(Worth reading article on historic perspective of police and why police acts like an occupying army-f.sheikh)

The police were first created to suppress labor militancy and the Left, before becoming a tool to bludgeon the most marginalized in society, particularly poor black people. We must dismantle this brutal instrument of social control.

The police are out of control. They murder unarmed, poor, disproportionately nonwhite people with near total impunity. They provoke protests, antagonize protesters, arrest journalists, and violate civil liberties. They torture detainees and run black sites for interrogations. Their unions protect them from accountability, demand special legal protection, and undermine the political authority of any mayor, governor, or public figure that even mildly criticizes them. They refuse to collect and share national data on how often, when, and against whom they mete out violence while on the beat. They reject the minimal requirements of a democratic society to know how they operate.

The police have become an independent, organized body that relates to the public more or less the way an occupying army relates to the native population. How did they get like this?

Excellent work has shown how the police preserve racial hierarchies, in part by using force disproportionately against minorities, especially black people. The police were central to W. E. B. Du Bois’s theory of how the ruling class used racial ideology to divide workers who shared economic interests. As recent protests have awakened the public to this “social control” function of the police, they have also opened up the space to ask a basic question: why are there police in the first place? What interests do they serve, and why have they become so militarized?

As it turns out, the institution emerged to police allpeople whose freedom the ruling class feared. In the United States, as in other countries, the police were created to manage the social problems of a capitalist society — poverty, crime, and class conflict — while suppressing radical challenges to that society. As those challenges became more serious, the police became more militarized. The institution that in the United States has been directed with special force and ferocity against black people is, today, the most visible and violent part of an all-purpose apparatus of discipline and control. Once we grasp the origins of the police and why they militarized, we can recognize why all workers share an interest in transforming the police.

This history is also a reminder that there will be no full reckoning with the police without confronting the social interests that oppose serious social transformation. There are many, including the biggest names in corporate America, who are ready to proclaim the police intolerable in their current, totally unhinged form. But they have not objected to, and never will challenge, the basic social control function of the police. As the question of what to do moves forward, it is worth taking a hard look backward for where to draw the lines.

The Early Days of American Policing

The police are a recent invention. In the early American republic, formally constituted police forces were essentially unknown. Law enforcement took the form of posses and irregular patrols, comprised of citizens who temporarily came together under the color of law to apprehend specific individuals. Cities did not have regularly appointed police, fully and formally employed by the state, with special legal authority to use violence against the population.

The introduction of police forces was a response to a modern problem: social disorder created by the working class. The free urban poor unnerved the American ruling class. Unlike slaves and indentured servants, they were under no particular individual’s juridical authority, and they possessed civil, and sometimes political, liberties, which they were free to use as they saw fit. “The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, who preferred slavery and small property holders to wage laborers. That way citizen militias would be sufficient; no police or standing armies necessary.

First formed in the United States (and England) in the early to mid-nineteenth century, the police enjoyed broad discretion to arrest anyone who could not give a socially accepted account of themselves. As Sam Mitrani observes in his history of the Chicago Police Department, the city council’s Committee on Police, tasked in the 1850s with establishing a modern police force, stated that the police should have wide latitude, since “matters not criminal in particulars, but which if permitted to go unchecked in a dense population like ours, would result very injuriously to the city.” So too in the major cities of the South. A quotation from Charleston in 1845 makes the point clearly:

Over the sparsely populated country, where gangs of negros are restricted within settled plantations under immediate control and discipline of their respective owners, slaves were not permitted to idle and roam about in pursuit of mischief. … The mere occasional riding about and general supervision of a patrol may be sufficient. But, some more energetic and scrutinizing system is absolutely necessary in cities, where from the very denseness of population and closely contiguous settlements there must be need of closer and more careful circumspection.

As Alex Vitale has noted, slave patrols were predominantly “rural and nonprofessional,” functioning only to police slaves that managed to escape the normal juridical authority and physical violence of the slaveowner and his overseers. But in cities, slaves acquired de facto if not de jure civil liberties and mixed with the free workers who also spooked ruling elites: “They [slaves] could congregate with others, frequent illicit underground taverns and even establish religious and benevolent associations, often in conjunction with free blacks, which produced tremendous social anxiety among whites.” These cities, Vitale notes, set up formal police forces, sometimes called “city guards,” who were permanent, professional, round-the-clock regulators of “social peace.”

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“Several studies have found that, on average, there’s some physical similarity between one’s parent and one’s partner. That is, your girlfriend might well look a little bit like your mother. This physical similarity is apparent whether you ask strangers to compare facial photos of partners and parents, or whether you assess things such as parent and partner height, hair or eye colour, ethnicity, or even body hair.”

Why? Familiar things are attractive. So long as something isn’t initially aversive, and you’re not over-exposed, then in general something will become more appealing the more you encounter it. Part of the attraction to parental features could be attributed to this familiarity effect. Yet familiarity doesn’t account for the whole phenomenon. First, people’s partners seem to be more likely to resemble the parent of the corresponding gender: girlfriends match mothers, and boyfriends match fathers, irrespective of whether they’re in a heterosexual or homosexual relationship. Second, emotional closeness to a parent increases the likelihood that your partnerwill resemble your parent.

Another possible reason is that, biologically speaking, prime reproductive partners sometimes look a little like our parents. Of course, incest itself is a different game: reproduction between close relatives can lead to dangerous recessive genetic disorders. And yet, some genes work well together, so a partner with subtle resemblance to family members might actually be one whose genetic material contains some of that useful overlap. A wonderful study of all known couples in Iceland across a 165-year period found that those with the most grandchildren were related at about the level of third or fourth cousin – no more, no less. So it seems there is some evolutionary advantage to finding traces of parental features attractive.

But what about sibling appearance? My research team and I realised that explanations for the appeal of parental features would also tend to apply to sibling features. Indeed, in historical high-fertility populations, siblings might have been more frequent and therefore more familiar playmates than parents. So, in our latest study, instead of looking at the similarities between partners and parents, we turned our focus onto brothers. We collected together facial photographs of the brothers and male partners of 56 women. Some of the women were volunteers whom we contacted directly, and some were people whom we didn’t know personally, but who had a sufficient public profile that we could identify their brother and boyfriend. We then asked female volunteers to compare each photo of a woman’s brother against four other men, one of whom was that woman’s partner. The volunteers did not know that the men they saw were the brothers and partners of specific women. The volunteers ranked every group of four partners according to how much they looked like the brother.

If there was no similarity at all between a woman’s brother and partner, then we’d expect the volunteers to pick randomly, selecting each of the four pictures one quarter of the time. When we looked just at the raw numbers, we found that nearly one third of the raters’ choices were for the ‘correct’ brother-boyfriend pair as looking most similar. However, these raw numbers are only indicative, and we wanted to know how we might extrapolate the data to the population at large. We used a statistical model to predict this, which indicated that if we generalised beyond our dataset, people would select the correct brother-boyfriend pair as most similar 27 per cent of the time, and as first or second most similar a combined 59 per cent of the time (instead of 50 per cent). The model predicted that people would say that a woman’s boyfriend and her brother looked least alike just 16 per cent of the time.

Of course, not every woman in our study had a partner who looked like her brother, and that is true of women in the world at large. But when we compared our data to the data from previous studies, it appeared that people’s boyfriends resemble their brothers about as much as people’s partners resemble their parents. Since siblings resemble their parents, it’s possible that brother-boyfriend resemblance is merely an essential corollary of parent-partner resemblance, or even vice versa.

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posted by f.sheikh

Readers who have followed several incarnations of my blogs (like this one, and this one, and this one) will have easily figured out that, politically speaking, I lean left, though with a number of qualifications and caveats. But I make a point of reading conservative authors and columnists, for a couple of reasons: first, to keep up with what they say and how they think (so to sharpen my own opinions and arguments), and second because they too, at least some of the times, have something interesting or constructive to say.

A recent example is David Brooks, a regular New York Times columnist, who is defined by Wikipedia as a Canadian-born American conservative political and cultural commentator who writes for The New York Times. On April 15, he has published a column for said newspaper entitled “Five lies our culture tells us.” I’d like to examine each of the lies in turn, in order to stimulate a discussion that may help us all see why such lies contribute to (or even, as Brooks argues, are at the root of) our political problems.

Lie n. 1: Career success is fulfilling. Brooks suggests that this lie is most evident at the point of college admissions, which put a lot of pressure on students (and their families) by instilling status anxiety. I think he is far too modest in his claim. Status anxiety is built into the very fabric of American society from the moment people are born. I live in Manhattan, and I know parents who fiercely compete (and pay outrageous amounts of money, and sometimes cheat) so that their five-year olds get into the best elementary schools. And it only gets worse from there.

A number of my students tell me that they have to defend tooth and nails their decision to major in philosophy because both peers and relatives are of the opinion that they are wasting their time and won’t make any money. (Which, incidentally, is not true.) Everyone is after grades, not learning, because they think the former, and not so much the latter, are what will get them a well paying job.

Also, as Brooks puts it, actually achieving things — even things you really wanted and thought meaningful — isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. He recalls the instance when his editor called him to tell him that his first book had made the best-sellers list. “It felt like … nothing. It was external to me.” I have had similar experiences, when my books come out, when I got my PhD in biology from the University of Connecticut, or the one in philosophy from the University of Tennessee. When I got my first academic job. And then the second. And the third. And the fourth.

But Brooks goes overboard when he implies that career achievements are not fulfilling. They can be. Especially if the career is meaningful in a broader sense. I’m sure he feels good about being a journalist and writer, contributing to society in a positive fashion. So do I, as a teacher and writer. The reason we don’t feel much once a goal has been accomplished is because we are already thinking of the next goal. The book just published has been in the rear mirror for months, and we have been working hard to finish the next one. Writing is a telic activity, as Aristotle pointed out, so it needs to be constantly renewed.

It also depends on what sort of contribution to society your career makes. If you are in the business of helping people, one way or another, that’s fulfilling (think of doctors, teachers, even lawyers). If you are in the business of harming them (e.g., working for a company that pollutes the environment, or makes weapons, or exploits people), not so much. And most businesses are neutral, neither making society better nor worse. Which means that the people who pursuit those careers tend to think of what they do as a means to pay bills, not a source of meaning for their lives.

Lie n. 2: I can make myself happy. The problem here, according to Brooks, is with the notion that happiness is an individual accomplishment, dependent on things such as winning one more time, losing ten more pounds, becoming better at whatever. By contrast, he points out, research shows that people on their deathbeds say that the things that made their lives worth living were loving relationships, not accomplishments.

Here I agree to a point. Yes, relationships are most definitely crucial for happiness. We are, after all, highly social animals. But relationships are hard to maintain, regardless of whether we are talking about friends, relatives, or partners. And sometimes it is a good thing to let go of a relationship, because it has gotten to the point of being more harmful than beneficial.

Moreover, there is something to the notion that happiness is “an inside job,” so to speak. Meaning is a human construct, and we — individually — are in charge of the particular meaning we invest other people, or what we do, with. So I would say that in a sense our happiness is up to us, and yet it does very much involve the way we relate to other people. One thing I know for sure, and I think Brooks will agree: when I’ll be on my deathbed, I won’t regret having forgone writing one more technical paper, especially at the expense of cultivating deep relationships with the people I love. But I will also cherish the memory of those few books that I wrote and I’m actually proud of…

Lie n. 3: Life is an individual journey. Brooks suggests that too many people think that a good life consists in racking up accomplishments, as if they were points in a video game. What matters is to get to the next level. And then the next one. Hence the bizarre American obsession with “bucket lists,” and the success of books like “1,000 Movies to See Before You Die.”

A corollary of this attitude is that we should be free in the sense of unimpeded by close ties and relationships. I remember when I first moved to New York, back in 2006, I saw advertisements (I forgot for what!) that said “If opportunity is around the corner, turn often.”

But that’s an impoverished view of “happiness,” one that is hedonistic in nature, discounting the fact that — on the contrary — in order to live a meaningful life we need to have bonds with others. Again, we are eminently social animals. I’m not sure I’d go as far as Brooks does when he writes that “it’s the chains we choose that set us free,” but that’s partly because I don’t consider my ties with my partner, my daughter, or my friends to be “chains.” They are more like symbiotic tendrils, through which life-giving substances flow back and forth between myself and those I love.

Lie n. 4: You have to find your own truth. Brooks calls this the “privatization of meaning.” He objects to what he sees as an attitude according to which everyone gets to choose their own values, their own answer to the ultimate questions in life. He mockingly warns that, unless your name is Aristotle, you ain’t likely to succeed, arguing instead that values are created by communities, in a group process that takes generations.

Yes. And No. There is no question that values — again, being a human construct — are created by people, and that such creation is indeed a group affair. If nothing else because if your values aren’t recognized by at least a minority of people in your community you are going to have a really tough time pursuing them.

But values also change over time, which I suppose it’s something that Brooks may less often be happy about. I mean, there is a reason why people use the word “conservative.” For instance, we are slowly — and certainly not inevitably — moving toward a society where gender, race, and religious affiliation don’t matter to someone’s prospects of living a good, fulfilling life. While we are still very far from that ideal, an increasing number of people do recognize it as an ideal to be pursued.

Let’s not forget that this wasn’t always the case. The 1926 (please notice the late date!) slavery convention, for instance, has been ratified as recently as 1953 by Australia, Canada, Liberia, New Zealand, South Africa, Switzerland, and the UK. By 12 more countries (including Italy) the following year. Nine more nations (including Israel) followed in 1954. Paraguay and Mauritania have joined the club only in 2007, and Kazakhstan only the following year. And of course the abolition of slavery doesn’t mean the extinction of racism.

Do we want to consider women’s right to vote instead? Saudi Arabia has granted it as late as 2015. But even Switzerland agreed only in 1971, Portugal in 1968, and Colombia in 1957. Even the so-called “greatest democracy in the world,” the United States, approved women’s suffrage as late as 1920. And of course there is the issue of gay and transgender rights, very much a work in progress. At best.

So, yes, values are not individual, they are societal. But societies evolve, and we — as individuals — do play a role in nudging the process forward, or at least not allowing it to slide backwards.

Lie n. 5: Rich and successful people are worth more than poorer and less successful people.Or, as Epictetus puts it with characteristic sarcasm:

“The following are non-sequiturs: ‘I am richer, therefore superior to you’; or ‘I am a better speaker, therefore a better person, than you.’” (Enchiridion 44)

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posted by f.sheikh