Great piece! Took me an extra day to get to it; I was dropping my wife off for a silent retreat in a neighboring state. It was interesting to see how other folks "do" the fight against Covid-19.
Two thoughts on your article. First, it seems to me that many of the issues concerned with the police reflect their strongly held positive self-image. If the cops and their friends could just recognize why others have a different idea, we could make progress toward a rational discussion.
Second random idea, could we have some sort of federal training for cops, perhaps after a year or two on the job. Once the cops have the training -- let's say a month of training -- they'd get some sort of certificate that makes them eligible for a benefit of some sort. The training would cover the sorts of issues that make more sense once you've actually been on the job. Obviously this requires more work, but the basic idea is to find some positive ways to encourage progress rather than simply to yell at the cops for their failings.
There’s a lot of info to process here (and kudos for pulling together the data that was missing). My first impression is that when we talk about emotions like fear, courage, hate and love; these exist on spectrums and there’s a lot of gradations in between fear and courage or hate and love. Most people probably can’t move directly from one extreme to the other, and will need to travel through a few stages to get there. Some might get stuck at indifference. I think it may be worthwhile to examine what are pathways between these. If step one is gaining perspective (removing the bias that obscures reality), then is step two turning down the temperature of rhetoric?
My own intuition says that people must accept that we live in a complex and non-binary reality, and that what seems obvious may be an illusion so we cannot be so confident in our own rightness. Then we must be curious. You, in particular, have demonstrated this exceptionally well.
The huge challenge is to find pathways out of fear, and I’m not feeling optimistic about this at the moment. People respond to incentives, but there are no incentives to give up the fearmongering in reaction to fear, that inspires fear in others. We’ve seen this for decades with Fox News, for which fearmongering is a business model, but I see it in the left activist movement that has taken over the head-space on the liberal side in the past year. Those activists (and their allies) have found solidarity in maintaining a self-image that sustains that fear in themselves, and a political movement in directing that fear at others. As you note the police have their own epicycles driven by fears of the populace, of being mobbed by hostile minorities for doing their jobs. And so it goes round and round.
One of the most distressing (and fear-inducing) things for me about the current times, is to see the national newspapers of record engage in the distortions that you describe under the title of “reckoning” which has a very sinister and aggressive sound to me. It’s a Biblical word, a word used to evoke what’s coming to someone who has already been judged guilty. It provokes the fight-or-flight reflex and, speaking personally, it puts me in a fighting mood. Which is, sadly, not conducive to empathy.
Great piece! Took me an extra day to get to it; I was dropping my wife off for a silent retreat in a neighboring state. It was interesting to see how other folks "do" the fight against Covid-19.
Two thoughts on your article. First, it seems to me that many of the issues concerned with the police reflect their strongly held positive self-image. If the cops and their friends could just recognize why others have a different idea, we could make progress toward a rational discussion.
Second random idea, could we have some sort of federal training for cops, perhaps after a year or two on the job. Once the cops have the training -- let's say a month of training -- they'd get some sort of certificate that makes them eligible for a benefit of some sort. The training would cover the sorts of issues that make more sense once you've actually been on the job. Obviously this requires more work, but the basic idea is to find some positive ways to encourage progress rather than simply to yell at the cops for their failings.
There’s a lot of info to process here (and kudos for pulling together the data that was missing). My first impression is that when we talk about emotions like fear, courage, hate and love; these exist on spectrums and there’s a lot of gradations in between fear and courage or hate and love. Most people probably can’t move directly from one extreme to the other, and will need to travel through a few stages to get there. Some might get stuck at indifference. I think it may be worthwhile to examine what are pathways between these. If step one is gaining perspective (removing the bias that obscures reality), then is step two turning down the temperature of rhetoric?
My own intuition says that people must accept that we live in a complex and non-binary reality, and that what seems obvious may be an illusion so we cannot be so confident in our own rightness. Then we must be curious. You, in particular, have demonstrated this exceptionally well.
The huge challenge is to find pathways out of fear, and I’m not feeling optimistic about this at the moment. People respond to incentives, but there are no incentives to give up the fearmongering in reaction to fear, that inspires fear in others. We’ve seen this for decades with Fox News, for which fearmongering is a business model, but I see it in the left activist movement that has taken over the head-space on the liberal side in the past year. Those activists (and their allies) have found solidarity in maintaining a self-image that sustains that fear in themselves, and a political movement in directing that fear at others. As you note the police have their own epicycles driven by fears of the populace, of being mobbed by hostile minorities for doing their jobs. And so it goes round and round.
One of the most distressing (and fear-inducing) things for me about the current times, is to see the national newspapers of record engage in the distortions that you describe under the title of “reckoning” which has a very sinister and aggressive sound to me. It’s a Biblical word, a word used to evoke what’s coming to someone who has already been judged guilty. It provokes the fight-or-flight reflex and, speaking personally, it puts me in a fighting mood. Which is, sadly, not conducive to empathy.