Category A and B Problems

[This was written in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, but really could apply to any ideologically tinged terrorist attack.]

There are two kinds of problems in the world. Problems and… problems.

Category A problems are things we know are bad, but more of a technocratic matter to fix - if at all. The common cold, death itself, losing keys, bad writing, bad weather, flaky colleagues. We don’t deny their existence, or the suffering they cause, but we don’t spend all day obsessing about them either. We can’t even really write good magazine articles about them.

Category B problems are bad things that come about from underlying issues that we feel a responsibility to solve. Lack of scientific funding, inequality, sexual harassment, Islamophobia, global warming, bullying, AIDS (or how we deal with it poorly). Whatever our worldview is, we see some problems that spring from our philosophy (or rather, what we seek to fight), and those problems - from small to big - demand a response. Generally, we feel that enough willpower by people can solve these Category B problems, and therefore our lack of willingness to do so makes us responsible for the suffering these problems cause. Category B problems make for great writing.

Everyone sorts anything bad they see into either Cat A or Cat B problems.

What we immediately realize, is that people have very different ideas of what goes in each bucket.

A pro-death penalty person may see rampant crime as a problem to be solved by sufficient determination, including using the most extreme methods of punishment. That said punishment sometimes is broken and mal-used, is a Category A problem that can be solved by making a technocratically better death penalty system. It’s a tragedy* to them that Texas sometimes kills an innocent, but that’s not a problem like rampant crime.

An anti-death penalty person sees the state executing people as a problem to be solved by a more pacifistic, less bloodthirsty outlook. The crime that the death penalty responds to can be solved in various technocratic ways (more police, more job opportunities), but the act of killing by the state - which represents us! - is a moral outrage that needs to be stopped immediately.

A lot of ideological arguments aren’t about whether a particular event is bad or not, but whether it is a problem or a problem.

***

Killing twelve people in a violent attack is wrong, full stop, regardless of the attitude towards free speech. But stopping there feels wrong somehow. It feels like we’ve treated a terrorist attack as a Category A problem, when the event is so politically charged that it must be a Category B problem. We must find further evidence behind it, that ties it to *some* ideological cause. We have to believe that there’s some chain of cause and effect by which “more willpower by us” will lead to this never happening again.

The first two responses that leap to mind are Islamophobia, and extreme defense of free speech. We can point to this senseless death as insufficient commitment by our society to either of those ideologies. “If only we kicked out all muslims” or “If only we convinced everyone to never get upset about a media depiction”, people think in fear and anger.

Or we can go for more subtle worldviews. Zizek writes that these totalitarian outbursts are a response to the ubiquity of liberal capitalism. I feel at the very least they are a result of the masculine proclivity to violence and mutual-escalation, which is the biggest problem in the history of the world. We all need some blanket to say “truly this is a Category B problem.”

***

Were the cartoons racist? Should we get very defensive of violent attacks on art that are cruel to an oppressed community? (ie, does the racism in the cartoons demote the attacks from a Category B problem to a Category A problem.)

Here, I think we must learn some humility. We are not French. It is extremely tempting to export the lessons in America about racism and satire and religious tolerance, and feel those lessons apply everywhere. But the histories of all of those is different elsewhere.

America still deals with the legacy of slavery, and our sensitivity to the black community is an attempt to balance out their treatment as lower class for hundreds of years. France is dealing with a difficult immigration problem - one that might eventually lead to them just kicking everyone out. Both are bad, but the ideal responses to each aren’t the same. America must grapple with the failure of assimilationism, while France is still deciding whether it can even try assimilationism.

Even more relevantly, religion is very different in France. The mainstream right-wing is not as religious in France as in America. The immigrant community is separated more by their religion in France than they are in America.

If a liberal organization in America were to say “we oppose all religion in public life”, we would find them brave, and bold, and we would expect them to get lots of antagonism back from the mainstream. We might not agree with their stance, but we would understand their choice of enemies (ie, the Republicans).

But saying that in France might be very different. If they don’t expect any Christians to be offended by their evangelical atheism, then perhaps they are only picking on an impoverished minority when they say that. In which case we don’t respect claims of “neutral secularism” any more than we respect concerns about “inner city culture”.

Or maybe the two countries are much more similar and these differences don’t apply. I don’t know because I don’t know France.

***

So SSC presents their own short reading on the massacre:

I’ve been trying to avoid talking about Charlie Hebdo because it seems like classic toxoplasma. It’s something everyone should agree is terrible, and instead we’re desperately trying to figure out how to turn it into a controversy / a stick to hit one of various out-groups with. But I was impressed by some of the discussion of French double standards – a Charlie Hebdo cartoonist who said something mildly anti-Semitic was recently fired by the magazine, then charged with ‘inciting racial hatred’ by the government. And a Muslim comedian who used some arguably inflammatory language to describe how he felt about the attacks was charged and faces seven years in prison. If I had to justify the existence of Charlie Hebdo to a French Muslim, I would want to be able to say “Look, I know it offends you, but we hold freedom of speech absolutely sacred and we want you to join us in that”. Instead it’s going to look to them (maybe accurately) like Muslims are specifically singled out as a group it’s ok to offend even while everyone else gets “protection”. It’s good that this incident has gotten everyone excited about free speech, but now the French need to start making sure the realities match their newfound ideals.

He notices the desire to make this into a Category B problem, no matter what your ideology is, and then he immediately turns it into his Category B problem about free speech.

I’m not a free speech absolutist. I take speech, and art, seriously. They have the power to effect the world in ways both immediate and gradual. They matter. To treat all speech as value neutral is both empirically wrong and actually disrespectful to speech. If we actually know speech or art that we feel is wrong and bad, then of course we should discourage it.

Governments currently are very bad at regulating this sort of thing. They hit everything with hammers. And so for now we accept “governments, pretend speech doesn’t matter, okay?” But this doesn’t make it absolutely true. It’s just a hack.

I don’t think there’s anything valuable in the anti-Semitic comments, or Holocaust denial. I’m okay with them being chilled.

Here’s where they actually go wrong: speech might matter but it doesn’t always matter a lot. The retaliation against it shouldn’t be seven years. Seven years in jail, what the hell. When we do that we are inflicting a ton of suffering on a person, for the sake of a fairly minor mitigation against the world. When that happens I am very skeptical that utilitarian thinking is going on, and I am more suspicious that it’s actually posturing. Prove how much you care about the protected group by being willing to hurt someone disproportionately. The recipient of the punishment is regrettable collateral damage, but well, that’s a Category A problem, isn’t it?

I don’t care if anti-semitic free speech is chilled a little. I do care if a good person sits in jail for seven years. And when we think about it, yeah, obviously one of those is the more important one. But we get so caught up in pursuing our cause, that we dismiss the much more serious Cat A problems, just for the sake to point out a Cat B problem. This tendency worries me.

***

*"Tragedy" is a word associated with Cat B problems, fairly often. "An outrage" is the term associated with Cat A problems instead.

The overuse of italics for problems and problems, is a joke about our existing language's inability to express important differences in some concepts, and the failure of symbolic knowledge overall. Such as in the difference between liking someone and liking them.