Civil Society

We are all limited. We all express ourselves in ways that reveal those limitations (not always where they are flattering to us or other people). So we are all bigots. But we don't have to be uncivil about this. We can learn to express ourselves in ways that pointedly leave room for valid alternatives.

We can be aware that others are not like us, that being like us does not make one a good person, that it is possible to hate us and still be an exemplary human being. We should aim to inspire our opposition to be better than we are by acknowledging that they might be. Heterosexuals who dislike homosexuality (as something they might do or "condone" or whatever) should deliberately make room for gay marriage to exist (and fail on its own merits or lack thereof, if it must fail). Christians who dislike Islam should pointedly refrain from banning its practice, instead giving it room to "do its best" (not worst) by deliberately keeping the level of social discourse high (avoiding the temptation to sling insults and/or bombs). A bad enemy becomes good when he has to model civil behavior to engage you (i.e. elicit a meaningful response). If so-called "freedom fighters" went around doing voluntary business with "oppressed" people in ways that benefited them, this would be (and is) a much more effective means of persuasion (and improving social discourse) than "shock and awe" (which creates more negative blowback than positive compliance, and solidifies the idea that a conflict must be pursued by means that are uncivil).

People make and respond to signals. They cannot help it. The most we can do to influence the process is alter our signals, broadcasting invitations whose outcomes appear better to us (for some reason). Unfortunately, many of us become hooked early-on to the rewards of signalling anger violently (or dismissively). While this kind of signalling inevitably has its place (as something necessary in the human collection of signals), over-cultivating it is disastrous (especially when we move away from small societies with primitive arms into large societies with WMDs). In the latter situation, we want to inspire discord that is constructive (even and especially when parties involved are hostile): we cannot afford to be violently angry (responding to every "terrorist attack" with a counterstrike that escalates the destruction of civil society, at home as abroad). We must de-escalate the conflict by changing its terms, making it a contest to win people over (as grudging allies or neutrals) rather than a race to see who is annihilated first.

The really civilized person recognizes that there are limits to what we can do to defend civil society with dismissive, aggressive imposition (verbal or physical, legal or illegal). If we have to wage total war to save it, that society is already lost: it is no longer civil. Its security does not matter, since it no longer represents something worth securing. It has become nothing more than a giant collection of dynamite wired with what we hope is a really, really long fuse.

We should look for excuses not to intervene. We should absolutely not try to "defend marriage" (or family or virtue or modesty or charity or honor or patriotism or some other seeming public good) by imposing our view of it on others against their will. We should resort to violent imposition in extremis only (e.g. when somebody attacks and we are in process of stopping them from crashing planes into buildings), and our response should be as brief and un-impactful as possible. Minimizing security should be the ideal, not maximizing it. We should openly warn people that the best way to "defend" their way of life (whatever that is) is to practice it peacefully, non-confrontationally, and contentedly: I should not make my happiness require you to embrace it where it is not yours. I should give you space to be yourself, a self that is not me. If you want to wear a burkha, fine. I must be OK with that, and you must respect my decision not to wear one. There is not "one true national dress" that we must all accept. There should not be. Anyone who proposes such a thing endangers civil society more than he protects it--and must be resisted (peacefully, of course).

Wu Wei (無為)

If all culture is poison, as I have come to believe, then it is also to some degree healthy.  This is true even of the most awful culture anyone can imagine.  Health is a matter of dosage, not substance.  From this it follows that the most dangerous poison in my life is the one that appears to do no harm.

When I first experienced my faith crisis, there were many contributing factors.  One of them was the terrible shame I felt as a result of contemporary Mormon teachings about sexuality.  As a young man experiencing puberty in the LDS church, I felt that my existence as a sexual being made me inherently evil.  Every time something occurred to remind me of sex, I felt evil, and there was nothing I could do to escape the horror of my own judgement (a judgement that I found confirmed by Mormon leaders, rightly or wrongly, on purpose or not: it doesn't matter).  I was wounded a great deal by my experience with puberty, and the church did thrust some daggers in those wounds, causing them to fester.  This is my story.

Moving out into the world, I meet people with stories like mine, people broken by some toxic encounter with culture.  Occasionally, we victims like to imagine a world in which our personal monsters don't really exist--a world in which no young man is ever ashamed of his sexuality (in my case), a world in which authority is never abused, a world in which perfect justice is something impossibly good rather than awfully evil.  The older I get, the less I believe in the utility of such imagination.

The reality of life is that something will always hurt you.  Something will break you.  Something will kill you.  And no matter who tells you otherwise, there is no silver bullet.  There is no Fountain of Youth, no panacea for human suffering that will make it all vanish or reduce it all to something universally benign (let alone pleasant).  Life is hell.  The trick is not to deny this reality, not to escape it, but to meet it head-on in the best manner possible.  If heaven is a place where nobody gets hurt and nothing goes wrong and it does not matter what you do, then heaven does not exist.  To the extent that I am serious about engaging with the world as it actually exists, I must give it up.  I must make hell minimally painful rather than try to replace it with something else impossibly pleasant.

The problem with people who are hurt (people like me), is that we see only what hurt us.  We don't see how what hurt us helps someone else.  We don't see how banning the drug we OD'ed on will not improve universal human health.  We see life narrowly, generalizing from our own experience naively into the experience of others (who are not like us, not even when they appear to be so).

I cannot tell you how to live.  I cannot tell you how to meet the unique and personal hell that you will face in your existence.  I can support you.  I can be a resource for you.  I can offer sympathy and respect.  But more than that would be immoral--harmful to both of us.

Back to sex.  What saved me in the end from the crippling weight of my own judgement was not a sudden lift in universal human sexual taboos.  People continue to have sex today the same ways they have for eons: my story was never about them.  What saved me was meeting people who supported me, people to whom I was not ashamed to bare my soul.  As long as there are people like this somewhere, people like me will be fine: we just need to find the healers.  We don't need to make everyone practice the same kind of medicine.  We don't need to ban sexual shame, no matter what harm it has done us. How could we?  My shame was interior and autonomous.  The LDS church did not put it there.  Its mistake was to treat me with a generic soul-medicine against which I experienced a severe allergic reaction.  Some people need the kind of medicine that the church practices.  Some people need external shame (lacking the kind of massive internal inhibition that I have, not because I am better than anyone else, but because I am me).  Shutting down the social therapists that dispense external shame will not fix the world; a few guys like me might feel a bit better (for a while), but other guys out there will be suffering for lack of the shame they can no longer find.  My life is not worth more than theirs.  My suffering is not worth more.  They have the same claim to health that I have, and we cannot live by the same lights: our health is not the same.

The ultimate lesson I take away from my experience is that I cannot speak for other people.  I cannot tell them how to be happy.  I cannot pretend to design a single regimen for human life that will "maximize utility" (to borrow the convenient expression) for all and sundry with more benefits than deficits.  I don't believe that this "single regimen" exists (anywhere).  There is not one good way of life.  There cannot be.  All attempts to build and enforce such uniformity end up being more evil than good, hurting more than they help.

This means that people have to be wary.  We have to mistrust others and ourselves.  We have to diversify.  Never trust one institution or regimen with all your soul.  Don't worship one god.  Don't attend one support-group.  Don't bet on one stock, one company, one government.  Don't depend on a single career.  Within whatever career you have at the moment, don't depend on a single path to get the results you want.  Be redundant.  Be inefficient.  Doubt everything.  Don't be quick to identify yourself positively with any group or group ideology, even if you like it.  Be yourself.  Have multiple friends, but not too many, and never burden any of them with more trust than they can bear.  Own yourself (including the reality that you have no concrete self, no permanent essence that persists through all the various permutations other people call "you").  Know your limits, and don't let yourself think you can transcend them.  Don't make others dependent on you.  If you must be a leader for some reason, ditch that role as soon as you can (especially if you are successful at it: success attracts people to court ruin, their own and that of others).  Don't hate the things that hurt you (even when they hurt you really badly, even when you have to defend yourself by attacking them head-on).

Be hard like water: hard enough to break rocks, but not so hard that they break you.

If I Were Prophet

I do not envy the LDS General Authorities their position in society, at all.  But that doesn't mean that I have no interest in what they do.  As someone who grew up Mormon and still sees much to admire (and learn from) in the body of culture we point to with words like Mormonism, I cannot help having my own ideas of what the LDS church should (or perhaps better could) do to improve its positive impact on the world.

My ideas here are not a serious call to repentance, a demand that the church offer reparations for whatever ill I have seen it causing myself or other people.  This post is not the place for that, and to be honest, I see the utility of that kind of rhetorical posture as fundamentally limited.  I have probably already gotten all the rise I am going to get out of the church with my personal angst (expressed elsewhere on this blog).  I am utterly at peace with that.

This post is a free gift from me to the Mormonism I loved (and to some degree still love and will always love).  You don't demand that someone accept such a gift.  You offer it on her doorstep and let her do whatever she wants with it.  I will not be offended if this gift is wholly ignored.  But I could not rest easy until I put it out there, available to my Mormonism, even if she never has time or interest to look at it.  I love the LDS church, even if she no longer loves me (as a heretic who drinks coffee and doubts the truth of many assertions emanating from modern prophets, seers, and revelators--not because they are terrible monsters, but because my experience reveals them to be wrong).  So, with that prelude out of the way, let's get down to business.

(1) Theology and Teaching.  I put these issues front and center here because they have become the heart and soul of modern institutional Mormonism.  We meet on Sundays to learn and discuss theology.  We attend seminary for the same reason.  We go on missions to preach it to the world.  We search the scriptures to find it there.  We go to General Conference to get it from General Authorities, including our own modern Moses--the man who wears the mantle of authority that once graced the shoulders of Brigham Young.  When people want to know what Mormons are all about, we immediately start talking theology (eternal families, love, service, Christ as a redeemer making these things continually possible in a world that seems to obstruct or prevent their appearance in particular instances).

Like many believers in many historical religions, we Mormons are obsessed with theology.  This does not mean that we have coherent theology.  In fact, my experience with Mormonism and other theological religions (e.g. other forms of Protestantism, Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism) leads me to conclude that Mormons are definitely more lax about theology than many (even most) other people.  For us, "official doctrine" is whatever Moses or any of his myriad representatives happens to be saying at the moment--with the caveat that future events might prove this doctrine to be fallacious (and thus no longer true or official, at least not in an absolute sense).  We don't have strict schools of thought who develop rigorous, logical systems shoe-horning the world into a series of rational categories to which reason and faith together demand absolute adherence.  There are no Mormon Thomists--no Mormon theologians in the tradition of medieval scholastic Catholicism (to cite one example).  This does not mean that individual Mormon authorities don't try to affect strict theological rhetoric (speaking Mormon with a kind of scholastic Catholic accent): the late Bruce R. McConkie is a notable example of this; the incoherence of his work speaks for itself, I think--and good Mormon that he was, he completely reversed his positions when unforeseen historical developments made them patently untenable (viz. his about-face on the Mormon doctrine of Cain's curse).  

Right now, LDS Mormonism struggles to pull theological coherence from an historical tradition founded on incoherence.  Early Mormons disagreed on theology all the time.  Joseph Smith contradicted himself repeatedly and significantly throughout his career as prophet--embracing Trinitarianism in the Book of Mormon, throwing it away in Nauvoo; rejecting polygamy in the Book of Mormon, embracing it in Nauvoo; affirming individual liberty in his campaign for president of the USA, denying it to the editors of the Expositor as mayor of Nauvoo; etc.  Brigham Young and Orson Pratt disagreed profoundly on serious doctrinal matters (e.g. what is the Holy Ghost?).  They aired their disagreements publicly, in speeches and publications, without killing Mormonism as something vital (to both of them and to the communities where they participated).  In our own time, prominent Mormons continue to disagree profoundly (though they have become less willing to let us see that disagreement, preferring to hide behind a facade of unity for reasons that I find misguided).

In our day, Mormonism is largely a matter of doctrine.  The doctrine taught is incoherent, especially for those with any experience doing rigorous theology outside Mormonism (e.g. converts with a serious background in the intellectual traditions that exist in faiths like Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity, or Buddhism).  The current regime demands that we sweep this incoherence under the rug, "putting it on the shelf" for solution in the next life (or whatever).  I think this approach is fundamentally self-defeating.  I think it impoverishes Mormonism unnecessarily, stifling our ability to relate meaningfully to fellow Saints and the world outside our culture.  Instead of hiding our theological incoherence as some kind of sin to be ashamed of, we should embrace it in the tradition of our Mormon ancestors.  We should admit out loud, in public, that there is no such thing as official Mormon doctrine, that individual Mormons are responsible to learn and articulate for themselves the messages that the Spirit of God may communicate to them.  This does not have to destroy the ability of our communities to function usefully.  It will require us to change the way we do some things, however.  I have some suggestions.

In a world where there exists no fixed doctrine, order in the community has to be founded on something other than the Spirit (which can move your neighbor to inveigh against homosexuals while it moves you to do the opposite).  People have to develop their own ideas about morality, and then they have to learn how to share those ideas respectfully with other people--even when other people disagree with them profoundly (as Brigham Young disagreed with Orson Pratt).  How do we train that?  How do we make that happen in a way that enriches everyone?  I think Mormons could do this very well, in a way that would enrich all our experience (though it might cause us some discomfort sometimes, too: that is the price of dealing honestly with other people; sometimes, one feels "offended").  My suggestion is that we replace the three-hour block of Sunday meetings with a single, one-hour sacrament meeting.  After the sacrament, an ordinance that I am not interested in changing (except to put a word in to support finding roles for young women to play alongside young men--note that this does not necessarily require granting women the priesthood), the ward will hear two talks.  One talk will be offered as a positive discussion of some virtue or ordinance or aspect of the Mormon gospel, and the other will be offered--as a matter of course--as a rebuttal (a refutation or correction or caveat directed at the talk that preceded it).  Ideally, the rebuttal will be polite (avoiding insult and/or the temptation to call the first speaker out as some kind of deviant: the assumption should be that we are all friends, and that friends disagree sometimes in ways that it is useful to explore through discourse).  While this approach will definitely make many people uncomfortable at times, I think it will offer more positive results than negative.  I think it will teach Mormons to value their incoherence (a trait that is not going away any time soon) as something useful (as I think it is).  At the very least, it will definitely make sacrament meetings more interesting.

Note that I don't think anyone's personal testimony should be denied expression in this venue.  People should feel free to get up in front of the congregation and say, for example, that they believe homosexuality to be a sin.  All I am requiring is that every such assertion find a counterpoint.  This needn't require people to adopt positions they don't hold: if I personally feel that homosexuality is a sin but circumstances require me to stand up and "refute" a brother who has just articulated my view, then I will talk about how someone faithful might disagree with both of us--or I will look for ways in which I think the first speaker spoke too harshly; maybe I will end up saying that while I agree with his feeling, I think there are better ways of making peace with people who feel differently than what my brother recommended in his talk.  I offer this purely by way of example, for the record.  I personally have no problem with homosexuality.  But I also have no problem with people who disagree with me outspokenly--until they think that their opinion should be spoken and mine silenced.

(2) Priesthood and/or Authority.  Reframing the way Mormons talk about their theological incoherence necessarily raises the question of authority in the community.  What standing does authority have in Mormonism as I imagine it?  What is priesthood?  Some people think of these things (authority, priesthood) as static, eternal realities that never change.  While that is a perfectly fine theological notion for you to hold and me to disagree with, I don't think it can be used to create a good community.  A good community requires honesty and openness.  It also requires a degree of parity between participants.  People need to have their innate abilities and contributions validated in meaningful ways (ways that are not obviously artificial).

Right now, LDS General Authorities find themselves out of their depth (it seems to me).  They are not theologians.  They don't see angels (any more).  They don't agree with one another about what the church is or what it should do.  And the church has outgrown their ability to direct it, whether individually or collectively (it seems to me).  Recent events (e.g. the construction of the City Creek Mall, the mass apostasies in the Philippines and South America) demonstrate that the LDS church is a strong regional organization (centered in the Old West, i.e. Brigham Young's state of Deseret) and a weak international one.  My own experience confirms that Mormon culture is markedly different in Deseret than outside it.  I grew up in "the mission field" (i.e. outside Deseret) and then served a mission with Deseretians and lived in Utah for four years while attending BYU.  Before my sojourn among the Deseret Mormons, there were things about Mormon culture I was completely unaware of (e.g. the fact that there is no such thing as "thoughtful dissent" in Deseret; in my "mission-field" Mormonism was a lot more about being a responsible free agent and a lot less about following the prophet, whose words often didn't say much to us outsiders that wasn't harmlessly generic--e.g. "stand for something you believe in").

Mormonism raised me to be independent, to seek personal revelation, to doubt creeds (my own and everybody else's), to pursue knowledge but never to find it.  She raised me this way, then sent me on a mission where she demanded the complete opposite: I put on the missionary badge and suddenly Mormonism was all about conformity, passing every meaningful decision to some external authority, accepting creeds from priesthood leaders without question, and recognizing that all meaningful knowledge was restored by Joseph Smith (not the Joseph Smith I was encountering in my own study of history--a crazy maverick who couldn't hold a thought without contradicting it--but a cardboard model of moral perfection whose ideas were reduced to safe moral platitudes from self-help books written by American salesmen in love with the 1950s).  My mission presidents weren't bad guys, at all, and they did their best to run my (now-defunct) European mission following the program given to them by their priesthood leaders.  Unfortunately, those leaders were completely out of touch with reality--their own history as Mormons and the history of the people I was supposed to convert to the Mormon gospel.

The out-of-touchness that emanates from the high places of Deseret is not really a moral failing.  It makes perfect sense to me that a bunch of well-meaning businessmen with a very inward-looking culture should be out of touch with ideological reality on the street in northern Spain.  I would expect them to be out of touch.  Solving this "problem" is not a matter of getting i-Pads for the brethren or broadcasting their talks to chapels via the latest communications technology.  The LDS church is really good at technical solutions to cultural distance, in my experience--and conversely awful at human solutions.  My mission was a long series of bungling failures to connect.  The few times I made real human connections, I did so by explicitly ignoring my instructions from church leaders and simply "following my gut" (i.e. the Spirit) wherever it led.  I opened myself up to people, inviting them to share a bit of their story with me in exchange for a bit of mine.  And we connected.  We didn't convert on the spot.  I didn't walk away Catholic or Pentecostal or atheist, and they didn't walk away Mormon.  But we talked.  We shared something.  We saw each other as human beings, human beings with dignity and mutual respect and ideas about life whose utility didn't depend on adherence to any particular creed.

My good mission experiences were not about proselytizing (which in my experience is a colossal waste of time and resources, even if your goal is explicitly to get as many committed converts as possible--which mine isn't, just to tip my hand).  In my experience, proselytizing is junk (a bad approach to building meaningful human relationships), and it produces junk (dysfunctional relationships).  Real mission work is about doing what Ammon does in the Book of Mormon--making yourself available to people as a friend, a peer, and a servant.  "What do you care about?" the real missionary asks.  "What do you love?  Show me, so that I can help you tend it.  I care about your little garden of moral goodness.  I want to help you make it a better place--not by rearranging it to look just like mine, but by putting into it the things you want to put in.  You can come look at my life for ideas, if you like, but don't see it as a model for yours.  We are all different, and I respect your difference.  I love it."  If I were prophet, no member of the LDS church would ever serve a proselytizing mission ever again.  Missions would be all about offering service and/or doing real work (for compensation: maybe some missionaries could put in voluntary hours with local or church-owned businesses learning and practicing trades for the benefit of surrounding communities?).  Multi-level marketing sucks, even when you use it to offer people the gospel of Christ.  Pimping Mormonism in this fashion just makes the body of Christ into a harlot (and breaks my heart, honestly: I get really sad when I think about all the time I spent tracting in northern Spain).

But I keep on getting distracted from the real question: what are we to do with priesthood and authority in a Mormonism where anybody can be inspired to do or say anything?  To me it seems that we need to move toward a place where individual members of the church take more responsibility for their own moral agency (where it is good and where it is bad) and give less deference to authorities (thereby relieving the latter of an all-but-unbearable burden).  We cannot expect the Apostles to resign all at once or deny their calling--nor would I advocate for that happening ever, at all.  But it would be good if members stopped having unreal expectations of General Authorities, including Apostles.  It would be good if the Apostles could publicly renounce the lie that they are all agreed about Mormon doctrine, and then go even farther and renounce any pretense to define doctrine for the church (ever).  Ideally, in my mind, the Apostles should retreat from the position of "spokesmen to the entire world" which history has thrust upon them.  Instead, they should be spokesmen for Deseret (as they already are--that is where they do the most good, in terms of creating opportunities for individuals to better themselves freely).  They should make their financial stake in Deseret explicit (opening the books so that tithe-payers see precisely where their contributions go), and exercise their authority most only as CEOs of Deseret's financial empire--rather than pretending to have insight into humanity where they simply don't have it.  They should publicly renounce the expectation that they speak for the entire church on any matter.  They should publicly affirm that the lowliest member of the church has access to as much spiritual truth as they have, from the same sources, and say that they do not aim to shape Mormon belief except by their own example of love--as manifest in their providing various goods and services through the financial empire that they control as heirs to Brigham Young.  Every time a Bruce R. McConkie wants to go after a Eugene England, he should always tell everyone that he is "speaking only as a man" rather than as God's mouthpiece (a role which I think would be best left to all church members, as part of the covenant that we make with the Lord without any ecclesiastical intermediaries).  People should always feel free to disagree, to criticize, and to abstain from behaviors that they find counter-productive (without incurring the charge of heresy and being ridden out of town on a rail).

What about women and the priesthood?  While I admit it might be nice to give women the priesthood, I have too much experience to make this part of my platform for church reform here.  I think there are alternatives available less likely to alienate significant portions of the current church membership (including many women who adamantly refuse priesthood in its current form, for reasons that I cannot fault: I too would not wish to be bishop or anything like it under the current regime).  My initial idea would be to make the Relief Society a lot more prominent.  Balance the Quorum of 12 Apostles with a Quorum of 12 Sisters (not necessarily under that title) holding equal stakes in the financial empire of Deseret.  Make those women talk as much as the men (in General Conference and whatnot).  Make the local Relief Societies functional equivalents to bishoprics (with the same authority, the same budget, and the same local presence: e.g. if the bishop has to sit up on the stand during the sacrament meeting, then the Relief Society president must sit up there too).  But there is no need to change traditional terminology, referring to women in power as priesthood-holders and/or making them officiate in ordinances that they don't necessarily wish to participate in.  I would like the church to come up with ordinances for them to perform (looking to the 19th century for examples of how Mormon women traditionally gave blessings and administrations and explicitly making these part of the Relief Society's mandate).  And I would change the temple ceremonies to make women theologically equivalent to men (i.e. subject only to God and their own conscience, not to any husband).

In sum, my views on how authority should evolve in contemporary Mormonism look something like this.  (1) The current authorities should explicitly refuse to be doctrinal authorities.  They should refuse to dictate morality to Church members.  They should make finances transparent and provide avenues encouraging thoughtful dissent (and proliferations of Mormon ideologies that they need not endorse in any way, shape, or form: by their fruits ye shall know them, not by the endorsement of some Apostle).  (2) Women should become equal partners with men, exercising the same authority in practice even if they use different language and/or ritual to express it.  Make the General Relief Society equal to the Quorum of the 12 (in number and in real power to move resources).  Make the local Relief Society equivalent to the local bishopric.  While I see no need to give women the priesthood explicitly (particularly if/when many of them expressly refuse it), I would like them to have more "ritual duties" in the community (comparable to priesthood duties for men--e.g. give the young women something to do as part of administering the sacrament; make it expressly normal/proper for females to give blessings as they used to, and so forth).  (3) Missions should be service projects (which need not be a net drain on church resources: many of the youth of Deseret, especially, might benefit from working inside the financial empire of the church, ranching or farming or even helping out at City Creek).  If I were in charge of church missions, I would give individual members a greater say in determining their own mission, inviting them to apply to serve in capacities that appeal to them and then reviewing applications (the way real businesses do things).

(3) Community Service.  I put this here because I see this as something that Mormons historically do rather well, even though we talk about it really badly.  We do get things done.  We don't tell people clearly what we are doing (e.g. where their contributions to our enterprises go).  We should change that.  Publish the church books (as soon as possible: I recognize that it might require some time and effort to make them presentable).  Make church businesses something the church talks about (at conferences, in meetings where young men and women decide where and how they might like to serve missions for the church, etc.).  Talk about how the hunting preserves and cattle ranches are beneficial, preserving ecologies that keep humanity alive and well (not just Mormon humanity).  Talk about how valuable cheap education from highly qualified professors is: BYU is a really great place to go to school, even better if its Board of Trustees explicitly renounces any pretense of controlling what students and faculty there think or say in public.  Show the world that Mormons let people do things that matter and speak their minds, even when they say things that strike some authorities as ridiculous and/or awful.  Real faith is robust enough (or perhaps better, antifragile enough) to endure dissent.  Real religion embraces atheism (which it creates: Martin Luther may be accurately characterized as one of the first great modern atheists, who rejected the religion of his day as hopelessly inhumane; Joseph Smith is very similar--embrace this reality rather than fight it).

This brings me to the image Mormonism cultivates with the outside world.  Instead of dancing on a wire all the time between non-Mormon "liberals" (who hate it as a backward, inward-looking community uninterested in the shiny things they value as high culture) and non-Mormon "conservatives" (who hate it as a reminder that their own historical tradition is less coherent than they would like), the LDS church should just be itself.  It should actively, explicitly embrace its entire history: "Yes, Joseph Smith was a crazy idiot.  He was also a prophet of God, kind of like all those other prophets out there--all of whom are more or less insane and dangerous.  Use your own relationship with the Holy Spirit to determine when it is not safe for you associate with them.  The church is here to help you where you may find it useful.  Please ignore it or speak out against it, as the Spirit may move you, where you find it harmful."  It should encourage multiple versions of Mormonism (in Deseret and outside it).  Let BYU professors teach whatever they want, publish or perish on their own terms--as people see the fruits of their Mormonism and embrace or reject it on its own merits rather going off of the opinion of an "authority" whose outlook on humanity and Mormonism is inherently limited, so limited that he cannot see the glaring differences that separate Mark Hoffman from D. Michael Quinn.  Not all "heretics" are the same: don't tar decent human beings like Quinn with the same brush you use to paint thugs like Hoffman.  Quinn belongs at BYU.  Hoffman belongs in jail.  Any power of discernment that fails to notice this cannot be trusted to govern people without explicit limits on its authority, limits that recognize and advertise its very human imperfection.  (If we look into the historical record honestly, we see that speaking as a man means speaking as a total moron on more than one occasion.  Nobody should give any Moses the kind of abject submission that many Mormons want to give theirs.)

Eliminating the three-hour Sunday block frees up a lot of time (not just the time in classes but also a lot of the preparation time that goes into creating the lesson-plans and whatnot for those endless classes that no longer have to happen: they could continue on a voluntary basis as options for people who want them, of course; I certainly wouldn't ban people from spending their entire Sabbath at church).  I would like to make regular service something the individual LDS community does more, as a matter of course.  Instead of making people come in on Saturday to clean bathrooms (and then three hours on Sunday!), have them make a regular service meeting part of the weekly routine.  If you live in Deseret, this might involve doing something for a church business (e.g. some of the welfare farms or canneries, assuming the feds haven't shut those down completely).  If you live outside Deseret, then local bishoprics and Relief Societies can be creative (coming up with opportunities to serve the local communities in ways that are meaningful to Mormons and to the external community). 

Deeds speak much more effectively than words.  Do things that matter, and people will "magically" become more interested in what you have to say (even if they don't believe it for a moment: don't expect them to).  My single biggest problem with institutional Mormonism as it exists currently is that it seems like a giant exercise in talking (not because no action occurs but because it all goes on behind the scenes, as something ancillary and almost unimportant).  And I am pointedly excluded from the talk, as somebody whose discursive perspective lies irretrievably outside the narrow spectrum of doctrinal orthodoxy imagined by the powers-that-be (a spectrum that is entirely artificial and plastic, changing dramatically at the drop of a hat--if we look at its historical evolution).  Let the morons (like me) talk.  And make it obvious that the church is about more than just talk.  Serve people.  Love them enough to let them fail (and even go to hell) on their own terms, learning from their own mistakes (rather than the ones you forced them to make in a fit of well-meaning charity).

There.  Probably nobody will read all of this, but I feel much better having written it down.  I love Mormonism.  But I think she hates me, and I don't see us getting together again any time soon.  So I wish her the best as she moves on to lovers less obnoxious than I am.

Futile Rebellion: Why Terrorists Are Fools

In light of recent events, I have been thinking about my position on violence.  I think violence is something necessary to life.  I think we are all violent.  That said, there are better and worse ways of expressing violence.  Methods that involve useless escalation of dead-end conflicts are always worse.  Terrorism is a self-defeating, stupid modus operandi, whether the people employing it are heads of state or vigilantes among the people.

Take the case of the Boston bombing that went down recently.  Some civilian vigilantes get all riled up (for reasons that I have ranted about here on this blog: they feel threatened by society and its leaders, not always illegitimately).  They respond by attacking a bunch of civilians.  The final result is that innocent people die, and the crooks whose power the terrorists resent (no matter who they are or how innocent or guilty anyone finds them) obtain even more authority than they had before.  The vigilante terrorists actually make freedom less for themselves and everyone else every time they threaten the government's sheeple.  Under threat of attack, the sheeple lose what little inclination they might have to preserve the institutions that make us free: institutions like due process of law, presumed innocence, fair trial, and so on.  At the end of the day, the terrorists are dead, and the people are more under the thumb of government (well-meaning or not) than ever.  The resentment that led the terrorists to strike out against society terminates in a society even more likely to inspire resentment.  Attacking the bear with a sharp stick just makes it more dangerous, whether it is a Russian Kodiak or an American grizzly.  Stupid terrorists.

The best way to get back at the government is not to need it.  The best way to use violence is not to employ it randomly against helpless civilians.  The terrorists' problem is that they attack government by mimicking its worst aspects.  At least government is accountable, even if only in theory, to someone every time it decides to go haywire and kill a bunch of folks.  And seriously, dumb terrorists, have you not considered that governments have you utterly outmanned and outgunned?  If you are going to play the game of treating people as human shields, you should be aware that your opponent can cut through the shield much better than you can.  The second amendment doesn't exist to protect me from government in modern American society.  I don't want a shotgun to protect me from Uncle Sam's tanks, mortars, and nukes.  (What good would it be, seriously?)  I want a shotgun to protect me from cretins like you.  There is the place for legitimate social violence: Some punk goes to blow up a marathon and I take him out.

So much for the vigilantes who run planes into buildings or blow up marathons.  Now for the terrorists in government.  These people are in a tougher position in many ways than the vigilantes (who should simply stand down, since they do nothing good for themselves or anyone else: if they want to commit suicide, then they would do better to make it a private death).  Government is necessary at the moment: it is something natural that all societies have.  That said, it has an historical tendency to do bad stuff (e.g. kill crowds of people).  I don't want to tell government how to do its job, how to "protect" citizens from themselves.  I think it does this job best when we citizens don't need it much.  I would rather be free than safe.  I would rather be blown up by some punk on the subway than be strip-searched every time I get on.  Given a choice between vigilante terrorism and government terrorism, I will always choose the vigilantes: I think they are less dangerous.  Government here can do its job best when it helps me meet the vigilantes myself, preparing me to respond effectively (rather than imprisoning me in my own house for hours while it takes care of things for me--or pretends to take care of them, at any rate).

Ideally, government does not need police or military for much.  It takes free citizens and turns them into its police.  We become the police.  We become our own government.  We become the people making decisions that define our lives.  We become the people who get blown up by those stupid vigilantes and keep running anyway--not because we think the police or the military will save us.  We couldn't care less about that. We know life isn't safe, and we wouldn't have it any other way.  We do not ask for safety or security--we know that these are illusions--but for the freedom to respond appropriately ourselves to the threats that manifest unpredictably in our lives.  Good government equips us to meet those threats better, allowing and encouraging access to tools and training that will make more of us better stewards of our own mortality.  Good government encourages us to have the weapons, munitions, and physical resources (food, water, shelter) to handle threats in our environment (threats that include but are not limited to idiot vigilantes who decide that the best way to make a meaningful religious or political statement is to blow other people up and bring the heavy hand of military dictatorship down to crush us all).

I have never rebelled violently against government.  I never want to.  I see that such rebellion would be counter-productive (making things worse for me and for everyone else, not better).  If I do rebel, it will be quietly, non-violently, and inobtrusively.  I believe in kindness, civility, and decency above all else.  I believe in them so much that I am determined to practice them even towards historically rude government (within reason: there are regimes out there that I would oppose actively, either by fleeing the country or taking up arms, but those regimes are not the modern US one).  Smart people who know what violence is know its limits.  They see that they cannot force themselves unilaterally on others without getting hurt and hurting others unnecessarily in the process.  They see that reality, and they respond by standing down--permanently and resolutely--from useless rebellion.  Silly as those "occupy this and that" protests are, they are preferable to "blow this or that up" protests.  Dumb or dangerous as the Tea Party may be, the "blow stuff up for God" party is dumber and more dangerous.  If you want to rebel, do yourself a favor and take the route of Martin Luther King or Gandhi.  Find something positive to do, something that isn't hurting other people.  Make the beauty you cannot find in the world.  You don't have to kill the world to do that.  You don't have to hate it.  You don't have to fear it.  You don't have to care about it.  Just let it go and get on with your art.  Make an art of life instead of cultivating the art of death.

It doesn't matter if society is messed up.  It doesn't matter if other people don't like your art.  You can make it and enjoy it.  If you love it enough to turn it into life (instead of death), there will always be someone willing to see value in it.  Show them that value, and they will become your friends.  They will love you and help you make something beautiful--a garden of liberty whose fruits do not depend on regular watering with the blood of innocents (or even of tyrants: give it your own blood before you steal any from another human being).  If you cannot do this, then at least have the decency not to involve innocents in your death wish.  Do what Buddhist protesters do, and burn yourself to death somewhere in a public place.  Make your statement with your own blood, not mine or my kids'.  The sympathy I have for your plight--your suffering, your religion, your lifestyle, your family, your art--vanishes the moment you start gunning down random strangers.  I may resent the government boot-heel you bring down on my neck, but that doesn't mean I'm not glad when it breaks yours, you cowards, you dogs with no honor. 

You deserve the death you get.  You deserve it much more than all those people who will suffer because of you--not just the people you personally cut down, but also the other people the government will cut down needlessly because they remind somebody of you.  You are an emblem of what is most wrong in all of us--a giant, festering sore on the face of humanity.  As long as you persist in keeping the bear of bad government alive and angry, she will never stop tearing the meat off all our bones. 

As for that bear: dear representative of the American people, the next time you wonder why vigilantes go nuts and attack you or your people viciously, take a look in the mirror.  Look at the blood dripping down your face, the blood of people killed all over the world to keep us "safe" from death (that always gets us anyway), and see what it is that the dumb vigilantes fear.  They are dumb because they express fear badly, not because they have it.  I fear you, too.  But I know better than to go poking you with sharp sticks.  And I am too civilized to make others suffer unnecessarily because I am afraid.  But I am afraid, more afraid of you than of the terrorists, more afraid of being "saved" than of being blown up.  I value freedom over security.  I do not waive my Constitutional rights.  I do not want you to declare war on anyone or anything as a result of stupid vigilantes going nuts and murdering innocent people.  I don't want more military and police.  I don't want more laws.  I don't want more security.  I want you to stand down.  Weep with me, if you like.  Teach me ways to defend myself better.  But don't pretend you can make all the violence disappear by taking absolute command of society.  Don't listen to the cowards who want you to promise them the impossible--reward without risk, profit without loss, happiness without sorrow, life without death.  I fear your lies more than I fear the terrorists' truth. 

Civil Society and the Law of God

Something I need to chew on some more.

Biology contains all kinds of redundant systems that serve no obvious purpose (until somebody finds one: are my ears biologically engineered to serve as resting-places for spectacles? should I be very concerned that all my fellow humans use their spectacle-holders for the proper purpose? is the proper function of the ears a matter that the Supreme Court must decide for all civilized people?).

Citing scripture as though it offered a clear window into the mind of God is very problematic. There are many examples we might discuss, but let's just take two:

(1) "When thou comest nigh unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it. And it shall be, if it make thee answer of peace, and open unto thee, then it shall be, that all the people that is found therein shall be tributaries unto thee, and they shall serve thee. And if it will make no peace with thee, but will make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege it: And when the Lord thy God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword: But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself; and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies, which the Lord thy God hath given thee" (Deut. 20:10-14, KJV).

This is the Lord's method for waging war as revealed to the Deuteronomist(s), and it is the "nice" method--as opposed to the brutal slaughter of all living things that he mandates for "the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites" (Deut. 20:17). Is this the method of warfare that our American troops employ in Iraq, in Afghanistan? No. Bad as we are, we do not all embrace collateral damage and cultural imperialism as unproblematic goods. If we waged war "biblically" by following the Deuteronomist methods advocated here, people would see us (quite justifiably) as uncivilized monsters (with little to set us apart from Francisco Pizarro or Genghis Khan, who also had strict codes of honor justifying all the methods they used to slaughter people who resisted domination and steal all their stuff). If we reject God's methods for making war, why should we embrace his methods for making love? Isn't this problem the very reason Mormons want "continuing revelation" (so that we aren't stuck following rules that work really badly in hindsight, even if they looked great to some prophet at some point in the past)?

(2) "Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination" (Lev. 18:22). "If a man find a damsel that is a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found; then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel’s father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his days" (Deut. 22:28-29). So, the Lord's Pentateuchal law of marriage forbids homosexual relations (Leviticus) and mandates that the heterosexual rapist must pay a fine and marry his victim (Deuteronomy)? In our modern society, even in Utah and the Bible Belt, nobody seriously argues that women should be forced to marry rapists. That is something we have rejected (justifiably) as barbaric and unnecessary in our society (which is not Deuteronomistic society, thank God). Why are we still citing Leviticus as something meaningful, then? How is forbidding homosexuality any less barbaric than making a woman marry her rapist (with whom she is supposed to be reconciled merely because he gave her father some money, as though she were a piece of property he had damaged)?

If the "old law" in Leviticus and Deuteronomy is not really rendered utterly null by Christ's new one, then how do we determine which bits to keep and which to ignore? Why does Shakespeare get a pass for dressing men in women's clothing (Deut. 22:5): shouldn't all God-fearing people boycott him and his evil literature for its affront to biblical decency? Why don't we insist that people avoid eating shellfish (Lev. 11:10) or pork (Lev. 11:7-8)?

If we skip the Old Testament as irrelevant (which is what we really do most of the time, thank God) and jump to the New, the only anti-homosexual prohibition we get comes from the apostle Paul (Rom. 1:26-27), the same guy who thinks women should remain quiet in church and wear a full-body veil (1 Cor. 14:34-35; 1 Tim. 2:11-12; 1 Tim. 2:9-10; I must confess the καταστολή looks a lot like the burkha to me, even if we agree with Origen that it should be interpreted allegorically here). Why do we reject Paul's advice on women but keep him on speed-dial when it comes to deciding how to interact with homosexuals?

Scripture says all kinds of things, most of them mutually contradictory (and ignored by most of the faithful in all historical religious traditions). It is not a clear guide for anyone's morality, and it cannot be turned into law that agrees neatly with the civil society we have built in modern America--a civil society which rests on ideals (like freedom and mutual toleration) that it does not value much. (You will find little importance given to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" in the Old or New Testaments: they tell you how to be righteous, not how to be free. Instead of approaching freedom as something beneficial to be cultivated, they most often approach it as something dangerous to be controlled via submission to the divine will. For better or worse, the USA and the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition historically stand against this approach more than with it, although we are doing our best to correct that deficit in modern society--on the Left and the Right.)

The Love of a Free Man

Every child has a right to Mother and Father.

Every child has a right to good food, clothing, and medical care.

Every child has a right to opportunities for improving itself (i.e. education).

People are fond of making statements like these, statements that sound nice but carry some very poisonous implications (in my opinion).  The problem with all these rights arises when other people see how I am failing to provide them to my children. 

What happens when my family lacks mother- and father-figures that meet with somebody else's approval? 

What happens when my idea of what constitutes good food, clothing, and medical care conflicts with somebody else's?

What happens when my idea of what constitutes a good education for my child isn't yours?

In the modern world, this is more or less what happens.  A bunch of busybodies see my family and are terribly offended by it (seeing its existence as an attack on theirs).  Responding to the threat posed by my existing with relationships that don't look enough like theirs, these busybodies get together and organize protests.  They make flyers.  They create memes on Facebook.  They make all kinds of holy noises about things like "grassroots politics," "the moral majority," "family values," "progressive values," and whatnot.  They form PACs.  They gather donations.  They write angry letters to their clueless representatives in some august body of government bureaucrats pretending to be responsible lawmakers.  The bureaucrats get ants in their pants and do what they always do--form a committee.  This committee sits down and determines to establish once and for all (1) what a good family looks like (what constitutes an acceptable Mother and Father for all Americans?), (2) what good healthcare looks like (what constitutes an acceptable diet for all Americans?), and (3) what a good education looks like (what constitutes an acceptable education for all Americans?).  The committee is very precise and deliberate.  It must be practical.  It cannot make room for all kinds of silly exceptions to general rules.   It has to lay down the law--for everyone, for all time.

And so what happens when my little family isn't up to snuff?  What happens when the committee isn't impressed by my fathering skills, or my wife's mothering?  What happens when it notes that I don't feed my kids a USDA-approved diet--of poisonous denatured crap marketed by profiteering companies whose deep pockets make them much more interesting and persuasive to bureaucrats than I will ever be?  What happens when the committee doesn't like the education I have chosen to give my kids?  Nobody knows.  But one thing is certain: I will be under scrutiny, and I might lose the right to even have a family, if the committee decides that I am not worthy of such an honor (or deserving of such a responsibility, if you prefer).

Who limits the committee's jurisdiction?  Nobody really.  The bureaucrats answer to their loudest constituents--a bunch of punks who want to micromanage my life to make it look like theirs--and to other bureaucrats, some elected and some not, who tend to think that the answer to all society's problems is letting more of them get a lick in.  ("Just let us handle this one, kid.  We'll take care of your problems!")  Inviting these clowns into your life is easy: getting them out is really hard (no matter what political party they belong to or where they worship on Sundays).  Combine the bureaucrats' inherent love of absolute authority with their busybody constituents' insistent demand that all human relationships be micro-managed to meet their finicky tastes, and the result is a perfect recipe for enslaving me.

I don't give a damn about gay marriage, one way or the other.  If you want one, go for it with my blessing.  If you don't, I would never force it on you.  I am not an angry guy.  But there are ways of making me mad.  I get mad when punks want to bring bureaucrats into my home (into my bedroom, for God's sake) as some kind of absolute authority pronouncing judgement on the worthiness of my personal relationships--"defending" my marriage (or my diet or my education) by forcing me to make it according to the arbitrary determinations of some stupid committee.  I resent this "defense."  I see it as a direct attack on my religious freedom, not the legitimate defense of anyone else's.  (You want religious freedom?  Get the heck out of my house, out of my bedroom, out of my larder, out of my career, and out of my life.  Go and live your own.  You don't have to solemnize my gay marriage, or say only nice things about it.  You don't have to eat steak.  You don't have to go to school where I do.  You don't have to bail my business out when it fails.  You don't have to buy healthcare for me.  Your religious freedom doesn't include the right to make me live the way you do.  I have religious freedom too, punk, so go eat the poison you like and leave me to the ones I prefer.)  

Just so we're clear: I will marry whom I damn well please, of whatever gender or age I please, for whatever reason I want.  I will eat what I damn well please, in whatever quantities I please, for whatever reason I want.  I will send my kids to school where I damn well please, for whatever reason I want.  I don't care if I am not the best qualified person to marry or make dietary choices or educate kids.  I will not sign my marriage, my diet, or my kids over to some committee (not even if the chair of that committee affects the titles or trappings of deity: the real God sends rain upon the just and the unjust alike and doesn't give a damn about making results fair--in this life or any other that we know anything definite about).

The committee and the busybodies it represents can cite me statistics all day long, proving (1) how my marriage would be better if I were a rich, white heterosexual with a partner of the opposite gender (so we'll just seize the kids of poor single parents, or force them to marry someone of the appropriate gender and socio-economic class right away if they want to keep their children?); (2) how my diet would be better if I followed USDA guidelines (get your heart-healthy whole grains while they're hot, suckers!); and (3) how my kids would be better off if society took them away from me and gave them to Mitt Romney or Barack Obama (think of all the rights and opportunities my children don't have because I'm not a millionaire!).  I don't care.  Maybe the committee should sterilize me while they're at it.  Heck, they could cut all the fuss and bother and just send me straight to the gas chamber.  (Yes, Godwin, I embrace thee.  This is the Internet, after all.)  What a load of crap.  Not only does it make no sense as an idea (religious freedom means that I have the right to make you my bitch! this is precisely what the founders of our republic wanted, as anyone who reads the Federalist and/or Anti-Federalist papers will agree), it would be a practical disaster (creating far more confusion and suffering than it could ever hope to alleviate).

Love is not a human right. It is a human opportunity (that can never be granted by committee). You should leave people as free as possible to find and express it in whatever circumstances life gives them. Sometimes, those circumstances will make somebody's love look poor and mean and worthless to other people, but that is no reason to take it away, to deny its expression, to replace it with the love of others who are more fortunate, or more aesthetically pleasing to some committee of busybodies too busy interfering with others' lives to manage their own.  (Don't you people have something else to do?  A budget to keep?  Drones to send against Pakistani women and children while you agonize over some American woman's decision to remove a few cells from her uterus?  A beam to remove from your own eye, maybe, before you go poking around for the motes in mine?  Scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites.  If you are reading old Judaeo-Christian scripture, this is what you are.  If you don't read scripture, then pick up any book you like on Hitler's Germany, Franco's Spain, Mao's China, or Lenin's Russia: these are your heroes, the shining beacons of moral purity that you want me to follow to a better future.  Even if you are right, I don't want to come to that future.  I would rather go to the gas chamber.)

In conclusion, if I ever sit on a committee charged to consider the institution of marriage as it exists throughout humanity (in my country or any other), this will be my contribution: "This committee has nothing useful to say when it comes to prescribing the nature of people's personal relationships. As long as they are not killing each other or inflicting criminal damage, people can have whatever personal relationships they want. They can register those relationships legally using any language they please, and they can participate in society however they find opportunity."  See?  I actually believe in religious freedom, unlike the punks (conservative and liberal) who want to make everyone live as they do.  (What would Jesus do?  He would make you live like me, obviously.  What would Abe Lincoln or Martin Luther King do?  The same thing!  Everyone must be good the same way!  We're all going to march in lock-step to heaven on earth!  Not with me you're not.  I am never going to board that ship, not matter who or what stands at the helm.)      

The Thoughts of a Free Man

All people who participate in national politics actively these days (e.g. by voting for Republican or Democratic candidates for president) are socialists.  They believe in the power of central planning.  They give strength to bureaucracy (which works the way it works, the whole world over: there is no vast different between American bureaucracy and Soviet or Chinese bureaucracy; all the bureaucracies are more similar than different, a fact that our obsession with ideology tends to obscure).  Instead of reading polemics by strident partisans (arguing for or against some -ism), read novels.  Standing in a bread-line in Soviet Russia is not that different from standing in line at the DMV in the good old USA.  Prisons in the USA are not that different from prisons elsewhere.  WMDs here are like WMDs there.  Armies here are like armies there.  Police here are like police there.  Stupid polemical arguments here are like stupid polemical arguments there. 

The kind of freedom that I care about is not a word in a particular language.  It does not depend on how a bunch of robed dudes interpret an arcane document.  It does not depend on you or me or any of us.  It is bigger than everyone, individually and collectively.  You cannot control it, no matter how many bombs you make or laws you pass.  I don't have to fight to protect this freedom from you or anyone else because it doesn't need protection.  In fact, to protect this freedom is to lose it.  It is not secure.  It is not securable.  You can worry about it obsessively or pay it no mind, and it doesn't give a damn.  It just goes on existing, enabling your life and everyone else's, until some unforeseen moment when it decides that someone or something stops living.  The market drops.  Cancer appears.  A tsunami strikes.  An earthquake hits your nuclear reactor.  Lights out.  No time-outs.  No instant replay.  No referees.  No rules.  No closed system to game.

Freedom is embracing this reality--knowing that you don't know reality, that nobody knows it, and that this moment of ignorance is unexpectedly, inexplicably sweet.  How delicious that we are all alive!  How wonderful that we can speak, think, and even move with purpose every now and then and accomplish things (not because we have any right to them, but because luck conspires to enable our feeble gestures toward purpose and meaning).  Why ruin this blessing by attempting to muzzle it?  How can I drag myself away from the joy of my own experience long enough to ruin yours (by trying to make it just like mine)?  How does it build my delight in life to deny yours (or vice versa)?  Live and let live (and die) is the credo of the really free man.  I am not threatened by your happiness, even when it is not mine.  I know that I am dying.  I embrace death with the same joy that I feel for life, since life and death are really the same thing (life is built out of death: every step away from one kind of death draws me that much closer to another one).  Freedom is knowing the outcome (I must die) and not caring (I shall make a beautiful death, whenever my moment comes).  Freedom is not giving a damn whether other people are capitalists or communists.  Freedom is not giving a damn whether gays marry or not.  Freedom is not giving a damn whether the Constitution says this or that.  Freedom is not giving a damn whether God did this or the devil that.  Freedom is not giving a damn (not because you are an angry nihilist who rejects all meaning in life, but because you are a realist who sees that your personal happiness does not have to depend on outcomes outside human control).

Confronting Human Violence

In light of recent events (specifically the rash of public shootings in the USA), I have been thinking about guns.  Here are some of my thoughts that seemed worth writing down (for future reference).  My thoughts arose in the context of conversation with several different people (whose words will be reproduced anonymously here in bold where necessary to make my ideas make sense).  If I weren't in such a hurry, I would try to save the best bits as their own essay, but time is short and I don't want to lose anything that might be useful for future reflection because I cannot think of a way to work it into a single essay.

Trying to lower armed violence by arming more people is the equivalent of a junkie who takes uppers to counter the downers.

I would qualify this statement by saying that the character of the person you arm matters a great deal. Arming me would not make anyone less safe. I would not be more violent. I would gladly register any arms I might have with the public (and the police), and receive the best training available to me. I would avoid confrontation at all cost.

Passing out guns on the subway (or a gun-show) would not be the same. As I see it, the problem with our current situation is a failure of culture (and responsibility). Guns are like cars: dangerous equipment that nobody should have unlimited access to. If you want to play the game, then you have to prove your worthiness. As someone who aspires to drive and carry weapons, I embrace that responsibility: if I use either tool improperly, I accept full liability (up to capital punishment and the seizure of all my property for the community). I am willing to give the community good faith. I think I deserve to be armed.  By "armed" I don't mean that I want my own personal tank, or anti-aircraft guns. That used to go without saying, but these days you have to remind people of their limits.

I admire your responsibility, but the research shows that guns in the home increase the risk of child related accidents and women being killed in domestic violence.

Research also shows that death is inevitable, and that correlation is not causation.  (Don't keep loaded guns lying around. Lock stuff up, and for goodness' sake, learn to load your weapon when you need to use it: it isn't hard, and if you don't leave bullets lying around, your kid won't shoot anyone with them.)  Research probably also shows that inexperienced drivers cause more accidents. When my kids are old enough to learn how to drive, I will invoke this research to prevent their ever learning. Or maybe not.

Carrying a gun makes you 4 times more likely to be shot or killed by a gun. 

I currently reside in "gun-free" Chicago, Illinois, where as a good citizen I am unarmed (and plan to remain so for the foreseeable future). What do statistics say about my chances of making it home today without being shot, compared with (say) Provo, Utah (where I just spent the holidays, and ran into people carrying concealed weapons, incidentally)?

If my chief motive in life is to avoid being shot, then my best bet is to move away from civilization and keep a low profile. I am less likely to be shot in Provo than Chicago. In Nowhereville, Montana, I am even less likely to be shot. But even there, somebody with a gun might find me. There is no place on earth where my likelihood of being shot disappears entirely.

Society gets better because we begin to identify with those who are different than us, we leave patriarchy behind and equality takes root. Racism, misogyny and other "-isms" go by the wayside. As we begin to see our enemy as ourselves, increase empathy, understanding and tolerance.

As we do this as a society, violence as a whole decreases. If people's attitudes continue to remain rigid, that they must defend themselves, then we are not making progress toward egalitarianism and empathy and moving farther toward violence and an "us versus them" mentality, and this worries me. 

Egalitarianism is not non-violent, historically. The most egalitarian societies we know of are hunter-gather cultures rife with murder. Social hierarchies (the opposite of egalitarianism) suppress this "low-level" violence, and channel it into "high-level" violence (the wars of conquest and defense that students of history are familiar with). There is no path away from social violence. 

I guess I don't understand the basic premise of you argument which seems to be: "Carrying a gun makes you less likely to be shot."  That doesn't follow for me. Can you walk we through the argument?  

Carrying a gun doesn't make you less likely to get shot. It gives you something to fight back with that might actually stop your attacker from doing more than wounding you. 

What about Steven Pinker, who says that violence is decreasing?  He has research behind his talks.

Of course Pinker has research behind his talks.  The problem is that his statistics lie, and because he is smart, the lie sounds really convincing (so convincing that he himself believes it). This is the great disease of our time: mistaking information for understanding.  Pinker is just another well-meaning, smart dude fooled by randomness.

Pinker is not wrong although Nassim Taleb might be. Google "fooled by belligerence." 

To me, the really interesting thing in the conversation between Pinker and Taleb is not the emotion or any specific numbers, but the way the numbers are interpreted. I leave the numbers to speak for themselves (to those who know how to read them): suffice it to say that for me, angry or not, Taleb is right (maybe arrogantly, belligerently right, but arrogance doesn't make you wrong, in my experience).

A firearm is solely an offensive weapon. It offers no defense whatsoever. It can only be used for preemptive aggression.

For example if you carry around a broadsword, I can carry a shield and stop your blows if you decide to attack me. But if I point a gun at me, your gun offers you no defense whatsoever. The only way you would be able to use a gun to protect yourself from assailants is to preemptively shoot them. Which is exactly what professional gunmen, like the military, do. 

Yes, and if you drew a gun on me, I would like the option of pre-emptively shooting you, exactly the way police and military do.  If you drew a knife on me at close quarters, I would also like the option of pre-emptively stabbing you (or at least hitting you with the hardest thing available). I would not pick up a block of wood and to try hide behind it while calling the police (in hopes that they arrive in time to collect something more than my dead corpse).

But you can't be pre-emptive. That is what I mean as it being only an offensive weapon. Once I make the aggressive move, there is very little chance of putting your self into the position of being an aggressor. You have to point the gun first, which means it is not a defensive weapon.

If you want to lower your chances of getting shot to death in Chicago, you would better invest in Kevlar. 

Kevlar is much more expensive than a weapon, much harder to carry, and much less effective. There is nothing anywhere that makes danger go away. We are none of us ever perfectly safe. The issue at hand is how we respond to danger. Some people want to hide behind blocks of wood (or armor plate) while others shoot them. Others would prefer to fire back. I maintain that there is a place for firing back, that people like me should be allowed to cultivate the option of firing back (within limits that already exist: police and military already carry guns, store them, and even use them responsibly quite a bit). 

I believe that what you are saying is that the merely the idea that many other people might be carrying a gun would be a deterrent to offensive action. I'm not sure if there are any statistics to back this supposition up though. 

I don't make arguments about statistics (which I inherently distrust, as the ability for even the most expert of experts to misconstrue them is so high). All I maintain is that in individual hostile encounters, my ability to respond to your firing a shot at me by returning fire acts as a powerful deterrent (particularly if you are a thug whose training consists of seeing a trigger and pulling it where mine involves drilling tactics with military and police). 

I am not sure that homicidal maniacs who plan on offing themselves after offing everyone else will be dissuaded by the thought that someone else, too, might have a gun. 

I don't care about what they think. I just want the ability to shoot them dead when they show up in my vicinity. If people really want to off themselves and others in a public venue, then there is little you can do to stop them beforehand. Simple IEDs are really easy to make (even illiterate Afghanis and Iraqis manage them very well). All I ask is the right to respond aggressively when I am personally assaulted. 

Psychiatrist James Gilligan makes this statement: "the attempt to achieve and maintain justice, or to undo or prevent injustice, is the one and only universal cause of violence."

This is profound to me, and I have never considered this before. As I am listening to you saying you are willing to commit violence for the same reason, i.e. that you feel JUSTIFIED in defense, even as others in this conversation are pointing out the error of thinking that guns provide a means of defense.

What you are saying is that you want pre-preemptive justice through the use of violence, or that you want to fight violence with violence.

How do we, as a society, justify violence with violence? Isn't this really the core of the argument? People want to fight violence with violence? They want to justify this? 

Is there any other way to fight violence than with violence? Historically, again, states exist as monopolies on violence. The police and military we rely on to protect us are all about violence. They fight violence with violence. You can try the method of the Anti-Nephi-Lehis (to invoke Mormonism), but that usually means that you die (a martyr and a saint perhaps, but still dead, and some of us cannot stomach the notion of dying without a struggle). 

Yes, there is a better way to fight violence than with violence. When we understand that the core of violence is to seek justice, then we must educate people that it is maladaptive to seek justice through violence-- negotiation, the justice system, communication, these are all appropriate alternatives to violence. As we educate people, as we increase empathy, then people will seek justice through appropriate means and not through violence.

The person committing violence often has a warped idea of justice and will often take the violence out on someone other than the person they are angry with.  This not rational.  Education will help them.

I do not agree that the core of violence is to seek justice. People are violent animals. Why do puppies fight? Why do my two sons, whom we have not abused or raised to be commandos, instinctively fight (especially with other males)? People are violent. Justice is something we invent to explain this fact: it comes after violence, not before.

My kids are already violent (and cute and nice and sweet, too). They are not just (and have no coherent theory of justice: what little they have and are conscious of is less developed than their idea of, "Get the other guy! In the nuts!"). 

Also, where is the "warped idea of justice" in the dark alley where a woman is being raped and responds by shooting her attacker dead?  How would education make this outcome different?  How is it bad?  

People are becoming more and more civilized and finding non-violent ways to solve their problems. Although your kids (and mine too) have a natural tendency to fight, we teach them that it's not right, that they need to talk about how to solve their problems and not hit. I believe that a reduction in poverty and an increase in education will allow more parents access to these methods of problem solving and that from that we will see a reduction in violent crime.

When did I say that a woman being raped in an ally has a warped idea of justice?
 

It may be true that people are becoming more civilized and less violent overall (leaving aside that this is probably just a statistical illusion, as pointed out above), but it is patently obvious that individual members of the species are not equally responsible (or educable). In order to survive, I need to know how to speak the language not only of cultured elites, but also of evil thugs.
 

You keep returning to this notion that violence arises out of a misconstrual of justice, as though the solution to social violence were a better theory of justice (or more Platonic dialogue with a master like Socrates). I merely cited an instance of social violence as it typically occurs (a woman is assaulted in an alley somewhere, despite all her efforts to avoid confrontation, and responds by shooting her assailant). I think it is a good thing that she shoot the would-be rapist. I don't see her owning and using a gun as any kind of threat (or to be more accurate, any danger she creates is more than balanced by her ability to turn it back against those who must be stopped if we are to go on living well, individually and collectively). What are you telling her to do? Drop her gun and attempt to reason Socratically with her attacker, persuading him that he only wants to hurt her because he has been brainwashed by the patriarchy? In my eyes, even if that were true (let's assume there is a patriarchy and he was brainwashed), invoking it would not change anything. People who care about those kinds of arguments aren't rapists. You don't treat them the way you treat someone with depression (vel sim): you shoot them dead, preferably before they maim or kill you.
 

I disagree. As a woman who has been a victim of domestic abuse as well as a rape victim, I am intimately familiar with violence and its trauma. My home has also been broken into--not once, but twice.

Not only does my personal experience not make me want to own a gun for personal protection, but it has made me want to understand why people, who have never experienced what I have experience feel so threatened by this world.

I have experienced the horrors of this world and yet I do not wish to lash out at at. I do not wish to go on a rampage and kill the people who have harmed me. I do not wish to own a gun and kill.

I do wish to change the world for better and make this world a less violent place. I wish to be better and help others to be better.

I am perfectly willing to let you be who you want to be. Unlike some, I don't think that all people in positions of social authority should always be armed. If you don't want to carry a weapon, then you should never have to. You can be an Anti-Nephi-Lehi if you want, but I reserve the right to be different. I am going to play Ammon, and I think that option should be available to good guys (as it is and always will be to outlaws).

Don't force me to live your life, please. I would never force you to live mine.

But, you see, we have a world filled with guns.  That makes me feel unsafe.  People want to put guns in schools. I work in a school. I do not want guns in my work environment.

I do not want people carrying guns in the streets.  This does not make me feel safe. When we have these discussions, all of this must be discussed, not just your desire to have guns in your home. 

Being alive means that you are unsafe. I am sorry if that makes things unpleasant, but it is true. You will never be perfectly safe, ever, no matter who does what. Even if you did manage to keep guns out of your environment, you would not be safe.

We cannot build a society that excludes all things that make you (or me or others like us) feel safe. What feels safe is not always safe, for one thing, and for another life is inherently fragile (and unsafe!). Please don't force us to live in a fantasy land where nothing bad ever happens to good people. I have already spent too much time living in that web of sweet, well-meaning lies--and I am never going back. Ever.  

I also work in a school. Every time I step into class, I am fully aware that some student could walk in and start blowing things up. I go in unarmed. I feel people's pain, but I also know that banning guns unilaterally (with no provision for people like me to qualify for exceptions) will do precisely nothing to make anybody safer.

Guns are not the only dangerous machines that kill people.  Consider cars.  They might even kill more people than guns (outside of wars, if I remember somebody's statistics right and those statistics weren't lying). The real problem here, as I see it, is fear, which you want to handle one way (your way). This is fine, until your way becomes the only way, and I am supposed to pretend to be you. I am not you. I refuse to react to fear the way you would. I do not expect you to be me. Please stop trying to make me be you. 

So it seems like we're looking at this problem from two different angles--the world as it currently is, and the world as is should be. My opposition to arming more people as a deterrent to violence is that I don't feel that it moves us closer to the world we want. It reinforces the idea that the only solution to violence is more violence. Do I want to take away guns from people who currently own them? No. People can make their own evaluations on whether a gun will make them feel more safe given their current situation. But I don't want to encourage the idea that more people owning guns makes the population as a whole more safe--that moves us away from the direction I believe society should go.  

I personally think that the deepest problems here are inside people's heads. People are afraid. We are afraid because the world is actually dangerous (regardless of what guys like Steven Pinker say: he sounds nice, so we want to believe him, but I just don't live in his world, which frankly reminds me of a certain religious daydream into which I was born and from which I have spent the past few years extricating myself). We are always going to be afraid, because the world is always going to be dangerous (or unpredictable, which amounts to the same thing). Confronted with the uncertain, with our raw fear of it, we all must react. We don't react the same. We never did. We never will. Society is about negotiating our different responses so that we are minimally harmful to one another. I think we can negotiate a situation in which the possession of guns is treated like the possession of other dangerous tools (like cars and mortgages: guns are not the only things that kill people).

Give people responsibility for their own actions. Make them liable, and guys like me will step up to the plate and succeed (the way many police and military already do: in fact, many of my friends who get my point of view and put it into practice in their own lives are police and military; talk to them, and they will not tell you to rely on them for protection from all the bad guys; they don't trust themselves as much as you trust them). Don't make us face fear in a way that turns us into helpless cowards. If you back us into a corner, then we will be that much more likely to do what cornered animals do.

It doesn't matter when you tell us that you are putting us in a straitjacket for our own good. We get that you act out of the best of intentions. We see your life, and we honor your choice to live in a way that demonstrates your integrity. Please give us the same option, the same respect, the same responsibility that you so nobly bear for yourself. Please let us be heroes, too. Please recognize that yours is not the only heroism, the only truth to which all others must bow (or what? are you going to come to my house and take away all my weapons? are you going to send the police to put me down as though I were mafia? am I mafia to you? I don't know, but I do get the feeling that many people like you have very little human empathy for people like me). 

 

On your right to "shoot dead" whatever you perceive as a hostile threat: I support in principle such a right, but in fact there is a tremendous difficulty. Someone firing a shotgun in a movie theatre is an obvious threat where a gun response would be justified, but other threats are not always so obvious. You might mistake me in a dark alley, for example, as a hostile threat and so shoot me in the face--but what about my right not to be shot in the face by paranoid vigilante types? Or do you believe that the death of Trayvon Martin was justifiable homicide?  

If I venture into a dark alley where a woman is being raped and she mistakenly shoots me as an attacker, then I consider myself justly shot (and would not begrudge her the right to respond, even if she shoots me dead). 

Do you believe it is justified to use lethal force to stop a property crime?

I am not sure how I feel. On the one hand, I would not respond violently without assessing the situation. I think there is a real difference between a stick-up in the street, say, and waking up to find some guy breaking into your house. In the first situation, I would be inclined to hand over my wallet and walk away (especially if the robber got really close to me, and certainly if there were several of them, as there often are in these situations). In the second, on the other hand, I would be inclined to use deadly force (and feel perfectly justified: if you come crashing into my house while my family is sleeping, then you just signed your own death warrant; how am I supposed to know whether you are a starving bum desperate for a meal or some crazed serial killer out for our blood? I cannot know this, so I cannot be criminally liable for treating you as a direct threat on my life). 

Even with all the horrid things that have happened to me--the domestic abuse, the rape, the home invasions--I choose to live my life not in fear, but in hope. Hope for a better life; hope that humans can change; hope that we do have the capacity to change our environment, our beliefs and our situations. It is with that hope that I live. Not in fear but in peace. 

I applaud your choice to embrace hope. However, please know that when your hope means that I have to give up mine, it becomes very bitter to me. Think about how you would feel if I made you own a weapon, train with it regularly, and take it to school every day, along with all your colleagues (including the creepy janitor who might be a pedophile, or the principal who is a sadistic bastard that beats his wife and leers at you). How would you feel? That is how I feel when you tell me that there is no way I can ever carry a weapon in Chicago. What makes you feel safe (and hopeful) makes me feel unsafe (and hopeless). The heaven on earth that you imagine (in which we all move forward together in lockstep towards a society devoid of all violence) is hell for me (as I confront armed criminals in Chicago with my fists).

As long as your safety requires me to run unnecessary risks (from my perspective: I understand that yours is different, but I have to live with mine), there will never really be peace between us. Festering distrust, mutual recrimination and suspicion, perhaps (the best option) a respectful hostility (I see your sainthood and salute you as a foe worth having). But you do not persuade me, and I doubt you ever will. I have been led too many times into the lion's den by prophets of peace whose only real skill is in making others fight their wars.
 
Auferre, trucidare, rapere falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. And the response from me will always be to raise an arm, discharge it, and shout: "Sic semper tyrannis!" (I am aware that those words were desecrated by idiots before me, and that they will probably appear in the mouths of worse criminals yet, but from my tongue they are honest, as honest and heartfelt as any words I might ever say. If that offends you beyond all hope of repair, then you should wage war against me and kill me quickly, rather than ask me to suffer a slow death by living somebody else's life.) 

I am asking society to collectively be better, to do better.  

I am wondering who "society" is, and how they can ever hope to be better when they have no integrity (as a collective). People talk about "the American people" as though there were such a thing. There is not. I reject any implication that I must live my life in lockstep with some collective culture that has no regard for my existence, no respect for the sanctity of my self-determination, no place for my personal responsibility.

Who are you referring to as your society? Mass-murderers? Is that your society?

My society are my friends, my family, my neighbors. They also include the children in my school; some of them have troubled lives and troubled families and I consider it my responsibility to reach out to them and improve their lives, if only by listening to them and letting them know they are cared about.

Yes, my society has also included the man who tried to strangle me and the teen boys who broke into my home. I am helping the police in each case to help them get help; as I want them to become better so they do not make the same mistakes.

My society includes my wonderful children, whom I have sacrificed for to get a great education so they can make a difference in their communities/societies. They are activists and work to change the world for the better.

My society includes children with disabilities and their families and I work to improve their lives; children that the world discards. My society includes people here, that have left the mormon church and are in need of community and support.

I choose to see good and happiness and hope. You do not. It is all perspective. We live in the same community. 

The city of Provo, where I was just in company with various armed individuals, is not a city of mass murderers (the tragedy of Mountain Meadows occurred in the past, in a different part of Utah). I was not taking part in serial killings over the holidays.

My society are my friends and family, including many who have guns. I love and care about these people, and they use their guns to do good in the world (the same way they use their cars, their mortgages, their computers, their books, their toasters).

My society includes children too. They aren't always the most intelligent, in my experience. They don't get justice (until they punch their brother and he bites them back: then you can see the dim hint of a dawning realization cross their little faces).

My society includes some disabled, too. You are right to note that they find ways to contribute that make them valuable to the rest of us. I wouldn't let them get in over their heads (with any of the dangerous machinery lying around our house or anyone else's).

I do choose to see good and happiness and hope. You do too. But my happiness is not your happiness. My hope is not your hope. My safety is not your safety. I never knew that you even existed until this morning, when it came it my notice that we share a virtual friend (whom I have only interacted with online, alas, though he is probably justly grateful at this point in our conversation). We do not live in the same community. 

Serious question: when a celebrity, politician, or rich person hires an armed bodyguard for protection, is this an example of someone using violence to prevent violence?  Also, I notice that some people get all up in arms about how sacred life is when they want to protect unborn fetuses, but then suddenly start talking about things more important than life when the debate turns to gun control, or hawkish attitudes to war. So which is it? Is life sacred or not? 

If those silly "gun-free zones" really worked as advertised, then the White House would be one, and the Secret Service would be Japanese samurai with no training in firearms.

All I know is that if life is sacred then death must be too. You cannot worship life without worshipping death, and to my (admittedly limited) knowledge, nobody has lived (or ever will live) without dying. In my experience, the same is true of violence: as far as I know, nobody has ever lived without violence. Not all violence is equal, of course, but there is no way to eliminate it (short of killing everyone: see the quote from Tacitus that I provided above).

Please note too that I support a woman's right to abort. Unlike many who wear the badge "conservative" these days in the USA, I don't believe in letting outside agencies make that decision for a person. In my utopia, you get to decide which children you bear, and what tools they inherit (including guns). 

It's true that nobody has lived without dying. It's also true that human technology and medicine has extended the time that we all can live. We see this as a good thing. This is how we can worship life and not death--we continue to push death away from us, welcoming life and working to prevent death as long as possible.

We can do the same with violence, cultivating a society in which violent solutions are ostracized as "uncivilized." It's already happening (when was the last time someone was challenged to "pistols at dawn?"). You will retain your rights to keep your guns, and to pass your guns to children and grandchildren, who will have an increasingly diminishing need for them, until gun collectors are seen as quaint as civil war reenactors, and the second amendment has as much validity in our lives as the third. This is the world that I'm working for. 

I have no problem with people like you going for your dreams, and I admire your motivation. My only concern arises when you try to force me to do things your way or die (as you have been particularly careful not to do in this thread, in contrast with some: thank you). I have no problem with the idea that I might be (or become) obsolete. I know it and embrace it.

I agree with you that things work better since we moved away from settling conflicts by single-combat (in some arenas: I actually sometimes wish they would bring back the custom of letting people challenge politicians to duels; it would make some of them think more clearly before they tried to force us all to do things their way). I'm all about enabling people to pursue productive ways of pursuing conflict that don't involve unnecessary and/or inappropriate violence. I support the right to be violent in certain circumstances: it is OK to squash mosquitoes now and then, when they bite you, but there are always limits; it is not OK to bomb the neighborhood with DDT because you don't like mosquitoes. I think my position is as fair and reasonable as anyone can expect somebody like me to have.   I am open to screening and training standards being raised for the legal possession of firearms in the USA.  I think that social responsibility is important, and that gun-owners could use more of it.

(Also, as long as we are talking about medecine, remember that it is not an unqualified good, historically.  Iatrogenics.) 

[A] Well, sure, if people could have guns and self control we wouldn't be having this conversation. It's a matter of degree. I believe we could all agree that nobody should be allowed to own nuclear weapons--that we should strongly regulate them, in spite of the second amendment. The same argument can be used with regard to high capacity firearms: extended magazines, fully automatic rifles, and the like. Some people have no self-control, and will attempt to solve their problems with guns in ways that prove unacceptably catastrophic. No amount of counter escalation will fix that. We need sensible gun regulation, akin to the UK, Canada and Japan. Anything else is just wishful thinking.

[B] But this conversation suggests that restrictions don't solve those problems. Gun control doesn't work. 

I would say that gun control does work: it makes me (the person determined to keep the law) a sitting duck in a hunting preserve for criminals. Every society has predators and prey. Gun control works to make sure that people like me (polite, civilized people determined to play by the rules) are always prey.

I am supposed to watch TV. I am supposed to believe that nothing ever happens unless somebody paid somebody something for some product. "Safety" is supposed to be a product I purchase from politicians (if I am a good little boy), or from a gun store (if I am an inbred, redneck cretin). If the product doesn't work as advertised ("I bought safety from my local schoolboard and people died anyway!"), I am supposed to weep, wail, and gnash my teeth in protest on TV (again) until somebody "does something" (i.e. re-arranges the deck chairs on the Titanic so that we can all go back to business as usual). From beginning to end, the thing is a stage-managed farce, on TV, in which idiot journalists drag me from one peak of emotion to another willy-nilly, milking me for money the whole way, selling me a bunch of lies and even more dangerous truths whose real-life value is almost completely worthless.

Stand back for a minute and consider that people die of drone attacks all the time in the Middle East--people no less innocent and helpless than the school children who perished in Connecticut--and the media couldn't care less. We all couldn't care less. We all keep fighting the stupid war that is killing them. We all keep using cowards' technology to deliver more firepower to those innocents than Adam Lanza ever had. Bastard that he was, at least he walked into that school himself. He didn't send a robot to do his killing for him, and then try to claim that all the innocent deaths were excusable collateral damage. He killed himself because he knew he was a guilty son of a bitch, and he wanted to die.

The price for my refusal to face the reality that my life costs others' lives (as it does, every day) is that I become complicit in what somebody else does to defend me. I refuse to see the people my government kills (not always quickly or humanely) so that I can be "safe" (and I retain hopelessly naive views of what safety really is, in the real world, where I do not live). I rely on somebody else to decide how violence gets done. I delegate that responsibility (the responsibility to exert some will to decide who dies so that I might live). If I surrender myself completely to the lies on TV, I become unaware that it is mine. I make no heroic choice (to stand down and be martyred like Jesus in the New Testament or fight to the death like Hector in the Iliad). I become a passive bit of chattel, making money for those journalists (so that they can continue to spread their poisonous lies, so that people will continue to wring their hands over one death as they ignore twenty others, so that politicians can continue to get elected on platforms and promises that make no sense, so that I remain a victim instead of an agent all my life). Fuck that. 

Regarding comparisons between the USA and other nation-states.  The USA is not a small island. The USA is not a small country. American culture is not homogenous (see my comments about "the American people" above). We are not Singapore, not Britain, not Japan, not Switzerland, not Australia (even, thought that might be more like us). It is hopelessly naive to assume that you can govern us (all 300 million or so) with a single policy that works well in another group that isn't us. The death rates for places that are not America are just more lying statistics (a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing meaningful, until they somehow mean that I am supposed to delegate all my integrity to somebody else, usually somebody who needs to get elected to public office or who relies on milking my emotions for profit; I mistrust both individuals). 

You might get somewhere telling the government of Chicago to think seriously about making their town more like Singapore (and/or less like Mogadishu). That kind of thinking at least shows some promise of making sense (and even maybe leading to some real insights, after some effort and experimentation). The kind of apples-to-oranges claptrap that journalists always trot out is just garbage, even when they try to make it sound smart by using math.  Comparisons that presume the equality of variables not really equal strike me as fundamentally ridiculous, more likely to lead to unexpected bad results than expected good ones when we take what works great in one environment and try to implement it where it might not work well at all.