Offense / Defense Framework

I’m going to start off by pretending this post is about soccer.

Accountability for attackers and defenders

Something that I don’t feel the need to prove, because it just seems to be a given — something so obvious in how we think about sports — involves the difference between the sorts of behavior we expect, afford, and even value for defenders compared to the sorts of behaviors we expect, afford, and value for attackers (specifically behaviors around compliance with the rules). It’s just kind of accepted that defenders, by virtue of their jobs and their responsibilities, are allowed to get away with a little more. Sometimes we imagine defenders as rugged, utilitarians, their only task to keep the ball out of the net, and this next part is important: by any means necessary.

Sure, they will get called for obvious egregious fouls, or the type of obvious foul that prevents a goal scoring opportunity,. but all in all, a defender is kind of expected to break the rules a little bit. Think about a corner kick. There is so much obvious holding happening on every corner kick, and we expect this. The referee very rarely calls it. We understand this. It’s because the defender has such an existentially burdensome task, again: prevent goals by any means necessary. The stakes of allowing an attacker to get a clean header on an otherwise innocuous corner kick are so high, the consequences so grave, that we expect him to hold the attacker a little bit, keep him from getting a good jump. Our value system for observing and understanding defenders is just biased in this way, towards allowing for more extreme or some might call “dirty?” play.

By contrast, for attackers, we just don’t allow this kinda stuff. If an attacker fouls a defender on a corner kick in some way, perhaps a push in the back, allowing him to get a clean jump, and a clean shot on goal off an otherwise innocuous corner kick, the referee calls the foul nearly every time. We expect him to call it, perhaps we desire him to call it. The stakes of not calling it are so harsh: the awarding of a goal for one team and not the other, compared to the other way around on defense- the not awarding of one. There is a real asymmetry in values here that we accept. And that’s even in an environment where we kinda want goals to happen. We understand that attackers don’t get to act like defenders when it comes to what kind of citizens they are on the soccer pitch. Defending involves a certain privilege around rule breaking (in many sports). This post isn’t for me to agree or disagree with that, but I’ll say I have no major objection to it.

Now, this soccer illustration is an incredibly tame, unimportant example of a framework I’ve been thinking about and trying to articulate in my life for a long time. It’s never occurred to me to write about it, but I talk about it with my friends pretty often as it relates to non-soccer things. Recent events have tempted me to put it down on paper here and to meditate on it. It’s not that I think I can illuminate something radically new here — it’s an incredibly obvious thing. Perhaps if anything, consider this exercise a sort of therapy for me. I need to play around with some abstract stuff here as a safe way to engage with the horrors in the news. Also, I want to stress that I don’t think real life is sports, nor do I think it’s a good analogy. Part of the point of this post is to highlight that there’s an unfortunate shared logic, one that we should reject, and one that’s ultimately incoherent.

Offense / Defense Framework

When I talk about this with friends I use the dumbest name possible. For some reason I’ve just never cared to or thought it needed a better name. I call it “offense / defense framework.” To work our way away with baby steps from sports toward something else, I like to think about Helms Deep in the second Lord of the Rings movie (I read the Hobbit and even Fellowship but I stopped there for some reason and stuck with the movies from there out). The orcs and the dark armies (o god, I was trying to avoid this), are marching on the armies of middle earth. The humans and the elves and dwarves and what not, the good guys (mostly) are in protection mode, battening down the hatches at this giant keep that’s been built into the side of a mountain: Helm’s Deep. We generally expect the good guys in movies to behave on a different level than the bad guys. Batman doesn’t kill people, right? At Helm’s Deep though, the good guys are under siege, facing annihilation, and we see them do some classical siege tactics. Aragorn exclaims “Show them no mercy for you shall receive none.” (remind me to come back to this perversion of the Golden Rule)

Anyhow, we expect this type of behavior, or at the very least broadly accept it from people who are “playing defense.” Further, what’s more important than how we the reader/audience evaluate the behavior of people “on the defensive,” at a more real level, the defenders themselves rarely seem worried about the harsh nature of their battle tactics, the ethical dilemmas —if any— of the way they go about fighting. They are being tasked with defending, with survival. And when this is the case, the nature of these tactics are less important to them than the outcomes, again an asymmetry with what we expect from combatants who are “on the offensive” and how those combatants themselves evaluate their own decisions.

Disputes

So normally, when I’m talking with friends and I invoke “offense / defense framework” (to the occasional eye roll), what I’m talking about is the unfortunate phenomenon where a person, or a group, or an institution, or a nation etc are (let’s say) rightfully defending themselves, facing existential threat etc, and they’re playing by “defense rules” — just more broadly they’re scrapping and fighting pretty hard — maybe even getting away with some grey area stuff that “offenses” generally wouldn’t (in the discourse let’s say). And here’s the moment where it goes wrong (and no one is really to blame here). Sometimes when you’re playing defense and fighting for survival and not so worried about the rules, you land a blow so violent (or a foul so egregious) (or an insult so deplorable) that it can recast your aggressor as.. a defender. And it’s not even that they’re necessarily the defender now. It’s that they’re hurt and feeling vulnerable and they now interpret themselves as playing defense (they may already have been - more on this), and… yet you still feel the same way (fighting for your life). This could be in an argument with a spouse, a fight on twitter, a protracted struggle between labor and capital, or far grander in scale. When you land a significant blow on your aggressor such that they take a defensive stance, it’s not like your brain realizes you’re on offense now. It’s not like, OK now my opponent is “fighting for their life (and adjustments in their behavior/tactics will be accommodated just so) and so I must now abide by more amenable rules of engagement.” Nay, the sad equilibrium is that both combatants are now “playing defense” even if one of them is stronger or less vulnerable, and even if they play defense for so long that they are effectively besieging their opponent for generations while at the same time feeling certain that they themselves are besieged.

When each combatant thinks they themselves are playing defense (and FWIW perhaps neither party began the argument on purpose or with intention), it suddenly becomes really hard to see a way out. You might imagine both sides “playing dirty” ad infinitum with each next defensive action aggrieving the other in a downward spiral of spite or worse, with an escalating vengeful body count.

Solving Conflict

So what do you do? To be honest I’m not totally sure, but whatever you do, it seems to me it has to be nested within a framework like this, where everyone acknowledges that “both” sides are playing defense and importantly that that is not a coherent state (by identity defense can’t coherently play against defense), even if it feels individually correct, and/or an unfortunate natural equilibrium.

So I don’t know the answer. I’ll say though — in a stalemate like this, challenging the premise is often helpful. In this case, the examples I’ve used (or the poorly sketched abstractions) always involve 1v1s. And if you’ve read anything I’ve written on soccer, you know how I detest the reduction of all of soccer into a series of 1v1 duels. It’s simply the wrong metaphysics. It lacks what is a known and real interdependence between all the players on the pitch, the ball, the space, the time etc. This is true in soccer and in non-soccer stuff. You simply cannot boil reality down into individual encounters of rational people within markets or battlefields (or whatever state of nature you choose) because below that layer there were always relationships and dependencies, the most basic fabric of reality.

So I don’t know — maybe if we find ourselves (and we do) in a downward spiral of 1v1 defense vs defense slugfests, we should open our eyes to the fact that it’s not 1v1. There is a vast scale of interdependent groups, individuals, histories, nations, institutions, etc. And something about recognizing that tells me that there are solutions that can unwind the downward spiral of defense vs defense (1v1). I would venture to say, that the “original” (if that’s even a thing) feeling of defensiveness…. was a product not of direct causal grievance by a single antagonist, but something more complex (interwoven). It’s never just your opponent who has caused you to feel so vulnerable, and it’s never just your opponent who will resolve the dispute (either through victory, surrender, or truce). There’s a whole interdependent web of factors and people at play here. Somehow we have to find a wide lens and seek outside of the box solutions since the problem was probably never in the box to begin with.

Something related, while I’m at it (back to Aragorn).

The “Golden Rule” kinda sucks.

I mean, the Golden Rule is better than not having the Golden Rule. And for the record it’s this:

Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

This adage is like one of the main ways that we teach kids how to not be assholes. My sense is it’s pretty pervasive in elementary school and preschool. It probably works. They seem to understand it pretty well. Hey kid, what are you doing there? Would you want someone else doing that to you? No? OK, do something else then… (to them).

This framework is fucked up. First, is it really the case that we can only imagine all of human behavior as exchanges between individuals (necessarily strangers) where each interaction does things to the other person? Do we need to be using this word other? How does this work? Are these like… contracts(?) that we’re supposed to enter into with strangers/others? Is that our vision of the world here? That there’s me, and then there’s others? And that I yearn to.. to do a bunch of stuff to others(?), but if I stop and think about it, I wouldn’t want them doing that stuff to me, so I’ll reconsider? Fuck that. A much better framework is what MLK laid out:

We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools.  We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.  And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. 

This strikes me as immediately compelling (and if anything is natural it’s that inescapable network of mutuality). No, I’m not going to abstain from … doing something to someone else because I wouldn’t want them to do it to me. I’m going to abstain from … doing something to someone else because to harm anyone is to harm myself. Cuz they are a part of me, and there’s no outside of that. There’s no “other” that can do stuff unto me or that I can do stuff unto. It’s interdependence all the way down. These contracts don’t have material breach clauses in them cuz they’re not contracts.

For Aragorn in Lord of the Rings, it’s really important that these orcs are so clearly constructed as “outside” of society — a sort of alien menace for which there is no sympathy or brotherhood. I suppose that’s fine for Tolkien (not going to relitigate that here). But if you see anyone in real life using language like “our opponents are the dark armies or the children of darkness” — just know, what they’re trying to do is dislodge that very natural metaphysics of interdependence that King lays out so well. It’s a necessary precursor for first, propping up the shitty idea that there’s two teams, then that one gets to play defense and perhaps commit atrocities, and lastly that these atrocities do not automatically harm those who inflict them (which would be true if we were all one and there was no outside) but instead they’re unfortunate things that must happen to others.