Author: AdamRowe

Immigration and Hospitality:  Thoughts on Camp of the Saints, Exit West, and Kant

Many years ago, in the mid-1970s, I read a novel called Camp of the Saints by a French writer, Jean Raspail. Camp was about the death of the West via an apocalyptic mass migration from South Asia and other parts of the darkest Third World to the shores of Mediterranean France. While unabashedly racist in its portrayal of the arrivals, the real target was weak-kneed Western leftists and multiculturalists (though the word had not yet been invented), who were shown as too soft and wishy-washy to fight back until it was too late.

At the time I was rather down on soft-headed leftists myself, so I basically liked the story but thought the mass-migration scenario was pretty farfetched. Today, of course, it sounds more prophetic. It shouldn’t be any surprise that Camp is a cult favorite of Steve Bannon and anti-immigrant nationalists on both sides of the Atlantic.

The reason I’ve recalled this old book is that I just finished a new novel, Exit West, by the Pakistani writer Mohsin Mahid. Mahid has written a number of good books that revolve around the crisis of modern fundamentalism in Pakistan and elsewhere. Exit West is a kind of reimagining of Camp of the Saints that privileges the immigrant view. In a sprawling unnamed South Asian city, Islamic radicals gradually take over and ordinary lives are crushed between random violence and religious repression. A young couple, Nadia and Saeed, just embarking on an affair, are pushed together for survival. As things fall apart, mysterious gateways begin to appear around the city that allow people to escape, and Nadia and Saeed jump from South Asia to a refugee camp on the Greek island of Mykonos, then to London, and finally to the Marin hills outside San Francisco. They join a huge movement of peoples from all over the world who show up uninvited in the wealthier, established countries of Europe and North America, often emerging from their portals literally inside rich people’s bedrooms.

What Mahid tries to do is imagine a positive outcome from this crisis. It would be easy to go in Raspail’s direction and see this uncontrolled flood leading to civilizational collapse, and equally easy to write a thriller showing how the threatened societies marshal their armies and militias to destroy the invaders. It is harder to picture a new world emerging, a new modus vivendi between the global haves and have-nots. In Exit West, the British stand down from an all-out attack on immigrant enclaves—we aren’t taken inside British decisionmaking, so Saeed and Nadia can only conclude that it would have been too appalling for British citizens to stomach. In America, the new immigrants live in the hills and slowly integrate into the cities; we never get much of an explanation as to why a nationalist backlash doesn’t materialize.

In a short epilogue several decades later, Saeed and Nadia, now long separated, meet again in their unnamed South Asian city, where life has returned to normal. “Half a century later Nadia returned for the first time to the city of her birth, where the fires she had witnessed in her youth had burned themselves out long ago, the lives of cities being far more persistent and more gently cyclical than those of people, and the city she found herself in was not a heaven but it was not a hell, and it was familiar but also unfamiliar, and as she wandered about slowly, exploring, she was informed of the proximity of Saeed, and after standing motionless for a considerable moment she communicated with him, and they agreed to meet.” Their journey has opened them up. Nadia, never religious, has discovered a new sexuality, and Saeed has stayed within Islam but with a broader understanding of its many faces and of the world more generally. Human beings are resilient, seems to be the message, and given opportunity and time will restore a kind of equilibrium.

Mahid’s soothing picture might seem utopian, except that to a large extent I think it corresponds to reality. In the US and Canada and Australia and Western Europe over the last 20-30 years, huge numbers of poor immigrants from very alien cultures have moved in. This has not seemed quite so odd in North America, where there is a long history of this sort of thing, but in Western Europe it has been new and more disruptive. Despite plenty of friction, until very recently the sky had not fallen.

Terrorism shifted the debate, however. ISIS-inspired attacks that turned immigrants into a perceived 5th column, and the huge wave of immigrants in 2015 from Syria and Afghanistan and Libya and sub-Saharan Africa fleeing war and oppression, produced a crisis in Europe. European politics continues to be warped to the right by immigration fears, even though the number of migrants has now returned to pre-2015 levels. East European states like Hungary and Poland seem to have tipped irretrievably towards authoritarianism. Italy is teetering. Angela Merkel may lose her position; if Germany goes to the dark side, the West is indeed in trouble.

America, despite a huge drop in illegal immigration over the past 10 years, has gone into its own largely self-inflicted tailspin. Trump and other right-wing opportunists have pumped up immigration fears as their main vehicle to take power. With little direct impact here from Syria and other terrorist trouble spots, Trump has falsely but successfully held up Central Americans fleeing gang violence and broken states as sources of crime and instability.

Given these trends, maybe it is useful to hear Mahid’s call not to lose heart. Who would have thought 50 years ago (the US relaxed its immigration policy in 1965) that Europe or even the US would absorb so many, so quickly, with so little violence or blowback? The big and many not-so-big cities of Europe, North America, and Australia have been transformed into far more diverse, vibrant, and interesting places. Immigration has added so much to the economies, the arts, the cultures, the social fabric that it is difficult to imagine the alternative. Who seriously wants a New York or London or Toronto made up mostly of white Anglo-Saxons? In the 1980s we feared a rising Japan; today, who owns the future—immigrant-averse Japan, or immigrant-welcoming (until recently) America?

Who, 50 years ago, would have predicted other astonishing successes to the benefit of the world’s poor: that China would become a fast-growing middle-income state, that India would feed itself and generate a dynamic tech sector, that South Korea would become rich and democratic?  The great danger of that time, an aggressive Soviet Union fostering left-wing radicals around the world, is a distant memory.

Now that blowback is upon us, it isn’t clear if our current preoccupation with immigrants is a phase we will outgrow or the harbinger of worse to come. Mahid suggests the former. The immigrants as he portrays them are mostly decent, normal people escaping terrible situations. Some bad apples are present—he mentions attempts by Islamic militants to carry out attacks designed to provoke a violent response—but they are not the norm. The receiving peoples are also decent, sometimes confused and fearful but able to see the common humanity in the new arrivals. When they come face to face and must decide whether to share or attack, they share. Eventually, if the world’s haves are generous and patient, the chaos and violence driving people to flee their homelands will abate, allowing for a more stable relationship.

May it be so. But hope is not a strategy, and we will need to navigate some choppy waters to get to Mahid’s equilibrium. Too many places in the world have become unlivable, and unfortunately the reactionary politics that immigration is provoking in rich countries are likely to make things worse. Less positive engagement with the outside world, less foreign aid, less trade, less global cooperation—this is a recipe for a downward spiral.   Twenty-five years ago a more confident America negotiated NAFTA as part of a successful strategy to stem out-of-control immigration from Mexico by helping Mexico become more wealthy and democratic. It worked; today net immigration from Mexico is zero. Nothing similar is imagined now for Honduras or Guatemala.

The incentives for politicians in many rich countries to demagogue immigration are very strong.  Fear—that a flood of newcomers will take away our jobs, harass our women, shoot us down in the street, or just make us feel like aliens in our own land—has been a potent force that is driving today’s populism.   It is far easier to scapegoat vulnerable outsiders than address the real causes of discontent such as growing inequality.

While the threat has been exaggerated, does that mean it doesn’t exist? Is there a size and type of immigration that is genuinely dangerous? There is, of course. Open borders with no restrictions would be unsustainable. Wages would plummet. Social services would collapse. Integration of immigrants into a stable, functioning liberal society would become impossible. Friction between natives and newcomers would escalate, and a harsh nativist backlash could easily lead to a police state or civil war. It would not help anyone, including the world’s poor, if developed countries were destabilized and impoverished.

So we need limits on immigration. But all of us lucky enough to have been born in a country that other people would like to move to should reflect on what we owe to those—the vast majority—not so lucky. To some, those mired in the most extreme poverty or facing imminent danger, we owe immediate help including the boon of immigration. But we can bring in only a fraction of all those in less dire circumstances. At a minimum, it seems to me, we need a long-term policy that offers hope to all, a policy that commits America and its allies to moving the world towards economic development, and decent and effective government.

This used to be the consensus about US foreign policy in the post-war era. In our own slightly myopic but generous way we seemed to say: We would love to let all of you in so you can become Americans, but since we can’t, we will help you become more American. Many of our allies joined in this endeavor. Liberals and conservatives emphasized different tools, with liberals leaning toward direct aid and multilateral institutions like the World Bank, conservatives toward free trade and private foreign investment, but both agreed that helping other parts of the world become richer and freer was in America’s interest and also an obligation that came with our great power and wealth.

This consensus has now disappeared. The Republican Party has been captured by leaders who view relations with the outside world as transactional, short-term, and guided by an America First mentality. Instead of seeing our prosperity and power as implying some moral responsibility to share these good things with others, they see others as perpetually taking advantage of us and trying to cut us down. The long history of Western colonialism and predation and military intervention—processes to which the United States has been no stranger—might make us willing to concede that the problems “out there” are partly our doing. This view is mocked as weak and naïve.  People in other countries, emphatically including our oldest and closest allies, are seen as competitors if not outright threats. We owe them nothing.

Immanuel Kant’s essay “Perpetual Peace,” written at the end of the 18th century, and reflecting the same enlightenment principles that had just brought the United States into being, was one of the earliest and greatest attempts to outline how peace could be achieved in a world of sovereign nation-states. Kant says that one of the three Definitive Articles for peace between nations is that “The Law of World Citizenship Shall be Limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality” (the other two: all states must have republican governments, and all states must join a federation that renounces war). What does this mean? According to Kant, “hospitality” means “the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another…they have it by virtue of their common possession of the surface of the earth, where, as a globe, they cannot infinitely disperse and hence must finally tolerate the presence of each other.”

Today, much more than when Kant wrote, we are one world. We cannot disperse and must learn to tolerate. If Americans are true to our principles, it is impossible to believe that national borders should be undergirded by hard lines of race and culture. This is the zero-sum vision of Camp of the Saints—it’s us or them. The truth is that at bottom borders are arbitrary, and which side of these artificial lines you end up on is largely a question of luck. It is this view that I believe informs Exit West, and Kant, and America in its better moments. We have an obligation to be hospitable. To acknowledge this is the beginning of moral clarity.

 

Two Nationalisms

Many voices, worried about the toxic populism that has engulfed America, are appealing to our tradition of ‘civic nationalism’ as an antidote. Recently I heard former CIA Director Michael Hayden invoke it against whatever it is Trump stands for.

Civic nationalism means a patriotism and identity that rests on principles and core values that are universal and apply to everyone, embodied in a constitution and laws that are binding equally for all within a given territory. For Americans, these are the principles and values set forth in the Declaration and Constitution and Bill of Rights and Lincoln’s great speeches, refined and modified by key Supreme Court decisions, and exemplified by the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. Their ultimate justification is a claim that they are true: based on inalienable rights that can be discerned by reason and translated into institutions and laws that earn our intellectual assent. If you accept and adhere to these you are an American. It is a nationalism that can be learned and acquired; this makes it perfect for assimilating immigrants and enabling social mobility.

Civic nationalism is usually contrasted with ethnic or ‘blood and soil’ nationalism, meaning a patriotism and identity that rests on shared characteristics such as ethnicity, language, culture, and religion. In America this often means a view that ‘real’ Americans are white, of European ancestry (preferably northwestern European), Christian (preferably Protestant), native English speakers, and so on. Being American is something you are born with, rather than something you acquire by affirming a set of principles. For ethnic nationalists, even principles such as “all men are created equal” are seen as something discovered by Protestant Europeans and not accessible to people from distant cultures. The source of patriotism is emotional and historical, not rational.

Blood and soil nationalism has led to terrible things. In 19th and 20th century Europe it fueled anti-Semitism, ethnic cleansing, fascism, colonialism, two world wars, and the Holocaust. In both Europe and the United States today nationalists are suspicious of immigrants, especially non-white immigrants from non-European countries. As blood and soil nationalists are well aware, the percentage of ‘real’ Americans is dropping as immigration and demography and cultural shifts make the US less white, less European, less Protestant.

Advocates of the civic version sometimes try to draw a hard line between the two types of nationalism. In America, however, the lines are blurred. Almost everyone has immigrant ancestors and knows something of his or her arrival story. The immigrant narrative is a central part of American identity, and many of us know that our ancestors came and struggled to learn English, to be accepted, to adopt local customs—in short, to become Americans. More importantly, for most Americans belief in founding principles is at least as much rooted in faith and tradition as reasoned understanding. Americans stand for freedom of speech, or the pursuit of happiness, more or less the same way an Englishman stands for the Queen. It’s what you were brought up with.

Furthermore, civic nationalism is not always an unalloyed good, and blood-and-soil nationalism bad. The Soviet Union is an example of a state that tried aggressively to suppress ethnic nationalism and replace it with a civic faith. The results were horrific, because in the Old World, keeping down longstanding national identities embodied in communities with centuries of shared traditions, languages, and religions could only be done with almost unimaginable coercion. Ultimately it was the passionate resistance of suppressed ethnic nationalisms—including Russian nationalism—that destroyed the USSR, just as earlier versions led to the breakup of the Hapsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires.

In the US too zealotry in defense of perceived core principles can be destructive. Second-amendment fundamentalists have mobilized to further the spread of guns with scant regard for the consequences. Neoliberals have fought with great success to reinterpret American principles as prioritizing property rights and corporate rights.

It seems to me one way of defining the task of modern statecraft is to harmonize these two sources of identity. While the United States is perhaps the original of modern ‘civic nationalism,’ (a classical version might be Imperial Rome, which extended citizenship and a considerable degree of cultural tolerance to non-Romans) other states such as France have their own versions or have adopted variations of models originally developed elsewhere. The UN and other international institutions have helped legitimize a set of individual rights and principles of good government. All over the globe a rational, rights-based patriotism that often has considerable popular support is in tension with a blood and soil narrative focused on language, ethnicity, history and attachment to a particular culture. (Some would argue that there is a third alternative in the modern theocracies of Iran or Saudi Arabia and ISIS. Religion is usually a component of ethnic nationalism, but making it the central source of national identity is a way of combining the strength of tradition with the strength of a set of bed-rock principles—but derived not from reason but from revelation. This view is present in America too, despite our separation of church and state, when people go too far in identifying our political principles with Christianity).

The biggest danger can come from a fusion of civic with blood and soil nationalism. We then see all the emotion and energy that comes from our natural attachment to place and tradition, combined with intellectual conviction and self-righteousness. This is what produced the Civil War in the US, where two distinct American experiences, with and without slavery, generated incompatible interpretations of founding principles.

Do we see something similar today? I would argue that for a long time very distinct American experiences have been in tension and led to distinct nationalisms. An urban, more educated, more pluralistic experience rooted in both external and internal migration (of rural white and black Americans) has been growing, while a rural, small-town experience (now relocated largely to the suburbs) and rooted in the ‘rugged individualism’ of Westward expansion has been in decline. This tension has often been fruitful as generation after generation of Americans has migrated to cities and gone to college and mingled a more traditional set of values with newer norms. But the fear of losing their social and economic privileges has often caused an explosive reaction among white, rural Americans, as with the rise of the KKK in the 1920s, or McCarthyism in the 1950s, or George Wallace in the 1960s. Today it has exploded again with the rise of the Tea Party and populism.

The divide between the two is not that one is ‘civic’ and the other is ‘ethnic.’ Both versions contain principled appeals to founding principles and emotional appeals to tradition and culture. Both versions claim to represent the ‘real’ America. The urban/immigrant variant puts more emphasis on tolerance, pluralism, and a view of the United States as an imperfect work-in-progress, a country that is different in degree but not in kind from the rest of the world. The more conservative rural variant emphasizes America as a unique “city on a hill” that requires adherence to a set of strict founding principles that cannot be separated from their European and Christian origins. Immigrants or minorities or educated elites who deviate from the standard model are viewed with suspicion.

One of the dividing points between the two is a different understanding of the individual and his or her relation to the larger community and the government. The conservative version emphasizes individual rights and downplays duties to community or state; its American hero is the frontiersman, taming the West with a horse and a six-gun. In comparative polling, Americans (followed by England and other former British colonies) are always the most individualistic, as seen in answers to questions about whether success is due to hard work or good luck, or whether welfare hurts individual initiative. This is why the US continues to tie itself in knots when it comes to constructing a modern welfare state: our efforts to prioritize property rights and individual choice have led, for instance, to our insanely complicated and too-expensive medical system.

This uncompromising individualism can make the American model attractive in other countries—where people often chafe under powerful social norms—but also deeply disliked. Most other peoples place more value than Americans on family, village, and state. It is an almost universal criticism of America in Europe, East Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America that the American ‘way of life’ undermines familial and communal ties. It is viewed as glorifying a me-first struggle for wealth and power.

This has become more true in recent times. Individual rights and opportunity have always been a central part of the American identity, but the thrust of modern American conservatism, the neoliberal version dominated by Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan, has been to double down on these strands of our history while denigrating alternatives. Fear of anything that requires a strong central government (except, inconsistently, the military) has become the dominant nationalist narrative. This has created an odd world where conservatives, who would seem naturally to stand for strong traditions and emotional ties between citizens, have become tightly bound to radical theories of free markets and individual choice that are destructive of all traditions and non-rational commitments. But however inconsistent, a nationalism with a civic side emphasizing individualism and limited government, and an ethnic side that rests on white, European, Protestant traditions has become a potent political force.

The liberal alternative, true to its more pluralistic dna, has not found an equally coherent way to define its own version of nationalism. Its civic side draws on deep American principles in emphasizing equality and democracy over individualism, but its emotional appeal has tended to dissolve in identity politics—an orientation now mirrored with equal if not greater vehemence by white nationalists. Liberal nationalists are put off by what they see as the defiant, flag-waving, chest-thumping, military-focused assertion of national superiority that passes for patriotism among conservative nationalists. This sometimes leads to a carping narrative that only sees American shortcomings. The conservative emotional appeal is strong but narrow, and as many have pointed out, based on a shrinking part of the electorate. Liberal nationalism is more inclusive but weaker and sometimes divides more than it unifies.

To create a stronger nationalism, liberals must be clearer on how equality and democracy are endangered by too much individualism. America is most true to itself when we help all our citizens get ahead, not when a distorted meritocracy produces a few winners while the rest struggle. And it must dial back on the perception that lifting up non-white minorities comes at the expense of the majority. Conservatives must understand that neoliberal individualism destroys traditional values, and flirting with white nationalism amounts to mirroring the worst aspects of the identity politics that most conservatives loathe.

Intellectual and emotional attachment must both be present for any viable American nationalism. America starts with a powerful set of principles, but it also has a magnificent land, stories of sacrifice, heroes and villains, great works of music and literature, amazing scientific and technological achievements—in short, all the ingredients to engender a healthy pride and bonds of kinship and trust, without falling back on race or religion. For the most part we interpret our successes as the realization of these principles, and our failures as falling short. In this way founding ideas explain the good things we have done and infuse all our history, and also spur us to do better. This is a powerful combination that I think can continue to serve us well, as long as we avoid the reactionary temptation to interpret our story as perfect, or the revolutionary temptation to interpret it as constant failure.

How I Think About Racism

Growing up and living in America over the past 60 plus years I have toggled repeatedly between optimism that we are leaving our racist past behind, and pessimism that we will never be rid of it. Every time it seems we have put it in the rear view mirror, it roars up and sideswipes us. We have gone in one head-snapping moment from our first black President to a President who is not only himself a despicable racist but encourages and raises up racism in others. All too many of my fellow citizens are either eager to follow, or don’t care enough to reject, this kind of leadership.

Pessimism on this point is ascendant now across the land. One cause is the growing realization that prejudice is often held unconsciously or semi-consciously, and manifests itself in patterns of discrimination in policing and education and housing and on and on. People who are convinced they have no racial bias often act as though they do, especially when they are anxious or stressed. There seems no way out. What are we to do with all this?

Clearly for much of our history a majority of Americans grew up in a society steeped in racism. White Americans—and not just in the South—were explicitly taught, or absorbed by example, endless lessons about the inherent inferiority of African-Americans (and Native Americans, and Chinese, and more). They might not have been taught that it was permissible to treat African-Americans badly, but it would have been strongly implied. Family, friends, community leaders, and local press reinforced this point of view.

It is important that for much of this time racism was instated from both the bottom and the top. It was something you absorbed from your peers, but was also deliberately fostered by rich and powerful leaders for their own benefit and to keep poor whites and poorer blacks from making common cause. Educated authorities drove home these lessons with warped interpretations of the Bible or pseudo-scientific theories of racial hierarchy.

It is not a sufficient excuse for acting badly to blame it on a bad upbringing, but it is a factor that needs to be considered. If someone is a murderer or a thief, we often, and properly, put some blame on factors outside the individual’s control. We look to childhood abuse or neglect, or extreme poverty, or an undiagnosed mental or learning disorder, as mitigating circumstances.

What we don’t typically say is, “well, they were brought up in a community where their parents taught them that murder and thievery were OK.” For the most part such parents and such communities do not exist. But if someone has racist views, it is often the case that their parents—and the broader community well beyond their parents—DID teach them that racism was OK. And via racism people easily learn to tolerate and even advocate murder and theft directed at people they see as inferior.

It is difficult for most people not to learn lessons that come from family and peers, are reinforced by people in authority, and are in their own self-interest. It takes a particularly strong person to resist. We can look back today on previous generations of Americans and understand regretfully that many of them shared in the taken-for-granted prejudices of their time and place. (There are people who because of their learning and sophistication should have known better: see Jefferson, Thomas.)

Today though, if you have racist views you have them in the face of most of what you will be taught in school and hear from figures in authority. For several decades the ‘official’ view, from (most) government figures, newspapers and major media, religious and business leaders, has favored racial equality. You cannot easily plead ignorance and the rest of us cannot and should not easily excuse you.

It is nevertheless true that there remain many families and sub-cultures that think otherwise and teach their young the same lessons as their grandparents and great-grandparents. The grooves of prejudice are deep and close to the surface. How do we judge those unfortunate enough to be raised this way? How do we judge ourselves?

I said earlier that racism in our history was both bottom up and top down. I think today the continued surfacing of discrimination and prejudice is mostly top down. Even as the dominant narrative has changed sharply towards racial equality, it has been easy for ambitious politicians from Wallace to Nixon to Trump to exploit racial bias to gain power. Today the leading voices in the Republican Party base their appeal on thinly-disguised shout-outs to white male fears of losing dominance. Stopping by any means necessary the long term shift towards more power for minorities and women is their central message. Much of their criticism of ‘elites’ and ‘Washington’ translates into anger at new cultural and political norms mandating greater equality.

Faced with this repeated bubbling up of racism, one response is to go on the offensive, exposing and confronting every instance, big and small. We (white people) are encouraged to uncover our own unconscious biases and be ready to jump on every tasteless joke or unthinking stereotype.

Introspection is always valuable, and sometimes thoughtless relatives or friends need correction. But in my view we need to be understanding of, perhaps even sometimes overlook, the garden-variety racism that is floating around in many Americans. It can’t be argued away with confrontations and criticism. Shaming and pillorying every minor manifestation (such as relentlessly exposing ‘micro-aggressions’ on college campuses) is counter-productive and deepens our cultural divide. Instead it needs to be delegitimized by aggressively and persistently calling out leaders in politics, in religion, in business, in law enforcement who are deliberately fostering these messages. Those people and their self-interest have to be relentlessly exposed. They have to be defeated in elections, ousted from their pulpits, voted off their corporate boards. Racial bias in policing and the courts is especially toxic and must be countered. Racial appeals have to be seen to not work. Once those leaders are discredited, racism will not vanish, but it will lose its force.

Trump is extraordinarily damaging because it is top cover from people in positions of authority that gives permission to ordinary people to act badly. It is crucial to counter and expose his racism and defeat him and his supporters at the polls. And their racism and prejudice must be seen to be a key reason for this defeat.

Just as urgently, we must do something about the conditions that make it easy to activate racial prejudice. Families and communities that are in decline—losing jobs, losing hope for the future—are ripe for appeals to race. Raising them up is the best way to blunt prejudice and keep it beneath the surface.

Education that is honest about our American past, and the ways that past shapes us now, is the best long-term corrective. Certainly my baby-boomer generation was raised on many lies and half-truths: that slavery ‘wasn’t that bad;’ that the Civil War was really about ‘state’s rights;’ that once we ended legal segregation we would quickly see full equality. Steps such as the removal of Civil War statues are vital to spark re-thinking and to send a message about what is acceptable in the public sphere. If we do this, future generations will be less susceptible to racist appeals.

My concluding thought is that racism and other types of prejudice don’t come only from our peculiar American history. It is, I think, a permanent part of the human condition that we are susceptible to being suspicious of people who differ racially or ethnically. There is plenty of racial and ethnic prejudice in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America. Everywhere it is a potential that can be activated by stress, fear, and greed, and is urged on by ambitious men who see it as a vehicle to gain power and wealth.

This is not an excuse: every bad or immoral act arguably is rooted in some ‘natural’ drive; we expect decent human beings to resist and control these drives. What it means, I would hold, is that we should not hope to ‘eliminate’ racism or think that it is some unique failing of Americans or white Europeans. What we can do is weaken it by making it a losing strategy for acquiring power.

Permanent Disruption

I recently read an article by Walter Russell Meade in Foreign Affairs, “The Big Shift: How American Democracy Fails its Way to Success.” I usually like reading Meade, who is good at putting today’s problems in perspective. In this case he compares our politically impoverished, feels-like-we’re-puppets-of-our-corporate-masters present to the period after the Civil War, when the US was birthing massive new industries and government seemed unable to keep up. Meade thinks the information sector is playing this role today. His optimistic point is that in the first half of the 20th century government did catch up. The US generated laws and institutions to regulate big business, while deploying some of our new national wealth to help the old and the poor. We can do that again, Meade promises. Harvard polymath Stephen Pinker on a grander scale offers the same promise in his new book, Enlightenment Now, which argues that if we trust in the scientific method and build on the progress of the past several centuries, all our problems can be overcome.

This is a useful view, and has some truth to it. But when I read Meade and Pinker I get a sinking feeling. Their framework is reassuring, telling us we are in a temporary ‘period of transition’ and eventually we’ll get our feet under us and restore some kind of normalcy. Only that isn’t what seems to happen, and will probably never happen. Is there anyone who believes we are moving from a stable time when peasants worked the land under the thumb of rich autocrats to a new equally stable time characterized by…what? Factory workers marching off in the morning with their lunch pails and coming home at night on the trolley? Office workers driving in from the suburbs and returning to a nice martini? Twenty-somethings in remote workstations logging into their latest gig jobs?

No. The disruption from our capitalist system and constant scientific and technological advances is never-ending. Meade glosses over the slight 20th century hiccups of communism and fascism, both of them attempts to exploit the chronic insecurity and anxiety caused in normal human beings by this endless churn. Communism promised a new order, overseen by all-wise technocrats, that would permanently alter the distribution of economic and social rewards to the benefit of all. And part of the attraction was that it would be a one-off: once the world was cleansed (violently and irrevocably) of the old order, the new order would last forever. Fascism was to do the same: cleanse the world of the inferior races and put the world under the boot of its rightful rulers, and you have the 1000 year Reich. They failed, so good for us, but it was a near thing, and the underlying sources of fear and anxiety—the loss of control and predictability over our daily lives, the risk of losing everything from random economic or scientific changes, the upending of social and cultural norms—have not gone away.

I am generally sympathetic to the progressive response, which is to use an active government to smooth out the inevitable ups and downs of the modern world with a variety of programs to guarantee basics like healthcare, housing, education, and a respectable income. The United States can and should do a much better job in all these areas. I think this would help buffer us from the excesses of populism. Let’s go all the way and implement some form of Basic Minimum Income. But I am not Panglossian about this. European states that offer a lot more public support than the US are also being buffeted. This is because the sources of anxiety are as much cultural as economic. The threats posed by immigration and demography and technology cannot be fully overcome by more social programs. And there is no realistic prospect of a resting place; no one can promise that once we deal with the Dreamers, or take down all the Civil War statues, or get over it and offer universal healthcare, that disruptive change will be over. No, we all realize with more or less clarity that climate change is coming, that the robots are coming, that a multicultural (and much older) society is coming, that gene-splicing is coming, that sneaky new ways for corporations and politicians to manipulate us are coming , and on and on. And as these waves of disruption threaten to break over us, we become more anxious and more susceptible to the siren songs of thugs and bullies and clever power-mongers.

Meade and Pinker would tell us, and are right to tell us, that these challenges pale in comparison with what our ancestors faced every day. Thanks to economic and political advances we don’t generally have to worry about starving to death if it’s a bad winter, or dying from minor infections, or being raped and pillaged by invading Mongols. But most people are not reassured by being told they should stop complaining about today’s problems because it used to be worse. Their sense of well-being comes from their expectations for now, and their experience with other people more or less like themselves.

Our responses fall along a spectrum from full-blown reaction, digging in our heels to Make America Great Again; to embracing the Brave New World. The former leads to Trumpism and the rule of thugs and bullies, the latter to an equally obnoxious but so far unnamed syndrome that we might call Zuckerbergism: don’t fight the manipulation and exploitation of your identity by the gods of Silicon Valley. Just relax. Make more friends on Facebook.

As is often the case, the extremes meet and reinforce one another. The Cambridge Analytica fiasco has shown that using the most sophisticated technology tools in the service of reactionary politics is well-advanced.

Today we have a political divide that is incoherent from the perspective of managing the inevitable arrival of the new. There is a liberal/progressive movement that wants to do more to support families economically and limit the power of corporations and special interests, but also favors aggressive efforts to expand rights for minorities and women and immigrants. There is a conservative/reactionary movement that wants to slow or roll back the expansion of individual rights and the flow of immigrants, but favors leaving individuals at the mercy of the market and encouraging the continued rise in inequality and corporate rights.

Populism can be seen as an attempt to combine liberal economics with a conservative social agenda. As practiced by Trump and his supporters, however, it has been wholly captured on the economic front by Paul Ryan’s neoliberal orthodoxy, leaving its appeal to rest entirely on its resistance to cultural change. In other words, it is standard-issue modern conservatism, but with an ugly edge that often crosses the line into outright racism and xenophobia.

How should we think about this? If the progressive economic agenda is a good thing from the standpoint of managing economic change and enabling citizens to cope with the radical uncertainty of modern life, is there also a case to be made for a slower, more deliberate approach to cultural change? This is a difficult nut to crack, because any such call easily plays into the hands of people who want no change at all. On some issues, such as the status of African-Americans, I would argue there is no room for anything but maximum pressure. Racism has such a deep hold in America that it requires uncompromising straight talk and radical measures, like the new National Lynching Memorial in Montgomery.

Other issues, however, are less straightforward. Immigration is an area where I think the reluctance of political leaders to manage the flow of immigrants (the result of overlapping pressure from business and progressive activists) has led to an unnecessary crisis. There is no excuse for demonizing immigrants as people, but it is not incompatible with liberal values to agree that every society has some limits on the numbers and types of people it can accept without excessive strain. Anger over immigration is the number one driver of today’s dangerous populism in both the US and Europe—responsible politicians should have done more to prevent this from happening. More limits 20 years ago would have headed off today’s enthusiasm for a Wall.

Support for rural and small town America is another area where we have not done enough as a nation. Economic dislocation has combined with disdain from urban elites to create a burning sense of anger and frustration. Does everyone have to drink soy lattes and live in a downtown loft? There are signs that ambitious youth and new companies are leaving over-priced coastal cities and striking out for the heartland. Let’s encourage this.

While racism and xenophobia are front and center in motivating populist reactionaries, anger over women’s rights is close behind. Male resentment at the rising assertiveness of women is a major driver behind the alt-right, not to mention Hillary’s loss. At the risk of angry hate-mail, I think this is a problem we need to take seriously. Young men, especially the less-educated, are having a hard time finding their way in modern society and are angry when they see women getting ahead. Many women understandably think this is a non-problem. We don’t want to reinforce patriarchy. But disgruntled, alienated young men are easy recruits into the worst kind of political movements. We need public service and apprenticeship programs aimed at finding meaningful work for men who are falling through the cracks.

There is, in short, lots of room for new political movements that don’t oppose change per se, but focus on ways to soften the impact and spread the benefits widely. Dealing better with economic change is crucial. But we also need to recognize and address sympathetically new challenges to identity, meaning, and status.

Why I Am Skeptical of Skepticism

Today’s emphasis on the weakness of human reason, our cognitive limits and unconscious biases, has become destructive. It’s the go-to story for anyone who wants to explain away things that other people are doing that they don’t like, or justify their own prejudice. The battering rams of ‘criticism’ have done their work well. Fifty years ago it was a mark of educated liberal sophistication if you pointed out that the media were pawns of corporate masters or reflected the class interests of Ivy League editors; today Fox News and every man in the street believe some version of the same thing.

The Big Idea of classical Western philosophy was ‘nature’, an objective reality independent of human beings but knowable by human beings and governed not by capricious deities but by impersonal and regular patterns or laws. We are part of it but also able to stand outside and observe it, analyze it, comprehend it. This idea clashes with most religions and a view of the world controlled by multiple gods or one god. It weakened under Christianity and almost disappeared, but survived and eventually was renewed more or less successfully in the acts of synthesis of medieval scholasticism. But it was a forced balancing act and eventually broke down with modern science and Enlightenment thinkers exploring nature as an independent reality while—initially—paying lip service to religion.

Science and objective inquiry, however, eventually turned on themselves. Many modern philosophers who looked at human beings as natural phenomena concluded we had huge built-in limitations. Hume and Kant defined unbridgeable limits to reason—we could describe Nature mathematically, but never really ‘know’ it. Darwin and his successors told us we were packages of drives and chemicals designed to survive and with brains optimized for reproductive success, not objective knowledge. Nietzsche questioned the premise of philosophy, that human life was improved by the use of reason. Freud and countless others tried to probe our hidden depths, finding we had all sorts of unconscious biases, goals, prejudices, and instincts that often overwhelmed our little frontal cortexes. Wave upon wave of sophisticated Marxists and neo-Marxists taught us to be suspicious of accepted political, social, and personal positions as nothing but justifications for power and privilege. Thomas Kuhn explained that even the natural sciences are warped by ambition and resistance to new truth. Today growing branches of social psychology and behavioral economics have popularized what is now almost a given for many, that no matter how ‘rational’ we think we are, we are caught in a spiderweb of biases and cognitive limitations.

This is a pretty well-trodden story by now.  What has become clear is that  this rejection of the possibility of agreeing on an objective reality has now penetrated so deeply that it has become an unquestioned article of faith that corrodes the possibility of common discourse. We see this in our current politics. We are having bitter fights now about science and the role of experts in politics and policy. Populists and conservatives are lining up against scientific findings like global warming, the need for childhood vaccinations, and other similar exercises in truth denial. The Trump budget drastically cuts government funding for scientific research, and Trump himself regularly asserts things that are manifestly untrue, while equally regularly claiming that all his critics are liars. The Republican tax bill that passed in December assumes future economic growth from tax cuts that is contradicted by experience, economic theory, macroeconomic models, the vast majority of economists, and many businessmen and investors.

More generally, an influential sect of conservatives opposes the role of “experts” and professionals in government and public life generally.  Steve Bannon’s famous pronouncement some months ago about rolling back the “administrative state” articulates this view. Regulations promulgated by “unelected bureaucrats” are a major target (never mind that most of these have been mandated by Congress), but the disagreement goes deeper. Many of the conservative thinkers who have banded together behind Trump demonize Woodrow Wilson as the arch-enemy who symbolizes what has gone wrong with America. Wilson was an academic and a political scientist—first President of the American Political Science Association—who thought good decisions should be informed by professional experts drawing on the latest scientific research.

In the Bannon perspective argument and discourse are exclusively about the will to power: undermining other people’s views and advancing the interests of your own tribe. There is no point in fighting bias, prejudice, instinct or whatever—this is who we really are. This is the nihilistic position that now seems to animate American (and Russian) internet trolls who have weaponized these critiques: it’s fun to weaken all norms and social bonds and ‘play’ at being irrational haters.

The American founders by and large supported what they saw as new, scientific discoveries in politics, as Hamilton tells us in Federalist #9: “The science of politics, however, like most other sciences, has received great improvement. The efficacy of various principles is now well understood, which were either not known at all, or imperfectly known to the ancients.” This new science did not assume that human beings were always reasonable in understanding and working for the common good. Quite the opposite: it was built on the assumption that men are not angels and usually act for their own narrow and selfish ends. Scientific institutions and laws, however, can take this into account and convert normal self-interested behavior into decent government.

The difference between then and now, in a nutshell, is that we are less and less sure that people are rational in even the narrow sense. Our democracy doesn’t assume that voters are high-minded and disinterested; but it arguably does assume that voters have a good idea of what they want and can map political candidates and policy proposals onto their wants and choose accordingly. Certainly this is possible for a literate, informed, educated citizenry. This allows for the formation of coherent political parties and political platforms.

But the election of Donald Trump is only one arrow in the quiver of skepticism about voter rationality. Much research on both the macro level (voting patterns, public opinion surveys) and the micro level (how individual choices can shift or change due to cues and circumstances that have nothing objectively to do with a political choice) suggests that we do not know our own minds. We do not have stable preferences, do not connect preferences to policy options, do not vote or choose in accord with any recognizable ideology or set of principles. We are ridiculously easy to manipulate and confuse. We pick our tribes or parties first, and make our goals and principles fit.

In the eyes of many advocates of these theories, the problem these findings point to is not that we don’t know our own minds, but that we don’t really have minds to know. In this the findings of political science and social psychology seem to agree with much of modern philosophy. The ‘self’ is an illusion, an unstable fiction of coherence that is belied by actual human behavior. Much of what we like to think our ‘selves’ think, believe, and do is done to us by unconscious drives and internal mental modules and genetic makeup. Or it is shaped by idiosyncratic external factors—upbringing, language, culture, geography, what we ate for dinner, a random TV show.

You don’t have to be a philosophy major to accept these conclusions. They are baked into most of our education in the humanities and social sciences, and increasingly into popular discourse.  An appropriate response to this framework would seem to be humility: “don’t believe everything you think.” Even if we reject the more radical implications, we should have a healthy skepticism of our own opinions. But inevitably it is most often used to cast doubt on what other people think, people we disagree with or dislike.

Accepting that there are limits to individual reasonableness doesn’t have to do this—it can reinforce the need for dialogue if people agree that each of us by ourselves has limits and blinkers, but collectively we can approach closer to what is true and good for all. The argument for democracy as the best, or at least a defensible, form of government largely rests on judgments about the role of uncertainty and unpredictability in human affairs. If the world is terribly complicated and full of complex interactions, and human beings are inherently limited, no human being can fully unravel the lines of causality, or predict the outcomes of what we do and don’t do. This means in some basic sense that we are all equal. Each of us is just as flawed and partial as anyone else. There is good reason to think that joint judgments that get the benefit of many individuals contributing their experience and views, and that guarantee the decision will be made with an eye to the well-being of the many, will be better and fairer than the judgments of a few.

This was Aristotle’s argument for democracy. We are better together. We don’t have full access to the truth but we can discern more and check one another’s excesses and mistakes if we agree on processes and institutions to manage conflict, and accept that the results of these deliberations are legitimate.

It is not clear that most Americans accept this anymore. It may be that democracy “cannot bear very much reality.” Today we have an unprecedented class of commentators, analysts, and explainers operating ceaselessly 24/7. Deploying the multiple access tools of social media, close examination of every law, every election, every public figure, every tweet, reveals too many warts. Each voice wants to gain our attention and our dollars by stoking our fears. Our naïve faith is overwhelmed. The reaction is often, I don’t trust any of you. Or, I trust the ones who reinforce what I want to believe.

Popular culture reinforces our pessimism. Americans today are not optimistic about their future, and the airwaves (an anachronistic image, but you get the idea) are full of dark and dystopian tales. Today’s Batman is not your father’s superhero. From the Matrix to Westworld, reality is something to be manipulated and reshaped, usually by nefarious governments or corporations. Orwell’s 1984 is back on the best-seller lists.

Today, defenders of democracy must go deeper than reiterating the arguments made in 1789. We were founded at a high point of optimism about the ability of reason to craft laws and institutions to steer us in a positive direction—a belief that normal people with all their frailties can, if well-organized, make good decisions. Americans now tend to believe that their most important institutions conspire to deceive and manipulate them, while many of their fellow citizens cannot be trusted because they are deceived and manipulated, whether by fake news or the deep state or wealthy oligarchs or Silicon Valley techies or all of the above.

I have no easy solution, but I can say that nowadays I try to be skeptical of skepticism. The United States has, by any historical or comparative measure, had a damn good run these last 250 years. We need some major housecleaning, however, to have another 250. We seem to have collectively decided that making serious changes to our institutions is just too hard. We can’t get rid of the stupid Electoral College, we can’t restrict money in politics, we can’t do something about our crazy Senate and its bias (the worst in the developed world) in favor of the rural few at the expense of the urban many, we can’t lift up African-Americans, we can’t fix gerrymandering. And much, much more. Let’s do some of these things, and we won’t need to make so many excuses for our bad behavior by blaming hidden drives and unconscious biases.

 

Awhile ago I posted a piece about addictive behaviors. (http://www.adamideas.org/?s=Addictive).  These are drives and instincts that are rooted in human biology and evolution that modern technology and business can easily exploit, things like our cravings for sugar or sex.  I think our fascination with guns also falls in this category.

GUNS

Among the many reasons people give for wanting access to all kinds of guns is that shooting is just a lot of fun. I think that’s obviously true, but why exactly is that? Let’s think of shooting as an extension of throwing. From an evolutionary point of view, humans evolved about 2 million years ago to be terrific throwers, much better than our ape cousins or any other animal on the planet. This involved changes to our shoulders and other physiological shifts allowing us to coordinate leg, torso and arm motions. Better throwing made us better hunters and better fighters, increasing our intake of protein, altering the course of evolution and setting us on the path towards bigger brains and modern Homo sapiens.

In short, throwing is a Big Deal. Being able to project a rock or stick or spear accurately and at high velocity over a long distance was an extremely valuable skill. Human beings were praised for it, taught it, had more children because of it, and the talent and the liking for it was bred into us. Oh, and there appears to be a significant gender gap here, with males not only being able to do it better because they are bigger and stronger, but because there is a neurological component that makes it easier for men to coordinate the complex coordination of leg, torso, and shoulder. In any case, whether via nature or nurture, throwing well became a central part of being a successful man. It made you a good hunter and useful warrior. It got you recognition, status, better mate selection.

The key thing here is that throwing, and throwing well, became something to enjoy for its own sake. It was closely connected to survival and evolutionary advantage, but like many activities (e.g. sex) it became enjoyable for its own sake. It was incorporated into games and sports. It was what boys did when they didn’t have anything else to do—skip rocks, throw snowballs, flip knives into trees.

Over time we added new ways to throw. Spears. Darts. Slings. Bows and arrows. And eventually guns. Guns don’t require the same physical skills as throwing but satisfy the basic urge to project something and hit a target quickly, accurately, at a distance.

We still highly value a good thrower. We pay pitchers and quarterbacks a heck of a lot of money. Most of our popular sports involve some type of accurate throwing to hit a target—baseball, football, basketball, tennis, lacrosse.  Soccer does it with kicking but the core objective—projecting a ball quickly and accurately—is the same. What video game doesn’t make shooting or throwing of some kind a central feature?

And so too with guns. Someone who is good with a gun is praised for having a valuable skill. Like a good accurate throw, a good accurate shot just feels…fun. Satisfying. People admire it, identify with it. And while throwing a baseball or spear is hard and difficult for many people to do well, shooting is a lot easier and can potentially be taken up by more people.

So there is a very strong biological, evolution-based desire for the gun industry to build on. Yes, there are other drivers too, for safety or power or as a symbol of freedom or whatever. But all these ride, it seems to me, on the underlying satisfaction and enjoyment people get from throwing. And it’s easy for a firearms company to make a gun more ‘fun’ by emphasizing that it’s faster (assault rifles have much higher muzzle velocity than handguns), or shoots more quickly, or is more accurate, or projects something bigger and heavier—any of the basic components of satisfying throwing.

Does this make shooting a potentially ‘addictive’ behavior? There certainly does seem to be an irrational attachment to shooting and guns by their most fervent defenders, a good sign that we are dealing with an instinctive drive that can turn addictive.

Of course this doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t regulate guns. People have plenty of other outlets for their throwing needs, and we could easily accommodate the use of guns of different kinds at licensed ranges. If we recognize and deal with the connection to throwing, we have a better chance of crafting arguments and policies that all of us can live with.

How to Think About Guns

(I wrote this initially after the mass shooting at Sutherland Springs, Texas in November, but it applies just as much after yesterday’s Parkland school shooting in Florida, AND THE MAY 24 ELEMENTARY SCHOOL SHOOTING IN UVALDE, TEXAS).

After the latest mass killing in America, in Texas, at a tiny church in the middle of nowhere, in a town that loves its guns and still loves them–another demonstration to us all, as though another demonstration was needed, that we human beings are made of some kind of special steel that is impervious to evidence and logic and heartache—after this bloodbath we were inundated, again, with calls to treat the perpetrator’s mental condition, or fix the loopholes that kept him from being listed as a child-abuser and on a no-buy list for guns. From the Attorney General of Texas, no less, we heard once again the astonishing truism that ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people.’

I say truth because it is, of course, undeniable. Human beings are the problem. On this we can all agree. If we can fix the human problem, it would be safe for us to have guns. If we can keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill, we will be safer. If we can keep guns out of the hands of all the people who lose their tempers, who get road rage, who envy their neighbor’s shiny new car or hate the way they keep their yard; all the people who drink too much at parties, or use opioids or meth or coke; the ones who take anti-depressants and lithium, and the ones who throw them away; all the people who get jealous at their girlfriends and boyfriends, who want to dominate a spouse or a date; all the people consumed by lust, who think ‘no’ means ‘yes’; all those obsessed by power and needing praise and validation; every young man on the streets with too much testosterone; everyone who’s careless and forgets to put dangerous things away or lock them up; everyone who’s lost their job, had a bad boss, got passed over, seen their dreams go up in smoke; all the daredevils, the risk-takers, the ones who think they’re invulnerable; all the rich people who feel entitled and can’t imagine anything bad happening to them, and the poor who don’t expect anything but the bad; all the stupid people, the confused, the baffled, the frustrated; all the power-hungry ideologues and the people in thrall to their conspiracy theories and lies; everyone who’s been traumatized and has PTSD; all the ones left behind, lying in the dust, and those who put them there.

Yes, if we can keep guns out of the hands of these dangerous folks, we’ll be safe.

Raise your hand if you’re a candidate for sainthood. Look to the left, look to the right, look in the mirror. Not too many hands up.

I’m a good person, you’re thinking. I would never hurt anyone except in self-defense, never use my gun dangerously. I haven’t done drugs, committed any crimes, threatened anyone.

Good for you. But…never? NEVER?? No one knows themselves that well.

We aren’t able to predict who is going to be the next killer. What do people always say, afterwards: “He seemed like such a nice guy.” “I would never have imagined he would do anything like that.” Here’s the thing—people change. People snap. Stuff happens to them, or in them, that no one else can see. There are no signs, or only ones that can be interpreted correctly after the fact. Look at the Las Vegas killer. No one saw him coming. No criminal record. We still don’t know ‘why’ he did it. All we know, in retrospect, is that he spent a lot of his time and money collecting guns and training with them.

I’m not just talking about mass killings. Those are awful but relatively rare. We have zero ability to find those people ahead of time and put them on some no-buy list. And these are usually determined people who are not deterred by easy-to-get-around restrictions. No, I’m talking about all the day-to-day, mundane stuff. The botched robbery. The wife-battering husband. The street-level gang-banger. The depressed teenager. All the killings that add up to over 11,000 homicides by gun in 2014. To a US homicide rate 7 times higher than the average for other developed countries, and a gun homicide rate over 25 times higher. To over 20,000 suicides every year, from guns.

We have a shitload of guns floating around in the hands of virtually everyone. In the hands of all of us with all of our frailties, all of our selfishness and anger and stupidity. Technology has made these weapons cheaper and cheaper, and more and more lethal. To make it worse, we live in a consumer driven society where amoral companies compete to develop and sell us the coolest, most effective, do-the-most-damage-in-the-least-amount-of-time toys. Other amoral companies compete to glorify gun violence in movies, TV, music, and video games. All this is insane and suicidal. Any society would suffer if it imitated this. But it’s only part of the story.

Let’s be serious for once. We have a problem that won’t be solved by restricting bump stocks or assault rifles or gun-show loopholes with all those ‘common-sense’ laws we hear about. Gun advocates laugh, rightly, at most of these well-meaning but inadequate ideas. They wouldn’t do much. The problem requires solutions commensurate with reality. We have a lot of people who exalt guns and the gun life, who get their meaning and identity largely from guns, who place guns at the center of their world. Fewer and fewer Americans own guns or use them, but those who do are more and more committed. They buy more guns. They care about guns more than anything else in life. This needs to be turned around. And that will take real action and strong laws. It will require a shift like the shifts we’ve seen about smoking and drunk driving, a rejection of a set of attitudes and behaviors that characterize a lot of Americans right now.

Yes, gun enthusiasts, I do mean you. We need to de-legitimize having guns for ‘fun’, collecting guns, seeing guns as signs of manhood and authority, and viewing guns as central to being an American. Protecting your family in your home, yes. Going hunting in the fall, yes. The current pornographic obsession with guns that we see at gun shows, in Hollywood, in the NRA, no.

These cultural shifts can’t be legislated, but laws and public action and statements matter. The de-legitimization needs to start at the top with some bright lines. Registration. Tough restrictions. Buy-backs. Destruction of illegal weapons. Lawsuits against gun manufacturers. Condemnation of cultural products that glorify guns and the gun life. Rolling back open carry laws and prohibiting guns outside the home except in carefully defined circumstances. Courage in the face of inevitable pushback and anger, knowing that the majority of Americans—even conservatives and gun owners—already back many of these measures.

The starting point should be taking back the Second Amendment. One of the gun movements great successes was a deliberate campaign to re-define the historic understanding that connected gun ownership rights to a broad public purpose, maintaining a militia for community self-defense. The Heller Case as articulated by the late Justice Scalia is a travesty of bad scholarship and sophistry. (I suggest you read it and judge for yourself). It needs to be aggressively challenged and questioned. It is not ‘normal,’ and not consistent with most legal scholarship or most Americans understanding of the English language and the meaning of the Constitution. It is now used by gun extremists to justify any type of weapon, to anyone, anywhere. On this issue Americans should never give in, never, never, never. The Constitution is not a suicide pact. It aims at securing us a decent life.

Part of this fight is to knock down the idea that guns in private hands are our protection against bad government. Gun enthusiasts often seem to see themselves as protagonists in the next re-make of “Red Dawn”, taking to the hills with their Bushmasters to fight some shadowy state power. But if modern government does go bad, no number of pop guns will stop the 82nd Airborne or the 1st Armor Division. More to the point, the architects of the Constitution looked to strong states to help check national power, not groups of armed insurrectionists. The inability of the national government to deal with various local rebellions was a major reason to create a stronger structure under the Constitution. The 2nd Amendment is designed to protect state authority by checking the national government from taking away the weapons needed for state militias. (And also to make sure that in slave states, white citizens always had the means to keep slaves under control).

The 2nd Amendment is the only one of the 10 amendments in the Bill of Rights that has an explanatory preamble. The others simply define the rights being protected. That tells us this ‘right’ is something different and needs to be carefully circumscribed.

To the extent 2nd Amendment purists are motivated by genuine arguments, they rest on a deeply flawed understanding of freedom. When advocates are confronted with the undeniable consequences of their stance—the 30,000 gun deaths (and many more injuries) each year, the mass shootings, the degradation of our public space, the huge financial burden (and cost in lives) for police and private security, the humiliating damage to America’s soft power—they tend to shrug. This is the ‘price of freedom,’ as Bill O’Reilly said after the murders in Las Vegas.

The freedom arguments used here focus, as is all too common for modern conservatives, almost exclusively on possible abuses of government power. To be free is to be free of the state. But there is no freedom in practice without states. The drafters of the Bill of Rights were steeped in the arguments of natural rights theorists—Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu. Human beings living with no agreed authority over them, in some version of the ‘state of nature,’ can be argued to have a natural right to defend themselves and preserve their lives (and property, to the extent it is needed for life). But as Hobbes pointed out, this is a life “of all against all”—nasty, brutish, violent, and short. We have plenty of examples of this sort of life today, in Somalia, in Yemen, in Afghanistan, in El Salvador. These are not places with any shortage of guns.

The primordial threats come from our fellow man. It is to ease these that we have government, to protect first of all Life, along with Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. This is the natural right tradition that our Founders lived and breathed. Government cannot take away the right of individual self-defense but it can and must check the rights of individuals to use force or the threat of force to have their way in the world. Human beings are not angels. Self-defense cannot become an excuse for every manner of pre-emption or implied violence. Having and displaying modern firepower and allowing it to be widely available sends a message to your fellow citizens that any and every interaction has the potential to become deadly; that doing or saying anything offensive, even accidentally, may result in lethal violence. It signals that I as an individual, someone you may not know and have no way of knowing, am prepared and willing to take things into my own hands rather than rely on police or courts or designated authorities.

The implied threat from owning modern weapons inhibits free speech and democratic debate. This is especially the case for weapons that a reasonable person would interpret as beyond what is needed for personal defense, e.g. any type of assault rifle, or armor-piercing or extra-lethal rounds, or large clips. The same for carrying any type of gun in public.

“An armed society is a polite society” is another way of saying it is an intimidated society. Arms used to be the monopoly of the ruling elites, who used naked force to keep the lower classes submissive but among themselves relied on codes of honor backed by the threat of duels or vendettas to settle disputes. An elaborate etiquette and courtly language accompanied these norms to avoid giving offense and triggering violence. This is incompatible with a healthy democracy where we need open and unconstrained debate.

Gun enthusiasts who want to make the world safe for guns by identifying potentially dangerous people and not letting them buy guns are heading down a perilous road.  All of us are potentially dangerous.  And in a society saturated with guns, there is no way to keep even a mildly determined person from getting a weapon.  These arguments are not serious.  They are pretexts.

The true believers and 2nd Amendment purists are a minority but a very vocal and determined one, backed by abundant funding from firearms companies. They are in my view committed to a false vision of human nature and human community that violates our fundamental rights to life and liberty, and undermines democracy and individual freedom. This must be checked by the use of political power. People committed to a different agenda have to be elected and then supported in the face of intense blowback. And we must change the debate, going beyond feckless calls for ‘common-sense’ compromises and taking a clear stand against the association of guns with freedom, manliness, fun and the Constitution.

Parades and Infrastructure

Donald Trump wants to hold a big military parade. It makes sense. The military is the most trusted institution in the US, according to polls over many years. So a controversial President might want to identify himself with the military.  He has already larded up his administration with generals.  Certainly there is little payoff in identifying with the government, or Congress, or most other US institutions that have nosedived in popular opinion. The Donald, like a lot of other Americans, looks at our government and dislikes most of it.

Maybe one reason the military stands out is that we no longer try to use government for much else.  It used to be that government led the way on big things that made Americans proud. The Panama Canal. TVA. The interstate highway system. The space program. Social Security, the GI Bill, the Great Society. We don’t do that kind of stuff any more. We have a huge military that bounces around the world–without a whole lot of success, one is forced to add—but is popular partly because there isn’t much else we do as a country.

In Canada and the UK and the Nordic states and a lot of other developed countries, their national healthcare system is tremendously popular—probably the most beloved national institution. It symbolizes something that they do together to share the wealth generated by a successful post-industrial economy.  So do other social programs that offer unemployment benefits and free higher education and family leave. One can argue about the pluses and minuses of each of these programs. But taken together they create a sense of community and shared purpose about what matters for a thriving society.

How do Americans rate our healthcare system? Not so good. It remains astronomically expensive, with mediocre performance that still leaves out a lot of Americans. Obamacare improved it, but it certainly didn’t unite the country behind a shared sense of commitment. Social Security and Medicare are popular, but the rest of our extremely complex and fragmented welfare and safety net programs are often disliked and resented.  The recipients are nickeled and dimed and scapegoated to feel small, while the donors convince themselves they are suckers.  Education costs keep rising and are outside the reach of more and more Americans.  We spend oceans of money on healthcare, education, and welfare, as much or more than the social democracies we like to scorn, but get much less, not just less actual assistance to people in need, but less trust, less sense of common purpose, less of the intangible glue that makes isolated individuals into citizens.

The Donald just floated a plan for an infrastructure program that illustrates his view of government. The idea is to throw out some small sums, a few billion a year, and have them catalyze lots of investment by states and private companies. There is no signature project and even if the idea works (and most think it won’t do much) it will result in projects that are profitable for private investors, meaning it will address only a fraction of the real needs the country faces for fixing the infrastructure we already have. As for building something new and better—high-speed rail like China, or a renewable energy system, or ways to deal with rising sea levels along the Atlantic Coast—that’s not going to happen. Having just triumphantly passed a tax bill that shifts money sharply from government to big companies, there are no resources left.

Think small and short-term and steer benefits to the investor class. Let billionaires and their fancy new foundations handle anything big.  Abroad, advertise our narrow self-interest and leave managing global institutions to China.  That’s the underlying vision.

Without vision the people perish. If the only thing we can agree on is that we love our military and want it to grow and grow and entertain us with parades, we are in serious trouble. Is there nothing else we can muster the will to do collectively to make our country a better place?

A cartoonish version of meritocracy is popular with many conservatives. Newt Gingrich, for instance, during the recent controversy over black athletes kneeling for the national anthem, castigated them on Fox and Friends because they justified it by appealing to the importance of equality and diversity: “All this left wing rhetoric, but the fact is what has made America extraordinary is that we reward winners.” Gingrich argued that rich black athletes are ‘winners’ and invited them to embrace his Darwinian version of America.

The Gingrich view is in fact the opposite of what really makes America extraordinary. “Rewarding winners” is a good definition of the way most of the world has always worked: some set of tough/smart/lucky men win a no-holds-barred, violent, struggle for mastery. They fend off rivals and upstarts. They institutionalize their victory with an army and laws and legitimizing rituals and voila, we have a ruling oligarchy, dressed up as Kings and Queens and courtly aristocrats.  In this society, where the losers are castigated as natural inferiors, a lesser order of human beings, the   Winners rule indefinitely–until taken down by a new set of tougher/smarter/luckier men.

America was meant to be a standing affront to this world. It was meant to be the first society where you didn’t need to be a “winner” to have dignity, to possess rights, to make a decent living, to have a voice in public decisions.  You might gain great wealth and high office, but that wouldn’t mean you were better than other citizens, and it didn’t give you any entrenched privileges or let you pass your status on to your sons and heirs.  You didn’t take power by killing your rivals and their families, and you didn’t keep it by using your immense wealth and power to keep your boot on the neck of every possible challenger.

Our love of the rugged individual is perhaps the American version of original sin. Nurtured by centuries of frontier society, a Protestant emphasis on a one to one relation with God, and the priority placed on individual rights at our founding, it is easily fanned into flame by special interests seeking to hide their pursuit of privileges under the cloak of meritocracy.  Affirmative action is the most common but not the only target. Consider for instance how corporate campaigns against unions play up supposed infringements on individual rights if workers are ‘forced’ to support unions in a closed shop, or how attacks on the Affordable Care Act often start with how the individual mandate violates fundamental freedoms.

In all these cases we are being asked to sacrifice some of our autonomy to achieve a collective good. Americans may claim to ask “What Would Jesus Do,” but often what they really want to know is “What Would John Wayne Do.” Scratch the average American male and you discover that they imagine themselves alone in the saddle, fighting off Injuns and horse-thieves with their trusty Winchester. When this manifests itself as self-reliance, it can be a source of strength and confidence; but it can easily slide into a self-destructive shame at accepting help or acknowledging weakness. When it manifests as winner-take-all selfishness, it corrodes bonds of community and country. The unrestrained love of “winners” leads to the despicable picture of candidate Trump daring to criticize John McCain because he was a ‘loser’ who allowed himself to be captured and made a prisoner of war.

The better image of America is not John Wayne riding off alone into the sunset, but the wagon train:  a community of regular folks working together, sharing, moving forward but leaving no one behind. It is the Statue of Liberty inviting to our shores the tired and poor. It is every Frank Capra movie.  It is rich successful people kneeling to draw attention to those left out of the American story.  There is no room in it for Newt Gingrich.

Dismiss the Past, Dismiss the Future

At church today the sermon was about how we link to the past, in particular our own ancestors. Our minister was eloquent in describing how she reconnected with the story of her grandmother. But we Americans are not especially ancestor-oriented, to put it mildly. Our history and our self-understanding tell us that we are new, that we are not constrained by the past, by what our great-grandparents did. We don’t care if they were poor nobodies. We don’t venerate the ancestral village. We make no offerings to the ancestral gods. Any reasonably self-aware American who spends time abroad—in Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, almost anywhere else—quickly realizes that for most peoples, the past, in the form of family and culture, is powerful and alive in a way that it just isn’t for most Americans.

This can be a real source of strength. We absorb immigrants and newcomers readily; we re-invent ourselves and start anew; we are not imprisoned by old customs and fears and prejudices.

But there are some huge dangers as well. A people that doesn’t care to be molded by the past may end up ignorant of it, and molded without knowing. Today’s debates about race, for instance, suffer from a terrible ignorance and selective forgetting. “Why dredge all that stuff up?” is a common complaint, at least from those who would be made uncomfortable by remembering.

To care about your ancestors and the story of your family, your community, your country, is to make them no longer past but part of the present. It is to see yourself as part of something greater than the individual you, something that shaped you and that you have a responsibility to pass on. If this sense of connection is weak, it’s easy to believe that everything you are is your own doing. And it is hard to sustain a sense of responsibility for the people who will come after you.

A prickly individualism that denies the shaping power of outside forces easily denies the duty to give back. Debates today about taxes and public spending often pit those who see all such demands as suspect, as taking from successful people to give to the less deserving, against those who stress that no one is successful alone and we all depend on public institutions that work for the common good. When President Obama said “if you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that,” his point was not to denigrate individual effort but to remind entrepreneurs that they are embedded in a country and society that helped them succeed.

Maybe more importantly, this mindset makes it hard to feel responsible for the future. We pay lip service to thinking about our children and grandchildren. But public policy to meet longterm challenges, like climate change and failing infrastructure and marginalized minorities, suffers when we are not habituated to think of ourselves as part of this greater multi-generational enterprise. Our decisions have consequences beyond the next election cycle, the next up and down of the markets. The rational-choice framework that undergirds our individualism has a hard time offering good reasons why we should care about generations yet to come.

Tocqueville ends Democracy in America by telling us “I go back from age to age up to the remotest antiquity, but I find no parallel to what is occurring before my eyes; as the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man now wanders in obscurity.”  This is exhilarating but also frightening.  Two hundred years later, it is essential for us to connect more naturally and normally to the past.

Caring too much about the past can be dysfunctional. But an appropriate and measured regard for our past may be the only way that we humans can connect ourselves to the future. And that is not dysfunctional, it is vital and necessary.