Toward an Activism that Doesn't Compromise Truth
And Universities and Journalists that aren't (Primarily) Driven by Activism
Too many of the academic, professional, and social groups I have mostly rolled with as an adult are too comfortable with lying in order to preserve first of all an ideology in their heads and second of all a large portion of the cultural power in the United States. That the lies are often couched in empathy or compassion or sympathy make them worse, not better, as it often puts them in the category of what Glenn Loury might call “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”
I’ve pointed out before and probably will again that for all of our best intentions, part of the way our brains deal with the infinite complexity of this life is to generalize. There also appears to be an evolutionary advantage to creating in-groups and out-groups, and of course this fact is some of why progressives go after the likes of Carole Hooven and others who reckon seriously with the observed behavior of, say, chimpanzees. Now we can and should talk back to our generalizations and our tendencies to create in- and out-groups—the micro is often as or more interesting than the macro—but that doesn’t mean we don’t ever need to be able to describe a trend or that we shouldn’t notice that most marriage beds and friendships are in-groups that hints at an out-group. This does not make them bad. I have also pointed out that those on the cultural and political left who endlessly claim to be so concerned about stereotypes and all forms of discrimination seem just as prone to stereotyping and discriminating. Examples abound.
I have made the point elsewhere that I am usually not that shocked when politicians lie. This is because I can see the obvious perceived partisan advantage for them in doing so: they are trying to win votes, so there’s an inherently two-faced nature to the work. Which isn’t to suggest that all politicians lie or that they should. But our expectation that they will probably lie to us is actually why we need an intact journalism that is doing the work to expose those lies. And not in a partisan way. But now we have a journalism that will suddenly rationalize numerous incidents of plagiarism by the president of Harvard. And many normal, everyday people will nod along.
Earlier this week, I read Jennifer Sey’s post, “Facts Do Care About Your Feelings,” a response to Christopher Rufo’s “The New Right Activism,” which was something of a manifesto for his own political strategy that he wants more of the political right to take on. Both Sey and Rufo are pleading for more pathos and narrative in its culture-making; from their standpoint it’s something the left has been doing all along. To which I say, I mean, sure, well, sort of. Yes, emotional appeal can keep our interest, but for Rufo, who was one of the leaders of the effort to get Gay canned at Harvard, it was actually the facts presented that ultimately made the difference. You see, facts and emotions aren’t opposites. And the truth really can move us: to sadness and grief, to repentance, to anger and ultimately change. It is the form of the facts that can and ought when possible to be presented artfully, but this is not a replacement, ever (!), for truth.
Speaking of Rufo, who can certainly be a bit of an annoying Twitter hack—though I do admire his courage in taking on many of the cultural institutions that conservatives and independents have been passively ceding for far too long—Josh Barro points out in his Very Serious post, “Universities Are Not on the Level,” that it is precisely progressives’ lack of commitment to truth that makes them so susceptible to looking foolish when battling against the likes of a Rufo:
“What seems to be happening here is they are suffering from Chris Rufo Derangement Syndrome. That is, they know conservative activist Chris Rufo is a bad guy, and therefore the only way they can analyze a question on which he has opined is by assuming that the opposite of whatever he said was true. If Rufo says Gay plagiarized, then she must not have plagiarized, regardless of whatever near-duplicate paragraphs we can see with our own eyes. In addition to being a terrible approach to learning the truth, this mental model endows Rufo with tremendous power: If you have Rufo Derangement Syndrome, all Chris Rufo has to do to make you look like a total idiot is be right about something, once.”
I had a similar experience recently while watching the online documentary film, The Fall of Minneapolis. The film—made by a journalist and a former cop—is about George Floyd’s death and its consequential aftermath, especially in Minneapolis; I learned about it from Loury’s podcast.
My conclusion from the film was not that implicated policemen did not play a role in Floyd’s death, even starting with the film’s first scene (the footage of which is derived largely from police body cams). I thought the cop who approached Floyd was unnecessarily abrasive before there was much of a reason to be. I’m sure that attitude comes from dealing with all kinds of bullshit all the time, and yet it ought to be part of the constant discussions and training in that field (and I believe in police in this country of 330 million people where our citizens commit roughly 25,000 murders a year) to get that frustration out in other forms and to not take it out on people in the street. Which also doesn’t mean I don’t think cops should have tools in their proverbial belt to deal with verbal abuse, resistance, and even violence; they just shouldn’t be the starting point.
What the film did convince me of, though, was that we were collectively lied to about George Floyd’s death. Politicians, journalists, the courtroom even, and yes, activists, too. They lied and they lied and they lied. Sometimes by omission, other times directly.
In the film, we learn that Floyd first mentioned not being able to breath before anyone was really touching him. We learn accurate races of the policemen at the scene (believe two of the four weren’t white, including the officer who initally arrested Floyd). We learn that EMTs originally went to the wrong location, which was a critical delay. We learn that while the first autopsy did find policeman culpable for the man’s death, the word homocide isn’t in it. The word “asphyxiation” is, but only to clarify that the man conducting the analysis did not find evidence of it in Floyd’s dead body. We learn that Floyd had enough Fentanyl in him to kill him and had Covid. Additionally, we learn that the procedure most people have referred to as Derek Chauvin’s “kneeling on (Floyd’s) neck” was, well, in his training manual (Chauvin’s mother produces it in an interview). Now the case can maybe be made that Chauvin administered the procedure incorrectly in consequential ways, but this is a nuance (which often gets us closer to the truth) that is very different from pretending that he was ad-libbing the whole way. We learn that an important policeman lied about this under oath, and we learn that most of the police body cam was oddly excluded from the trial.
As I have already stated, none of this means the policemen involved shouldn’t have been held, to different degrees, accountable for a death that might have been avoided. But it was the collision of these forces above that was “the story,” and we are in need now more than ever of people who have the courage to track these details down, no matter out inconvenient they are to various political programs.
It isn’t uncommon for a huge news story to get told poorly initially and for it to need revision with time. This certainly happened with Columbine, for example. But I think journalists in particular could do a lot to help us here, by starting with curiosity rather than moral indignation. Curiosity combined with the fairness of honesty is not, it's worth noting, is not the same thing as “objectivity.” We always bring the priors of our life experience to any particular situation. Activism isn’t a bad word, but contemporary activists deserve some of the blame, as they do seem to thrive more at the moment on moral indignation than actually improving people’s lives. And yet, it is media who drives so much of the rage, though of I guess it is mutually-reinforcing in that audience equals good from a kind of media business perspective.
This whole discussion comes, of course, at the backend of the series of events that led to Harvard President Claudine Gay’s resignation. The political left, who loves to think they are on the side of the underdog, has largely defended, umm, Harvard on this issue. On the other hand, hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who is, himself, a Harvard grad, is threatening to partner with AI tools to conduct similar plagiarism audits of the rest of Harvard’s faculty and perhaps at other elite universities, too.
I am all for it. Why wouldn’t it be in the public’s interest to know whether plagiarism is a norm by faculty members at institutions that regularly discipline 18-year-olds for plagiarism? And if little or nothing is found, then we know that Gay’s case was, in fact, especially disturbing. Sounds like a win-win to me. To be sure, there can be truth without justice, but there can certainly not be justice without truth. The only reason to skirt these processes is if you have something to hide.