I understand the point here, and you can extend it in a lot of directions. Think about Mary Douglas' work on purity--that the things we consider unpure end up spreading their ugliness and impurity to human beings and institutions assigned to those things. So various kinds of negative associations hover over funeral directors, over executioners, over sanitation workers, exactly as you point out etc. and we come to have expectations about the personalities and affect of people in those roles--there is a sort of contagion from the ugliness of a problem or a task into the ways we imagine and relate to the people that have to handle the task, and a contagion that ends up hurting or corrupting them over time. (e.g., think of the things that people who are trying to moderate social media have to see in huge amounts every single working day.)
1) The problem I have is that first you are assuming a function for the police that isn't necessarily the reason why we have police in the first place--police as we know them are a very modern institution that appear in the 19th Century for the first time and while they definitely were thought to have a role in maintaining public order, it was mostly about keeping types or classes people perceived to be disorderly out of respectable neighborhoods, often using spectacular or exemplary violence. (e.g., not neutrally about suppressing violence by individuals in a democratic society, but instead something more like a directed and semi-authorized vigilantism; lynching is the most extreme variant here, and notably that was semi-sanctioned by local authorities and police in the first third of the 20th Century in much of the U.S). When I look at any group of workers or any institution and say "we have this idea about this institution or those people", I tend first to think that idea is derived from historical associations, from deeper roots.
2) But that leads to the second problem that lurks under a fair amount of calls for defunding police, which is that the circumstance you frame as the normal point of reference in your first footnote isn't really the global 'normal' of police *at all*. Not really even in most liberal democracies--it's mixing up "this is notionally what ought to be" with "this is what actually is". So in some sense when you imagine police as using spectacular or exemplary violence in order to suppress violence--a kind of "you don't want to do that, trust me, because here's what's going to happen if you do", you imagine a police force with control, precision and instrumental self-consciousness that *doesn't exist*.
3) I think you also therefore discount quite a few other things that act on or suppress violence. You mention honor-directed cultures, which often look to manage or handle violence via the threat of reciprocity. (Think in its most extreme forms of feud in medieval Norse societies, or the Hatfields and McCoys--a system that is in some sense game-theoretic in how it manages or cathects violence.) But think more generally on the role of 'culture' here. Do most citizens in liberal democracies require witnessing or even thinking about the possibility of police violence in order to suppress their own violence? Any society where policing is the only thing between order and chaos--the proverbial 'thin blue line'--is a society that would crumble into chaos pretty quickly, because you can't possibly have enough police (or have spectacular enough performances of the ugly suppression of an ugly problem) to maintain order. Most of the time, people are maintaining order on their own, as a result of the habitus of particular social classes, particular communities, particular religious doctrines, particular conceptions of the self and self-control, etc. So where does that all come from? Where is it enacted? How do liberal democratic individuals actually encounter the ugliness of violence (and avoid it) when police are not around? I don't think it's usually about fear-of-police or even fear-of-police-like-authority-figures.
4) There's a complicated conversation among early modern European historians about just how prevalent spectacular public violence was (e.g., public torture, public executions, etc.)--it at least seems to have been less common than is often thought, and crowds less unanimously approving of it--but I think you could at least say that if that was a different sort of staging of ugliness intended to suppress ugly behavior, it really didn't work.
5) There are a fair number of smaller-scale societies in human history that haven't had police, incarceration *or* the threat of reciprocal honor-driven violence that nevertheless haven't been especially prone to violence. There may be ways to deal with at least some ugly problems that do not require a specialized class of people who act as our surrogates and thus take on the ugliness of the problem on our behalf, as our martyrs.
Thanks for this thoughtful and detailed comment. I did hesitate to write about police, because I agree it is a complicated topic. I don't feel confident about any overarching, coherent opinion of the police institution. I do think the core argument in this piece is sound, though, even though I recognize all the complications you mention. Police are only one of many solutions to violence, and possibly not the best, especially (as you point out) considering the common problems in implementation details; yet empirically they're the solution that virtually all modern, more-or-less liberal states have chosen. Is that an accident of history or a culturally evolved optimal solution? I don't know.
The general insight is extensible, in any event: that if we think of a particular function as distasteful, ugly, repellant, disgusting, then that is a kind of contagion that sticks to anyone who has to carry out that function. And we have to imagine that in turn has consequences psychologically etc.--*so much* of our cultural representations of police, our endless numbers of TV shows etc. takes up that point, that being associated with violence and having a sanctioned right to violence 'seeps in' to police as individuals over time.
although the whole idea of "defund the police" illustrates your point, it actually wasn't an idea really promoted by people who used the slogan. It was just a REALLY poorly worded slogan. What most people wanted was a reallocation of resources spent on the police so that in certain circumstances (dealing with the mentally ill, for example) some expertise rather than weapons could be deployed. And also allocate resources to better train the cops in how to deal with people they thought of as "other" and thus less worthy of a restrained response.
I don't think ANYONE really wanted to eliminate cops. Who would you report your stolen car to? Who would respond to your 911 call as someone actively tried to break into your house?
I think the "ugly problem fallacy" does indeed exist. But it feels like you kind of set up a straw man to make the point. Your other examples work better.
That's fair, though I'm not sure I 100% agree with you. I do think that whoever really demands the full abolition of the police is a small minority, but I think that minority exists. Since we're talking about slogans, I'll point out that "All Cops Are Bastards" is another widespread one. Even if most people who thought carefully about the matter would conclude that abolishing the police is a bad idea, that doesn't mean that there aren't people who truly want that, or at least who express unambiguously that they do.
I hadn't heard the "all cops are bastards" bit, but since I simply reject pretty much anything stating "All X are Y" unless it involves all men being mortal (and I think a lot of religions disagree on THAT one), I guess I wouldn't have spent any time thinking about it. Actually, I'm wondering if overgeneralization is one of the real ugly problems.
The REAL ugliness of "defund the police" is that so many people took it literally and tried to squelch any attempt at police reform.
As a liberal communicating online with mostly liberals, I spend an untoward amount of time saying "no, actually all Republicans aren't dumb" or "all MAGAts aren't actually evil." Deluded in a dangerous aspect of thought, but not evil. Of course, in some cases, both dumb and evil are true.
Aesthetics-maxing! What an Instagram-invoking word but quite true. Probably part of why I like Baudelaire so much, it's exactly what he does in his poetry.
Great food for thought. I'm ambivalent about the police too (putting it mildly) but that's probably not a discussion for the comments of this particular piece.
This is so perfectly articulated!!! It is so strange to me that people can’t see this. That we keep harping on the ugliness and cannot see that they are actually absorbing the ugliness. Without these institutions things would look a whole lot uglier!
I understand the point here, and you can extend it in a lot of directions. Think about Mary Douglas' work on purity--that the things we consider unpure end up spreading their ugliness and impurity to human beings and institutions assigned to those things. So various kinds of negative associations hover over funeral directors, over executioners, over sanitation workers, exactly as you point out etc. and we come to have expectations about the personalities and affect of people in those roles--there is a sort of contagion from the ugliness of a problem or a task into the ways we imagine and relate to the people that have to handle the task, and a contagion that ends up hurting or corrupting them over time. (e.g., think of the things that people who are trying to moderate social media have to see in huge amounts every single working day.)
1) The problem I have is that first you are assuming a function for the police that isn't necessarily the reason why we have police in the first place--police as we know them are a very modern institution that appear in the 19th Century for the first time and while they definitely were thought to have a role in maintaining public order, it was mostly about keeping types or classes people perceived to be disorderly out of respectable neighborhoods, often using spectacular or exemplary violence. (e.g., not neutrally about suppressing violence by individuals in a democratic society, but instead something more like a directed and semi-authorized vigilantism; lynching is the most extreme variant here, and notably that was semi-sanctioned by local authorities and police in the first third of the 20th Century in much of the U.S). When I look at any group of workers or any institution and say "we have this idea about this institution or those people", I tend first to think that idea is derived from historical associations, from deeper roots.
2) But that leads to the second problem that lurks under a fair amount of calls for defunding police, which is that the circumstance you frame as the normal point of reference in your first footnote isn't really the global 'normal' of police *at all*. Not really even in most liberal democracies--it's mixing up "this is notionally what ought to be" with "this is what actually is". So in some sense when you imagine police as using spectacular or exemplary violence in order to suppress violence--a kind of "you don't want to do that, trust me, because here's what's going to happen if you do", you imagine a police force with control, precision and instrumental self-consciousness that *doesn't exist*.
3) I think you also therefore discount quite a few other things that act on or suppress violence. You mention honor-directed cultures, which often look to manage or handle violence via the threat of reciprocity. (Think in its most extreme forms of feud in medieval Norse societies, or the Hatfields and McCoys--a system that is in some sense game-theoretic in how it manages or cathects violence.) But think more generally on the role of 'culture' here. Do most citizens in liberal democracies require witnessing or even thinking about the possibility of police violence in order to suppress their own violence? Any society where policing is the only thing between order and chaos--the proverbial 'thin blue line'--is a society that would crumble into chaos pretty quickly, because you can't possibly have enough police (or have spectacular enough performances of the ugly suppression of an ugly problem) to maintain order. Most of the time, people are maintaining order on their own, as a result of the habitus of particular social classes, particular communities, particular religious doctrines, particular conceptions of the self and self-control, etc. So where does that all come from? Where is it enacted? How do liberal democratic individuals actually encounter the ugliness of violence (and avoid it) when police are not around? I don't think it's usually about fear-of-police or even fear-of-police-like-authority-figures.
4) There's a complicated conversation among early modern European historians about just how prevalent spectacular public violence was (e.g., public torture, public executions, etc.)--it at least seems to have been less common than is often thought, and crowds less unanimously approving of it--but I think you could at least say that if that was a different sort of staging of ugliness intended to suppress ugly behavior, it really didn't work.
5) There are a fair number of smaller-scale societies in human history that haven't had police, incarceration *or* the threat of reciprocal honor-driven violence that nevertheless haven't been especially prone to violence. There may be ways to deal with at least some ugly problems that do not require a specialized class of people who act as our surrogates and thus take on the ugliness of the problem on our behalf, as our martyrs.
Thanks for this thoughtful and detailed comment. I did hesitate to write about police, because I agree it is a complicated topic. I don't feel confident about any overarching, coherent opinion of the police institution. I do think the core argument in this piece is sound, though, even though I recognize all the complications you mention. Police are only one of many solutions to violence, and possibly not the best, especially (as you point out) considering the common problems in implementation details; yet empirically they're the solution that virtually all modern, more-or-less liberal states have chosen. Is that an accident of history or a culturally evolved optimal solution? I don't know.
The general insight is extensible, in any event: that if we think of a particular function as distasteful, ugly, repellant, disgusting, then that is a kind of contagion that sticks to anyone who has to carry out that function. And we have to imagine that in turn has consequences psychologically etc.--*so much* of our cultural representations of police, our endless numbers of TV shows etc. takes up that point, that being associated with violence and having a sanctioned right to violence 'seeps in' to police as individuals over time.
although the whole idea of "defund the police" illustrates your point, it actually wasn't an idea really promoted by people who used the slogan. It was just a REALLY poorly worded slogan. What most people wanted was a reallocation of resources spent on the police so that in certain circumstances (dealing with the mentally ill, for example) some expertise rather than weapons could be deployed. And also allocate resources to better train the cops in how to deal with people they thought of as "other" and thus less worthy of a restrained response.
I don't think ANYONE really wanted to eliminate cops. Who would you report your stolen car to? Who would respond to your 911 call as someone actively tried to break into your house?
I think the "ugly problem fallacy" does indeed exist. But it feels like you kind of set up a straw man to make the point. Your other examples work better.
That's fair, though I'm not sure I 100% agree with you. I do think that whoever really demands the full abolition of the police is a small minority, but I think that minority exists. Since we're talking about slogans, I'll point out that "All Cops Are Bastards" is another widespread one. Even if most people who thought carefully about the matter would conclude that abolishing the police is a bad idea, that doesn't mean that there aren't people who truly want that, or at least who express unambiguously that they do.
I hadn't heard the "all cops are bastards" bit, but since I simply reject pretty much anything stating "All X are Y" unless it involves all men being mortal (and I think a lot of religions disagree on THAT one), I guess I wouldn't have spent any time thinking about it. Actually, I'm wondering if overgeneralization is one of the real ugly problems.
The REAL ugliness of "defund the police" is that so many people took it literally and tried to squelch any attempt at police reform.
Yes, I think a lot about overgeneralization! I indeed think it's at the root of a lot of the world's problems.
As a liberal communicating online with mostly liberals, I spend an untoward amount of time saying "no, actually all Republicans aren't dumb" or "all MAGAts aren't actually evil." Deluded in a dangerous aspect of thought, but not evil. Of course, in some cases, both dumb and evil are true.
Aesthetics-maxing! What an Instagram-invoking word but quite true. Probably part of why I like Baudelaire so much, it's exactly what he does in his poetry.
Great food for thought. I'm ambivalent about the police too (putting it mildly) but that's probably not a discussion for the comments of this particular piece.
This is so perfectly articulated!!! It is so strange to me that people can’t see this. That we keep harping on the ugliness and cannot see that they are actually absorbing the ugliness. Without these institutions things would look a whole lot uglier!