I am entirely in favor of meting out severe punishment to policemen who abuse the power that society has entrusted in them in order to do unjustified injury, to exploit, or to oppress. The death of George Floyd appears to represent such a case, and I will be happy if, the courts having done their job properly and the perpetrators having been found culpable, just penalties are imposed that will have a deterrent effect on others. Moreover, if there are systemic problems that need to be addressed, I am entirely in favor of addressing and fixing them.
Demonstrations have their place, I suppose, although I now wonder how much good could have been done if all of the energy invested in the current round of demonstrations had instead been deployed elsewhere — e.g., in community clean-up, running errands for shut-ins, service at soup kitchens and food banks, and so forth. (Such things could easily have been done in the name of George Floyd.)
But there is no place for riots and destruction — destruction that often damages the very communities that can afford it least and for which the rioters claim to feel concern. Supermarkets that are destroyed may not return. Minority-owned businesses that have been torched represent the death of dreams and a real setback for minority economic progress.
But mobs, enraged crowds both literal and figurative, are often quite mindless. Here are a few recent examples:
Really. Read this one. It will astonish you.
“Re: Re: Re: The Disturbing Campaign against Tucker Carlson”
I’m not, on the whole, a Tucker Carlson fan, but . . .
“Insanity at the Poetry Foundation”
“Two of its officials resign after its formal denunciation of systemic racism provokes a furious demand that it do more.”
“Sanders Dismisses Progressive Calls to Defund Police, Says Departments Need More Resources”
“Camden Didn’t ‘Defund the Police’”
I myself can easily see the point of weakening police unions, since they have often hindered reform and the firing of bad officers, just as teachers’ unions have frequently blocked educational reform and the firing of bad teachers. But that’s not quite the same as the utopian anarchist fantasy of abolishing law enforcement altogether.
***
I’m a bit puzzled that these people managed to be admitted to medical school, and that my Utah state taxes are subsidizing their education:
The demand that the University of Utah not merely reform its police force (which, to my knowledge, has no George Floyds in its record) but “Eliminate the police department budget and reallocate funds to programs supporting people of color and people in crisis” is simply brainless. Moreover, rather than acceding to the demand to “Integrate mandatory education in aspects of health equity and justice, including the history of racism in medicine, into the medical education curriculum,” I hope that students in medical school will focus really, really hard on medical education. I’m sorry to see the University administration seeming to grovel before such thoughtless virtue-signaling. Finally, I see in the demands of these students the beginnings of a campaign to strip the names of all leaders and prominent members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from university buildings. Just wait.
It’s already happening regarding an analogous institution to the south:
“Change the name of Brigham Young University”
“Tasi Young: Time to Change the Name of BYU”
My response: No!
Once we start down this road, how can we ever stop? The virtue police have proven themselves insatiable. Christopher Columbus? Check. Robert E. Lee? Check. Thomas Jefferson? Check. George Washington? Check. Winston Churchill? Check. All of them reduced to one aspect of their lives, judged, and found not merely wanting but demanding condemnation and erasure.
“The Cancel Counter: Statue of Famed Revolutionary War General to Be Removed from Albany City Hall”
“Boston weighs fate of statue of Lincoln, kneeling freed man”
“There’s No Reason to Cancel Gone with the Wind“
“New Jersey lawmakers try to ban ‘Huckleberry Finn’ from curriculum, again”
Mark Twain’s novel humanizes a black man in an era when that was somewhat revolutionary. It’s anti-racist. But so what? Ban it!
Really. Once we begin on this path, there’s no limit. Consider this one:
“How Much Longer Will MLK’s Statue Stand?”
Some years ago, I read Ralph Hancock’s translation of Alain Besançon’s A Century of Horrors: Communism, Nazism, and the Horrors of the Shoah.
I believe it was in that book that I encountered this interesting observation:
Nazism, Besançon wrote (if it was indeed Besançon), had a finite goal. At least in theory. Once the Jews and the Gypsies were gone, the Slavs enslaved, and so on, the perfect Nazi society would essentially have been achieved. Aryan supermen would be in power, and equilibrium would have been reached.
Communism, by contrast, would never be done. The most minute deviations from the Party line, whatever the party line happened to be that day, would be sought out and lethally punished. And there were always deviations. The slightest differences of opinion were criminalized; the slightest policy variations were deemed treason.
The history of the leadership of the Soviet Union, Communist China, and other such states — with their continual purges of previously favored leaders and apparatchiks, their endless heresy hunts and show trials — illustrate that fact in spades. I recall the story — I don’t know whether it’s true or not — of a cabinet minister who once dared to suggest an alternative course of action during a meeting with Enver Hoxha, First Secretary of the Party of Labour of Albania from 1944 to his death in 1985. Hoxha, it’s said, pulled a pistol, shot him in the head, and continued with the meeting.
Ideologues are always searching for heresies and heretics, and they tend to be unforgiving.
A passage from Hamlet II.ii has been going through my mind as I watch calls to “cancel” or erase historical figures for their sins against the current party line. In it, Polonius says that he will treat a group of traveling actors according to their merit. Hamlet objects:
Polonius: “My lord, I will use them according to their desert.”
Hamlet: “God’s bodykins, man, much better. Use every man after his desert, and who would ‘scape whipping? Use them after your own honor and dignity. The less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty.”
It behooves us to view prior generations charitably, if only in our own self-interest. They had moral blind spots. But so do we. Of course we don’t see them. That’s what “blind spot” means. If we hope for charity from succeeding generations, we should extend it to those who’ve gone before us.
***
Here, though, is my favorite bit of recent idiocy, kindly brought to my notice by my friend Ed Snow:
“British anti-racism protestors call for destruction of Giza Pyramids”
Given the context, I’m reasonably sure that these poor, benighted souls equate the term slavery with black slavery. But this is historically inaccurate. Moreover, they plainly assume that the pyramids of Egypt were built by slave labor. However, this was very likely not the case. In any event, they’re now proposing cancellation on a literally monumental scale.
I almost wish such buffoons good luck. I think they have no idea how big, and how solid, the pyramids are.
[I’m now credibly informed that it was opponents of the current demonstrations who brought up demolishing the pyramids, as a reductio ad absurdum argument. At least two Egyptian news outlets, however, reported the matter as my link above does, and it was on them that I was relying.]
***
On a brighter note — both in terms of intellect and in terms of mood — here are two very good and very balanced statements on our current controversy regarding race and policing, one an article and the other a video:
“Watch Company Releases Powerful Pro-Police Ad Amid Anti-Police Climate”
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