I've just relocated a comment I made on an article written by Domyo Burk, Not Just Guns and Madmen: Our Whole Society Is Insane
"A wonderful article which raises so many deep issues. We've become morally and socially unmoored. The warm and affective bonds of community have been dissolved, leaving nothing but monetary ties, the most brittle and transitory of all ties. We need to rebuild real community, and resist temptations to embrace surrogates in the absence of the real thing. That's both an institutional and personal question. There is plenty we can do in our interpersonal relations to extend sympathies, loyalties and solidarities, as adumbrated in this article. We are indeed suffering an epidemic of loneliness born of loss, loss of place, identity, community, meaning. The sociologist Max Weber perceptively described the modern age as one in which the central institutions proceed "without regard for persons". That impersonalism shows in the numbers of people who feel lost, adrift. We badly need a repersonalisation, at the level of social relations, practices and institutions."
Domyo Burk responded: "Ah, the brother speaks my mind." At least someone agrees with me, then.
I wrote that comment three years ago, October 2015. It bears repetition. In fact, it bears full book length treatment. The world is divided between a fake right and a fake left, economic liberalizers who free the market, cultural and ethical liberalizers who free the individual - and that freedom from communal, social, ethical and ecological constraints has given us inequality, exploitation, uncertainty and planetary unraveling. Call it whatever you like, but to survive and thrive we - insofar as a 'we' can still be identified in a meaningful way - need to crack the problem of how an individual freedom aggregates into a collective unfreedom. Liberalization is the road to mutual self-cancellation and annihilation.
I don’t count and don’t care to remember the growing number of incidents in which individuals armed with guns have gone on a killing spree in towns and cities. Each new incident is merely the latest in what is now clearly a pattern of death and destruction that exhibits a society dis-at-ease with itself. We may express shock and outrage, but such incidents are now so frequent that shock must shortly give way to numbness, outrage to a hopelessness born of a feeling of powerlessness. We can express sympathy and offer prayers. Some say prayers are useless and do no good. They are confusing different things. Acting on the causes of violence in modern society requires more than prayer, but the non-religious and plain irreligious should be careful here, since their repudiation of prayer as futile also applies to expressions of sympathy. Without appropriate actions – of which more shortly – their own demands that violence end can also be dismissed as pious wishes that do no good. The good that is done by expressions of sympathy, collective gatherings, demonstrations of unity and, indeed, the offering of prayers results from the declaration of solidarity in suffering. And that does a power of good, because it tells people that it is worthwhile looking for solutions to the problems that ail us. Prayers are never meant to substitute for action, but to inspire it by offering support to those seeking redress.
What is not helpful are the usual and all-too-quick recriminations. Incidents are an invitation to those with political grievances to air to indulge their prejudices. Whenever facts contradict their pet cause, they remain remarkably silent. Not to worry, some other faction will fill the space with their particular noise. It is right to challenge the bland condemnations of ‘senseless’ violence. Let us take it as read that the taking of life is violence against the senses, that someone must be detached from their own health and sanity to take the lives of others. We have every reason to analyse further. The description ‘senseless’ is too often an excuse not to ask tough questions of present social and political arrangements. But that isn’t an invitation for each and every group to contribute to faction and violence by writing their own political, racial, or religious positions into what remains a fractious and divided terrain. There will be social, political, and cultural reasons behind such events, since there is most certainly a social pathology at work. We need to heal it rather than contribute to it and reinforce it.
Which brings us to gun control. The issue crops up every time. With good reason. No guns, no shooting. Simple. Or not so simple. Sides divide, positions become entrenched, and instead of the deeper analysis as to why society is so off-kilter, the question is defined neatly in terms that fit existing political divisions. And so to the next incident, and the same political battle that gets nowhere. It is a political self-cancellation that says everything about the much vaunted ‘conflict pluralism’ at the heart of liberal society and politics. That’s the problem with liberal freedom. As strong as it is with respect to individuals being allowed to choose the good as they see fit, when it comes to the collective goods upon which any flourishing society rests, liberalism fails: individuals cannot be bound by a greater good. When it comes to a definition of the common good, individuals are always free to opt out, refuse cooperation, negate arguments for the public purpose. We are seeing the dynamics at work with regard to climate politics. Environmentalists in the main are liberal, seeking no fundamental transformation in the structure and relations of society. They assert the freedom of the individual and the right of subjective choice and affirm individual rights. All well and good. Except that the climate is a public good and the crisis in the climate system is a collective crisis requiring collective action. The lesson is simple: you cannot resolve a collective problem on individualist premises. The demands for collective action are thus levelled on government and law, to be an abstract community or common will, in a society of fragmented an fractious individual wills. The position is incoherent.
We are between worlds.
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
The problem lies in the loss of morality in the heart of social relationships, corrupting society from within. Individuals are being severed from a sense of identity, community, and belonging, a sense of meaning that gives hope for the future and inspires action, from all that embeds them in the society of others. In the first instance, that severance is from God as the ground of our being, and from the Natural Law that orders all things to their true ends.
I don’t need to be persuaded that guns are hideous things, instruments of death, the executioners of life and all that is sacred. I can’t stand them. But I am curious about the extent to which guns are burned into the psyche of the modern world. I was a John Wayne fanatic when young. And many years later, despite having learned of Wayne’s political views, I still have a soft spot for him. His best film was his last one, The Shootist. He plays a dying gunman who, going out with one last gunfight, sees that it’s not the way, and nods approvingly as his young acolyte throws the gun away after yet more killing. I note the number of television programmes and films which make guns and shooting central to their entertainment. I don’t fail to notice, either, the same number of programmes and films which put on violence of all kinds other than shooting as entertainment. And before the watershed. Violence to others has become normalized, and people consume it as entertainment. There is something sick in the modern psyche. I call this violence as entertainment pornographic, the kind of pornography that adults seem happy to put before children, before the watershed, normalizing the most depraved of behaviours in interpersonal relations. I remember Desmond Morris writing about the fuss that the publication of his book The Naked Ape caused in 1967:
The Chicago Tribune pulped an entire issue of its magazine because its owners were offended by a review of the book that appeared on its pages. Why were they so offended? Because the review in question included the word 'penis.’ Sexual honesty, it seemed, was another of the faults to be found in the book. The same newspaper included endless reports of violence and murder. The word 'gun' appeared frequently. As I pointed out at the time, it was strange that they were prepared to mention something that shot death, but not something that shot life. But logic had no place here. By exchanging my fish and birds for men and women, I had uncovered a sleeping giant of human prejudice.
I have often wondered what would happen if, instead of guns being drawn and shot before the watershed, we saw scenes of full frontal nudity and sex. I think there would be outrage. I consider guns as entertainment to be pornographic. The world of TV and film is full of guns. I can’t stomach that world. So why not just ban guns? If guns could be banned, I’d ban them. I’d ban plenty of other things I can’t abide, too. Wouldn’t we all? But the problem with bans, even presuming that they are possible, is not just that it means overriding politics – the often legitimate disagreements of others – is that it smacks of a legalistic and regulative approach that all too easily substitutes for the transformation of social and moral relations that alone restore society to health through the balance and integration of personality and community. Bans merely cover the basic lack of morality; they are surrogates, with the law substituting its institutional force for what individuals ought to do as moral beings themselves. There is no substitute for virtue, and virtue is always a personal quality, a question of character. It is the character forming culture of family, work, and relationships within community that is missing.
I don’t see constitutions as written in stone, I don’t make a fetish, still less a Golden Calf, of laws and institutions, I’m all in favour of tougher regulations, more thorough background checks, and restricting access to guns. I wouldn’t lose sleep at all if they were banned. In fact, I’d be happy had the things never been invented in the first place. But they have been, and that invention points to a basic fear and a violence that feeds on itself, that risks escalating out of control, and that makes collective outbreaks of war all too comprehensible for comfort. I’m interested in the whole issue of false idols demanding human sacrifices, because I think there is a deep psychological imbalance at work here that demands for legal controls merely sidesteps and leaves untouched. I do believe that law has an educative purpose as well as a regulative purpose, and that appropriate laws go hand in hand with moral and psychic transformation. But not instead of. I am not pitting the one against the other. I am suspicious of the way the issue immediately fractures into two sides with clear, pre-established, political identities. Unless you get out of the political trenches and seek redress by putting law, morality, psychology, and sociality together, then the problem of violence will continue to run through the social fabric, tearing it apart. The individuals using the guns to kill others are moral agents whose destructive intent says something about the society which generates them. Their moral compass is perverted, and that perversion is effected by the culture of licence and libertarianism, diminishing public life and the public imagination, feeding division in society and faction in politics, that has been engineered over the past few decades. Treating the symptoms of violence may well be better than doing nothing, but in a culture of violence it will be an endless task. Sticking plasters will not hold together a society that is falling apart. Until we are prepared to look deeper into the fundamental violence at the heart of a divided, competitive society in which each sees others as mere means to personal ends or as competitors for scarce resources, then we will continue to live in a society of mutual enmity and antagonism. We need to change the fundamentals.
We live in godless, prophetless times, wrote Max Weber a century ago. My view is that a godless humanism has produced the most pernicious inhumanism, the mechanization of mind, matter and men delivering us bound head to toe into the spiritless, soulless megamachine. The modern intellectual revolutions drove God from the world and put world-changing power into human hands. The effect was, of course, intoxicating. In the meaningless, purposeless, valueless universe, where no God was present, humans arrogated to themselves the power and privilege to project their own value and meaning upon the world. But, without any resonance between inner and outer worlds, without a God to draw us out of our ego to identify with a larger purpose and end, such projection could only be empty, a self-assertion on the part of increasingly smaller selves. The expansion of means has brought a diminution of meaning. And here we are, bewailing our end as we envisage the end of a meaningless world, with no prospect of any other world beyond our finite, meaningless selves. Without God, there is naught but the despair of semi-clever monkeys, monkeys that had the intelligence to create technologies that made them seem as gods, but lacked the wisdom to use them as God would have them use them. Luckily, whilst human arrogance and stupidity is almost limitless, it is exceeded by God's mercy, which is infinite.