The latest print edition of the Economist magazine has an editorial on “The power of protest” with a positive, supporting tone for large scale social protests throughout the US and the world. I am not disagreeing with that position, just adding another aspect for better analysis.
Like almost anything in the world, social protest can and will have its disutilities. For one thing, it shifts public attention away from the pandemic, which should receive the largest amount of short term attention. Instead, the protest indirectly encourages crowd behaviors disregarding social distancing. When a bunch of people are shouting, talking and yelling, the virus could spread very fast. The only safety factor is that people feeling sick were unlikely to attend the protest. But again asymptamatic people can still spread the virus, so not much assurance there.
Why is it a bad thing? Let us take one step back and see a bigger picture first. The pandemic really revealed how vulnerable we humans are, compared with the power of nature embedded forces that can easily dominate ours (think of the wildfires, earthquakes, flood and tsunami, and the big eruption of Yellow Stone some day in the future that may destroy much civilization surrounding it). All the technologies we human have so far invented have been dwarfed by the pandemic. This is the time human solitarity is needed the most, and yet we see the society splitting more than ever.
Some would argue social justice is more important than a short term suffering or risk taking. “Living free or die”, as the slogan goes. The problem is that social justice cannot be achieved overnight or in a few days/weeks. We are in this for a long haul. In the short run, we are strictly better off and obtain higher utility by heeding social distancing, unless you don’t care about catching the coronavirus.
Diminishing Returns to Social Movements
Social protest is a type of social movements, which differ in efficacy in terms of achieving their goals or causes. In my opinion, the number-one efficacy driver is the gap between the status quo and the ideal, most desired status. This explains why the civil rights movement in the 1960s had made such a long last, big progress. Back then, social injustices were so obvious that everyone could see it everywhere, from buses, movie theaters and schools. Today, the gap is smaller, subtler and oftentimes limited to specific occasions, communities, and domains of activities. This is why social movement today will have a diminishing return compared with the earlier times.
An important reason is that while racism existed previously with undebatble evidences and unquestionable interpretation, racism today could exist in ways that are subject to different and competing interpretations. For every George Floyd case we may have a Candace Owens arguing that blacks have themselves to blame, that the biggest problem is the blacks themselves. Due to the political correctness, one thing for sure is that there are far more silent people out there thinking about the same as Owens but chose not to say it out loudly.
Another driver for the diminishing returns of social protest is controlled by the behaviors of protesters. When there are more looters than peaceful demonstrators, it seems easier to take side with Candace Owens. On the other hand, when there are more people of different ethnicities participating in peaceful rally, it would be easier for the protest to connect and unite the society.
The other reason for diminishing returns is when people target at symbals than the roots of the social problem in their fights for social justice. It is an inefficient and unfair way of fighting and less likely to serve its real goal or cause. This has already happened in the US, when protesters tored down the statues of some historical figures. Essentially we are judging people in the past by the moral standards of today, and are demanding a perfect human being in a statue, when in fact no human is perfect. Fighting statues is both extreme and easy, because statues are dead objects and anyone with a simple tool can accomplish the task. But is goes to the extremes or “corner solutions”, which are less popular than the interiors or mild solutions that encourage diversity and balance.
The Biggest Disutility Comes From Suppression of Diversity of Preferences
No social movement should be used to suppress different opinions, preferences and free exchange and contest of preferences. This is why the writings by Amy Wax, the law professor at University of Pennsylvania https://www.inquirer.com/philly/opinion/commentary/paying-the-price-for-breakdown-of-the-countrys-bourgeois-culture-20170809.html, made me concerned and worried. First of all, I agree with her that “All cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy.” More accurately, it is better to use families as the units of analysis, as within every culture we see diversity of families. So the above statement would be changed that not all families are equal and some are better preparing their members to be productive than others.
Her other article https://stemcool.blob.core.windows.net/blog/wsjamy.pdf was even more shocking. It started from her personal experiences after she and another law professor published their op-ed on Philadelphia Inquirer on August 9, 2017. In her words “The reactions to this piece raise the question of how unorthodox opinions should be dealt with
in academia—and in American society at large.” There has been little rational discussion and debate from the open letter signed by more than 30 law professors, demanding for invitation of students to monitor her behaviors and words. Again in her words, “This letter contained no argument, no substance, no reasoning, no explanation whatsoever as to how our op-ed was in error.” The last part was not exactly right, because the letter should have made clear that her wrongs were being “racist”, “sexist” or “xenophobic”. But the main idea of encouraging free exchanges of ideas, reasonings and preferences is definitely right. We should not take any social preferences, no matter how prevailing they may be at a time, for granted, and use social and institutional forces to replace meaningful discourses is not productive.
Jonathan Haidt of New York University, as quoted by Wax, was right that “Every open letter you sign to condemn a colleague for his or her words brings us closer to a world in which academic disagreements are resolved by social force and political power, not by argumentation and persuasion.” America became the strongest country in the world not because suppression of discourses but the opposite.