Objection
We must allow companies to collect and exploit private conversations, because poor people cannot afford the prices those companies would charge otherwise.
We cannot allow transgender women into women’s toilets, because many women cannot feel safe from being raped if that happens.
We must build our cities around private car transport, because many disabled people are physically unable to use public transport.
These are three arguments I’ve seen on social media, which have caused me to block their authors. I do feel somewhat bad about that. While some of these comments may be disingenuous, mostly I believe they are genuine attempts to advocate on behalf of under-represented groups. But in the name of pushing progressive causes forward, you can’t waste time debating the fundamentals with people who aren’t here to contribute positively. And they aren’t gonna take the hint and slink away. You have to block them and move on.
Pattern
There’s a pattern here, and I don’t know if it has a name. But it does have an XKCD, so call it the Workflow Objection.
I think we should improve society somewhat. So I propose a policy. Let’s have bike lanes on every significant road. This will make car transport more congested, but bike transport much easier. This will encourage low-carbon transportation, as well as a more active and healthy lifestyle. These are large wins over the status quo. Today the basic layout of our urban environment is designed exclusively around private cars, with facilities for other users tacked on as an afterthought. We can fix this.
A disability-rights advocate pops up. Pro-bike policies are ablist. Disabled people already have great difficulty getting around, including things like finding a parking place suitable for unloading a wheelchair. At least once you’re in the road network, things are manageable. But a bicycle is completely impractical. This policy might slightly improve things for the able-bodied, but do they really need this? Whereas the increased traffic congestion and reduced accessibility of roads will be a major impediment to the disabled. This is a group of people already systematically discriminated against by the system, who are living on the edge as it is. This policy is punching down and reaching up. Therefore it is immoral.
In fact, the Twitterati will elaborate, we can only assume this is deliberate. This policy is clearly part of a secretive eugenics drive. Say no to Nazi bicycles!
(Twitter really was awful. I’m glad they decided to shut it down and it was never heard from again.)
The pattern here is that there is a bad system, built for the socially dominant group at the time. Discriminated groups, having no other option, carved their own spaces into that system. The poor exploit every discount they can find, even those that come with onerous conditions. Women rely on the strong social stigma of anyone resembling a man entering a female toilet, to establish that as a retreat from a hostile environment. The disabled established car-based transportation options to take advantage of the existing road network. But now if we attempt to change the fundamental design of the bad system to be more inclusive and sustainable, with more than just the interests of the dominant group in mind, we end up destroying those carefully-contrived niches too.
Dissonance
This argument hits hard! The whole premise of left-wing politics is that we want more equality. We’re sick of disfavoured groups being excluded from the fruits of our collective labour, left to drown individually. We believe every human being is entitled to dignity, and that the needs of the least favoured among us should have the highest priority. So it’s pretty devastating to propose an idea that we believe will improve the lives of a discriminated group, only to have it pointed out how it will destroy the lives of an even-more discriminated group. And to our shame, we hadn’t even considered those needs!
That’s a heavy dose of cognitive dissonance. I thought I was one of the goodies, but I’m one of the baddies. The reaction is rarely anything positive. Either you try to shut down the objection out of anger, which really does end up sounding eliminationist. Or you bend over backwards trying to accomodate this unanticipated requirement into the grand plan, which usually destroys any chance of success for a policy that was only marginally achievable in the first place.
Trap
This cognitive dissonance is a trap. The best way out is not to step in it.
It really is true that many women go into the women’s toilets not because they need to piss, but because that’s the only place they can reliably sit down and take a few breaths to recover from a colleague’s clumsy sexual harrassment. The potential for encountering a masculine face in such a room can, in fact, reasonably be seen to limit the effectiveness of a women’s toilet for the purpose for which it is actually used. (To get there we need to leave aside the fact that transgender women face the exact same need, so let’s do that.) If I, as a cisgender male, suggest that we improve equality by having unisex toilets for everyone, you can see how I might have missed an important part of the problem. And you might well criticise me for my lack of empathy for the people around me.
But think about it from a different angle. If you discovered that sexual harrassment in the workplace was a significant problem, and you wanted to do something about it, what would you do? Would you build a toilet? Of course not. That’s a terrible solution to the problem. One train of thought might lead you to set up a break room exclusively for women. But you wouldn’t install sinks and stalls in that. You wouldn’t fill it with loud mechanical noises like cisterns and hand-dryers. You wouldn’t make it a tiled, echoey place. You wouldn’t open it to sudden visits from strangers. In a thousand ways, a toilet is a terrible design as a place to obtain psychological safety.
But you’d have to be pretty lost to end up on that train of thought in the first place. Women shouldn’t have to retreat to a special room where they can find psychological safety. The workplace should be that already. Sexual harrassment should not be tolerated. Men should be trained to react with horror at even the hint they are acting in such a way. This is not unthinkable. Witness the convoluted buffers straight men establish around themselves to ensure no-one could ever interpret their actions as sexual interest in another male.
So if it never occurred to me that women’s toilets were being used as a safe space, is that really surprising? Why should I think such a thing? Toilets are for pissing in! That’s why they are built that way.
Contingency
The app that listens in to people’s private phone calls and uses the data to train AI, is not an anti-poverty scheme. It may be used to help relieve some of the grinding poverty that our capitalist society imposes on the disfavoured, but that’s not what the app developers had in mind. As such, it will always be a fragile thing to rely on. It’s not just privacy campaigners who put this system at risk. The company that runs it may fail at any moment. They may decide they have other financial priorities. The AI boom may bust. It wasn’t built for the poor, they are not part of its purpose. And if we have other reasons why we need to get rid of it, that’s just tough.
We cannot make any progress if we require that no-one at all is left behind. We can make reasonable efforts, that is all. We must make sure that we don’t build new structures that are designed to exclude people. But that does not mean that all excluded people will be made better off. The only way to preserve all of the contingent uses of every niche left in the existing system by happenstance, is to keep the existing system exactly how it is. And that can never be just, nor is it sustainable.
The right wing of politics, the conservatives and the capitalists and the libertarians and the neo-darwinists, they never have this problem. As far as they’re concerned, if you can’t keep up, you don’t deserve a place. They all instinctively understand that any useful policy will leave some groups behind. The difference is, they relish that. They would never dream of discarding a policy because a handful of disabled people would be left worse off. That just shows it’s working! And for fifty years their agenda of division and deprivation has proceeded without internal dissent. It’s only the left wing of politics that allows itself to be persuaded that nothing can be done.
Inequality
I don’t think this problem can ever be entirely solved. But I think there is one path towards mitigating it: economic equality.
All three of the examples I gave gain their weight in the context of the threat of economic immiseration. This is explicitly the whip that is supposed to keep us all disciplined and productive. Our society deliberately creates an underclass of ostentatiously desperate people. They are there to send a message: that any of us who fail to do their part to keep the great machine turning will be condemned to join them.
The poor are the people who have no choice but to give up their privacy for cash. The women who put up with toxic workplaces do so because unemployment is even more terrifying. The disabled are assumed unproductive by default and systematically lumped in with the “lazy”. None of these people have spare capacity to join a coalition striving towards some vague and distant utopian dream, when in the short term that will take away the supports that keep their heads above water. And so instead they are co-opted into passionately and perfectly rationally defending the very status quo that oppresses them.
So the place to start is economic inequality. We should aim to provide a basic floor to people’s living standards, enough to be a respected participant in society. That would provide enough security and breathing space for people to absorb incidental shocks from unrelated reforms. It’s true that we should provide additional support to the disabled, but that is a topic of fractal complexity. We cannot hope to craft a policy to support exactly those who need it first, before reforming anything else. We will miss people. Better to support everyone.
Pragmatism
Happily, most of us in the progressive wing of politics wanted to do that anyway, out of a basic sense of justice. Hooray! But what’s interesting here is that my argument doesn’t depend on morality. The XKCD was not about social justice, it was about a software upgrade. It’s a matter of practicality. Regardless of your moral views, continuous reform is a necessary part of running a civilisation. Inequality leads to small but extremely vocal minorities capable of effectively opposing literally any reform at all, as a matter of accident. Therefore, societies that don’t provide for their minorities will stagnate and perish.
Of course, there is one alternative, called “fascism”. Ignore the minorities. Better yet, eliminate them. Install a strong dictator who can decide on his own which reforms to make. And it seems many people do find this idea attractive. But historically, minorities don’t go out that quietly. Attempts to follow this strategy have not been very successful. And since one of the oppressed groups we’re discussing here is “women”, who are not a minority and cannot be eliminated, you can see how this isn’t really a practical idea.
Tactics
While we’re working on that though, how do we hold together a progressive coalition in the face of the legitimate objections of the people our policies leave behind? Unfortunately, there’s only one approach possible.
*plonk*