I imagine that people equivocate because even in circumstances of objective personal tragedy, they don’t want to surrender to having the terms of the meta-narrative that tragedy is being used as an element of dictated to them. Because it’s not a personal story, it’s a specially selected local incident elevated to national attention for very specific reasons, namely because it fits well into a popular narrative that will drive popular attention. This isn’t an argument that we should or shouldn’t cull through every act of excessive force or harm done to black people by police to build a case for a specific racial-law-enforcement narrative. It might be a narrative we need to hear. On the other hand, it might not be the only narrative we need to hear, and some people might resist joining in in appropriate sympathy and concern out of their own concern that the narrative that they think is important and essential for the wellbeing of all will be overwritten and drowned out. That they’ll lose the ability to control the terms of the debate, and so lose the ability for their perspective to be heard. I listened recently to some very impassioned words from a black police officer, about how they are feeling misunderstood and mischsracterized and profiled and targeted by media attention and narratives. He felt that all the arguments and explanations and understanding were being used in favor of the people he had to deal with and against him and his fellow officers. And it wasn’t clear to me that he was entirely wrong. I could understand his resentment. Because although it’s easy to hold him to such a high standard because of how important his job and the power it confers is, it’s also easy to forget how awful and difficult and frightening and dangerous an environment I’m expecting him to face every day. Considering what they have to deal with and what it does to them, why don’t we show them the same sort of hesitation toward judgment and understanding that we seek grant to the people they confront?
None of that is an endorsement, just a reflection on the different forces that make people feel like they have to take the positions they do. And, in my opinion, the environment that distorts meaningful experience and discussion and dislocated it from proper human experience is really the culprit, not the diversity of reactions. It disconnects us from the human reality of both the event and the discussion, and from one another. There are some people who are less sympathetic and emotionally reactive, without being better or worse people, just as there are people who are more sympathetic and emotionally reactive, without being better or worse people. And one might need very little to arouse a strong reaction in personal, moral, and emotional terms to something that happened to someone far away in an unfamiliar place. Another person might be slower to connect to the personal emotional realities and perceive such an event more from the locus of abstraction and their own specific concerns and sympathies. One type of person might be terrified by the spread of lawlessness and be desperate to protect against it at all costs, even myopically so. And their concerns are valid; the danger they perceive, and the injustices, and the value to be honored and preserved, aren’t unreal. They have a claim to their concerns and their narrative that foregrounds them. Another person might be horrified by the abuse of power, desperate to put a stop to it at all costs, dedicated to rooting it out and exposing it, to the exclusion of all other concerns and arguments. And their concerns are valid too, the danger and the injustices and the tragedies are real and costly. They also have a claim to their concerns. In a more natural environment, where people actually have to deal directly with the totality of other people and the narrative is primarily about this person and this place and this act and this tragedy and what we who are involved must do, who we must place a hand on for comfort, who to place a hand on for justice (and both are focused and purposeful and directed and have meaningful limits to guide them centered around actual involved humans) where instead we wage a shadow war of our own limited understanding of one another over our personal meta-narratives. rather than isolating our reactions and culling them from the distance of whatever we’re able to share across a soundbite on social media
Is there a problem? Yes. But our differing and exclusively antagonistic narratives about the problem are also a problem, because they distract and distort and get in the way of our actual ability to understand or solve or react appropriately to the problem.
We have a hierarchy of fundamental moral duties. First, to look after and cultivate our own souls, to make our selves more kind and honest and peaceful and patient and good and self-controlled. Second, to look after and understand and care for our families. To love the people placed around us, to show them value and help them grow and challenge them and encourage them and spend time with them and listen to them and make them better and stronger. Third, to care for our neighbors, those people placed close to our lives. Our coworkers and those we labor next to, the people in our neighborhood and our church and our childrens’ schools. And beyond that, to represent ourselves and that goodness as a fixed power and light of growth to the rest of the wider world. Those are the different rings that spread outward from the point in time and space and moral and relational embedding, efficacy, and understanding that is you. All of them are important and valuable. But the power, and the true growth of goodness, starts from the center. You realistically can only meaningfully know and touch and live within the lives of a group of around 150 people. And your investment your growth, your roots, have to start there, start as close to your own soul as possible. Because whatever you try to build at the extremes, if it’s not supported by a healthy, balanced heart, a trunk of strength from which the branches can grow tall and straight, it will be in danger of collapse, disease, instability, distortion, and corruption. You wont have the control to maintain your design if you don’t have the infrastructure to support it. And, as important as those outer ripples are (and they may be terribly important), if you’re engaging in life in a way that distracts you and distorts the world around you and takes you away from your core, that erodes your ability to love and listen to understand and invest in the people closest to the heart of your life, if they draw you in an make you feel like you’re engaging in real moral activity and understanding and and action, that that’s the real world surrounded by and invested in and emotionally reacting to and spending your efforts on, you’re going to end up in trouble. The highest tower may be the light that all nations see, but if you don’t build to it from the bottom up, it won’t stand. If you invest in a system that erodes your focus by simulating the effects of moral/emotional engagement but draws you away from the most important battlegrounds (your own heart, your family, your friends and coworkers) and makes it harder to understand and love them, you’re going to suffer. And so will others eventually, when what you construct doesn’t reach the heights or give the light you hoped it would. You’ll become frustrated, seek more extreme constructions, start looking for blame, start seeking the enemies who are holding you back or threatening what you have. Some modern systems do this addict you, engage you, draw you in, by appealing to your own better instincts. But they do so by drawing them away from their first soil, because that forum can’t be monetized or leveraged for political or social power.
How much time have we spent on media simply because our investments there seemed more valuable or more rsl than investments in the real world around us. And they’re so much easier. And simpler.
It distorts because we operate at the level of the mob. We understand, judge, react, interpret, feel danger and outrage.
You cannot export what you don’t produce at home.
So before you go everywhere with your anger and outrage, go home first. Talk to your spouse or parents or brother or sister. They’re probably a good bit different from yiu, but you love each other, so you have a connection to build on so you can learn from one another’s perspective. A communion of difference that isn’t built on mutual love and need and respect won’t enlighten many hearts. And first of all, go to your own heart. Find yourself in that person standing against another person. See the world through their eyes, see how that could be you. Find yourself in the heart of whoever seems furthest from your instinct. If that means finding yourself in the eyes of the perpetrator, then do it. If it means finding yiurself in the eyes of the victim, do it. Then, and only then, when you’ve confronted the possibilities of your own heart, will you be ready to judge and steer rightly when you hurl yourself into the sea of the further world.
Data selection 100% drives the interpretation of results.
Making Nobody Happy 