Sorority racism

The recent conflicts  in the US over race have involved a confused mix of two very different strands, one old and one new. The protests over the shooting of Black youths in Ferguson and elsewhere are of an unfortunately old kind: a struggle for equal rights and equal treatment before the law. This was the core of the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s that brought down the Jim Crow framework, equalized access to the vote, won formal rights in job and housing markets. Whites who have long seen themselves as allies in the battle for equal rights are quick to support protesters in this new conflict. But when Blacks protest the name of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, or the quality of the food at Oberlin, or the nature of Hallowe’een costumes at Yale; when they talk of “privilege” and “safe spaces” -- they are entering another arena entirely. Long-time White allies, who have marched and fought for civil rights, feel alienated, often angry. They are excluded; their good will in the fight for equality seems no longer to count. The Black demands seem to them petty -- how can “micro-aggressions” like bad food be put in the same league as Black lives at risk on the streets? These protesters have gained admittance to elite universities, they have won the battle for that right: why are they still complaining?

This is what Chris Rock, at the 2016 Oscar ceremony, called “sorority racism”:

”Is Hollywood racist? You're damn right Hollywood is racist. Is it 'burning cross' racist? No. Is it 'fetch me some lemonade' racist? No. It's just the [racism] that you've grown accustomed to. It's sorority racist. It's like, 'We like you, Wanda, but you're not a Kappa.'”

The new issues, though they sometimes adopt the language of “rights”, are not about rights. Everyone has a right to be treated according to the law, but no one has a right to name a building or determine food choices. The more telling and accurate word, widely used in these protests, is “comfort”. Blacks are demanding to feel comfortable, accepted, included.

This seems petty only to people who themselves feel comfortable. But we can all put ourselves in this situation: you become a member of a group, but you don’t really know the rules, you don’t know how to win respect, you are afraid of making a mistake that will make everyone laugh at you. It’s a severely crippling experience. Most of us say as little as possible. We would like to be invisible. We keep our opinions to ourselves. We self-censor.

There is now a large body of research showing the long-term damage. Students who feel uncomfortable perform less well. Employees who feel uncomfortable do not contribute as much.  In boards of directors of major companies, new members from formerly excluded groups -- women and minorities -- feel uncomfortable and so don’t speak their minds. These lead quickly to vicious circles: the students, the employees, the board members confirm the old suspicions that they are not as good. And then it doesn’t matter what rights they have: they are back in their old position at the bottom of the status hierarchy, unheard.

If we want to include new groups in our community, they have to feel comfortable. And it is always a messy process, because to feel comfortable they have to violate the unspoken rules of the existing in-group. They must have the space to be “off”, different, not quite fitting in. They are necessarily going to say things that we, the Whites who have set the rules of civil dialogue, find strange and offensive, that we don’t “get”.

We’re into a new phase. Equal rights have been achieved in many arenas, but that is simply not enough for citizenship in today’s society. We need equal inclusion, which has been achieved almost nowhere. That will take a lot of work, a lot of humility, a lot of misunderstanding and overcoming of misunderstanding.

Brexit

The Brexit vote is a reminder of how weak trust in “the system” has become. Brexit advocates were driven primarily by the feeling that forces from outside – international experts, politicians, bankers, the European Union – had let them down; they feel less secure, less prosperous, and less hopeful than the past. These sentiments, which can be seen growing in polls over the last several decades, have been catalyzed by the immigration crisis, which threatens a wave of outsiders that exacerbate the sense that they have lost control of their own lives. The vote is essentially saying, “We have to take control again; we can’t trust anyone else.”

But it’s important to note that even many on the other side of the Brexit issue feel somewhat skeptical about the system. The young, broadly speaking, were opposed to the split but not very enthusiastic about voting. They, too, don’t believe that the system really works very well, or that it’s worth investing energy in. Unlike the pro-Brexit voters, they do not want to pull back behind their wall – quite the opposite; but they feel they can continue to reach out, to travel the world, to enjoy multiple cultures, to start global entrepreneurial ventures no matter what the formal governing system is. They have a different perspective, one which puts much less importance than classical liberalism on the role of government.

So it’s not that a majority, even in England, want to shut down. About 37% of eligible voters voted for Brexit. Almost 20% didn’t vote – and polls suggest that the majority of those were pro-Europe but lacked passion for the issue. That is the danger and paradox of our age. Those who want to shut down, to return to a nostalgic past, have clarity and passion. Those who want to open up are more scattered, and many are not convinced that the current institutions are the best way of doing it. 

The good news, the extraordinary news, is that perhaps for the first time in history, those who feel strongly that they want to rally their tribe against the outside are in a minority. The bad news is that they know clearly what they want, while progressive forces do not. There is great danger in shutting down, and great danger that a minority could make it happen; but there is hope in the gradual growth of a perspective that extends beyond tribalism.

Government as an instrument of change

I think that we liberals often overemphasize the power of government.  The enormous victory of the Civil Rights Act and other legislative and judicial advances have led us to slight the hard work of building broad support. In the last few decades, conservatives have been better at that.

Basically, you can't force people to do the right thing. No society can be healthy unless most of the people, most of the time, think the laws are good and are glad to obey them. When that isn't the case, you end up with all sorts of distortions: cynicism, manipulation, evasion, hidden resentment, sometimes open resistance.

Thus there's a necessary balance between government and civil society. When you pass a law, you need to ask: is there enough support? If not, you need to get to work building it. FDR, it is said, told his backers when they proposed policy changes: “I agree with you. I want to do it. Now go out and make me do it.”

This is why I'm having doubts about President Obama's entry into the transgender debate. His attempt to use executive power to force North Carolina to back down on their restrictions has polarized the issue. Those of us who agree with his moral stance feel heartened that justice is being done; but in regions where most people are less supportive, the lines may instead harden. If people are forced to allow transgenders into the bathrooms, they will find other, perhaps uglier, ways to harass them. And even those who are sort of sympathetic may take offense at the entry of the distant government using compulsion, overriding their local officials to whom they feel much greater loyalty. When people are dug in to a moral view, legal change is more likely to catalyze opposition than change.

Lasting change requires the mobilization of civil society - bringing together associations, spreading the moral argument, convincing waverers. And we on the Left have not done that well. The implementation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. a great advance in social rights during the 1990s, has fallen short of expectations because the movement has not been well sustained. The legal shift on abortion has fallen even further short of its moral goals because it has sparked intense movements of opposition. These conservative movements have made great gains on the local level, winning over city governments, counties, states. They have been able in this way to greatly weaken the effects of liberal legislative triumphs in much of the country.

It hasn’t been all one-sided, of course. The gay rights movement, like the civil rights movement before it, did indeed build wide popular understanding and support before the major legislative and judicial strokes; the government action came as a codification and recognition of a shift in civil society. That’s a more lasting and effective path to change; we need to rebalance our attention.

Safe surveillance?

In my last post I made the reluctant argument that we need to come to terms with the need for surveillance. Given the increasing danger that one person or a small group can cause almost unimaginable horror, we have to be able to prevent it.

Is it possible to have surveillance without tyranny? I have a glimmer of an idea.

The problem is basically one of scale. If there is a file on every US citizen, then many thousands of people will have to be involved in gathering the information, collating it, putting it into patterns, making decisions. There are so many points at which that information may be misused or hacked that it’s basically impossible to prevent. That path leads to nothing but bad results.

But the technology community has begun to develop an answer. It’s called “homomorphic encryption”. It makes it possible to process encrypted data without decrypting it first. The Hacker Lexicon says:

“A homomorphically encrypted financial database stored in the cloud would allow users to ask how much money an employee earned in the second quarter of 2013. But it would accept an encrypted employee name and output an encrypted answer, avoiding the privacy problems that usually plague online services that deal with such sensitive data.”

In other words, the many thousands of people who touch the data could gather and analyze it without ever being able to see people’s names or identifying information. There might be “files”, but no one looking at those files  could tell whom they referred to. They could sift it for patterns that might indicate terrorist plotting, but they would not know to whom those patterns pointed.

That might make it feasible to cut down actual intrusions into personal privacy far enough to bring to bear the traditional mechanism of protection: judicial review. When law enforcement officials found threats in the data, they could ask a judge for the right to decrypt it. It would be like asking for a wiretap. It’s a violation of privacy, but one hedged with enough protections that we have agreed it is worth it to reduce crime. 

Homomorphic encryption is technically very difficult and still quite slow, but it has been improving rapidly and is getting close to feasibility. If this could work, it could reconcile defense against the growing threat of lone-wolf attacks with the rights of personal privacy and dissent.

Terror and surveillance

Attacks like the one in Florida this week, under the banner of ISIS, create a terrible bind for progressives and liberals. We can argue with conviction and evidence that the best way to minimize the danger is to unite with the Muslim community so they will offer no shelter or encouragement to extreme ideologies, and will join in thwarting terrorism. The right-wing impulse to exclude and harass Muslims has exactly the opposite effect, increasing the sense of alienation among marginalized youth and giving them a sense of grievance and unfairness to feed their darker impulses.

But that isn’t quite the whole story, and the rest is not so easy for a liberal view. Nowadays the threats have reached a new level. It has become easy for a single individual or a very small group to wreak very great damage. And it’s getting rapidly worse. If we look only a little distance into the future, with the increase in the complexity of digital connections and the rise of powerful technologies of destruction, that danger will become intolerable. We cannot allow even a little chance that a few people might set off an atomic bomb in one of our cities, or genetically engineer super diseases, or disrupt the programs that keep planes flying and water flowing.

But how to keep those risks near zero? Surveillance of Muslims certainly won’t do it: we have seen many times that the sense of grievance can come from many sources other than religious fanaticism. Dylann Roof took his inspiration for the church massacre from racist ideology; Timothy McVeigh’s bomb was motivated by anti-government frenzy; Adam Lanza’s school shooting seemed driven by personal feelings of romantic rejection. Sociopaths can always find a reason, and their weapons are only growing more powerful.

The only solution that I can see to such danger is surveillance of everyone. If someone is plotting mass destruction, we need to know.

I don't like that conclusion. The risks of tyranny and the loss of privacy are also intolerable. But as the potential rises for private people to do enormous harm, the rights of privacy have to be questioned. President Obama, who was a great advocate of civil liberties before becoming President, has pushed strongly for stronger surveillance capabilities. If he, who is basically on our side, sees that need, we should take it seriously – and try to find a better answer. 

I think the answer is probably to focus on how to prevent abuse of surveillance, rather than on stopping surveillance per se. We recoil from this almost instinctively: the idea that some power can keep tabs on our private lives conjures up images of Orwell’s 1984 and of Bentham’s panopticon prison. The trope that absolute power corrupts absolutely runs deep in our culture. But have we really put our minds to changing that equation? Is it possible to have enough surveillance to prevent the harm that terrorism can do, and the right controls to prevent misuse of that knowledge? I haven’t seen any serious treatment of that possibility – and it may be the only way out of our terrible dilemma.

Is Facebook bad for us?

No, it isn’t.

Many people think that social media are turning us into a nation of slugabed narcissists. But studies show something different. People are on the whole less isolated than they used to be; heavy internet users have the typical number of face-to-face connections, plus, in addition, robust networks of online connections many times larger. They are also socially active – more engaged than most politically and in social-benefit associations. They are less limited by views of in-groups, more willing to learn from unfamiliar perspectives, better at bridging across groups. They are better at managing complex and cross-cutting commitments, such as the balance of work, family, and friends. They are more open to sharing and exchange with others. Some studies also find that they are more trusting than average, and more open rather than narcissistic.*

Fears of fragmentation of the web into homogeneous echo chambers appear so far inaccurate: though there is high fragmentation on hot-button political issues, general news consumption is far less polarized online than offline, and Internet users are more likely to be influenced by new information outside their normal orbits.

People are not only communicating more, but they are communicating more widely and and in more diverse ways about complex topics like family, happiness, health, and career, as well as opinion-based or cultural issues like music and politics.

Yes, there are a lot of cats on social media; but cats create connections among people, and moreover there is much more than that. A friend of mine, a full-time competitive athlete, developed complex intestinal symptoms. She talked about it with various family members, team members, and doctors, but didn’t get much help. Instead, by far the best support came from web forums of people with similar experiences. From people she did not even know, she gained not only knowledge but also emotional comfort, understanding, and hope that she was unable to get from her close connections.

The internet is opening channels of real and rich exchange unprecedented in human history. Perhaps our greatest hope for the future is the fact that teenagers in Tehran and Beijing are downloading and sharing Western music and comedy shows. The pen-pals of the past have been multiplied a millionfold in friends on Facebook. These connections may in time build a foundation for understanding and peace. 

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* The evidence for claims throughout this post is cited in  Trust in a Complex World, chapter 4, section "Evidence".