The Moral Foundations for Resistance to BLM

As more cities become afflicted with the forcible disruptions staged by BLM, the question before us is whether a peaceable society is justified in fighting back and, if so, at what point and by what means.  I’m not talking here about violent assaults on police (like the one over the weekend in Compton, CA) or about riots, arson and looting.  Almost every normal person  —  and certainly any person open to reason  —  agrees that these are intolerable.  I’m talking about raucous demonstrations brought to the target’s home, or disrupting rush hour traffic, or forcing drivers out of their cars, or menacing ordinary people as they shop or dine or just walk down the street.

Most people understand that we need to accommodate free speech and perhaps, to a point, some of its excesses.  They also understand that racial discrimination  —  opposition to which is the asserted reason for BLM protests  —  is morally indefensible and has to an end.  The question is how far tolerance for forcible and quasi-forcible disruptions to the ordinary life of blameless people should go and thus, necessarily, when the correct response becomes, not tolerance, but intolerance, if necessary by force.

For decades, we have allowed the Left to conflate  discrimination with  invidious discrimination. The latter is unacceptable and needs to be fought by every legal means.  The former is essential, not only to a wholesome culture, but to life itself. Unless you can “discriminate” between a person of good faith and a swindler, you’re in for trouble. Unless you can “discriminate” between a dog and a hyena, you’re in for more than mere trouble.  And unless you can “discriminate” between when the light is red and when it’s green, you won’t be living much past this afternoon.  The essential human ability to discriminate, and the need to, constitute at their base the foundation for the idea of standards of behavior  —  norms that we expect individuals to practice in civil society and to which, if we want to live together in peace, we have the right to require obedience.

The BLM protests are doing for us what two lost generations of moral education should have but didn’t.  They’re showing us why standards of decency in everyday life are not just some Puritanical vestige or bourgeois chimera or outcroppings of “whiteness,” whatever that means.  The protests  —  their vulgarity, their presumption, their rudeness, their intimidation, their arrogance, their bullying, and their (for the most part) soft-core terrorizing have done much of the teaching for us.  In a way, they do it better, because, thanks to the YouTube life of the 21st Century, they show us graphically what’s happening to us:  We have lost the moral confidence to establish standards and require obedience to them. We get pushed around by misbehaving children and thugs impersonating protesters because we’ve been guilt-tripped by the racial narrative they’ve fraudulently appropriated, and have fallen for it without thinking about how far it rightfully extends or where the limits are. We had the luxury of our deficient reflection before we saw, as we have now seen on dozens of viral videos, what it actually means.  And what it means is not racial or any other kind of justice.  What it means is the incipient disintegration of civic life.  Put with only slight exaggeration, what it means is that the barbarians are at the gate.

Now that it shows up every day, the ingredients are there to recover our moral confidence — or if not moral confidence, exactly, as that is probably too much to hope for just in the moment  —  to show at least enough temper to say, “OK, that’s enough.”

Temper is just an impulse without a lot of nuance.  It’s a poor substitute for actually understanding the rightness of discrimination correctly understood, or the central rather than “privileged” imperative of establishing standards, or our right and need to enforce them, by persuasion if possible and by force if not.  But it’s a place to start.