I love John. I adore him and I think he’s a genius. He’s one of my favorite people to listen to. He’s so articulate and kind. And he has a good sense of when something has gone wrong, and seeks to correct it. He has a clear idea of what black America shouldn’t do and what won’t really help them. I think his only major deficit is that he lacks a strong positive vision of what could actually make things better or change things. I don’t think that’s his strength, and that’s fine. He’s a linguist with a strong interest in racial relations. He’s not a politician or sociologist or a saint, and neither am I.
Thomas Sowell or Glen Lowry have much stronger articulated visions of what would truly help black America, in part because they’re economists. And I think also because they’re really been through some really serious $#!*. John is such a decent, smart guy. He reminds me of my wife, who on talking to people with truly messy lives just doesn’t know what to say to them and can’t understand them. It’s so far from who she is.
So, to John, the removal of a few conditions that he perceives as the problem, a few small adjustments to the structure, are all you need and the whole ship will just right itself. But to those of us who are less good, less decent, less controlled, less brilliant, less productive, and less kind than he is, that seems hopelessly naive. Because we know ourselves too well.
I don’t disagree that some of his proposals have plausible merit, but you could switch everyone to phonics, provide better birth control, and end the war on drugs tomorrow, and very little would have changed in most people’s lives. Not nothing. Some big obvious things, but things that are more at the level of conveying consequences than producing them. And life isn’t ultimately a problem of distribution or conveyance, but of production.
Two out of the three of his solutions really just boil down to using technology to remove the most obvious (not only, just the most obvious) consequences of risky behaviors. That’s like solving psoriasis by providing hats. Yes, it would address a lot of the most obvious and visible consequences, and that’s not nothing. But it’s not a real treatment. It doesn’t make healthy tissue grow.
A good stay in prison or some serious time in a small town with people who have never bought into the personal cultural roadmap of the postgraduate elite could provide a person with some real insight into this kind of thing. A little personal chaos helps a person learn how deep some problems can go, and what it really takes to actually escape them and build something new, if you’re not by nature a reasonable and dedicated and controlled person, which many of us aren’t. It reveals how big the dragon and the deficit really is, and how big a thing you need to truly address those problems and fill those holes and meet those needs.
This is an area where I see Glen Lowry literally weeping as he talks, because he sees how terrible the beast truly is, and how insufficient our shallow signatory attempts to address it truly are. As if dignity and significance can be bought at so cheap a price. As if the government could just grant them by fiat. As if stability and productivity and erudition were such common goods for the taking.
My advice is to spend some time reading The Boy Crisis, then spend some time with people who are truly feeling the cost of fatherlessness. Don’t try to fix them or offer them anything to compensate them as a dispensation, just spend some time seeing how deep that hole goes. Or, if you want to be more positive, total up everything a stable family and a present father can mean for a child, everything it can provide, and then ask yourself what you or the government can possibly provide to make up for taking that away from so many children. This being just a single, common problem many people face. These are not such cheap goods that you can fabricate a substitute for them in an afternoon, or even a hundred years, or a thousand.
I also have to mention that the ivory tower attitude to drugs is getting absurd, these dainty dabblers in pharmaceutical pleasures. Addiction to drugs is a dragon that can eat up your whole life, all your love and regard for other people around you, all your ambition and all your money. Stopping taking them can be the worst pain you’ve ever felt in your life, and taking them can be an easy pleasure better than anything real in your daily life. It can replace your life, especially if it comes easier than the hard won treasures of successful being, swallow up everything you have to give and give you nothing back but dependence. That’s not a toothless dragon. The addiction becomes a personality within you that can eat up everything else about you.
Are you really going to go up to a fatherless young man, struggling to control his anger and lack of self worth, who’s fallen into the easy pit of addiction that’s absorbing all that’s best about him and say “Good news, you won’t get arrested for possession any more, and here are some IUDs and a copy of Hooked on Phonics!” Do you really think that will pull his world back together? That it will cause him to become creatively productive in a year, or fifteen years? That that small adjustment will on its own cause the racial crisis to just evaporate within a short space of time, and we’ll wonder what it was all about, that all that could have been so easily solved?
It even doesn’t matter if you’re black or not. I grew up in a small town where this story, this trap, was the story for plenty of folks, most of them white. Poor, uneducated, addicted, with unstable and broken families. The white lower classes are in a terrible state right now. There are certain things that are so universally damaging to a life that no one, of any race, can absorb them and not suffer a loss. They know no racial boundaries, whether they cluster and convey by race or not. And where they have been solved and put right they convey power and fortitude, also regardless of race. Some things are such universal goods, such rich sources of human capital, that they cannot help but lift you up no matter who you are.
And it’s not at all clear that using technological means to paper over some of the most visible (but not the only) consequences of a problem will actually help the problem. It might make it worse, for the sake of removing this one result. Did removing the barriers to widely available nutrition result in everyone becoming super healthy? Or did we lose the ability to regulate our own appetites and just make ourselves unhealthy in a whole new way? We altered the conditions, but not ourselves, expecting that to solve our problems.
Why economists might grasp this problem more clearly than other academics is an nteresting question. I think it’s because they concern themselves not merely with the obvious results, with distribution, but also with creative production. They see that there’s an underlying problem that’s even bigger than conveyance and distribution, and that the operation of that process can’t be taken for granted. And also that it’s much harder to manipulate. You can protect it and encourage it, but you can’t create it or call it into being by declaration, the way you can adjust distribution and conveyance by declaration. It’s not an outcome, it’s a capacity. It’s a mode of being. And I think John, perhaps, takes it for granted just a little too much, because he has so much of it.
We’re not all John McWhorter. And we need something that addresses our being, with all its needs and problems and possibilities. A parent is something that actually does that. A grand narrative, a heroic conception of your life story, like a religion, can do that. A purpose, a meaning, a great investment in a project for which we have responsibility can do that.
Black America, and really America in general, isn’t looking for a band aid, some better IUDs or more relaxed drug possession laws. It’s looking for a reason to be. For significance, for an idea of themselves that gives their lives purpose and hope and meaning. They want to be known, to matter to someone. They want to be needed, and to create something worth making and carry burdens and keep promises worth maintaining. They want someone to look up at them and love them and respect them, and have someone look down on them and comfort them and advise them. They want to know how to respect themselves and love their lives enough to be worth investing in. This is what all people want.
And you can’t get it from the government. You can’t extract it from white people, or grant it if you are a white person. You can’t get it by adjusting some laws or handing out some benefits, social or material. Making someone else be afraid of crossing you or upsetting you won’t make you feel like you matter, not deep down. Being seen by a crowd won’t give your life and relationships depth and meaning that lasts and endures beyond a moment. Making someone afraid of how they speak to you, shaming them, won’t make them love or respect or understand you.
Life doesn’t provide such easy fixes for the deep problems. Or rather, it doesn’t provides means other than those that have always been provided for everyone everywhere, for all time, but carry a high cost of daily maintenance. Family, community, parents, children, a stable romantic partnership, work, responsibility, a home, friendship, thankfulness, humility, wisdom, temperance, patience, honesty, dedication, kindness. These are the universal goods that can drive a life into creative production even in the worst of circumstances, for the most hated and disadvantaged of people. And losing focus on them, forgetting their value, being distracted by other shiner baubles, can lead even the most advantaged to ruin.
Who is John McWhorter without these things, without his patience and kindness and care and dedication and relentless productivity, his need to set right whatever is crooked? Not the man we know and respect. But where do these things come from? From birth control or phonics books? I have the utmost respect for these things. They are incredibly useful tools. But tools are only as useful as the hand that holds them is strong. As valuable as they might be, even these can be a detriment if you become convinced that by addressing the tools you have addressed the health of their wielder. It just isn’t that’s simple.
And I think John knows that, at least in the way he points out the inadequacies he perceives in critical race theory. It is an inadequate, not empty, way of addressing the realities it seeks to address. It doesn’t have hold of nothing, but it only has a part and imagines it to be the whole thing, and structures all interaction around that reduction. And that may go even worse than not addressing it at all. A poorly applied cure can do more harm than many sicknesses. That’s why a sufficient understanding of the real depth of the malady, as well as of the real nature and sources of health, is so important.
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