discipline : mackenzian

Every decision is a vote cast for the future we wish to live in… Every action we take should be a vote for the Beloved Community we wish to create.” —Hugh Hollowell

There’s a conundrum I’ve been turning over that’s reinforced for me every time I go to a park like Muir Woods or the Grand Canyon. The trees and the rocks and the quiet away from the city and the suburbs remind me just how young humans are, how brief our lives, how short our eras are in the grand scheme. This is a question of scale and perspective.

I also work with a number of social change initiatives. I enjoy learning about how history informs the present and I’m attentive to the contemporary conditions that we’re asking one another to live and grow in now. No matter how long a person’s life, no matter how comfortable their social location, they’re unique and meaningful simply because they’re here. I’ve never recovered from the first genocide I ever saw in my lifetime. It was one too many, and every genocide and war since has been one too many as well. This, too, is a question of scale and perspective, and it’s also a question of collective effort.

It takes all of us in one way or another to keep the status quo humming along. Just a few months ago, I paid a good chunk of federal taxes, and as a small business owner, I have to do so again next week. I have no qualms about 59% of that money supporting social programs, but I’m not at peace with the entire budget. My labor and revenue fund domestic and foreign policies I think are imperial, immoral, and incompatible with justice, humanitarianism, and sustainability.

So every time I pay in, I’m putting a few more hundred dollars into the way that things are, as do we all, not just when we pay federal or state taxes, but also as we buy and sell locally. A few hundred dollars might not be much of $3.7 trillion, but there are millions of us paying in. We’re why the Department of Defense can afford “fast, resilient microdrones that can be kicked out the back of a fighter jet moving at Mach .9.” We’re why there are funds, however few, to allocate to the National Science Foundation’s research grant accounts, and to buy FEMA more tents, and to maintain NOAA’s satellites.

Social change work is like running up the down escalator.

When asked about his work ethic, actor Will Smith once replied, “I am not afraid to die on a treadmill.” When I heard that, I laughed, but it’s also probably true. He has drive, he’s persistent, and I’m not sure anyone could stop him from achieving something he was determined to do. Any projects he’s passionate about will reap from that.

What about me? If things are moving the way they are thanks to the combined efforts of millions, and I’m also paying into the way things are as a dutiful resident and community member, how much discipline do I and my co-conspirators need to make genuine progress on new pathways, progress that pans out longer than an election cycle, longer than a life, longer than an era?

Hugh Hollowell is the executive director of Love Wins Ministries, a non-profit in Raleigh, North Carolina that builds community with unhoused people. He might also be the strongest critic of the snooze button I know. Around the time I met him, he wrote, “I am up against people who wake up at 6 a.m. and decide which minority group they are gonna screw over today. Why did I sleep in?” A few years later, he said, “While you were sleeping in, some CEO got up on time, ate his Wheaties, and planned a layoff or something.”

I laughed at that too, but it was a drier laugh.

I knew that those working against the perpetual motion machine of injustice have to have discipline.

We have to be focused.

We have to manage our energy.

I won’t say we have to get up at 6 a.m. (I’m still in denial!), but Hugh and I agree that we each need to figure out our best daily hours and deploy them in the service of all that’s good.

We get to bring our social compassion home to ourselves and our families.

We also get to eat and sleep and play, no less than others gifted life on our planet.

And somehow, we have to sustain a patience that the status quo doesn’t deserve, a patience that depends on someone somewhere still suffering in some way while we find the escalator’s emergency stop button and get all our people onto the right flight of moving stairs. I hate that.

I also know that without discipline and consistency, there can be no progress.

And while my daily schedule might seem like a tiny thing in the long shadow of life here, I’m beginning to suspect that Hugh is right, and the consistent will inherit the Earth.

I’ve had a few conversations this month about Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist whose research and pronouncements consistently stir controversy. Whether he’s ranking the attractiveness of Black women or analyzing the child-bearing choices of high-IQ women, Kanazawa draws criticism, rebuttal, and disavowals from other scientists as well as the general public.

One friend wrote that Kanazawa shouldn’t be cited as proof that evolutionary psychology is an inherently racist field: the field, he said, shouldn’t be judged by one member:

Many researchers came out in opposition to Kanazawa’s ‘research’ and others like it. Misapplications does not a discipline make. — Jaegerjaques Grey (@80Grey) August 8, 2013

I agree that one controversial member can’t represent an entire field. I also disagree that a discipline’s internal debates should automatically de-legitimize its unpopular figures: just because there’s disagreement doesn’t mean anyone should be excluded. Misapplications, false positives, and failures are part of what differentiates a profession or discipline from a dogmatic inquisition: dissociating from dissidents, outliers, renegades, and spotlight hunters can’t be the measure of disciplinary status, or the definition of “discipline” would have to be “Borg collective.”

A conference presenter (seated) addresses his audience — At the 2nd Annual Responsible Conduct of Research Conference, Texas Tech University Ethics Center, 2012

So what does make a discipline? A discipline is bounded by common epistemology, common research methods, common credentialing, and common peer review. Sharing a discipline doesn’t bind members to agree on interpretation; and those 4 common areas mean that Kanazawa is still “in” with evolutionary psychology no matter how much his peers distance themselves from his work. His public statements don’t degrade the profession, and peer dissociation doesn’t bolster his field.

My friend suggested that it was nevertheless “important for others in his field to call him out.” So I asked whether he could see a difference between “calling someone out” and challenging their research assumptions, methods, or findings in commentary or further research. If disciplinary “discipline” doesn’t distinguish between the two, then it risks conflating the integrity of field boundaries with that field’s approval of individual members and their personalities.

Furthermore, disciplines are communities of common practice. They’re not personality factories. They’re about what we do, not about who we are. This is why professional codes of ethics tend to focus on activity and inaction, not belief or character. Ethics codes tenets will include reducing conflicts of interest or maintaining confidentiality as these are fundamental actions that guard professional integrity and ensure that clients, customers, patients, and the public at large can rely on whatever professionals do. But those same codes won’t sneak from action guidelines into thought regulations; they won’t police a member’s feelings about his clients or try to fix his cosmological opinions. Those opinions will rarely even become a conversation topic unless they’re perceived to undermine the quality of a professional’s client relationships and performance.

In 2012, 500 Emory students declined to host neurosurgeon Ben Carson as their graduation speaker because of his views on the moral implications of evolutionary science. He saw the controversy as an attack on his personal religious rights, but his critics challenged him “as a representative of science and medicine.” Respondents debated the merits of his position, concerned by his philosophical assertion that “relativism” and amorality or un-grounded morality were the natural consequence of affirming evolution. Other criticism focused on how Carson had represented evolution to the Seventh-day Adventist paper that published his comments (Carson later said that the paper had misrepresented him by not printing complete quotations; I’ve not been able to find any statements from the paper confirming or denying Carson’s claim.)

But even though Carson eventually stepped down as Emory’s speaker, he wasn’t cast out of medicine. The event was extra-curricular, an out-of-work event. He wasn’t sanctioned by his discipline at any point—and wouldn’t have been unless he was found to have breached medical standards of practice.

My friend and I agreed that a person doesn’t have to be a decent human being in order to become an effective professional. Of course clients and customers prefer to work with decent human beings! Professions do shape how we live out our humanity with other people because they structure the spaces in which we practice and the relationships through which we interact with others in those spaces. But while our professional training and practice is based on shared disciplinary knowledge, that training isn’t responsible for professionals’ core sense of compassion or brutality. If a discipline’s members are adults with an intact sense of morality, the discipline’s ethics will lie on top of and interact with individuals’ ethics and the various intersecting ethics of their cultures, communities, and nations.

The consequence of this is an insight shared in an influential technical communication essay (summary) and made during my conversation with my friend: unethical practice and research can still be done with good technique,” and a “good technique” doesn’t change a practice’s fundamental ethical nature. Disciplines might make a person more effective, but they can’t make them “good.”

Some Questions

During this entire conversation I was thinking not just about how disciplines police their boundaries but also how religious groups police theirs. Are you part of a religious group or a professional discipline? What have you noticed about how these groups monitor who’s in, who’s out, and how they resolve conflicts about group identity and group ideas? Do they seem to prioritize the protection of their group brand and their public reputation; how are controversial ideas dealt with? What are that group’s ethics based on? Are those ethics about actions or character?