Back to the Corners

 

Went down to Lake Forest Park today, to check out the demonstration. Given that there were No Kings rallies today, it was pretty well attended. And, of course, there was someone in an inflatable costume. Given the proximity to Halloween, I would have expected to see more, but it seems that they were more popular back in the summer.

Dissembled

The whole debate about gun control is spinning up again following a shooting at a school in Bend, Oregon. I suspect that this iteration will have pretty much the same contours as the last. While I don't 100% agree with Malcolm Gladwell's new book on the subject of guns in America, I do generally take his point that the discussion about guns in the United States is fundamentally dishonest. As I noted when I mentioned the book, Mr. Gladwell doesn't think that the dishonesty is entirely intentional. (Although he does not some deliberate deceptions.)

One area where I think that the public debate around firearms policy is intentionally dishonest is the subject of costs. Current firearms culture and policy in the United States carries with it a death toll. And it's a very large one, especially considering that the United States is an advanced, industrial society with a decently well-functioning government. But it's hard to find someone who will openly stand up and say: "These deaths, as unfortunate as they are, are an acceptable price for the good that comes from people having widespread access to guns."

Politics in the United States tends to make people feel poor, and then attempts to find a villain upon which that poverty can be blamed. It makes complex problems simple, and gives people someone or something to define themselves in opposition to. For gun-rights activists, that villain is often some combination of "the government" and "criminals." Which is all fine and good, but for all of the death toll, those parties are still out there. There's been no righteous rebellion since the American Revolution, and violent crime is unlikely to ever go anywhere. And to the costs being paid are rarely being extracted from the identified villains.

So why not own that? Why not simply come clean about the fact that while yes, some number of the people killed every year with guns are "bad guys," like the Bend shooter, a pretty good number of them aren't, like the children and teacher at the school? While it's something of a truism in American politics that "Not my problem," equals "Not a problem," the unwillingness to admit to a problem that everyone else can see is part of what keeps things from going anywhere.

Questioned

I, for my part, am not a fan of populist politics, mainly because everyone can be at fault but "the people." Granted, this can said to be true of representative forms of government more broadly, but populism tends to explicitly make it front and center, as candidates running on populist platforms seek to burnish their "the people can do no wrong" bona fides.

Enter James Talarico.

“Why do we have a trillionaire when veterans are sleeping on the streets? The reason poverty exists is not because we can’t feed the poor, it’s because we can’t satisfy the rich.” By the way, what happened to the point of the question mark?

Personally, I would have figured that he's smarter than this, but, to borrow from Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his political ambitions depends upon parroting the public's misunderstanding of it."

Big picture, the "reason 'we' have a (paper) trillionaire" is simple. Given the choice between spending money to buy goods and services from one of Elon Musk's companies and spending money on subsidizing housing for impoverished veterans, more people choose the former. Enough people choose the former that the value of Mr. Musk's interest in his companies is astronomical, because the Boards of Directors of those companies believe (correctly or not) that a) no-one else can increase the value of these companies like Mr. Musk will and b) to keep the man's mind on the task at hand requires showering him with oodles of equity.

That's it. It's all down to choices that people have made. And if the United States, as a society, made different choices, there would be different outcomes.

No-one is prying some homeless person's last dollar from their desperate grasp to hand it over to Mr. Musk. People don't feel that they're well-off enough to devote resources to the issue of homelessness and/or they don't feel that the money will be well-spent/generate workable returns. In other words, people with resources are pursuing value, rather than charity.

I get that Mr. Talarico is playing on the sense of poverty that Mr. Musk's current net worth is generating, but this way of putting things gets in the way of people understanding that they have at least some agency in fixing it.
 

Undercapitalized

While out and around, I saw a woman holding a sign that read: "There is no ethical consumption under capitalism." My first impulse was to chuckle to myself and wonder "What about over capitalism?" But then it occurred to me that despite having seen that aphorism on multiple occasions, I didn't actually know what was meant by it. So, when I returned home, I looked it up. As I now understand it, the saying is intended to convey the idea that in a capitalist system, some aspect of the production or supply chain for every good and service necessarily entails some sort of deliberate, unjustified, exploitation or harm to someone. Accordingly, purchasing and using any good or service that was unethically produced or transported cannot be ethical. So no consumption of anything in a capitalist system is ethical.

Personally, I think that this, like a lot of buzzwords, doesn't really engage with the reality of the situation. After all, one doesn't need to be a capitalist to take advantage of other people. One merely need to be broke enough to regard living up to one's ideal ethics as an unaffordable luxury. In that sense, I think that the knock on capitalism is a bit misguided. As I'm given to understand it, may people feel that capitalism leads to a society where people don't care for or support one another. As I experience the world, the causation is somewhat different... to the degree that people don't care for one another influences the degree to which whatever economic system is put in place results in exploitation and harm.

And, at least in the United States, what stands in the way of a just society where people feel a broad duty of care for others is a factionalism driven by feelings of poverty. People feel that they don't have enough to fulfill their entitlements and/or meet their daily needs, and so they prioritize getting what they can over advocating that others be well-treated. Or even altering their behavior to try and redress things. Wal-Mart, for instance, didn't drive small retailers out of business through illegal business practices... they used their ability to offer lower prices to lure price sensitive shoppers away. I like local retail, so I patronize them whenever possible, even though that results in higher costs... a stance that has lead to some amount of criticism. But if I'd rather not shop Amazon when I can support someone else, that extra cost is the price of admission.

Whether or not there is ethical consumption in the United States is not for me to decide. Personally, I'm disinclined to consider the ethics of my own actions solely in terms of the ethics of all previous links in the chain, given that I can't control most of them. My job, I think, is to always understand myself to be well-resourced enough to not feel the need to shift my costs onto others.

Honestly

I read Malcolm Gladwell's new book, The American Way of Killing. Put simply, it's an indictment of what Mr. Gladwell understands to be the fundamental dishonesty, as he puts it, that's baked into the discourse concerning guns, violence and crime here in the United States. And it's fine, for what it is. As a Canadian, Mr. Gladwell hopes to bring something of an outsider's perspective to the discussion, which he does.

When I bought the book, the manager at Barnes and Noble, who is an old acquaintance of mine, told me that The American Way of Killing lacks the neutrality of Mr. Gladwell's earlier books. Having only read Talking to Strangers, I can't say for certain that it's true, but I do note a difference in tone. Mainly because Mr. Gladwell seems angered by the whole business; I came away from The American Way of Killing with the sense that Mr. Gladwell felt that, even of the dishonesty in the discourse was not always intentional, it was always culpable, and Americans bore responsibility for it. Which I get.

But I think, in that regard, that perhaps it would have been worthwhile to delve more deeply into the fear, mistrust and tribalism that underlies the dishonesty. For example, I am of the opinion that people are motivated to support "assault weapon" bans not only out of misunderstanding the relative dangerousness of the weapons (and Mr. Gladwell does devote some page space to a deception that fuels that misunderstanding), but also because they understand the weapons as a means in which people bring lethal violence into places where it's not supposed to be. On the other side of the ledger, many conservative gun-rights activists come across as motivated by the tripartite nature of current conservative populism; their guns are a defense against both hostile élites taking over government to use it against them and the undeserving others who prefer robbery and theft to honest work.

In other words, for me, the problem is that old villain of mine, low (or nonexistent) social trust, and the prices that people are willing to impose on those they mistrust for their own sense of security. In the end, I didn't find The American Way of Killing to be a bad book; I certainly learned some interesting things from it. But I think that it views the dysfunction in the way Americans talk about guns, violence, crime et cetera as a cause, and not also as an effect. So I'm not sure that there's a good way to take any solutions away from it.