Lord of the flies

The competition for dumbest idea has always been an in- tense one. The past century alone gave us would-be utopias in places like Russia and China that killed more of their own people than governments had ever killed before, a constitutionally enshrined prohibition of the sale of alcohol in America that encouraged organized crime and widespread flouting of the law, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which “outlawed” war a decade before the worst war in human history broke out.

In testimony to the capacity for mass human folly, each of those enthusiasms was pursued with great moral urgency and recommended as a step toward human progress by otherwise intelligent human beings holding positions of authority.

But none of that stupidity can likely top our idée fixe of the moment, “defunding the police,” which some have taken a step further toward abolishing the police altogether (when we get on the stupid path there is, by its intrinsic nature, no limit to how far it goes).

That such an assuredly calamitous proposal should be advocated by otherwise sentient creatures largely in response to what one human being did to another human being (what Derek Chauvin did to George Floyd) tells us a great many things, most importantly that, given the great historic dangers flowing from collective guilt, all police officers shouldn’t be held responsible for the actions of just one.

But this hasn’t stopped the mayor of Los Angeles from proposing a transfer of $150 million from his city’s police budget to “social services,” or the mayor of New York announcing a shift in funding from the NYPD to comparably ambiguous “youth groups,” or a majority on the city council of Minneapolis, epicenter for the national hate-cops campaign, from pledging to “dismantle” the MPD and “end policing as we know it” (Minnesota U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, a near-perfect guide to noxious ideas, actually referred to the MPD as a “cancer” that was “rotten to the core”).

An old adage about acting in haste and repenting in leisure comes to mind when hearing all this.

Indeed, what is being proposed by such ironically mislabeled “progressives” is nothing less than a repeal of progress itself; more specifically, a return to the “state of nature” identified by political philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, in which life becomes “nasty, short, and brutish” (or, in Tennyson’s version, “red in tooth and claw”).

Such woke warriors, who are sometimes impressively credentialed but generally poorly educated, probably don’t know much about Hobbes. If they did, they would also know that the very government posts from which they sermonize were established back in the haze of pre-recorded time to escape the kind of world they are promising to return us to; that government itself was created first and foremost to protect our lives and our possessions from the transgressions of those with bigger clubs than ours, and that the most important component of government is therefore law enforcement.

The council members of Minneapolis probably aren’t particularly conversant with the ideas of JeanJacques Rousseau either, even if their hopes for a post-police world are drawn directly from his romanticized idea of the “noble savage,” a mythical human being who, free of social convention and the oppressive institutions of corrupt (in this case racist) society, becomes peaceful, non-covetous, and altruistic.

The promise to abolish the police thus apparently rests on the dubious premise that our inner cities will, post-police, be populated only by noble beings incapable of threatening anybody — you won’t need to worry about whom to call if someone breaks into your house in the middle of the night because, with all the wonderful changes in human nature that will occur, no one will want to break into your house in the first place

Any fear to the contrary comes only “from a place of privilege,” according to the president of the Minneapolis City Council.

The great accomplishment of humanity, only gradually established in fits and starts and running counter to so much of the historical experience, has been liberal democracy based on the rule of law; broadly synonymous with what we think of as civilization.

It is a much more fragile construct than those now pulling on its threads realize, and when we find ourselves debating whether we would be better off without police, we also find ourselves much closer to a return to barbarism than to the just society.

Asad preview of what happens when the police aren’t there came on May 31 in Chicago, when 18 people were murdered, the highest number in a single day for the city in at least 60 years (maybe ever, since the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab data doesn’t go back any further than 1961).

According to Max Kapustin, the lab’s senior research director, the spike in killings was caused by the vacuum that opened when police were called away to deal with the looting and arson accompanying protests against police brutality.

For the Rev. Michael Pfleger, who has long campaigned against gun violence in the city, it became “open season” on the south and west sides once people noticed that the cops weren’t around.

And then the carnage began.