I have watched many responses to the Parkland, FL massacre. The cycle of horror and shock has given way to resentment and retrenchment. In all of the online “shouting,” I have been surprised – and hopeful – to see how the students themselves won’t back down. That’s where change will come from – real change – not through those of us who abstract and generalize horror and death but through those who have experienced it and will do anything to keep others from knowing the same pain.
Still, I am one of those “abstracters” and “generalizers” so I would like to make a few comments on that front. First, I have started to write up something many times, but I just kept deleting it. There was something missing. Today, I read this article, and Mishra hits on the epistemological basis of this argument (although he is not talking about gun violence as much as macro-political maneuvering).
You see, at heart, the issue of gun violence is an ideological one. Now, I don’t mean that in the way you might think. For my friends on the Right, that does not mean that the government is coming for your guns. For my friends on the Left, that does not mean that an emotional appeal and a heart-rending story will sway your audience. And, for any international friends out there, maybe this will help you make sense of the “craziness” of the USA. I’m talking about a deeper philosophical and moral issue.
At the ground of it all, Americans are Pragmatists. Whatever “existential” or “structural” or “constitutional” appellation we may choose, we’re still – as a country – deeply following the “cash value” of ideas, as William James so bluntly put it more than a century ago. Now, on top of that pragmatism, we find the ideological problem with “gun rights” or “gun control.” Where does the “cash value” lie – i.e., where does the buck stop?
On the Right, the “gun rights” advocates and their hangers-on deeply believe – in their bones they believe the world is set up this way – in Objectivism. Originating as a coherent system of thought in the writings of Ayn Rand, “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute” (Rand, Appendix to Atlas Shrugged). The germ of the ideological problem for gun violence lies in “with his own happiness,” for the tacit meaning is “I pursue my own happiness, and you can pursue yours.” Now, on the Right, it’s not that such a situation is preferable; rather, it is seen as a foregone conclusion that that’s how the world works. That’s why defense is so important on the Right.
By the way, Objectivist-Pragmatism is also the basic moral framework that the mass murderers operate with – which does buttress the argument of the Right. In other words, if that is how the “bad guys” are living, then we must operate in the same manner in order to stop the violence (i.e., fight fire with fire). Before the Right will “give up” their guns, they would have to change their view of the world.
I hope my Left friends were paying attention to that – that’s why any hint of threat to “gun rights” results in the defensive reaction you see on the Right.
Okay, now, let’s turn around and take a look at the Left. On the Left, Pragmatism still wins the day, but it is combined with Personalism. Personalism was first articulated fully in Borden Parker Bowne’s Personalism (but it goes back further). Essentially, on top of Pragmatism, the Left sees the indivisible value of each individual person so that deep down pursuing “my happiness” must include pursuing happiness for everyone. Now, my friends on the Left, there are some issues here. Who gets to decide what “happiness” constitutes? Invariably, it is those in power who are already seeking their own happiness by their own definitions. Also, Personalism is a recipe for frustration because no matter how far we progress we can’t ensure happiness for everyone, can we?
So, to my friends on the Right, when you talk about “gun rights” to the Left, they will always hear that you are asserting gun rights over the worth of human life.
So, where do we go from here? Do we jettison Objectivism? Personalism? Pragmatism altogether? I am not a big believer in black-and-white, either-or thinking. There has to be a Third Way. However, I do think the answer rests in education…
…starting with the realization of how incomplete these ideologies look when laid out in black and white.
What comes next? Where will we go? Maybe, we should listen to the children…
Dann—
Holy cow dear friend! How dare you introduce the voice of careful, reasoned, and, dare I say, Christian analysis into an issue where so many, on all sides, are so passionately “right?!!!” This is not only carefully and wisely offered, it brings, between the lines, love to bear on this as you have on other issues. Thank you for this; thank you for you. Listen to the children indeed.
Madoc
You have piqued my interest and raised some interesting points. My response includes generalizations that do not necessarily reflect individual views, so trigger warnings to whoever reads 🙂
To begin at the beginning, one must bear in mind that we are talking about gun rights in America. What some may think is a good idea in another country (culture and government) is codified in the founding laws of this one.
From the right, I see a common thread between Ayn Rand and Thomas Jefferson: happiness. Jefferson– whether Christian or Deist – noted its pursuit as one of the inalienable rights with which we were endowed by our creator, using it as a springboard from which to declare the Colonies independence from England.
If we take the tacit meaning as read, it would mean a land of sovereign citizens (rather than a nation with citizens), and a level of Social Darwinism deciding which – or whose – happiness was most fit to survive. Jefferson and the other founding fathers, however, used the self-evident, divinely endowed, inalienable rights as a springboard to dissolve relations with one government in order to form another, and that as free men, they ought to be able to preserve innocent life, defend liberty, and pursue happiness unencumbered by either a government-sponsored or privately raised force that sought to prevent them from doing so. Jefferson has addressed both issues, but I will not waste space with the quotes.
Today, we can roughly divide the right into two groups.
1) Objective: These may be religious or not, but most will hold what today we would call Libertarian political views. Here, the idea is that any government that has power at the expense of an unarmed populace will become corrupt and infringe on one of the inalienable rights mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. (Khmer Rouge, USSR, ROK under Park, DPRK, Nazi Germany, China). They also value human life, but recognize a necessity to defend an innocent life against a malicious one, and that if one of these lives must end, it is better for the malicious life to end in order to save the innocent one.
2) Subjective: These are trickier, and generally irrational. On this side, we see some of some religious or ideological extreme claiming sovereign citizenship (a logical outworking of Rand’s atheistic objectivism) with some rationalization from a religious text. This sort of thing happened with Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge. The subjective side will not respond to reason any more than they use it to come to rational conclusions, so I am leaving them aside for the purposes of this discussion.
Jefferson seems to have seen an armed populace as desirable 1) to keep the government in check, and 2) to keep malicious people from harming innocent people.
The vast majority of gun owners in America belong to the objective group. Some hold the views more strongly than others, and some for different reasons. And one must bear in mind that, generally, when the Right hears an espoused political or moral view, they generally ascribe to the speaker a whole set of political views. That is, they expect a gun-control advocate to be an abortion-rights advocate (of course, the Left generally makes reciprocal assumptions). But regarding the argument of the value of human life, the viewpoint goes something like this.
When the Right hears the Left talking the value human life as a rationalization for gun control, they ask some objective questions: 1) Why is the malicious life so valuable that we must deprive the innocent life of the ability to defend itself? And, 2) Why is an unborn life worthless against the mother’s convenience? The Left’s argument about the value of human life starts to take on the air of Weston’s monologue in “Out Of The Silent Planet,” valuing the concept of human life at the expense of individual human lives.
To the Right, the argument of gun control from the Left sounds, at best, nebulous. They hear people who are perfectly happy to kill a fetus because a mother finds pregnancy inconvenient, but rush to the defense of a murderer who chose to take an innocent life and may take others. At worst, they hear a diabolical argument, knowing how despots have oppressed unarmed populaces throughout history.
Put simply, the Right would argue that they value Human Lives as a means to preserve Human Life, and that to this end, Human Lives have the right to the ability to defend themselves from malicious Human Lives. And they see the Left as valuing Human Life as a concept and at the expense of any Human Lives that may be inconvenient.
Jefferson, even if a Deist, at least accepted an objective moral law to define which happiness was right. Rand would need objective — and therefore transcendent — definitions for “moral” and “productive” before she could “reason” which “achievement” was objectively “productive,” which would be a necessary step before she could define any “happiness” as “moral.”