This morning I read part of an article in which Jordan Peterson is reported to be caught off-guard in a equivalency test between the principle of selling gays wedding cakes and serving blacks wedding cakes. I cranked through this a bit as I lay in bed and the conversation and logic that I found myself in when a little something like this.
I put myself in Peterson's shoes and estimated why he stumbled and I think it might have been something of an overreach on his part, but also because of the strange ubiquity of the gay cake argument. Firstly I qualified myself as Peterson saying I'm not an oracle and I can only muster my own train of logic in the context that I conclude what I do and from that point I became me, myself.
In the end, I speculated out loud why it is that a comedian, as brilliant as they can be searching for the ironies of human life, can represent the public interest in thumping a public intellectual. This gets to the crux of my problem and the title of this essay. But let us consider the equivalence, if there is any, in the reasons for which someone might choose to discriminate against blacks and/or gays in the first place. Why is this of public interest?
In light of the recent Supreme Court decision to cure the anti-gay baker I note that the substance of the case turned on a technicality that fell afoul of one of the minor cogs of anti-discrimination law - something about the punishment being inappropriately harsh given the balance of harm at principle. I also note that given all of the skin in the game, how have we come to represent the public interest in something as insignificant as a $100 cake? Would we consider wedding cakes a public accommodation? In other words, in the great scheme of things, does this matter? I wondered how in the public mind something like this would even catch our attention in a world absent television. How on earth did homosexuality survive without such panoptic scraping activism? How indeed did black life persist or interracial love exist before the Loving decision? Do we really need this level of attention in order to have justice?
I conclude, for the sake of this argument that there was homosexual love long before Stonewall. But I also just recently watched 'Easy Rider' and I know that the road trip ends in murder and that this murder characterized the threat faced by the counter-culture. Well the counter-culture won, and as far as I know, there were only a few murders they suffered, even at Chicago in 1968. By the Bicentennial, there was only cursing. Long hair was no longer a threat. We have become as permissive a society as anyone might desire while still remaining a civilization, but that's not where are heads are at. Our emotions are animated by the memories of segregated water fountains, and fire hoses, and Michael Brown. Our emotions are animated by Matthew Shepherd and Harvey Milk, and by defiance in the streets. Our emotions are subject to react to the drama that characterizes the stories that persist, but not to the way people survive every day. We look to the moment where all hope was lost and the law and the state could not rescue the innocent victim.
Whenever I make my arguments, I do so in order to reveal the way I think about things with the hope that someone else can replicate my logic and see the sense in it. People have a hard time understanding this. If you're a programmer, you understand that you can represent any logical construction, and if you open source your programs, you are making an argument for the program's approach, not so much the end product of the program. There is beauty and power in the use of language itself. But there is always the limited experience of the programmer to solve problems and keep those solutions running in production. No programmer, no matter how clever, can have all the experience to solve all of the problems programs are capable of solving. No philosopher or shaman or priest solves all human problems. No public intellectual or comedian does either. But we might still use their arguments and algorithms. As I look towards the 95 Billion dead of humanity, I use today's logic languages, with an understanding that life, in a Jurassic Park metaphor, finds a way - even ineffably with proprietary logic and coding way may never know. Homosexuals did find love before Stonewall. Blacks and whites did find accommodation in their lives before 1955. We are not the last programmers, we just have the biggest compute networks ever.
And it is in that power that I propose an abundance of caution, and I do so in a way that should resonate with all those in favor of civil liberty, although having done so sounds awfully conservative to many ears. If we have the power (yes we do) to get the disposition of a water fountain used by Miss Jane Pittman or of the address of the restaurant who denied service to a political partisan, then how do we as citizens moderate that power? This is the power of media, of its overstepping into the bounds of society, replacing our powers of individuation with their editorial stances.
I am often asked very simplistic questions, and today I think I have a very simple answer that gets at the heart of the questions I raise. How can we take the narrative out of combined media and give a more accurate accounting of what justice actually is? How can we put the dramatic story in context? How can we bring forth the details in which the devil hides?
The public and society have conventions that do and should change. We ought to be able to navigate these changes and initiate them appropriately. That requires that we have the give and take which is prerogative of society but is not the ratchet of law. I see that we have politicized the personal and we agitate to enact the political to give it the force of law. We do so like machine gunners popping our heads out of foxholes every four years. Death to the other side. We have clearly destroyed all coherence in the administration and regulation of health care, and I think we are likely to do so in anti-discrimination law on our current frenzied path. That is because we are not engaged socially, but politically and at the mercy of very sophisticated implementations of mass communications. Our minds are being hacked because democracy. It's what we expect - we expect to listen to people who coherently represent the masses and we enable their abstractions. We pull the lever of consent and let loose the political beasts who will do as they please until the next time we vote. Then we go to sleep with the TV on thinking all of it's connected. Yet we know it's a news cycle of outrage. We let this influence who we befriend and defriend. It's sick. Or as Gordon Bennett said, it's counter-human.
If I were the owner of CBS, I would petition Congress to change one rule. That rule would be the presence of video in courtrooms.
If I were the CEO of Amazon, I would petition Congress to have access to all of that video and put machine learning algorithms to it all.
If I were a citizen, I would stop watching reality TV and watch court cases. Not just dramatizations, but actual court cases.
I would hope that this combination of situations would help us all to understand with more examples, the kinds of duties we might have if we spent more time on juries following individual cases resulting in a collaborative decision making process of delivering a verdict and less time in chat rooms following national sensations generated by editorial boards. It's just that simple. If people would avoid social media courts of public opinion the way they avoid jury duty, this might become a more civil society. If they moved toward jury duty, I think we'd get more actual justice. Ask any attorney how jammed up the dockets are and how much citizens give up by not following the courts more closely.
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In the other minutes of my morning reverie I thought about what it is we signify about ourselves in our permissive society. I would probably like to deal with that more closely in the future. But I am thinking about uniformity and formality with an aim to bust up the 'salad' of multiculturalism and grind out more 'soup' of pluralism. And this is where I may be making the same mistake at Peterson. It is because I think that sexual intimacy is inherently complex, private and important. That means it is much more individuated than racial identity and it is, I think, inevitably more close to the way a person sees themselves. The implication here is that the more you must identify one's sexual nature through the uniform of citizenship, the more you corrupt the democratic process. In other words, by declaring what is most intimate about you as a public marker, you destroy your own privacy by giving license to third parties to characterize you, not by your actual values and principles, but by your personal identity. To sow 'as a black lesbian, I feel..' reaps 'as a black lesbian, you must..'. It is because of this exchange that I cannot, nor should anyone, offer up equivalences along the 'multicultural' dimensions of human attributes. We only need act as citizens in the public interest, and therefore the public should only require us to follow orders applying to the uniform.
The uniform of citizenship allows us to be called to public duty without prejudice. The uniform of citizenship allows us to remain private individuals beyond public scrutiny.
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