02 Oct Is This ‘Fixable?’
Over the weekend, there was a shooting in a largely black neighborhood in Atlanta, to which several police officers responded. Although most of the responding officers were black, one was white. And as you can see in the video here, that didn’t go over especially well with the residents of the neighborhood, who harassed the white officer, chanted “No white cops,” and eventually forced him back into his patrol car, where he presumably waited out the investigation.
There are, we think, several different ways this story could be interpreted and, thus, several different lessons that could be drawn from it. What interests us, however, is that it reminded us of an article we read well more than twenty years ago, when we were still gainfully employed at a large financial services firm. If we recall correctly, this was a piece written for a fairly obscure journal (probably published by the likes of Taylor & Francis) that focused on law enforcement, national security, terrorism, drug cartels, and the like. We put the story in our “story ideas” folder – which in those days was an actual, real-life, manilla folder – and it almost certainly ended up in the trash some months later.
All of which is our way of saying that we searched all day yesterday (or for several minutes, at least), trying to find the story but were unsuccessful. So, you’ll just have to take our word when we tell you that the general gist of it was as follows:
People tend to trust those who share their culture or are of the same race to maintain order far more than they do “outsiders.” They also tend to be willing to put up with some “disruption” to their lives and some “unorthodox” tactics perpetrated by the order-restorers from their community because they expect those impositions to be rules-based and fairer in general than the “law” imposed from outside.
In addition to the issue of black residents’ distrust of white police officers and, by extension, preference for community “justice,” the article cited the experiences of Italian-Americans with the Mafia in early twentieth-century urban areas like New York, Chicago, and Kansas City, as well as the South Vietnamese preference for the order established by the Viet Cong to the order promised by the U.S. military. In all three cases, people were willing to tolerate some “indiscretions” in return for order imposed from within their community.
Given that we don’t have this article in front of us and haven’t even seen it in more than two decades, it would be rather foolish to try to draw many conclusions from it – or our remembrance of it. Still, we do think we can draw one: what we see on that video from Atlanta is not a new phenomenon. It may be more blatant, more aggressive, and more threatening to society, but it is not new. It is likely of a different magnitude than previous manifestations of the problem, but it is still of the same order.
Or, to put it more succinctly: there is nothing new under the sun.
Among the more comforting attributes of conservatism is that it enables one to dispense with hyperbole. Too many “conservatives” tend to forget as much these days, but it is nevertheless the core of the conservative temperament.
This is important for a number of reasons, across the entirety of the process by which societal problems are addressed. First, by dispensing with hyperbole, we are able to see the essential truth in the study/article noted above. Some manifestations of problems are more serious and more advanced and more threatening than others. About that, there is no doubt. But, as Russell Kirk put it, “human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent.” That which is a problem now has been a problem before and will, certainly, be a problem again.
Second, solutions to many of society’s problems may seem extremely unlikely, but they exist, if one knows where to look. The account that posted the above video from Atlanta commented on it as well, declaring “there is no fixing this.” That is, we think, the wrong way to look at the problem. It is important to remember that since our predecessors dealt with problems similar to our own, so did they devise solutions to those problems. And by maintaining a continuity between their problems, discoveries, and solutions and our own, we are able to “stand on the shoulders of giants.” We are able to learn from our predecessors’ mistakes and successes when addressing similar problems. We can find solutions in their experiences.
This is what Kirk calls the “principle of prescription”: “The individual is foolish, but the species is wise, Burke declared. In politics we do well to abide by precedent and precept and even prejudice, for the great mysterious incorporation of the human race has acquired a prescriptive wisdom far greater than any man’s petty private rationality.”
Finally, although many or most of society’s problems can be addressed by the wisdom of the ages, none of the solutions created for those problems will be perfect, and none will be permanent. There is a way to “fix” what happened in Atlanta, but it will not fix it completely or eternally.
This is, as we are wont to say, the moral of the story about the man, the woman, the snake, and the apple. We live in an imperfect world. As a result, we cannot expect to solve any problems completely. It is simply the nature of our temporal existence that societal problems are solvable only in a relative and momentary sense. For obvious reasons, Kirk calls this the “principle of imperfectability”:
Man being imperfect, no perfect social order ever can be created. Because of human restlessness, mankind would grow rebellious under any utopian domination and would break out once more in violent discontent—or else expire of boredom. To seek for utopia is to end in disaster, the conservative says: we are not made for perfect things. All that we reasonably can expect is a tolerably ordered, just, and free society, in which some evils, maladjustments, and suffering will continue to lurk…. The ideologues who promise the perfection of man and society have converted a great part of the twentieth-century world into a terrestrial hell.
Is it awful that the residents of the Atlanta neighborhood berated and humiliated the “white cop” just because he is white? Of course it is. Does the fact that the residents were so grossly disrespectful and antagonistic to the officer suggest a real and serious problem in American society today? Again, of course it does. Should this bother us? Should we, as a society, endeavor to fix it? Of course and of course.
At the same time, however, we must be careful about the solutions we impose, drawing on experience and history, and we must not expect any solution to be flawless or everlasting. Conditions change but the nature of man’s infirmities remains.
And thus should it be with all of society’s manifold problems. Hyperbole is our enemy. Hope and prudence are our allies. There is a solution to our problems. But it will be less than perfect. To believe otherwise is to believe in dystopian and utopian fantasies, neither of which suit man’s nature and existence.
