanish inquisition there's another very fundamental error and i've been waiting for some of my audience to ask me to comment on this there's a fundamental error in the approach of black lives matter and the whole left wing of the political spectrum i've been waiting for someone to ask me what would my solution be for racism in the western world looking ahead to what remains of the 21st century and the 22nd century the fundamental error that black lives matter is making is that they reason through racism subtractively they look at a racist society and think that they can simply subtract racism and it won't work the way to overcome racism is not by subtracting something negative it's by adding something positive you may not have known conscious racists so people who are racist and who are aware of their racism they're not in denial about it i have and if you get to know those people they actually do have anecdotes in their lives about meeting a person from this other race that they say they despise or against that they would never let their daughter marry where they really liked the guy and really got along with the guy and they thought he was a great guy and maybe they were even still friends to this day and for them this is not a contradiction as follows now i just mentioned it is not particular to the black versus white divide this includes the cambodian versus vietnamese divide and the chinese versus mongolian divide i am familiar with many forms of racism are very deeply filled another one would be russians against jews it's impossible to exaggerate the intensity of anti-semitism in eastern europe where they they utterly regard jewish people as a completely different race of man from russians eastern europeans um but nevertheless they will have been in some situation in their private life in their business life or in some like university let's say they go to a chess tournament and someone who is openly unconsciously anti-semitic ends up meeting and making friends with someone who's a chess champion who's jewish and it's because there's something positive they both admire they both appreciate they both struggled to be the best that they could possibly be you meet anti-semitic people who've actually met and spent time with someone else who they're both into competitive chess and they remember that was a great guy and they really respect them or their respect is intelligent they respect his perspective on chess you will meet white people who are racist against black people and say terrible things about black people and they never let their daughter marry a black person but you know there was one time when they went to an archaeological conference and there was a black guy there giving a presentation on the same kind of archaeology you know they met that black guy and they went out to dinner and they got along great now the problem with this is of course it doesn't negate their racism they remain racist they remain nonetheless prejudiced against other black people whom they have nothing in common with but just having this one thing in common becomes a bridge to exploring your common humanity however you want to put it it becomes a path forward from the ugly isolating bigotry of racism and it breaks down the deep-seated presumption that you or your race or nationality is somehow intrinsically and intellectually superior to people on the other side right not everyone can be a chess champion not everyone can be an archaeologist not everyone can be a comedian all of the most racist people i've ever known or met had comedians specifically they admired and considered to be brilliant who were across the divide of the whatever the people were that they hated or despised very often those comedians were making jokes that appealed to them too um what is the hat that everyone can wear in confucian society it was the literature of confucius and poverty-stricken farmers in small villages who didn't have access to universities didn't even access the tutors could study the poetry that confucius studied the book of odes and they could study the writings of confucius and they could be recognized as and respected as refined gentlemen at court or in various social forums they could elevate themselves they could have some of them they could they could overcome the unbelievable class barrier and snobbery that defined chinese traditional society uh can you imagine a world in which we have some common corpus of literature in which we have something that we engage in positively individually but as members of the same society that brings people together that lets them evaluate one another that lets them appreciate one another that lets them build on that common ground when people have this kind of common ground even if they differ even if they hate and despise each other think you know that guy has the wrong approach to chess that guy his view of archaeology is completely the wrong way around there will still fundamentally be that respect there's a kind of mutual respect even if it's about issues that are contested by both sides that defies that overcomes as i say this backward childish bigotry racism as we as we know it in the real world the question i have for the future of a multicultural post-genocidal post-slavery culture such as we have here in the united states canada australia the fragments of the british empire is what could that literature possibly be what could it be that we all study and that we have in common some appreciation for even if differing views of that answer is much easier to give for a country like france a country that is not built on genocide all right now the french did commit atrocities throughout their empire all around the world even in north africa let alone cambodia that's something within the territory of france and europe the indigenous people are the french germany quite a few genocides on their hand oh germany certainly has a storied history of genocide nevertheless the indigenous people of germany are german so you don't have to look too far to find a history and a literature that can be meaningful to them and can give people this kind of powerful positive common ground to overcome racism in the same way that the literature of confucianism which i'm not a fan of provides a kind of hat that in chinese culture and chinese civilization everyone could wear for the united states for canada for australia if you ask me what is that literature what could it possibly be my answer is i don't know but i feel that the single most important political question we can ask is not about cutting the policeman's budget if you really want an alternative to racism if you really want to overcome the unfathomably evil history of genocide and slavery that these british empire colonies were built on you have to find or you have to create that literature to provide that common ground for our future