...No Masters
Originally, I set out to understand why the state has always seemed to be the enemy of 'people who move around'... Efforts to permanently settle these mobile peoples (sedentarization) seemed to be a perennial state project...
The more I examined these efforts at sedentarization, the more I came to see them as a state's attempt to make a society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion...
I began to see legibility as a central problem in statecraft.
~James C Scott
Argument Extraction
On the categorization instinct
A fallacy(?) that I find to be particularly vexing is the so-called sorites argument, also known as the Sorites paradox, heap argument, or ancestral argument. To be clear, I can't say with authority that this is a fallacy. Some philosophers actually bite the bullet and say the reasoning within it as valid (see Dennett 2014: 395-396). This is why I'm not calling this the Informal Fallacy of the Day. So, let me give you the context and you can decide for yourself.
Take a look at the heap of tannin pictured here. (Tannin, by the way, is used for a bunch of things including winemaking, making ink, and tanning leather.) Clearly, that's a heap (or pile or whatever). Now consider one or two grains of tannin powder. Would you call that a heap? I hope not. Two grains of tannin powder (or sand or wheat or whatever) are not a heap. Now add a grain to the two grains you have in your mind's eye. Is this a heap? Nope. It doesn't look like adding a single grain turns a non-heap into a heap. But(!), this seems to make the existence of heaps impossible. How does a non-heap turn into a heap? Here is the argument in (sorta) standard form:
- 1 grain of wheat does not make a heap.
- If 1 grain doesn’t make a heap, then 2 grains don’t.
- If 2 grains don’t make a heap, then 3 grains don’t.
... - If 999,999 grains don’t make a heap, then 1 million grains don’t.
...Therefore, 1 million grains don’t make a heap.
...
You can see that an implied assumption here is that adding a single grain does not turn a non-heap into a heap. And it doesn't matter how high you go. We stopped at 1 million, but we clearly could've continued to 1 billion or more.
The argument appears to be valid. That is, if we grant the assumption stated in the previous paragraph, then the conclusion does logically follow. Moreover, this assumption does seem to be reasonable in the earlier premises. For example, it really does seem like two grains is definitely not a heap. However, this doesn't mean that the argument is sound. Recall that soundness requires both validity as well as premises that are actually true. In other words, granting that this argument is valid, we have to argue that some premise is false if we want to fight off the conclusion of this argument. But which one? At what point does a non-heap become a heap? It appears that there's no conceivable demarcation point that doesn't seem arbitrary. Maybe we can draw the line at 1883 grains of salt. But why? What's so special about 1883? You can apply this paradox to any composite object (an object that is composed of smaller units). For example, at what point does a get-together turn into a party? At what point do you go from having some similarities with someone to having "a lot" in common? How many hairs does it take to make a beard?
You might think this is philosophical nonsense. Maybe it is. But it does reveal to us an important feature of our cognition. There appears to be just noticeable differences, the minimum degree by which a stimulus must change in order for a before-and-after difference to be detectable to the human mind (Dutton 2020: 44-45). Put differently, there can be objective changes to some stimulus—say, a tone, a shade of blue, a physical sensation—that the human mind won't register until it reaches a certain magnitude. In other words, some sensory experience might change but you won't notice until the change surpasses some minimum requirement set by your cognitive system. The psychologist Kevin Dutton puts it well. "Life proceeds in grains. But our attention is drawn only to heaps" (Dutton 2020: 43).1
Of course, our cognition is built this way because, at least at some point, this was adaptive, i.e., evolutionarily advantageous. In fact, it looks like we need our cognition to be this way so that we can process the world more efficiently and effectively. At the same time, however, our capacity to organize might be overactive occasionally. We might project categories unto the world that aren't necessary and don't really make sense. For example, according to Dutton (43), Facebook (now Meta) has over 70 different gender options for users to choose from in its dropdown menu, including genderqueer, pangender, and two-spirit. It's seems very unlikely that so many gender categories exist. For one, how would one learn all of them so they can select which one they are? Students complain when I give them 20 different words to learn for a test. They would be in an uproar if I gave them 70(!). Why is there this proliferation of categories? Dutton, like me, blames social media (263-267). It looks like social media algorithms circulate these new category concepts based on user demand rather than veracity or usefulness. Again, Dutton summarizes for us:
“Categorization [is] innate. That much seem[s] indisputable. And with good reason. If we lacked the ability to organize the world, to sort our experiences into cognitive clumps of shared semantic meaning, then everything around us would be chaos and nothing would be certain or predictable. We'd be forever caught up inside an eternal Sorites matrix. Then again... there's a cap on the usefulness of such neurocognitive housekeeping. If those existential piles are arranged too neatly, are tidied up too fastidiously, our capacity to generalize from one context to another will be limited” (Dutton 2020: 56).
The moral of the story is: You naturally, effortlessly, and automatically categorize the world around you; but that doesn't mean that the categories you dream up actually refer to anything in the real world. All critical thinkers should ensure that they check their categories—to make sure that either they actually correspond to the world or that they are at least useful.
So is the sorites argument valid? Do heaps exist or not? I'm not sure. I only know that I can't help but see heaps.
“[O]ur black-and-white brains might not be able to draw the line between a heap and a non-heap when we're adding one grain at a time. We might not be able to track and determine the granular, incremental, chimeric transition between them. But put a heap and a non-heap side by side in front of us and we instantly notice the difference. it's sufficiently black on the one hand. And sufficiently white on the other” (Dutton 2020: 53).
On police abolition
Question: If we are starting society anew, what role should we give to the police? Plato's thinking that it might be easier to just start with children opens up a world of possibilities. It's already been the case that thinking about what sorts of policies Ninewells should have has allowed us to rethink some practices that are flawed in our current society. But we really can go farther. Perhaps we can abolish entire institutions. We considered just that—moving towards abolishing religion—in the last lesson. Instead of outright banning of religion, though, we considered simply banning the imparting of religion onto children. I'd wager that this ban alone would drastically reduce the incidence of religious belief, paving the way for eventual extinction. Today we put another institution on the endangered species list—one that you've been raised to think is essential but that perhaps might not be so necessary after all.
Here's a little context for setup. Nation-states have usually begun through conquest, and so from the beginning there are various associated injustices: slaughter, enslavement, genocide, etc. To supress rebellion and population leakage, nation states have used all sorts of carrots and sticks; but in the beginning, it was mostly just sticks (Scott 2017). Ninewells, however, could truly be a city begun via contract. We can lay out the policies, and those who want to stay can stay. If there is too much of a population loss we can open up the borders until we fill our carrying capacity. In fact, we might be the first city-state that's ever done this. Moreover, if everyone in Ninewells is voluntarily there (a true first for nation-states, I think), then typical tools for coercion might not be necessary, as they are in typical nation states.
Having said that, consider this. The police is, generally speaking, an apparatus of coercion: their function is to enforce laws (keyword: enforce). That is, they coerce the citizenry into obedience of the law either by implicit threat or by arresting those who break the law. Above I posed a question: if we are starting society anew, what role should we give to the police? One controversial answer is none.
Why would we want to get rid of the police? Why not just reform? Well, Vitale (2017) argues that the basic nature of the law and the police is to be a tool for managing inequality and maintaining the status quo. In other words, the function of law enforcement is to maintain our current level of social inequality. Increasingly, this has been done in more militaristic ways (Balko 2013). And so, police reforms that don’t address these realities are doomed to reproduce and intensify them. So we can reform the police with this reality in mind. Or we can just get rid of the institution as a whole, since it may no longer be essential.
Here's a history lesson to make the point. Vitale reminds us that policing came about in an era of slavery (and hence slave revolts), colonialism (and hence anti-colonialist revolts, e.g., in Ireland), and industrialization (and hence labor activism and strikes, e.g., the Luddites and the British Jacobins). This legacy continued in the first professional police department, established by Robert Peel in the UK, which regularly broke up strikes. In fact, Peel himself made his name in suppressing Irish revolts. Per Vitale, a culture of corruption and incompetence permeated most major departments. For example, departments were usually filled by political appointment, so officers would feel loyal to the person who appointed them—almost like a private army. In the American South, officers were even recruited from slave patrols—not exactly a pool of candidates ideal for impartial administering of the law. It's also the case that gamblers and then bootleggers were an important source of revenue for these early departments, since police would regularly accept bribes from individuals trafficking contraband (like moonshine). The history of detectives, by the way, is not much better. Their primary role early on was spying on labor activists and serving as agent provocateurs that would incite violence to legitimize violent suppression of activist movements. In other words, detectives would secretly infiltrate dissident groups and then incite violence so that their department can claim that a violent suppression of that group was legitimate, even though it was their own agents that had started the violence.
In the 20th century, authorities spied on anarchists and communists, anti-war activists, civil rights leaders (such as Martin Luther King, Jr and Malcolm X), and, more recently, anti-police-violence groups, environmentalists, Muslims, Occupy Wall Street protesters, animal rights activists (who violate ag-gag rules), and even anti-death-penalty activists. Moreover, both federal agencies and local police departments engage in questionable entrapment programs, e.g., the case of Shahawar Matin Siraj. Siraj, who is likely a person with mental illness, was egged on by undercover law enforcement agents to conspire to plant bombs; reportedly, Siraj told the conspiring agent that he’d have to ask his mom for permission first. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison. A relevant question here might be: having read all this, do you feel any safer?
Most concerning perhaps is the conjunction of policing and spying that has given rise to “parallel construction” techniques of investigation. Essentially, parallel construction works like this. First, law enforcement agencies illegally spy on Americans who are committing crimes. Sure, these are (typically) actual criminals, but it is still warrantless—hence illegal—spying. Then, policing agencies construct an alternative, legal (but false) account of how they found the evidence against them. In other words, they invent a story about how they legally caught the culprit, even though it was actually done through warrantless spying. Finally, the false (but legal) version of how they caught the culprit is used in a court of law against the defendant. And this is all fair game under current law.
This is all, I think, very concerning. Police are supposed to protect us, and they do. But they are also engaging in highly questionable practices. And notice, by the way, that I haven't even brought up death-by-police and police overuse of force. Add those two to the list above, and we can begin to see that the function of police perhaps isn't to serve and protect but to maintain the status quo of social inequality. Perhaps there's no fixing that institution. As Amna Akbar argued in a recent seminar: because racialized, gendered, and capitalist violence is fundamental to police, the result is that the police cannot be fixed and so must be abolished.
But what would happen? Well, key to the argument I'm proposing is not a sudden extirpation of police, à la the defund the police movement (which apparently most Americans, including African Americans, don't agree with). The argument here is this. If it is possible to relieve law enforcement of their duties through technology and smart policies, then we should do so (for the safety of citizens, to save money, to end an institution with a less-than-rosy track record, etc.). Further, it is possible to relieve law enforcement of their duties through technology and smart policies. Therefore, we should relieve law enforcement of their duties. Thus, there will be no need for police. How can we relieve law enforcement of their duties? Here's some Food for thought...
Objections to police abolition
- Read from 543a-559d (p. 238-256) of Republic.
Humans have a categorization instinct, a tendency to create categories for similar objects or composite objects and project them unto the world.
Our projected categories are sometimes accurate and sometimes not. Critical thinkers should have a method for discerning when their categories actually correspond to the world itself.
Vitale (2017) argues that the basic nature of the law and the police is to be a tool for managing inequality and maintaining the status quo.
It appears to be possible to relieve law enforcement of their duties through technology and smart policies, thereby extinguishing any rationale for the existence of police departments.
FYI
Suggested Reading: Kelsey Griffin, Harvard Law School Holds Lecture on Police Abolition
TL;DR: Has policing in America gone too far?
Supplemental Material—
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Reading: Rashmee Kumar, Envisioning an America free from police violence and control
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Video: Simon Fraser University, Categorization: a core cognitive process
Related Material—
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Video: Khan Academy, Weber's Law
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Video: 11th Hour with Brian Williams, Interview with Edward Snowden
Advanced Material—
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Reading: Dominic Hyde and Diana Raffman, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry on Sorites Paradox
Footnotes
1. If you've taken my logic course, then you know that Aristotle believed logic was fundamentally just reasoning about categories. Everything was either in some category or not. There was no in-between. Moreover, there was a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for inclusion in a category. Aristotle appears to have been wrong. There is room for fuzzy logic, logic where you can be more or less in a category (Dutton 2020: 51-54).