Forgiving racists

A strong line of argument in the Black community calls for more anger at the shootings in Charleston, and less forgiveness. (For example, Stacy Patton in the Washington Post, Roxane Gay in the New York Times).

Why refuse to forgive? What that does is to sharpen lines between communities, and thus increases the ability to fight. By refusing to forgive, you mobilize your own anger and that of your band. You assert your moral goodness along with the badness of your enemies. You feel good about yourself, and ready to act. If you’re going into battle, you certainly don’t want to forgive.

But this seems a particularly inopportune moment for such a position. This is a moment when an extraordinary number of Whites who have been hostile or ambivalent -- holding onto the Confederate flag as a symbol of their heritage -- are suddenly understanding what the blacks have been saying, and are ready to take some action. There is the widest opening of the door to communication that we have seen in many decades. Something might actually get done.

The willingness of many blacks, especially those in the Emanuel Church, to offer forgiveness has been an important factor in this shift. Whites have been astonished at this reaction, and ashamed. It has led them to try to understand more deeply the feelings and experiences of the black community, to empathize in a way they have not before. That is the kind of alchemy called out, at certain moments of crisis, by great leaders like Gandhi and Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King. As Abraham Lincoln (may have) said, “Do I not defeat my enemy by making him my friend?”

If you refuse to forgive, you may strengthen your own resolve, but you also strengthen the resolve of your opponents. When you draw the lines more sharply, you make it clearer to yourself why you are good and they are not; but you also reinforce their own sense of right. There are times when that is necessary. This isn’t one of them.

"I identify as black"

To trust others, you want to know where they fit in the scheme of things. You are used to treating women one way in particular situations, men another, and you expect them to respond appropriately. There are some things you can say to whites that you can’t say to blacks, and vice-versa; there are codes for the "right" way to behave for children, for police officers, for your wife or your husband, for other people's wives and husbands. You expect others to play these familiar roles and to know the codes as well as you. If they violate them in some way, even trivial, you wonder about them, and you can't really trust them in other ways.

Now we get Rachel Donezal, who has said for years that she is black and has held high positions in the NAACP, but who, it seems, is actually purely white. It rattles us. If it was the reverse - black passing for white - it would be much less upsetting; one might condemn it, but it would be easy to imagine why she would do that and what game she was playing. But we can't figure out what game she is playing here. It disturbs our expectations of how people act. Some people try to cram her into a familiar box: she must be doing it out of self interest, to gain advantages from affirmative action! But there is no evidence that she tried to do that; on the contrary, she almost certainly made life harder for herself.

Yet Donezal is only a particularly obvious case of something happening more and more widely: people are choosing, even constructing, their ethnic and sexual identities rather than accepting those given to them by tradition and birth. Many who might be called black do indeed choose to identify as white. President Obama had a choice, and he chose black. Why is that different from Donezal? He had one black parent, to be sure, but he still had to make a choice, and he was welcomed by the black community. Then there is the sudden attention to transgender people: even more sharply than race, gender has been the fundamental marker of human identity and the definer of relations - yet now Bruce Jenner can become Caitlyn.

It's understandable that many people want to say, "Stop this madness!" If anyone can be anything, how do we know who anybody is? How do we know what to expect? Can people choose to act any way they want? Isn't this a course towards chaos?

Shakespeare expressed this feeling at a time of challenges to the settled order of “degree”:

Take but degree away, untune that string,

And, hark, what discord follows!

What plagues and what portents! what mutiny!

What raging of the sea! shaking of earth!

Commotion in the winds! frights, changes, horrors...

But despite the discomfort and the fears, it's not going to stop. Jenner and Donezal represent just another step in a progression that had gone on for many centuries since Shakespeare's time, which has opened the opportunity for the shopkeeper's son to be a lawyer, and then for his daughter to be a senator, and for the grandson of a slave to be his boss. At each step of this long progression the same cry had been raised: it breaks the rules, it's immoral, it threatens our way of life! Each step has indeed been difficult and confusing, but our society is much larger and better for it. Now: if a woman can be president, why can't she be a man? And if she is born white, why can't she be black?

There's only one way to avoid chaos in a world where people really get to choose who they are: to try to understand them. If we can understand why Caitlin Jenner made her choice, we can start to make sense of her motives and, ultimately, to trust her. She has gotten to tell her story, in Vanity Fair, so millions have begun to stretch their understanding of how people might feel and act. But for Rachel Donezal, there has been less opportunity: she has been driven largely into silence.

We should stop and listen to her. We should listen to what she has to say about how she sees herself and the world. We should try to see her perspective. Then, if necessary, we can judge.

Inequality

Many people on the left side of the political spectrum believe that the key problem now is economic inequality, and that the solution must start by redistributing some of the wealth of the rich to the rest of the population. This is, for instance, the point of the “Occupy” movement’s criticism of the “1%”.

There’s much truth in this view. It’s now indisputable that the level of inequality has increased dramatically in recent decades, reaching levels last seen before the Great Depression (the one in the 1930s). It seems largely indisputable as well that the wealthy are more separated from the rest of society than in the past – living in gated communities, getting increasing access to services designed especially for them – and that the influence of money on the political process has grown. All of this is troubling. But the liberal diagnosis and prescription does not follow.

The first difficulty is that most of the country does not agree with this diagnosis -- so you can't get them to take the prescription. It is true that most citizens, perhaps 2/3, agree that the rich are not paying their fair share of taxes and exert too much influence; but if you dig a little deeper into the polls, you find that it is a weakly-held belief, low priority, and has actually declined in the last decade. That is why the Occupy movement has never gained significant traction beyond the core liberal community. Instead, much of the country believes, with great passion, that the most important problems are moral – a breakdown in responsibility, community, and value integrity. This leads not to demands for redistribution of wealth, but to various conservative and fundamentalist movements focused on religion and traditional values or local control.

These movements are not driven by the wealthy, though they have formed an uncomfortable alliance. The Tea Party and its ilk are neither very favorable nor very critical towards wealth as such; and their core issues are ones which are not of concern to the wealthy and are indeed often problematic for business leaders. Wealth in itself creates no reasons for caring about homosexuality or abortion or gun ownership; while business leaders disagree with the Tea Party on diversity and object to restrictions on immigration.

Any historical survey will make clear that inequality has produced morally conservative movements at least as often as liberal-redistributive ones. Sometimes the two strands have combined in unfortunate ways: millenarian movements since the middle ages have often combined extreme ethical-religious purism with total communism of property. More generally, the point is that that protest movements have rarely followed the simple logic of economic interests.

The second problem is with the liberals' prescription – their view of how to correct the injustices. Their answer is generally through a combination of tax policy and social-welfare redistribution. This answer does not take into account the really deep, wide, and long-lasting loss of faith in the effectiveness of government – going back at least forty years, and extending through the entire advanced industrial world. Even those who agree that inequality has grown too large generally recoil at the thought that government power should be increased to deal with it. About 2/3 of the population has a negative view of the federal government, believes it has too much power, and sees it as the primary danger for the future; less than 20% view it favorably, and less than 10% believe it should have more power.

So the liberal policy justification comes down to saying: “We know better.” There has always been something bothersome to me about the famous phrase, “It’s the economy, stupid!”: it seems disrespectful and demeaning, implying that many things that people care about very deeply are not important. And it doesn’t actually work: liberals have struggled to explain why so much of the electorate continues to vote against their economic self-interest, at least as the experts see it. Robert Frank, trying to figure out "What's The Matter With Kansas?", lamented that conservatives have “won the heart of America” even though – in his view – rational minds should tend to liberalism. A rather vicious circle of mutual misunderstanding has been established, and many in the broad middle of the country (geographically and politically) feel their concerns are being treated with disrespect. That sparks anger, and anger drives the tremendous energy of the Tea Party and other groups on the Right.

Anyone who cares about community needs to be concerned about the corrosive effects of rising inequality. But we need to spend more time understanding before prescribing.

Professionals: how to keep them honest?

Reports of dishonesty among professionals, such as doctors and researchers, are surging. Every day, it seems, new stories emerge of doctors who fatten their profits through unnecessary procedures, or who are paid by pharmaceutical companies to push new drugs. The Chief Medical Officer of the American Cancer Society describes American health care today as “a subtle form of corruption”. The corruption has also spread to many other fields: recent reports document rising incidents of outright fabrication of academic research results, and more pervasively, a widespread tendency to “torture” data – to use technically legitimate statistical analyses to get results that are statistically significant but not necessarily valid.

This probably didn’t happen so much in the past. Doctors and researchers used to be shielded from outside pressures and incentives, and primarily influenced by their peers. They were part of tight communities with strong values; their reputations – and success – depended in upholding those values. There wasn’t much confusion about right and wrong. Both moral and material incentives encouraged focus on the pursuit of truth and social benefit.

But things have changed. Professional communities are increasingly penetrated by the outside world. There is more chance to make money and reputation by impressing the general public: superstars are viewed on TED Talks and written up in popular media. At the same time, those outsiders demand new levels of openness: they don’t automatically take the word of doctors or scientists or teachers that they know what they’re doing. All kinds of objective measurements have been put forward to prove professional worth: ranking systems for universities, hospitals, schools, professors. Those who score high may make a lot of money.

Thus for professionals, motivations are confused. They are no longer bound in a relatively unified community that understands them in depth. There is tremendous incentive do things that look good in the metrics or in the press, whether or not they advance truth or justice. As a professor, I hear my young colleagues talking in the annual meetings about how many publications they can get out of a single study, rather than how they can deepen their findings. They measure results in part by whether they will get attention in the press. Once they’ve found a good result, there’s neither material nor moral incentive to query it: they want to get it out to a publication as fast as possible so it will count on their metrics. Some people, inevitably, are pushed close to the edge, torturing data and ignoring annoying nagging questions in their minds; a few are pushed over the edge, fabricating results.

What to do?

The road back to the old order is probably closed. Professionals can’t just keep each other honest. There are too many cross-cutting temptations and incentives. Moreover, the clients don’t really want that: they want a voice in professionals’ deliberations. In every part of society, there is less public deference to experts. People are less willing to just let their doctors prescribe or their teachers set curriculum; they want to discuss it and have their say.

Government regulation can at best deal with only a tiny part of the corruption: even the most dictatorial states can catch no more than a fraction of wrongdoing. Government is effective only when most people want to do the right thing.

The only way forward is a big change in mindset: for professionals and their clients to come together around a shared sense of purpose. Right now it’s a tug of war: in the past professionals did things their way, telling clients to trust them to do the right thing; now clients want it their way, wanting to shape outcomes and processes. The only way that will work is for the parties to try to build action in concert.

Doctors can't just tell patients what to do: they need to enlist them in a shared to maintain health. To do that, they need to discuss options and purposes, to listen closely to what the patients need, to make sure there is a common understanding of a course of treatment. With that kind of collaboration, diabetics, for example, are much more likely to take their medicines and maintain their weight. And doctors are more likely to be focused on the "right" things.

Similarly, teachers can't just set curriculum and expect to be paid what they think they're worth; they need to justify their worth to parents and communities, to win support. This can be painful and difficult, involving dealing with narrow perspectives and ideological conflicts; but it's the only long-term way to create a responsible system of education in which teachers are motivated to do the right thing.

This is a big change. Some small steps have been taken: some change in the way doctors talk to their patients, some improvement in the availability of information that patients or other clients, some increased education, some development of public debates. But we’re still far from a state in which clients and professionals really work together, both playing their part in maintaining core values.