Your being frightened doesn’t mean those people are dangerous

Earlier, I had a post about a very nice neighbor whose position on the issue of the marathon exemplifies a really damaging way that we are all tempted to think about public policies—there is the public good, and that good is obviously achieved through the one policy grounded in it. All other policies benefit special interests. That is, policy deliberation is simple because the right answer is obvious to people of good will.

Seeing our values as the values that matter, and all other values (goals or needs) as the consequence of special interest is a kind of imaginative selfishness. We can only imagine what impact policies might have from our self-oriented perspective. Our perspective is the universal one, and all others are particular.

The second problem with how we think and argue about politics exemplified on the neighborhood mailing list has to do with how our culture treats things like fear, anger, desire for vengeance, shame. And my argument is: not well.

There is another guy on the mailing list, who is (legitimately) angry about graffiti. Apparently, he owns a strip mall and has a real problem with graffiti. It’s reasonable for him to be angry about graffiti at his strip mall.  And, apparently, the city won’t do much to help him, and that also makes him reasonably angry.

One of many problems with the rational/irrational split is that our culture tends to privilege the “rational” side of that split, with the mostly unspoken assumption that, if you have something that falls on the “irrational” side of that split—a belief you can’t defend rationally—then you should abandon it. That’s a disastrous way to think about decision-making and public deliberation.

A lot of beliefs that can’t be defended rationally (and which we don’t hold in a “rational” way) are central to our sense of identity. From within the world that says you have to abandon beliefs that can’t be defended rationally, then, if we have a belief that can’t be defended rationally–we’re angry about graffiti, fearful about the presence of the Japanese, shamed by being accused of being racist–we don’t abandon them, but just try to present them as “rational.”

Since our cultural notion of what makes a belief rational is so muddled and gerfucked–a witches brew of feeling, affect, tone, metadiscourse, in-group identity, surface features (like data, appeal to studies, appeal to facts), identity–then we just present our nonfalsifiable argument as though our nonfalsifiable and irrational belief (graffiti is damaging, the Japanese are threatening, people shouldn’t call me racist) is “rational” by making it fit some of those incoherent surface features of a “rational” argument. We find data, studies, experts who support us, or we make our argument with claims to universal truths, and we adopt a calm tone, bemoaning the emotionalism of our opposition.

As lots of people have argued (including me), our understanding of “rational” is an imbroglio of criteria: surface features (metadiscourse that signals calm affect, such as hedging, rationality markers), rhetorical appeals (such as the appeal facts, statistics, expert opinions, claims of expertise), deeper features (such as the relationship of claims), relationship to reality (an argument is rational if it’s true, a rational argument is universally accepted, whereas an irrational argument is particular to an individual). None of those are useful ways of thinking about what makes an argument (or belief) rational (and, no, I am not arguing that all beliefs are equally valid or there is no truth), but that isn’t my point here. My point here is that, if you are angry about graffiti (or frightened by the Japanese, as was Earl Warren, or threatened by integration, as was James Kilpatrick) then simply saying, “I am really angry about graffiti because it costs me a lot of money, and I’m angry that the city won’t do anything about it” would look as though you are irrational. That’s an argument about you (not universal, therefore particular and “subjective”) and it’s coming from a place of emotion (anger).

I think that we should live in a world where people can make that argument–“I am very angry about this”–and have that taken seriously as a datapoint to be considered.

I think the fact that Earl Warren (and many others) were afraid of “the Japanese,” and James Kilpatrick felt threatened about “whites” losing their privileges are arguments that people should be able to make in the public sphere. I don’t think Warren and Kilpatrick should be able to make those arguments because those arguments are good or valid, but because treating them as claims about their beliefs (and not about the world) would have opened up policy options off the table (such as people like Warren learning to distinguish between Americans of Japanese descent and the nation with whom we were at war),, and having to submit those arguments to public deliberation would have shown the policies (mass imprisonment, segregation) were grounded in indefensibly irrational arguments.

I think that, had they been clear what their argument was (“I am afraid” and “I feel threatened”) there could have been some interesting and useful discussions, especially about policy, since the policy they promoted didn’t actually solve their problems (mass imprisonment of Americans of Japanese descent couldn’t make Warren any less afraid about the war with Japan, and that Kilpatrick was threatened by the possibility of “a coffee-colored” culture was not solved by segregation). But they kept their most relevant beliefs (“I am afraid of Japanese” and “Integration scares me”) off the table.

These are all instances of people with particular reactions to their particular situations, but that they reframed as problems for everyone, and they did so by transforming the objects of the feelings (“I fear the Japanese”) into the agents of those feelings (“The Japanese are dangerous”). If you insist on the objective/subjective distinction, then you’d say it’s that they make a subjective reaction an objective reality. But the subjective/objective distinction isn’t a useful way to think about these policy disasters because the people making these arguments sincerely believe they were describing, not a subjective perception, but an objective reality. No one thinks they’re being subjective.

I think it’s more useful to see this problem as someone taking their reaction and universalizing from it (as happened with marathons being universally good or bad) and projecting one’s feelings into the fabric of the universe. “I don’t like action movies” becomes “Action movies are bad.”

And that’s what happened with the issue of graffiti and the neighborhood mailing list. Instead of saying, “Graffiti is really hurting me, and I wish the city took it more seriously,” he argued that the graffiti in this blazingly white neighborhood was part of [dog whistle racist] gang activity. The notion that this neighborhood is in grave danger of turning into the site of [dog whistle racist] turf warfare is not just false, but fear-mongering in a neighborhood with a lot of elderly people. It’s damaging.

[That the moderators allowed him to engage in [dog whistle racist] and completely irrational fear-mongering about graffiti, nearly relentlessly, is why I left the list.]

A lot of people, Earl Warren among them, were frightened about how badly the war was going with Japan. Imprisoning Japanese wouldn’t make that war go better. His own policy didn’t fit his need. James Kilpatrick, like all whites, was genuinely threatened by desegregation—were desegregation to happen (and it still hasn’t), whites would no longer get a privileged status and a free pass for all sorts of things. Had Kilpatrick had to admit that was really his fear, then, perhaps, we wouldn’t be trying to make the point that black lives matter as much as white lives.

It seems to me legitimate that my neighbor is outraged about the graffiti on his strip mall, and even I found the graffiti in our neighborhood irritating (I really dislike graffiti unless it’s thoughtful), but it isn’t and never was a sign of gangs tagging our neighborhood. (I think I know what white kid up the street it was. He is not in a gang.) That was irresponsible and toxic rhetoric.

That a person is frightened by something doesn’t mean it is dangerous. We all feel threatened, offended, enraged, violated by various things. Those aren’t just feelings. They are beliefs. We believe that we are threatened, offended, enraged, violated. And, once we try to get others to share that belief, we are arguing, not that we are frightened but that those things are threatening. That slippage–“I am frightened” becomes “they are dangerous”–obscures that those two kinds of claims are supported in very different ways.

That some group is dangerous is not supported by your fear of them, nor your (and your in-groups) non-falsifiable claims about how everything they do is motivated by their desire to hurt the in-group. Warren said that the lack of sabotage on the part of Japanese was proof that they planned to engage in sabotage. Graffiti guy interpreted every instance of graffiti as proof of the impending gang war.

We can make arguments that our feelings are accurate assessments of the situation (as they often are)–that we feel frightened, threatened, uncomfortable, sexually aroused, sexualized, silence is a valid datapoint. It should neither be dismissed, but nor should it be seen as conclusive.

Graffiti guy’s really unhappy experience was a single datapoint. Relevant, worth considering, but not proof of impending gang warfare.

In a previous post, I argued that one problem with how we argue about politics is that we universalize from our belief system—because we are ethical people, then our policy agenda is the ethical one (and all other policies are unethical). For every apparently complicated political situation, there is a policy solution, and it happens to be the one that is obviously right to us.

I think that argument could be misunderstood as my saying that we shouldn’t argue from personal experience or personal perspective. Of course we should; in fact, that’s all we can do. And that’s how healthy argument works—with people bringing different perspectives. We can try to represent the perspective of people not like us, and we should, but, finally, we will still be representing our perspective on their perspective. The problem is when we insist that our perspective is the only valid one. Warren feared “the Japanese.” Black men fear the police. Kilpatrick feared desegregation. I fear climate change. Those are all datapoints.

Warren’s fear of “the Japanese” became the basis of public policy, but he never made a rational argument that his fear of what the country of Japan was doing militarily was evidence that people of Japanese ancestry in this country were dangerous. A black man who fears an interaction with the police can make a rational argument that his fear of police is grounded in evidence.

That I fear something doesn’t mean it’s so dangerous that we need public policy changes. But my fear might be a sign of a larger political issue that should involve policy changes. Fear is, by itself, neither rational nor irrational. Whether the claims I’m making about what my fear means for us as a community are rational https://www.patriciarobertsmiller.com//2019/10/18/people-teaching-argument-need-to-stop-teaching-the-rational-irrational-split/ or not has nothing to do with whether I appeal to fear or statistics, but with how I argue.