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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Almost every normal person\u00a0 —\u00a0 and certainly any person open to reason\u00a0 —\u00a0 agrees that these are intolerable.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Most people understand that we need to accommodate free speech and perhaps, to a point, some of its excesses.\u00a0 They also understand that racial discrimination\u00a0 —\u00a0 opposition to which is the asserted reason for BLM protests\u00a0 —\u00a0 is morally indefensible and has to an end.\u00a0 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 in<\/em><\/strong>tolerance, if necessary by force.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n For decades, we have allowed the Left to conflate\u00a0 discrimination with\u00a0 invidious discrimination. The latter is unacceptable and needs to be fought by every legal means.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The essential human ability to discriminate, and the need to, constitute at their base the foundation for the idea of standards of behavior\u00a0 —\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n The BLM protests are doing for us what two lost generations of moral education should have but didn’t.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The protests\u00a0 —\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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:\u00a0 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.<\/em> 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.\u00a0 And what it means is not racial or any other kind of justice.\u00a0 What it means is the incipient disintegration of civic life.\u00a0 Put with only slight exaggeration, what it means is that the barbarians are at the gate.<\/p>\n 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\u00a0 —\u00a0 to show at least enough temper to say, “OK, that’s enough.”<\/p>\n Temper is just an impulse without a lot of nuance.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But it’s a place to start.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Almost every normal person\u00a0 —\u00a0 and certainly any person open to reason\u00a0 —\u00a0 agrees that these are intolerable.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 They also understand that racial discrimination\u00a0 —\u00a0 opposition to which is the asserted reason for BLM protests\u00a0 —\u00a0 is morally indefensible and has to an end.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"yoast_head":"\n