Minnesota is rioting. The imagery of the police precinct on fire is surreal https://www.cbsnews.com/news/george-floyd-protests-minneapolis-police-third-precinct/. If you follow the news, then you likely thought the burning police building seemed, well, un-American. Not un-American in the way the accusation is usually wielded: to discredit those who would criticize our military or shake the foundations of our country. Rather, I mean it is an image straight out of a 60 Minutes segment where a foreign correspondent reports on an active conflict in North Africa. Growing up, I’d seen many images of wanton destruction… just never in the United States.
My timeline on Facebook, Twitter, and reddit are soaked through with political rhetoric. Having attended UConn, and growing up in New England, I am mostly surrounded by voices on the American left. My social feeds are a soundbox, and I’m unsure who my peers are speaking to. It’s either the choir or the enemy. Regardless both are futile audiences, especially if your message is delivered with furious haste.
Very few of those online, who are tearing into police and their peers and the rioters, are evaluating their thoughts and messages. It’s easy to whip out a hundred words when your blood is hot from watching viral videos online. Over the last week, videos of police beating on people are impossible to get away from. I have lately spent mornings lounging in bed for twenty minutes while Jacklyn prepares to leave for work. During these minutes, I’ve been stumbling into video after video of police misconduct. I don’t dive deep into these videos, only watching enough to understand the gist of the plot, the spark notes I’ll discuss with friends. Even in my condensed watching, these videos get my hackles raised.
I have a physical sensation I associate with being upset. The back of my skull tingles, similarly to a leg deadened from sitting for too long. When my head tingles, I know not to do anything I can’t take back. Or, at least, I’m trying to teach myself this. I’ve scrolled past Facebook posts where I’ve written out a comment, only to delete it. I’ve deleted more of my own comments than I’ve published, and often these comments take 5+ minutes to write. It’s frustrating, but it’s a good thing. I know I can’t provide accurate commentary when I’m emotional. But there are other obstacles to my expressing thoughts.
When you have an idea or an opinion, do you receive the idea and accept it on face value? Or do you hold it at arms length, turn it over and around, examining its truth value? Do you play devil’s advocate with yourself, poking holes in your opinion, then fighting back again against the pin pricks? If not, your opinions are probably useless. It’s hard to hear, but it’s the truth. Ideas and opinions need a rigorous shaking before they have value. You can, if you have the network, rely on peers to shake your ideas for you. Few people have the stomach for this approach. Instead, people greet criticism of their idea as judgement of their own self-worth as a human. Popular modern discourse doesn’t account for the difference between attacking an idea and attacking the individual. Attacking an individual is called an ad hominem. An ad hominem attack does not progress an idea, but only serves to diminish the chances of a worthwhile conversation (it’s also a popular way our president communicates).
When I began studying philosophy, I had a laughably inane reason for my interest: I enjoyed talking about conspiracies and working out the metaphysical realities of our universe, frequently during late nights with buddies, rarely while sober. I didn’t really know what studying philosophy meant when I began, and I expected it to compliment my English degree because I considered them analytical in the same ways. I was right; they did compliment each other, but not because English and philosophy are similar, but because they are radically different. English is about interpreting stories to receive value, but that value is subjective to the individual. Philosophy is rigorous about judging the soundness and validity of a specific and singular argument. Philosophy is the meta behind every disagreement in existence, and having come out the other side, I’ve learned that people are hardly ever arguing about the same topic, but rather two different ideas, bound only loosely by a related setting.
I’ll provide an example, one that discusses our current sociopolitical climate.
Those on the left who are indignant about racism and police abuse are arguing that police should protect and serve, not abuse and harass. They are arguing we need to be living in a society where the government treats all of its citizens as equals. These are important ideas. We need to collectively work towards instilling these values in our population and government. A society does not exist that is both healthy and has a lesser class of people. The concepts are diametrically opposed to one another, and if you cannot see that the black community is marginalized by our government, then I have a shocking fact to share: the Three-Fifths Compromise is still in the United States Constitution.
If you don’t remember from your primary schooling, the Three-Fifths Compromise was a deal made when the US Constitution was drafted. The North and South disagreed about how to count slaves as part of the population. The North didn’t want to count slaves, because slaves in the North were a small percentage of the population, whereas in the South, slaves made up as much as 57% of a state’s population https://faculty.weber.edu/kmackay/statistics_on_slavery.htm (looking at you South Carolina). When deciding how many Representatives to assign each state, the issue of slave population was hotly debated. Ultimately, the drafters decided on a 3/5ths compromise, where each slave would be less than a whole person, but not quite worthless. This is still in the Constitution; it’s the fifth sentence in the documenthttps://constitutionus.com. Our country was founded on many ideals, and one of those ideals was the exploitation of the black community. Despite our progresses, we have still not amended our Constitution to retract one of the original exploitations of the black community. The protests happening in 2020 are vibrations that originated hundreds of years ago. Any American who considers himself a patriot, who wants our nation to be great, needs to recognize the necessity of a government that polices fairly and equitably across all communities. This is what progressives argue.
Those counter-protesting have a nearly unshakable faith in the establishment. Whether they know it or not, their ideas are rooted in the work of Thomas Hobbes, 17th century political philosopher. His work “Leviathan” argues that a government should have unlimited power over the individual, because in comparison between the “state of nature” (as Hobbes puts it) and an authoritarian government, being under the thumb of a singular, centralized state authority is infinitely better than living in anarchy, where any neighbor or stranger could kill or steal without standardized reprise. In the state of nature, even a child could sneak up on a large man and cut his throat in his sleep. There is no protection in the state of nature, no justice, only survival.
Hobbes laid it on a little thick, and thankfully the drafters of our constitution recognized the dangers posed by a tyrannical government. Still, conservatives are the Law & Order party, and they fear the state of nature. Rightly so; the riots happening across the country are a taste of Hobbes’s theory. Never in my life has the value of a properly-trained police force been more obvious than right now. We need police, because without police and government there is chaos. This is what conservatives argue.
Log on to your favorite social media platform and find an article about the protests or the riots. You are guaranteed to find a population of progressives and conservatives, nearly equivalent to a small town, battling it out in the comment section. Their words will be caustic and inflammatory, and it is all completely futile because they’re not even arguing about the same thing. Yes, they’re broadly discussing the subjects of police brutality/socioeconomic inequality/theories of justice. When a progressive tells a conservative that the black community is disproportionately targeted by violent policing, and the conservative responds that we need to support our police and that their job is hard, they are talking about two completely different ideas. The conservative does not dismantle the ideas of the progressive; he doesn’t even address the concerns. Online forums and comment sections are modern gladiatorial arenas, where two interlocutors exchange barbs, scream through their keyboards, all while completely ignoring the other person’s points. This is not communication, but pseudo-intellectual masturbation.
The Democratic Party is the progressive party. It’s the party of change, and of forging forward without regard to tradition. Without moderation, progressivism tends towards anarchy. The Republican Party is the Conservative party. It believes in the status quo, and that to shake our society is likely to do more harm than good. Without moderation, conservatism tends towards fascism. We need both sentiments for our society to work. Radical progressivism is not sustainable and will, sooner or later, lead to our nation’s collapse as too many Jenga blocks are pulled out of our tottering tower. But without progress, we have stagnation, and it behooves us as a country to recognize our fellow man’s problems, especially if they are rooted in the same organization that is meant to protect us. Do not believe that our problems can be boiled down to a three sentence Facebook status. We cannot argue this out on Twitter and find a solution. Reality is far too complex. Recognize the value of your ideas, and then look to your neighbor to temper your one-size-fits-all solution. We can work together to fix our problems. We need to.