The Myth of "The Good Guy with a Gun"

The more guns a society has, the greater the number of people who get shot. That fact has been well established; the correlation is beyond dispute. And yet there are those who say "If we just had more good guys with guns we could intervene and save more people." And it's true that now and then a "good guy with a gun" is there to save the day (quite often these "good guys" are off duty police officers). And if we increase the number of guns, we'll increase the number of "good guys." And that is because we'll increase the total number of shootings, and therefore the number of opportunities for a good guy to intervene. But the increase is linear. So, to put it in simple terms, if today there are 1000 guns and 100 shootings and one time a good guy saved the day (and this does not happen in reality in anything like 1% of the times), then if we double the guns to 2000, we'll get 200 shootings and 2 times a good guy has saved the day. The number of people saved will go up 100%! But so will the number of people who get shot. Whereas before it was 99, now it's 198 (assuming for simplicity's sake only one person gets shot and one saved). There is never a point where more guns equals more safety.

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The Headless Leviathan

                It never occurred to Thomas Hobbes when he was describing the war of all against all that is the state of nature that the primary fact about humans could be anything other than the isolated individual. In fact it hardly ever occurs to anyone. Our experience of being a self is so strong. But our perspective being an individual gives us both the insight no other race from another planet could match into our being and a blindness, like the blindness every individual would have about his own face if not for mirrors. It never occurred to Hobbes that the default state of humanity was the group: the family, the tribe, the “race,” the nation, that we have this in common with ants and bees and elephants and gorillas. Our self is an expression of our role in the social unit at least as much as it is an expression of something innate, something, perhaps, we were born with or that, à la Freud, manifested and set in infancy. The self is fungible. The tyrannical group identity dictates certain roles and selves will always manifest to fill them, like an angel fish changing sex to keep the species going. Every classroom has a clown and a drama queen and a bully. This is why mobs act like mobs. This is why, when law cannot hold them down, every country, every culture has is terrorists.

                Unlike ants and elephants however human societies like human beings are in constant flux. Every classroom and every sports team and every neighborhood and every taste in music, every state and nation and gender and “race,” and church and state of being is at any moment its own organism. Could anything be more absurd than burning cars and killing strangers because your Spartans or your Red Sox won (or lost) the championship? The group organism, the anonymous group self (we can find this self in literature like nowhere else) takes control then. But it’s only the individual who is ever put in jail. We put them in jail because they exercised their part in the same group self that we are all subject to under the right conditions, depending on the moment’s need. (That’s why jails, though we cannot do without them, never solve the problem and aren’t about rehabilitation. They’re about removing the catalyst of past violence, their about taking the burnt candle out of the infinite box of candles.) The group self has no soul. It is a leviathan but not one that we become through reasonable reflection. It is a leviathan we are by default, by instinct the way any animal feels when to hunt and when to flee. A leviathan without a head.

And Another Thing about Guns

This is no one's opinion but a simple fact born out endlessly in study after study: that gun you have in your house is more dangerous to you, to your safety, to the lives and well-being of your children than anything you think you are using it to protect yourself from.

The Government, the Mob, and Guns.

Hobbes was pretty well on track.
If you don't trust government, you trust the mob.
Governments can be pretty bad, pretty untrustworthy.
But they cannot be worse than the mob.
At their worst, they cannot be worse than the mob.
If you distrust the government but you like guns
You are the mob.

God and Salman Rushdie

I recently heard Salman Rushdie assert that believing in God was like believing in a fairy tale and, in the same interview, duck the question of whether people who believe in God are not very bright—and this in the same interview in which he called Carly Fiorina, “the dumbest person with whom I ever shared a stage” (or words to that effect). Clearly, it takes a lot for him to duck a question. He’s probably right about Carly Fiorina. And I have great respect for him in general. I once went to India to give a paper on his work. I once taught a Ph.D. seminar on his writings. I’ve even read Grimus.

The problem with his apparent belief that believers aren’t as bright as nonbelievers is that it is objectively false. Intelligence itself has no bearing on whether or not one believes in God. I don’t think Salman Rushdie or Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins is any more intelligent than Paul Ricoeur, Rene Girard or Owen Barfield. No more needs to be said about that.

His comment about the fairy tale is far more interesting to me.  After all, he said, “we now know how where the universe came from” (or words to that effect).  Do we?

I have great respect for the scientific method. And I am the last person to suggest we confuse a religious text with a text of science. People who read the Old Testament with science or history (in the post Enlightenment meanings of those words) are idiots. Or very badly informed. No thinking (with the exception of trained scientists in the field in their professional capacity) can reject the Big Bang as the most accurate description of the start of the universe because no one but another professional scientist is in a position to do so.

But does the Big Bang Theory tell us more about the origin of the universe than Genesis?

Genesis says, “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth…. God said, ‘Let there be light, and there was light.’”

The Big Bang Theory says: “Bang. There was light.”

I don’t have any strong need to believe that the author or redactor of Genesis had special knowledge of the start of things here. The coincidence (which my phrasing has exaggerated) that makes “Let there be light” read like as good a description of that moment of the Bang as any needn’t be taken as anything but a coincidence. What is relevant is only this: Genesis provides an explanation of where the universe came from. God made it. God spoke it into existence. The Big Bang theory does not. Right or wrong, we Genesis tells us more of where the universe came from than science does—or can. So the notion that now we know how things happened (whereas before we did not) is nonsense. It may be that Genesis is wrong in telling us that God made the universe. Whether or not that is so, we are no closer to knowing where the universe came from. The start is not the same as the origin.

The Englightenment Delusion

Pray what was that man’s name,–for I write in such a hurry, I have no time to recollect or look for it,–who first made the observation, “That there was great inconstancy in our air and climate?” Whoever he was, ’twas a just and good observation in him.–But the corollary drawn from it, namely, “That it is this which has furnished us with such a variety of odd and whimsical characters;”–that was not his;–it was found out by another man, at least a century and a half after him: Then again,–that this copious store-house of original materials, is the true and natural cause that our Comedies are so much better than those of France, or any others that either have, or can be wrote upon the Continent:–that discovery was not fully made till about the middle of King William’s reign,–when the great Dryden, in writing one of his long prefaces, (if I mistake not) most fortunately hit upon it. Indeed toward the latter end of queen Anne, the great Addison began to patronize the notion, and more fully explained it to the world in one or two of his Spectators;–but the discovery was not his.–Then, fourthly and lastly, that this strange irregularity in our climate, producing so strange an irregularity in our characters,–doth thereby, in some sort, make us amends, by giving us somewhat to make us merry with when the weather will not suffer us to go out of doors,–that observation is my own;–and was struck out by me this very rainy day, March 26, 1759, and betwixt the hours of nine and ten in the morning.                                                               --Lawrence Stern, Tristram Shandy Ch XXI

 

Our narrator seems to have both (and paradoxically) an obsessive and a cavalier attitude regarding the origin of certain historically significant observations—observation which we (or at least he) could call emerging truths. Stern is both observing and mocking the new state of emerging knowledge, this Enlightenment sally into the territory formerly held by ignorance in which each new truth stakes its claim under the authorial flag of its discoverer. It may be only the role of ego in conquest that is being mocked here, but it may also be that Sterne understood that the enterprise itself, even in the early days of its success, was not precisely what it took itself to be. In Stern’s time, it was widely believed that progress in knowledge, wherever it was made, genuinely shrunk the territory of ignorance and that continued advances in the realm of knowledge would, eventually, eliminate the territory of ignorance altogether.

Two and a half centuries later, that claim feels quaint. Just as each scientific instrument designed to shrink the universe—from the first hand-held telescope to massive  infrared, radio contraptions we now have—have only served to make the universe bigger and bigger until its size, at one point merely unimaginable—has become yet one unimaginabilty nested inside or perhaps bumping along side an infinite number of other equally infinite spaces, so our conquest of knowledge in general has served only to increase our ignorance—or, more precisely our knowledge of our ignorance. We know both more and far far less than we ever did.  

I say we used to plant our flags on every new tidbit of truth conquered by understanding. But that’s not quite true. We still do it. Our attitude has not kept up with our experience or our observations. As we are becoming increasingly ignorant, as our only real knowledge is the ever growing knowledge of our ever growing ignorance we fail to adjust or attitude the realization that what we already don’t know has accumulated to the point where we can reasonably surmise that there is a vast territory of reality we can never subsume to knowledge.

And this is where we started before the blip of the enlightenment delusion.

MORE GUNS!

Threeman the One I'd Sailor

The parent, child and holy ghost, the ego id and superego, the I and the reptilian brain and the prefrontal cortex. The rule of threes.

How much of our perception of the world comes out of the war between the reptilian brain and the prefrontal cortex? How much comes out of those two parts (on the one side) and the singularity of the first person nominative singular pronoun?

One “I,” two brains. One I to rule unruly both. Two selves warring from which to produce a single unity. One I’d sailor.

Even God is three: Parent child and holy ghost. Freud claimed that the self was three, ego, id and superego. All these overlapping threes.

I sometimes think I’m most myself when I’m deepest in love. But that is when I’m least human, if human is what separates me from the other fauna of earth. I’m least in my reasoning brain. I say I can’t control myself. I must be my pre-frontal cortex, myself must be my reptilian brain. My ego can’t control my id.

If I am my I, I am not myself (said Alice). Myself am not I. But if my I is something I own—if it’s mine, it isn’t me. Nothing I own is me.

But that’s just words. That’s just the language and the structure of my language, which so often fails to organize being as being really is—assuming there is (which I doubt) any organization of language that would be able to map it. To me that is the fundamental fact. There is reality, which even to name “reality” is to misrepresent, and there is language which (among its several tasks) represents it, maps it, grids it.

Which tells me I have it wrong but doesn’t help me get it right. Who am I, myself? And who are you?

Laughing at Evil

Evil itself provides no challenge whatsoever to God—the existence of or the belief in. This may seem like a small, semantic point, but I think it’s actually big and essential. Evil implies God. This is not to say that God is evil but that evil cannot exist if God does not. Without God, “evil” is just a hyperbole for events that leave us feeling very sad or very scared. We may want to say “for events we can’t understand,” but without God these events are perfectly plain—whether they be the extermination of millions or the torture and slaughter of a single child, a hurricane that wipes out a whole tribe or the man-caused heat that burns a living planet to the ground. Without God there are only things we do or things that happen. Such events are in the total calculation of the universe random events, no different than the formation of a star via the coalescence of gasses or the massacre of a tribe of termites by a tribe of ants.

But I do not believe that humans can experience “evil” events this way—as meaningless. And I don’t think that this is because we find these events really really sad. The truth is that the murder of a child doesn’t just feel incomprehensible—it is incomprehensible. Despite the fact that, without God, it is easy to comprehend, it is experienced as something that should not have to have happened. It is experienced with the same deep affect which accompanies (although I’m saying this backwards) the literary form known as tragedy, which Aristotle famously characterized as “pity and fear” but which I would think better understood with that italicized phrase: It should not have to have happened. Of course with the murder of any individual child or with any “evil” or “tragic” event, looking at immediate causes, we can always see ways it might have been avoided. Every individual event is contingent and therefore, in theory, avoidable. Pulling back, however, we have to see that from what we know about the universe such events in general are unavoidable. Given the moral and physical structure of the universe, such events must be possible, and therefore, to paraphrase Derrida, whatever can arrive must arrive.

The question we are left with is whether the moral structure of the universe is really an amoral structure—which is to say, does not exist at all. Put another way, we are asking whether our reaction to Oedipus the King or the murder of Sally Jones is something we should take seriously or ignore, something we should believe in, or something we should pass off as an illusion founded in the chance wiring of our common circuitry. It seems to me the burden of proof is on those who contend that the profound experience of injustice or tragedy is not to be taken seriously, that whenever we are tempted to say or feel it should not have to have happened, this is mere apophenia, we are imposing a Darwinian impulse onto a random set of data—that our reaction to such events is in fact so out of proportion to the events themselves that any truly rational species peering down at us through their telescopes would be laughing.

Just Sayin

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the plastic they use to make the backs of TVs.
If snow is white, why then her skin is sort of dun colored. And if snow is brown
Or yellow or grey, her skin is still sort of dun colored.
If hairs were wires
That would be weird.
Her cheeks are skin colored. Her lips are lip colored.
I grant I’ve never seen a goddess.
So that isn’t relevant.
And I do like music. And I don’t agree with the destruction of coral,
literal or metaphoric.
I do love my mistress, always,
Even though she sometimes pisses me off.

 

 

The Poetry Teacher’s Final Assignment

I said
You’ve been studying poetry for fifteen weeks and now
To show me what you’ve learned
You have to write your own original poem.
Show me what you’ve learned.

Ben wrote
     Life is good
     more often than it is bad.
     Death sucks.
     Even though everyone is unhappy a lot of the time
     in almost every life there are moments when you realize
     it’s better than being
     dead.
     And even though death takes you away from all the parts of life that suck,
    Death still sucks worse.
    Life is still better.

I said
“You’re just saying it. You have to make me feel it.”
He painted it on a rock and threw it through my window.
He was aiming for my head.

More Poems More Poems More Poems

it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt
Elizabeth Alexander

People give things many different names. But in themselves, they have no names. When you are thinking, all things have different names and different shapes. But when you are not thinking, all things are the same. There are no words for them. People make the words. A cat doesn't say, ‘I am a cat.’ People say, ‘This is a cat.’
Zen Master

I should stop there. I should let the tensions between those two statements do their common work. I should let the apparent differences fade in their untruth, and let them, in them, mingle like male and female into the child of your thoughts. But I don’t trust you. I don’t trust you to see it. And I don’t trust myself. I don’t trust myself to see tomorrow what I see so plainly today. I don’t trust time; I don’t trust the mind to ripen and the reader—you—to see it when you ready. I don’t trust you to be ready. It’s so much better when I can point to the picture that changes form when you stare and merely invite you to look, to see if it if you can, not to see it, not yet, it if you can’t. That patience is better. That trust is better. It’s better if you don’t explain the koan or let the listener know it was a koan that passed like smoke from pipe you won’t recall you ever smelled for years and years until you smell it again returning you to this moment, proustian.

But we don’t live in a monastery. We live in time.

And you might miss it. You will miss it, most of you. And what if you never do small it again? It’s better to have the koan explained than to miss it altogether. We teach minds and fertilize plants because we don’t have the time not to and time would not be enough. And those who did not have to be taught have already stopped reading.

The only way past language is through it. The only way to silence is talk. The only way to dissolve the name is to give it. More poems, more poems, more poems. The old texts, endlessly glossed. The “it” we don’t have because it is not haveable. The airborne soap bubble you lose by reaching for. The same thing said over and over in new words is something else.

On Abstraction

The editor of a Ricoeur collection suggested, I’m sure knowing he was being simplistic, that the author recognized the old equation of fiction with the type and history with the facts. There are any number of reasons ultimately to reject that notion. But the suggestion will not go away, and should not because it’s not entirely false. Fiction is more like the general than it is like the particular and history more like the particular than the general on the whole. At the same time the whole question of the particular and the general—in whatever nuanced pairings these concepts appear—will always remain open, will always be to be explored and never be finalized precisely because, in good Derridian fashion, language itself is thoroughly entangled in the question. One might even wonder whether the very distinction “general/specific” is not itself a dubious metaphor driven by the observation of natural phenomena and the needs of language to abstract facts into classes in order to say something about them. You can’t give every tree its own particular name. And it’s true that in the observable world there are observable groups with an historical and ontological status that obviously justifies classifications—although the criteria of classification is not always and everywhere made by an appeal to history or ontology but are also made with reference to use. So there are trees and there are maple trees and oak trees—with all their subclasses. And every maple may be different from every other maple but any maple is more like any other maple than it is like any oak. And there are men and women. But, as we have more recently seen, the categories of “male” and “female” are far from obvious and can be rigorously maintained only with an great effort, one that in certain circumstances becomes unsustainable or no longer useful. It may also be other abstractions, just as justice, liberty, beauty (etc) take their substance from an analogy to the natural world and are maintained at great cost. We want to believe that beauty exists, and something certainly exists to which humans tend to respond in uniform (if not universal) ways—ways that are taught and maintained but also have to be understood as being to some degree “natural.” It would be hard to set up the experiments that would lead to definitive results, but some work is being done. And we know that although our dogs do not respond to music, some birds do. They have the brain for it. But is beauty just the shape of the brain? Is it those brains that produce these chemicals when faced with these things that create the illusion of beauty? This is not irrelevant even if, as I hope and expect, it’s not going to be the whole truth of the question. If we did not have eyes we could not see. Would landscapes still be beautiful? Perhaps they would, but not to us.

This casts us back to the one great Romantic insight, what Wordsworth refers to when he says, “both what we half create and what we perceive.” “Half” is an imprecise fraction. No one knows the proportion, but the insight is valid: there is no perception without creation. The question of objectivity is irrelevant. It does not exist as such to us or our reckoning, not even quite (I suspect) to our math—though math must come closest to it.

On Knowledge in an extra platonic sense

Preliminary thoughts:

It seems important to bring into question, almost whenever possible, the inherited notion of knowledge as the ability to inscribe into language, the ability to say, to paraphrase, to translate either what is not language into language or what is already into language into more language. This is certainly an indicator of a type of intelligence. An important and indispensable skill. For it is only one way to think about knowledge, advancing the platonic hierarchy of personhood that makes a metaphor of the fact that the head is higher than the heart and the heart higher than the stomach. It is, I believe, the prejudice that leads, eventually to Bertrand Russell’s negative critique of Romanticism that turns to feeling when argument fails.

In general there is no hierarchy of intelligences or knowledges. As with all other things, value depends on the moment, on the particular use to which one wishes to put the thing, on what, on short, one is trying to do.
Any athlete, musician or creative writer understands, in particular and diverse ways, the notion that has pervaded our culture since before the days of Plato and which we call “inspiration.” (What is called “inspiration” in poetry may be called “hot hands” in athletics and by various names in the performance of music. In all cases one is “in the zone,” which may last a minute or stretch on indefinitely.) What each one knows is that if he/she took even a split second to think—to invoke the right-brain centers of language—they would fail. Each has to “let it happen.” I myself have always been an athlete and have never been a particularly good one. Nonetheless, I know that in those moments in which have been good, when I have succeeded spectacularly, I was not, consciously, thinking. Good coaches always tell players to react not to think. Good players show wisdom in their choices. It’s not just that in the heat and smoke of a contest there is no time to think. Rather it’s that thinking—in that platonic sense—is an impediment to doing. But this doing proceeds from knowledge (not something we should brush back by calling it “instinct”). The ball comes to you and you know where everyone is and you know what to do with it and you do it. (Steven Gould notwithstanding.) There is a sense, afterwards, of “I can’t believe I did that.” At least there is with mediocre athletes who slip into the zone. But there is no sense that you didn’t do—that it just happened.

I once thought it would be easy to be a writer. Just study writing. Find out what writers do. Analyze good writing. And do that. And so it baffled me that, after achieving a certain level of intellectual accomplishment, I noticed that there were a number of very good writers who, in my opinion, weren’t any smarter than I was, weren’t even as smart as I was. Who didn’t know as much. Who pronounced, in their conversation, logical absurdities no one of their stature should fall for. I thought.

But writing too is a gift. It does not come from the same muse who gives her gifts to the philosopher. She is not a lesser sister, just a different sister. Even in language, what counts, traditionally, as intelligence is not mere intelligence and what stands as knowledge is not mere knowledge. Jazz would not be possible if music were not a response to knowledge and if playing were not an intelligence. Nor would any music.
Where are we going with this? What are the implications?

We often hear of “emotional intelligence.” Such terms are probably bandied about into nonsense quite often, but behind it is, apparently, something real, valid, something that would be to a significant degree misrepresented if we did not use the word “intelligence,” which comes from an emotional knowledge that I do not want to call “instinctive” but rather “deeply learned” through experience and because of a predilection. I would say there is also a spiritual intelligence. I can’t prove that. But it stirs me to note that spiritual awareness is not quite correlated with intelligence, in the platonically derived sense. Very “intelligent” people are, today, less likely to be “spiritual,” (people like Russell who felt the need to distance himself from Christianity but also much more recently like Dawkins). I think this is more a matter of ego than anything else. People who put all their stock in that platonic version of intelligence can’t possibly subscribe to a knowledge that requires some alternative notion of intelligence for support. Nonetheless when I’ve heard such famous atheists speak I hear so many simplifications, so many faulty premises, so many things that are, by any definition, simply stupid, that I have to wonder why they are talking at all or who they think they are talking to? Because, the point here, faith in fact does not quite correlate with “intelligence.” A lot of smart people are atheists. And a lot of people much smarter (on that scale) than you and I not: philosophers like Paul Ricoeur, and scientists and great thinkers in every academic field who have the capacity of spiritual intelligence and, having it (as perhaps everyone does to some degree, as even I, now and then, can impress far better players on a soccer pitch), don’t feel the urgency to suppress it in favor of what they have been told is the only true measure of intelligence.

My Coffee Grin

I’m rich. I’m filthy stinking goddam rich.
My coffee tastes better than your coffee.
I pay a lot more for it—a lot—
And it tastes a little bit better than yours,
Almost enough to justify the exorbitant cost.
I’m a lot richer than you are,
I have money
I can’t find
anything to do with.
So I buy this filthy caffeine from this specialty
farm the mountains of Columbia
where the sky spills just enough photons every day
and where when it melts
snow drips continuously over the shallow roots
with the regularity of sand
in an hourglass
shaped like a woman's torso.
It makes me happy, happier than you.
Just a little bit happier than you.
Wipe that grin off your face.

Where Meaning Lies

We don’t live at the place where meaning is.
We live in the space where meaning happens,
where meaning vibrates like potato flakes
on a stereo speaker, configuring and re-
configuring, always settling, never
settling, or flakes that would melt
if ever they stopped hopping.

The Fundamental (Mis)conception (DRAFT)

Out of which all problems arise.
Quantum Field Theory and General Relativity.
Particle and Wave.
My, myself, and I.
Same and Different.
Language and Writing.
The two that are two and are one.
What is and what is perceived.
Selfishness and Altruism.
Nature and Nurture.
Versus, and, or, either.
Free will and Determinism.
Truth and fiction.
You and your twin.
Reason and Poetry.
Poetry and Prose.
Men and Women.
Law and Freedom.
Living and Dying.
You and I.
We could go on.
The problems of arrangement.
The problem of the pairings
That encompass as they exclude.
The limits, the borders and boundaries
Without which we cannot think but which
We cannot cross
Because they don’t exist.

The Meaning of Meaning

Probably the seminal moment of my Ph.D. work: I took the conservative position that words have meanings—I called them primary meanings—that writers can play with as they wish but not erase. “No,” I was told. “This is not true. Read Derrida.” I read Derrida, and Barthes, and Lacan, read about the sliding of the signified over the icy surface of the signifier. I understood. Words have no meaning not only because they do not exist (what is a word but the idealized sewing together of signifier and signified) but because what does exist—signifiers on the one hand and signifieds on the other—can never remain bonded. Meanings never quite settle; postcards never quite arrive. This is how meaning is. This is how it works. This is the metaphysical state of meaning. This is not however how words are experienced. Words are experienced as though they exist and as though meaning is something they have. And in any language the meanings experienced by person A are likely to coincide deeply with those of person B. It’s what makes the effect of communication via language possible. This “as if” must be kept in mind whenever one pursues questions of meaning. Words do not have meanings but they have histories. Or rather, "having" being impossible with signifiers, each of us has a history with each word we have encountered, histories of which we are never more than partly aware of. Each word bumps against that history like a steel ball in a pinball game lighting or unlighting all the bumpers.

Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale by Marina Warner

Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale by Marina Warner
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was curious about how OzHouse would do under the microscope of this author. It offers another modern twist on fairy tales. I'd say it would do okay.

Warner lost a little credibility with me by getting the name of Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum wrong (she calls him Frank L. Baum), but as a history of the Fairy tale, the book does a good job. It has to be a selective history, in this case lacking little in breadth but a lot in depth. It skims over everything. It starts slow and obvious, but becomes interesting and even informative about chapter 3. The tone is lighter than one might expect or want, as though the author isn't convinced she's doing serious scholarship, which, really, she isn't.



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Last Night's Dream

Last night’s dream

Was too strange to tell.

Freud would have loved it

But Freud would have been wrong about it

But Freud would have said that my saying so only proved he was right.

What a bastard.