I watched a video of a very angry, young man driving a pickup truck flying an American flag on its bed as he spoke his utter outrage at Obama’s new gun control orders. His eyes burned my screen.
The young fellow was working class, intelligent and articulate. His logic, once his premises were accepted, was tight. I wondered, how someone clearly not a beef-witted twit comes, in the teeth of all evidence, to support the compulsive “more guns = safer lives” logic he spat like automatic rifle fire into the GoPro.
This is where I’d expect personal blame to surface in the form of comments like: He’s a f***in’ moron. People like him need to learn a lesson the hard way. He’s a racist, sexist macho throwback, if he’d use his brain he’d see what an a****le he is.
Stuff like that. Probably worse.
Can’t really blame that response. We’re reared into it. It’s all we know to do about extreme, anti-social thinking and behavior. But we can certainly fault it. It’s time to notice how destructively mechanical this conclusion is. We will never achieve resolution to the spate of social disquiet we now face while we misprize its source. We see the source as mechanical where we, ourselves, are not.
That this thinking is mechanical is evident in the underlying assumption that, interchangeably and regardless of particular circumstance, a normally functioning human will adhere to a fairly narrow set of behaviors and responses. If the human is not defective, s/he will never steal, lie, cheat or worse. If the human does any of these things, or, let’s say, becomes addicted to non-pharmaceutical drugs, it is a production flaw, a peculiar weakness of that particular unit, and the flawed unit must be removed from the active line and stored for repair or disposal. Except for the gratuitous violence with which we treat them, this describes our cultural outlook on our criminals.
The mechanism by which these “flaws” are uncovered in individual human units is the fantastical notion of personal responsibility. Now, there is such a thing as personal responsibility. But it offers a much smaller range of choices than we currently give it credit for. We now lay everything from body lice to bank accounts at the doorstep of personal responsibility.
The world of mechanics is full of snippets and bits of things whirring along independently of their surroundings according to settings and properties innate and particular to themselves and their siblings in manufacture. Put a toaster on the table, it will toast. Put it in the garage, it will toast. Put it outside in a snowstorm, it will still do its best to toast. It does not change or modify its function until its function is changed for it by outside forces.
Nowhere in the biological world does this ever happen. Biologicals are rooted in their surroundings. Put a living goldfish on the table, it will die. Put it outside in a snowstorm . . . there is only one place you can put a goldfish where it will live, and that is in clean water of a particular temperature. But notice the difference. When we put the goldfish on the table, and it dies, we don’t call that a manufacturing flaw or a character weakness. It is, simply, a biological response to its environment.
Humans, of course, are biological. Therefore, the context of our growing is tremendously significant. As we are 99.9% genetic copies of each other, there will likely be a fairly specific range of optimum conditions for growing human beings. The nature of our phenotype requires these conditions be not only physical but also psychological and sociological.
And yet, by our current, mechanical system, attention, in cases of aberrant behavior, is specifically and purposely not given to the soil in which the human grew or currently lives. If we treated ourselves biologically, the context of the behavior would be the single most important issue. From the viewpoint of the living organism which is collective humanity, crime can only stop when the society is no longer requiring it to exist, like a fever blister, as a symptom of how ill human society has become.
Why does this young man believe that more guns make for more safety? Not because he is flawed or irrational. He believes it because the disease in our social system requires this response, like measles grows spots. The violence of his response, as well as all crime, poverty, oppression, blanket hatreds, violence and cruelty, are called forth by the illness infecting the biological unity of global humanity. If this young fellow weren’t setting the screen ablaze with his rhetoric, someone else would be. Someone else would have to. The biological unity of humanity requires these symptoms of its disease.
And, for what it’s worth, from where I stand, the single, greatest source of our distress, the generator of crime, poverty, curable disease, hunger, war, cruelty and all oppressions is the dangerously imbalanced global wealth gap. It is a blood sugar level which makes a person comatose: a sodium level about to induce another heart attack in our global body. It appears to be the obvious place to begin.