Unintended Consequences

Ahmaud Arbery. An innocent 25 year old man gunned down for the crime of jogging while black. 

Some will argue that this is a sensational statement, but I'm going to make some otherwise sensational comments about that below anyway so strap in. 

This happened in February. It is now May. The two white men involved in the slaying are not in jail. Under Georgia law, given a loose interpretation of the situation while ignoring key facts, what they did to this young man was legal. Emphasis on "loose" and "ignoring".

We wouldn't even be discussing this had not third party video of part of the tragedy surfaced. Any reasonable person, after watching the video, can conclude one simple set of facts. An unarmed person was shot and killed by two armed people. This is irrefutable.

Under Georgia law citizens can not only carry, but they have the power to arrest. And (this is where the slippery slope begins) they have the right of defense when attacked. And this is true seemingly regardless of who provoked the attack. In this case we now know clearly it was the two white gentleman that provoked the situation.

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I want to try to deconstruct some of the ignorance and unintended consequences of the laws surrounding such situations that won't piss everyone off. And that's going to be difficult. To do this I'm going to naturally paint with a somewhat broad brush and admit that my own biases play some part as well.

But I also hope to belie some notions of political discourse that simply do not dovetail with reality.

There are foundations of the civil rights movement that rarely get discussed. And I could get lost in pointing some of these out. The secularists and atheists involved. The active homosexual leaders involved. The whites involved. I could write a dissertation about the inclusive and broad nature of the financial and foundational contributions of these groups but that would distract too much from my statements. 

What I can say is that I come by this knowledge largely from the efforts of my tiny little white girl mom. A mom who did actually fight in the trenches of the civil rights movement. A mom who helped establish North Carolina's first chapter of the NAACP. A mom who went to jail in the 60's during the Woolworths sit-ins.

A mom who largely got away with what were seen then as militant social actions precisely because she was a tiny white girl. 

This is the person who introduced me to shooting firearms and taught me how to do it well. Well after the crescendo of the Civil Rights Movement when I was 8 years old when she was on her second marriage and divorce and myself having a brother 10 years older she brought me out into a field with a Savage bolt action 22 rifle and began teaching me. I went on in later years to teach riflery and marksmanship at summer camp and became briefly involved in competitive IPSC pistol shooting sports. 

Being raised with secular humanist liberal progressive ideals and an appreciation of firearms didn't feel weird to me. Nor did it to my mother or any of her liberal contemporaries, regardless of the color of their skin.

But boy in this day and age it makes you feel like a unicorn in a wading pool of sharks.

All too often my opinions on the second amendment get dismissed by those on the left who claim that I just have a blind spot merely because I enjoy shooting sports. And perhaps that is correct to some degree. But I also realize just how ignorant so many people are of the history surrounding the Civil Rights Movement and how it ended up affecting firearms legislation.

Gun ownership was at the time a documented and well understood aspect of the movement. Dr. King's peaceful marches were a precise and powerful foil against the white oppression of the era, but there was context too that few take the time to digest. Public peaceful protests were to focus a lens on the less than peaceful retaliation by the state to leverage the media into the conversation. Privately, civil rights activists banded together in loose communities and groups to on a more intimate level publicly defend their neighborhoods with firearms. 

There was a sane divide and distinction that is lost in the conversation today. Civil Rights Activists realized in general that armed protests were not only counterproductive, they were foolish. Armed dissent might have made sense in 1800, but it certainly is a fantasy in 20th century America to believe that any group could overthrow the state. That's just madness and wishful thinking. But individuals living their lives with a firearm handy just in case and not making public political displays WAS a deterrent. And this was true in rural black America as much as it was true in urban black America. 

The modern divide between liberalism and firearms simply did not exist back then. And I argue that it doesn't really exist today. 

After Congress passed The Civil Rights Act of 1965, another law was passed shortly after, the National Firearms Act of 1968. And the proximity was no coincidence. 

Not to make any claims that the militant Black Panthers were fluffy kittens, but their armed protests for civil rights in California led us down the garden path of firearms legislation targeted at blacks in an attempt to seperate firearms from the liberal zeitgeist. A liberal collective made largely of completely safe living white people. And it worked.

Under then Governor Reagan we found the first legitimate attempts in generations at challenging the notion of the second amendment and its intent. Owning guns while black is as foundational and analogous with doing anything else.....like jogging.....while black. 

These legislative moves that began in California swept the nation. A nation in turmoil due to the civil rights movement, the counterculture movement, and the protests against the Vietnam War. And these culminated in the National Firearms Act. 

Largely seen today as a benign and sensible set of legislation, in its day it was equally an attempt to disarm en masse urban population centers. It established the legal precedents used today to continue a narrative about firearms as a social ill. And while parts of that argument seem to make sense on the surface it has institutionalized a divide between liberal values and the unfortunate reality of defending those values. It is a perhaps sad reality to admit to, but carrying a small pistol in an urban environment prior to this wasn't a radical act. It was a realistic act living inside the pressures of culture and poverty in inner city environments. In neighborhoods where ethnic groups preyed on their own this led to only the disarming of those.....who obey the law. It is no wonder that the lawlessness of inner cities of the era merely got worse. 

Unintended consequences. Naive ideas. Solutions that in a vacuum make sense, while completely ignoring human reality through ignorance. A culture where buying a gun at Sears, or Ace Hardware, or a corner drug store wasn't weird in the slightest. 

The danger, the real and legitimate danger of tinkering with the second amendment, has historically done little but exacerbate problems in society. Whether it be to limit or expand the rights to bear arms, it had created unfortunate scenarios that further remove ones liberty from the conversation and hand the rights over that conversation to a body politic.

Just as jogging while black has become a social and political reality we have to contend with, so has being armed while black. 

You can't in good conscience talk about one without recognizing the other......nor fail to  recognize that we have done this to ourselves.

A Moral Compass

I'm going to tackle some very complicated concepts today. And I will likely bore many of you to tears. 

I am an avid fan of history as are many people. But my fascination with it stems largely from a unique and over arching approach. 

A groundbreaking and brilliant documentary ostensibly about history, but in actuality more of a treatise on human behavior, came out from the BBC during my teen years. Directed and narrated by Richard Burke and titled "The Day The Universe Changed" is an exploration in a non linear nature of the tenets of behavior in the modern world, and where those ideas and ideals and ethical tenets come from. Even though it came out 40 years ago it is incredibly relevant in the current time and I encourage anyone and everyone to watch it. 

It alongside the brilliant documentary series by social anthropologist Desmond Morris, "The Human Animal" informed the foundations of my philosophy and worldview as I became an adult. 

Rather than answering all questions, those exposures to history, sociology, anthropology, and ultimately ethics and philosophy encouraged a young man's voracious appetite for knowledge. 

It will leave many who know me personally with contradictions, given my equal penchants for anime, video games, sarcasm, and irreverent and dark often oversexualized memes. Then again most people who know me really well already know I'm a complex and unpredictable motherfucker. 🤷‍♂️

................

Anywho......

I strongly feel we are on the cusp of an historical epoch. A new zeitgeist. One that may go unnoticed for it's scale because of the times we live in where change occurs so fast that we humans are basically just along for the ride. We accept "new normals" with unbridled speed never before seen in human history, simply because radical change occurs every generation now. Often times there are  multiple changes within a generation. In less than half the life span of my child who hasn't hit thirty yet, we went from zero to billions of smartphones. I'm typing this on a smartphone. 

You could scoff and say, if you do know your history, well every time we have a culturally altering event, change happens swiftly. And you'd be correct. But also wrong.

One of the most disruptive storms in all of human history was the invention of the printing press. Its inventor Johannes Gutenberg would go on to......die penniless. Patent law wasn't a thing back then. But within barely more than a generation it disrupted literally everything. The Protestant Reformation, the enlightenment, the Renaissance? These events and periods would not have happened otherwise. 

As a technological innovation the printing press really wasn't groundbreaking at all. It was merely the first time existing well established knowledge had been put together in precisely that way. Anyone today with an elementary school level education could re-discover such an invention. 

But even knowing the great philosophical contributions of the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Persians, and Romans before the dark ages, this was the first time in human history that knowledge was democratized on a grand scale. 

What pushed us to this wasn't however some grand tradition in knowledge. No, what pushed this was the collapse of the Augustinian worldview. The collapse of the ideology that embraced the concept that NOTHING about the real world mattered except in how it related to God and heaven. 

This took the black death, the literal death of more than half of Europe to bring about. And it took a LONG LONG time for ancient knowledge to permeate the aftermath. It is ironically perhaps a permeation that did not occur in the Muslim world, a fact we still cope with the consequences of today

In today's world, with multiple continuous centuries of general progress in the human condition, we see a freight train of change begetting change begetting change, continually gathering steam and on an unpredictable course to who knows where. 

We have created and embraced an artificial sort of selective evolution, based on the collective id and ego of our species that far outstrips the timescales of biochemical natural selection. The human population grew six fold in the 20th century on the back of this artificial construct. It also grew the art of warfare to levels of atrocity never witnessed in our species, to where we almost ironically had to adapt to rules of warfare that weirdly put almost random seeming constraints on our penchants for killing one another.

It had painted a maddening picture of how fragile our species derived ethics and cultural moral precepts often crumble in the face of the world we have made.  A divisive author in his own right, Sam Harris's book The Moral Landscape paints a damning and historical acknowledgement of this reality whilst giving some ideas of how to address it.

It is an easy topic to oversimplify, but I have to admit there was one takeaway from that book that painted this idea into my psyche most vividly. I'll try to drag up the photo, but in the book he places a picture of what seems like some military and non military men and women engaging in a seemingly typical picnic outing. We know enough about facial expressions, and the limitations in how people make those expressions to reliably and accurately perceive happy behaviors in humans from mere photographs. And it is a seemingly happy scene of people posing for a photograph.

When you know the backstory however, that this was a picnic of the adminstrative staff of the Aushwitz Nazi death camp, you begin to be faced with an unfortunate reality when it comes to human behavior. And what is that?

Human beings can become convinced, individually or collectively, to value ideas that go against their own long term self interests and/or against the interests of their fellow humans. Reliably so. 

It is this reality, alongside the directions technology push us into, that drives much of the human experience. 

Our moral intuitions, based deeply on well understood concepts of social anthropology, simply collapse in situations that do not involve direct interactions. 

If your great grandpa regailed you with his Congressional Medal Of Honor story about how he was the one bomb sight engineer to have pressed the right button at the right moment, under heavy enemy fire, to drop the bombs on a munitions factory in The Battle Of Dresden you'd be awestruck to a degree. But you'd have a differenct feeling of great grandpa if he had in loving detailed described another scenario where the same amount of people died, except it was him entering said factory on foot and killing the same number of people with his bayonet on a bloody rampage because his M1 was out of ammo. 

Proximity distorts our ethics. And this is a natural aspect of being human. The classic trolley problem in philosophy paints this picture as well, even if I feel it doesn't fully address the deeper issue of what precisely constitutes suffering. 

In this classic thought experiment in philosophy you have a trolley running downhill out of control on a track. In the way up ahead you notice five people working on the track. You sit beside a track switch, where if you pull that lever the trolley goes off a side track. Except on that side track is one lone worker who will die if you make that choice. The key is your choice is somewhat indirect to the status of that one guy.

There is a second scenario where instead of being next to a switch you are on an overhead bridge and beside you is an incredibly obese man. Your quick thinking mind is able to calculate that if you simply shove this guy off the bridge into the path of the trolley it will slow the trolley down enough to save those five individuals further on down the track.

Most people when faced with this thought experiment choose pulling the switch as the more ethical choice than deliberately shoving a fat guy to his death, even though the net outcome in human life is the same.

The flaw here is a minor one that doesn't quite take into account the actor and the agency involved with the protaganist in this thought experiment because it fails to address the real elephant in the room, being "what constitutes suffering". Because most people would also agree that perhaps the guy pulling the switch would suffer less in the way of PTSD and regret than the person deliberately shoving another human being to their death for the purpose of that agency.

I won't go into a lengthy rehash of what I've written the last month on the current pandemic, the woes of incredibly polarized national and world politics, or the socioeconomics of a broken capitalist philosophy. 

I just want to note as well as implore people to really think long and hard about what they value, and to at least recognize the slippery slopes and grey areas we now face as a species.