Mapping left

As has been wisely said, the map is not the territory. I believed this the first time I heard it, and I believe it now. Myopic adherence to principle is, in my view, one of the most pernicious human failings; it's how religion manages to convince people to do terrible things for what seem like the best reasons.

That said, when you make a journey, it's best to bring along a map.

I'm going to jump sideways to what seems an unrelated issue: the recall of Judge Aaron Persky. This will eventually make sense.

As you will recall, Persky was the California Superior Court judge who in 2016 sentenced Brock Turner to three months in prison for sexual assault, and who was later recalled because the sentence he handed down was deemed too light. It's not my intention to revisit the sentence, and while I sympathize with the objections to the sentence, I also recognize that recalling judges who are deemed lenient is going to serve as an incentive to other judges to sentence more harshly. These are competing liberal priorities: the desire to protect victims of sexual assault on one hand, and the reluctance to make sentences over-punitive on the other.

I can totally understand if a liberal prioritizes the former over the latter, and vice versa, but what I cannot grok is a liberal dismissing either one as irrelevant. At the time Persky was recalled, the leftist response I heard to concerns about the effects of harsher sentencing on marginalized groups was: "Rapists get the book thrown at them—end of discussion."

Now, I'm not going to seriously entertain discussion on, say, repealing the 13^th Amendment, because the rights and wrongs are pretty easy to discern, and anyone who disagrees is probably just trolling. Most issues are more complex, however, and require an attitude of curiosity and a respect for nuance that "woke" culture often makes impossible. Instead of taking your time sorting through the complexities, you are expected to take a black-or-white position, and fast, lest you appear to lack empathy.

Furthermore, "Lock 'em up!" is a quintessentially conservative attitude—that the only real remedy to crime is handing out prison time like candy. A more liberal approach is to treat this situation as a balancing act between leftist priorities, because, in general, when sentences become harsher, it ain't the Brock Turners of the world who will receive them.

Sussing all this out requires an awareness of just what you value. I am a liberal because I value the principles of open inquiry, empiricism, diversity, and a respect for due process. That is the map I carry with me. I think some others are liberal primarily not due to their values, but because of where their sympathies happen to lie. I don't know what map, if any, they follow. Admittedly, those approaches can often take you to the same place, but I think it matters how you get there.

You can ask, with some justification, why I'm spending time taking liberals to task when conservatives do far, far more damage. Answer: Conservatives are usually troglodytes, and troglodytes are gonna trog. Liberals, however, are supposed to be the good guys, right, and, in my view, if you claim to be one of the good guys, you have to act like it. Drawing your map is a great way to start navigating that particular territory.

It's not always good to be nice

I've been thinking a lot lately about being good.

There's a lot of debate over what it means to do good. Is doing good creating as much happiness as possible, for as many people? Adhering to rules of ethical conduct, against lying or cheating? Embodying virtues like charity, humility, honesty, etc? Although these are interesting questions, they are not what has been occupying my thoughts. Instead, what I have been considering is the difference between being good and being nice.

We've all known nice people. They say please and thank you, ask after your well-being, are generous (when it doesn't cost them much), and engage in all of the other daily pleasantries with which we are so familiar. When you meet one of them, at a party or wherever, you say to yourself "That person seems nice", without thinking much about it, and that's not surprising, because it's easy to be nice.

Good people, on the other hand, are more elusive. They are people who may not always ask after your well-being, but when they do they actually listen to the answer, and remember it later. They may or may not be courteous, but they are considerate, and they don't ask more from you than they expect of themselves. Their generosity is not the careless flourish of the well-provided, but an act of thoughtful concern. When you encounter a good person, you remember that for a long time, because being good takes work—and the payoff, if any, often sucks.

It's easy to mistake nice for good, but, boy, are they different.

I used to think most people were good, but now I think they are merely gregarious. Humans are social beings, and it's our nature to cooperate, but cooperation can take many shapes. One of those shapes is strangers joining together to help shove a stuck car out of a snowbank; another is neighbors forming a lynch mob to murder a marginalized person for some perceived offense. Nice people push the car; good people push away the lynch mob.

These days, that distinction has become ever clearer, as I see people around me, people I might otherwise have liked, cheer the caging of children while blaming parents for the cruelty, carry guns through city streets on the pretext of defending their rights, and march to force other Americans to risk serious illness so that they themselves can enjoy a cut and color. These people are courteous, often charming, and will be the first to invite you to a barbecue, but they aren't good. They're just nice.

The more I think about it, the less concerned with being nice I become. I'll do my best to say my courtesies and chat pleasingly with people at social events, but I'm no longer feeling guilty about, say, treating Trump voters like they are terrible people, and with telling Trump voters they are terrible people. That's not very nice of me, but I have decided I am not good at being nice. I'll settle for just trying to be good.