321. "Anecdotal," "Statistical," and the Force of Christian Love.

I know.  I know.  Anecdotal evidence is lousy evidence, taking you into a thicket of crappy fallacies — misleading vividness, hasty generalization, cherry picking, confirmation bias — and subject, oh so subject, to the availability heuristic.  Your logic teacher and your composition teacher will be all over you on it.  But lordy, it does work.  Oratorically, that is.

It worked that way on editors of the New York Times when they selected for the OpEd page a piece by black astrophysicist Jedidah C. Isler (12-17-15).  Their selection makes vivid the pain of a brilliant scholar reminded by Supreme Court justices of the supposed limitations of her race when right there, in front of everybody at her schools (and reading the OpEd piece) is an individual of possibly unlimited ability (Ph. D. at an Ivy League school, postdoc at Vanderbilt).

I can understand and sympathize with that anecdotal working until I get to Isler's general observation: "obviously black students march into classrooms all over this country and blow physical concepts out of the water."  Then the statistics kick in:  "In 2009, African-Americans [12 percent of the population] received 1 percent of degrees in science technologies, and 4 percent of degrees in math and statistics. Out of 5,048 PhDs awarded in the physical sciences, such as chemistry and physics, 89 went to African-Americans – less than 2 percent" (Huffpost Education, 10-24-11).

Anecdotes are good at showing us personal pain, statistics are good at showing us a national problem.  Anecdotes getting us to feel our fellow citizens' pain are needed to motivate us to do something about the problem, statistics are necessary to solve it, showing us what is working and what isn't.  They are most trustworthy in the hands of "academics" in the sense I have been plugging in this blog: followers of Socrates, multivocal testers, loving truth more than anything else.  Here that's scientists, following the method worked out, and remaining as objective (or, if preferred, "impartial," "disinterested") as they can.  Experience has shown that their way of thinking — statistical, analytical — gets more trustworthy results than the way of partisans and advocates.

We are living at a moment when black pain is most vividly before us, on television in the white police brutalities that have been exposed in such quick succession, and in books like Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me, eloquent cries of pain and, sometimes, defiance.  And that vividness, so helpful in motivating us, is, more and more, holding us back in solving our problems.

You could see it first fifty years ago, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a report on problems in black culture that, statistical and analytical, presenting facts and making careful conjectures about them, made a good start.  The reluctance verging on outrage with which the academy took up the problems, or, more precisely,  failed to take them up, can best be explained, I think, by unwillingness to cause pain, pain to a group so long pained, and pained by the group to which academics belonged.

Behind this unwillingness I see, even in those longest liberated from Christian belief, residual Christian love, the thing that, with the help of affluence, broke through in the Enlightenment (Post 308).

Christian love is one strong puppy; lose control of it and it will chew up your mind.  The head of the Episcopal Church in the U. S. lost control of it (momentarily we all hope) and brought every intellectual enemy of her religion his blackboard case.  The fortune teller in Acts 16:16-34 is different from us, her sermon went, but we must learn to love everybody who's different from us, without discrimination.  So, necessarily, love fortune-tellers without discriminating between them and prophets.  There goes distinction-making, a fundamental operation of the intellect, the one all rational human beings — including the embattled prophets trying to distinguish themselves from seers — depend on.  The congregation's mind is in shreds.  There's Nietzsche saying, "See!"

Put just a little of that into a university department and you don't make any progress solving the problem.  In sociology departments you don't even address it.  Fear of using hurtful language, everybody understands that, but fear of mentioning hurtful facts?  Sociology went forty years under "self-imposed censorship...on the subject of black culture" under that fear, fear, one presumes, of hurtful facts, hurtful statistics, hurtful analysis.  Orlando Patterson noticed this odd restriction (in The Cultural Matrix), and Thomas Chatterton Williams picked up on it (London Review, 12-3-15), but they, black thinkers both, are in the minority.

So much in the minority that when they ask a question in the old, free academic way it's like bells in the night.  "At what point might an oppressed group contribute — perhaps decisively — to its own plight?" (Williams).  There it is, the question timid whites have been circling for forty or more years, the question everybody needs to get to.  Damn the hurt.

And damn the love, the Christian love?  No, just keep control of that puppy.  There's a dangerous, tigerish force in it, a force that has to be managed carefully.  Aristotle, that pagan, shows the way.  He says that anyone can be charitable — that is, show love — "but to do this to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with the right motive, and in the right way, that is not for every one, nor is it easy."  You've got to use your head, and distinguish.

It's interesting to me that the rector in the Episcopal church I now attend, Lupton Abshire, quoted those very words in his sermon last Sunday.  What better occasion for a chorus on Christian love?  Merry Christmas!