The Contingency of Oarsmen

The following is adapted from an interminable project of indeterminate size, an as yet untitled work of impossible scope that will be a failure only in so much as it comes to any definitive conclusions whatsoever.

I find myself unable to write about mass shootings. Again. I can never figure out a way in that feels appropriate, that feels in any way equal to the horror, that could possibly justify saying anything at all. I've spent every night since this most recent one reading and reading and reading, and staring at the blank page, and giving up. And I think, I'll listen to some music, to clear my head, and then I'm waking up to the blank page, infuriated at myself for being unable to say something, again. Anything.

Maybe I've internalized Vonnegut's admonition, that there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre, and everything should be quiet after one, except the birds.  "Poo-tee-weet."  Maybe I just don't have the stomach for it, to connect guts to mind, in this place where the political and the theoretical and the verbal are ripped away, this place of impossible violence--where ideas surrender to reality. Every word--every thought--feels unsure in the face of such incomprehensible certainty, feels timid and cowardly before the clarity and the finality of violence.

We call it inhuman, we call it monstrous, we call it illness--a pleading hope for distance, as though there has ever been anything on the planet capable of these things, besides the human being. As though we could disown it. As though we might, through civilized heartbroken denial, absolve the human race by mere redefinition.

~ ~ ~

The primary, foundational delusion of human culture is indeterminism. The dogmatism of free will--of self-determination--is fertile ground, blossoming malevolent, benevolent, and ambivalent ends across the whole spectrum of human behavior and interaction. This is an untended and chaotic and polycultural garden--there is no grand conspiracy here, just a weird misapprehended fact borne of blameless observation, and the ego.

Mark Twain said: Where are there are two desires in a man's heart he has no choice between the two but must obey the strongest, there being no such thing as free will in the composition of any human being that ever lived.

Arthur Schopenhauer said: Man can do as he wills but he cannot will what he wills.

Kurt Vonnegut said: Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.

The mistake is made in the imagining of the will as some untethered possessable, something that exists external to the self, a tool that the self uses to independently interact with the world. This mistake is a definitional limitation of what "self" is, imposed by ego-centered notions of control--a limitation on the understanding of the self by the self in a flailing attempt to deny the reality of a mechanistic natural world. Rather, the will is neither free nor external to the self, but best understood as the expression of every input ever entered into the individual human machine. The will is an always-updating constant culmination of forces, seen and unseen--local inputs with recognizable causal chains merely the sensible product of unknowable forces stretching back into the indefinite reaches of all of space and time.

But you're "self-made," eh? All right, man.

~ ~ ~

"Treat the disease, not the symptoms," is a command I often hear in the aftermath of these events, as though the "disease" was anything other than the inclination to violence. As though human violence was the symptom of a diseased culture, and not the other way around. Violence is itself a fundamental expression of life, though the creative violence of becoming is often horrifyingly repurposed to malevolent undoing ends. If you're looking for the "disease," the regress doesn't stop--not at laws, nor at culture, nor at humans--just because you say so. It goes deeper than that.

Sometimes, when the sickness is all consuming and essential and a metastasized function of the body, when the disease is existential, when you couldn't cure it without eliminating the host, you treat the symptoms. You try to create the conditions where the disease cannot thrive. It's all you can do, if the disease is baked in--if, in fact, the "disease" isn't a disease at all, but an expression of life. The expression of a will to make things different, a seemingly oppositional will--to create a better, less violent reality--is not a denial of the mechanistic, determined world (as it may seem), but a coequal expression of life within that determined world. 

~ ~ ~

In the Coen brothers' movie No Country for Old Men, what makes Anton Chigurh so uniquely terrifying is not that he is a psychopathic, remorseless killer, but that he removes willing itself from the decision about whether or not he's going to kill. He turns over agency to a capricious and uncaring deterministic randomness, out of a belief that the machinery of fate, this final certainty of violence, decides all. But the will matters. We recognize this, and are horrified by him. His dogmatism is useful in so far as it demands a willful response, if not from the universe itself, then at least from you or me.

~ ~ ~

The dogmatism of free will is a useful delusion only in so far as its limitations are recognized and its reach constrained. Purposive, rational action is self-evidently possible--that it is informed by hidden causal chains should not cause existential dread, but relieve it. 

This is (part of) what makes the Christian redemption metaphor so powerful. The promise of salvation affirms the deterministic reality of failure in Original Sin, by which man is forever tainted, and through no fault or action of his own. It is how we were created, after all. The salvation narrative also affirms the indeterminate reality of our apparent free will--our chosen sins are indeed chosen, to an extent, but we are eligible for forgiveness because in an important way, it was in our nature to have failed.

Both things can be true--there can be purposeful, thoughtful, rational, moral action in a deterministic, mechanistic world. They operate in concert with one another, not at odds--both are (apparently) a necessary expression of reality. 

We are floating in a vast ocean. We are ignorant of the laws and forces that conspired to bring the ocean into existence, and that placed us here. We don't know how or why the winds blow. We don't know how or why the currents flow. But we have an oar. And we can paddle.

~ ~ ~

It is perhaps true, that if you could map one's entire consciousness down to the atomic level, you could point to a deterministic natural cause of every thought, whim, gut feeling, and ultimately every action an individual experiences or engages in. It is also true that that fact is utterly meaningless to the actual experience of a life. It doesn't matter, in an important way. What does matter is the recognition that there is a relationship between these two truths that expresses the world around us. A dogmatism that insists on only either denies that expression. It is not either--it is both.

~ ~ ~

Human beings possess the natural right to defend their lives, as does every other creature in the universe. This is about as self-evident as natural rights get. The right to self-defense is contingent on nothing--it is absolute, and was just as true 1000 years before the invention of the gun and will remain the case after all life on Earth has been extinguished. If someone or something is trying to kill you--whether you're a giant sea turtle or an oak tree or a little green alien half-a-million light years from home--you have the natural right to defend yourself. As truth, it is as about as close to fundamental and unimpeachable as one can get.

The relationship between the natural right to self-defense and the second amendment to the Constitution cannot be ignored, developed as it was from the English Bill of Rights. But the right to bear arms is also very clearly contingent in a way that the natural right to self-defense is not--not just because it is derived from that natural right, but also because no human being born before the invention of the gun, or after the gun no longer exists (in some imagined future), could be said to possess the right to bear an object that is not physically manifest. That would be self-evidently absurd.

The gun is not elemental. It neither possesses nor confers supernatural powers. It does not embody natural power, it is not a force of nature. The gun is nothing more than a tool, its power contingent. The right to wield that specific power is equally contingent.

To argue otherwise is to insist that no laws can be passed that could rightfully constrain that right. This is also self-evidently absurd. The existence of nuclear submarines and fully automatic anti-aircraft guns and intercontinental ballistic missiles does not confer upon the individual the right to bear those arms. So we constrain the right. Because it is not a natural right, but a contingent one. To argue otherwise is like claiming that "free will" is absolute, when it is self-evidently the case that one's desires and behavior and actions are at least in part contingent on forces well beyond any purely libertarian notions of self-determination. 

~ ~ ~

I am in danger, I realize, of appearing to be doing battle with straw men, but tell certain people--they're not hard to find--that they don't have absolute free will, or the natural right to bear arms, and see how they take it.

~ ~ ~

The dogmatism of the second amendment to the Constitution is useful only in so far as its limitations are recognized and its reach appropriately constrained. The moment it is considered absolute and inviolable is the moment it has lost its utility in a rule-of-law society. It represents the natural right that serves as its foundational justification--the natural right to self-defense, which is itself an outgrowth of the natural right to life--but it is not itself that right. It is instead a necessary contingency, here, now, in this physical reality.

It is often said, after these massacres, that such are the wages of freedom. That the cost of freedom includes this. That we should do nothing.

If the cost of freedom is the regular slaughter of children, if the cost of freedom is an army of teachers, trained in close combat and expected to be experts in assessing which of their students poses a mortal threat and then executing those students in self-defense, if the cost of freedom is maximum-security schools with fences and armed guards and locked doors--then this is a cost that we simply will not bear. Again--if the cost of freedom is the regular slaughter of children, then this is a cost that we simply will not bear. We must either lower the wages of freedom, or we can expect that enough people will not be willing to bear it. It is not either--it is both.

It is incumbent upon those who hold freedom so vociferously dear to find a way to lower the cost, even and especially by compromising on previously ferociously defended dogmas. The second amendment dogmatists must find a way to lower the cost, must be willing to bend, or the doom and gloom scenarios of confiscation and tyranny will be self-fulfilling prophecies. Which is possibly not too far from what these apocalypse-humpers are after, anyway--the incomprehensible certainty and finality of violence.

But we have oars.