aurora

Ta-Nehisi Coates is probably my favorite writer working right now, and with regards to the massacre in Aurora, CO (where, weirdly, I used to live when I was about 4 years old), he wrote this, in response to the argument that an armed audience member could have decreased the casualty rate:

It's worth considering the wisdom of waging a shoot-out in a crowded theater with a mad-man in body-armor. More than that, we should consider the import of the the argument's implication--a fully, and heavily, armed citizenry. If we all are going to agree to be armed, surely I don't want my arms to be inferior to the arms of my potential adversaries--a category including virtually any other citizen. The Aurora shooter was evidently in full body-armor. I need to upgrade to hand-grenades. And so we arrive at a kind of personal arms race, and we arrive at a world with minimal trust in the state's ability to deploy violence on our behalf--a distrust of the authorities whom we pay to protect us, a cynicism which says those authorities are beyond reform, and that only through this personal arms race, can a person sleep at night.

And too we are left with the deeply held belief that, somehow, we can always outgun those who would do us harm, or at least our end can come at the place of our choosing. Now we are cousined to immortality. Now we are chin-level with our various Gods.

It's worth considering what we mean by a safer society, and whether it can be secured through a cold war of all against all. It's worth asking if the world really needs more George Zimmermans.

there's a kind of circular logic to the pro-gun argument: there are guns, therefore my enemy may have guns, therefore i must have guns, therefore we must have guns, therefore my enemy may have guns, etc. it's an unbreakable circuit.

guns are for shooting other people. as long as they're manufactured and sold here, people will be shot and killed here with them. this is indisputible. as i mentioned several posts ago, those numbers are around 10,000 per year in the united states. i'm extremely unimpressed by the "freedom" argument in favor of owning firearms; if you're a gunowner, your freedom to carry that gun comes at the cost of 10,000 of your fellow citizens surrendering their freedom in the most permanent possible way. if we're talking about shopkeepers, or people working in dangerous occupations (bounty hunters, say), the gun is obviously a tool that one hopes to never have to use. on the other side of the spectrum, as TNC pointed out, there are the George Zimmermans.

perhaps I'm safe from being accidentally targeted by the likes of Zimmerman. i'm white. but i'm not asshole enough to believe i'm the only person in this country affected by these laws. if i were a black man, and i saw this, i'd feel threatened. maybe buying a gun would help me feel less so. maybe I'd start to see Zimmermans everywhere, and chase one down with my new gun, if he looked threatening to me.

i'm not sure how or why this all started, but i'm pretty sure how it ends.

forces

I've been thinking about goals lately, and not in terms of accomplishments or possessions or any of the other usual list items.

The more I question myself about what it is I really "want" and what makes me feel "fulfilled" the more I am aware of my obsession with understanding the world around me. This is a lifelong thirst and can never possibly be quenched. Which is good, actually. It's the kind of "reason for being" that will always be there to get me up in the morning, a mountain whose peak I can never reach or even see (and if you think I'm mixing metaphors now, just you wait).

Speficially, I want to understand the forces that capture us, that shape our lives and our destinies - historical forces, social forces, economic forces, political forces, genetic and evolutionary forces, astronomical forces, quantum forces...it's as if we're all born caught in a vast, multidimensional web of innumerable invisible forces that bind reality together and propel it forward, and we spend our lives desperately trying to learn the contours of one or two of these invisible forces, like walking tightropes while blindfolded, except the ropes are constantly shifting, the patterns and pitfalls continually making fools of us as they rearrange themselves so that what is sure footing one day becomes treacherous the next. History repeats itself, until it doesn't. People behave a certain way, until they don't. This political party is fighting for me, until it's against me. One day it's atoms, the next it's vibrating strings. Genes are selfish, or do they cooperate? Remember where the rope was yesterday, but keep your step light or risk falling off completely.

I'm seduced by the idea that there are deeper patterns, though, than are dreamt of in our current philosophies. Perhaps as we collect still vaster amounts of data, the larger, intersecting networks will begin to emerge. I'm not sure if we are learning more or just forgetting less, but we have more wealth of observation, and tools for recording data, than previous generations could begin to fathom. More data in the past ten years than in the previous 4.3 billion. What are the possibilities? What could all this data lead us to understand about these forces? Is everything quantifiable? Not just nature, but history? Human behavior? Society? Love? Hate? Can we amass enough data, and quantify enough of these forces, that we would be capable of predicting or even replicating our whole reality all over again based on the right equations, even down to the last neutrino, in a way that encompasses everything from the empire state building to the inevitability of me kissing my wife for the first time on 51st street? I hope so. The optimist in me dreams that there's a sort of clockwork to it all, and I want to someday catch a glimpse of it.

externalities

we are built to believe. without beliefs, we have no guide for how to behave, what to hope for, who to trust. there's nothing we can do to avoid believing in one thing or another; it's impossible to make our way through the world without forming some opinion of the place.

what's more - we admire belief in one's beliefs. to be true to our beliefs is a virtue: "maybe i disagree with him, but i admire him for standing up for his beliefs," is a commonly expressed sentiment; i'm sure i've said it, and thought it, more times than i care to remember. to assure ourselves of the value of our own beliefs, we often point to great historical believers, whose sturdiness of belief was the fulcrum on which history turned - martin luther king, for example. see, we say: there is a man who stood for his beliefs in the face of violence, hatred and even death, and his belief in his own beliefs changed the world.

i'm not sure that this is a choice. we appear to be wired to cling to our beliefs, perhaps as an evolutionary tactic to foster tribal unity, or perhaps for some other reason. and for every inspiring historical example of the triumph of belief, there are a dozen tragedies of beliefs gone berserk that we'd rather not mention. if dr. king was standing strong for his beliefs, so was lester maddox.

a strange thing happens when one of our beliefs -- or even worse our entire "belief system" -- is contradicted. rather than revising our belief to fit reality, our instinct is to ignore reality to preserve the belief. if history is any guide, we are prepared to do great harm to one another to ensure our beliefs are not challenged. we will lie and cheat, destroying or obscuring any evidence that disproves our belief, or willfully propagandizing in favor of beliefs which have been shown to be erroneous. we will shun members of our community and even our own family whose actions, or whose very existence, contradicts our beliefs. we are not merely prepared to die for our beliefs, but to kill for them, to wreak vengence upon those who commit the unforgiveable sin of believing something other than what we believe.

in the economics game, they have a Rumsfeldian word for an event in which any outside person is affected by an agreement to which he or she was not a party: an "externality". for example, if i take your money to let you dump nuclear waste on my property, and my neighbor's cattle all die of radiation poisoning, that neighbor's loss of property is an externality, an unintended (but possibly inevitable) consequence of our contract with which he had no involvement. once you start looking, you can find externalities everywhere - victims of secondhand smoke contracting fatal illnesses, teachers being laid off because of reduced tax revenue which was the result of a financial crisis caused by overleveraged banks, and of course, the phenomenon of global warming, which is perhaps the mother of all externalities.

beliefs often have externalities as well, even the ones which superficially appear abstract. in my home state of texas, for example, many residents have a fanatical devotion to their right to purchase and own any firearm of any caliber and function, as a matter of principle. it's clear that there are externalities to this belief; tens of thousands of people die each year as a result of our resistance to stricter regulation of firearms, and everyone who supports unlimited gun rights is forced to make the moral calculus that their right to purchase and own any and every gun currently in existence is of greater import than these thousands of lives lost. (occasionally, this crowd will attempt to provide a moral justification for this in the form of an argument that more gun ownership reduces crime and therefore saves lives, but numerous independent studies have shown this argument to be bunk.)

similarly, the conservative stance against universal health care (or, if you prefer, "socialized medicine") in america reflects a willingness to let 45,000 people die annually (nearly half of them children) as an externality to this seemingly abstract principle.

this is not to say that principles are not sometimes worth making sacrifices for; i have no doubt that my good friends in texas who support unlimited gun rights are comfortable in their belief that tens of thousands of annual deaths is a small price to pay for their freedom to buy and own any weapon of any caliber, regardless of the effect on crime rates. and i only bring up the gun rights debate as an illustration of a larger point; our society is full of these sorts of trade-offs, where a little more liberty for me results in a little more suffering for someone else. these are complicated issues. we restrict the freedom of business owners to discriminate against black people because it collides with the freedom of those same black people to get a fair deal in the marketplace. many business owners (such as the aforementioned mr. maddox) feel that is a bridge too far, and that their property rights supercede the rights of their fellow citizens to be treated fairly. there are externalities on either side. what becomes dangerous, though, is when an unwillingness to challenge core beliefs shuts down the conversation and we commence the battle royal.

i recently read that liberalism (in the 18th century/Locke/Enlightenment sense) is a philosophy of unilateral disarmament in the face of intractable differences. which, i suppose, is my point. each of us has our own history and our own set of lessons that we draw from that history, but none of us can see the entire picture. if we're to continue to live in a society side by side with one another, compromise, rather than total fidelity to one's personal worldview, is required. our beliefs must always be tempered by a healthy skepticism and a willingness to evolve when those beliefs interact with someone else's reality.