Leaving the Frontier

In a column this week in the Washington Post, Richard Cohen offers the interesting insight that the current gun control debate is not really about guns at all.  And he’s right.  According to Cohen, the debate, and those long lines at the gun dealers, are all about fear of government.  That fear actually combines two fears, a concern that the government will come and take away guns as a means of protecting individual liberty and skepticism that government can protect against guns owned by “bad guys.”  Cohen does not delve into the logical absurdity of such a compound fear – how can a government strong enough to take away all citizens’ guns be at the same time not strong enough to protect against guns? – but does thoughtfully note that the Second Amendment is more fiercely defended than the First; you cannot shout “fire” in a crowded theater but you can bring in a gun.  And it ignores the reality that stable democratic governments around the world, successfully and peaceably, ban the private ownership of guns.  Among the democracies in the world, violent deaths per capita in America not only top the rankings, they are three times the number in the country that’s number two.

That mix of logical absurdity and unequal concern about different forms of liberty, and of the reality found elsewhere, should have been a clue for Cohen to delve a step deeper, but he (probably wisely) chose not to.  For it signals entrance into the jungle of human emotions we call the unconscious.  Any good Jungian would immediately recognize that we are dealing here with the Other, that part of our thoughts and emotions that we find so reprehensible that we deny having them at all, projecting them onto convenient targets outside ourselves.  Even saints have violent emotions and lascivious thoughts – remember Jimmy Carter’s Statue of Liberty comments? – but if we are not reconciled with ourselves, it’s much easier to blame immigrants or Muslims or teenagers, or government. The whole of living becomes them against us.  In other words, the enemy that we fear, and call oppressive government, is really ourselves.  If we were reconciled with our own nature, it would be much easier to accept that everyone, ourselves included, would benefit from reasonable regulation of our ability to do violence.

That projection of our own worst feelings onto others serves not only to paint them with an undeservedly tarred brush – why, for example, should an immigrant wish to behave any worse toward others than we would? – it also enforces an unworkable distance between us all.  When government becomes the hated Other, capable of committing our own worst impulses against us, we become incapable of working together to solve our greatest problems.  And that feeds our fear that in case of trouble, government will not be there to help us.  We create the government we feared.

The obvious question of course is why America’s attitude toward gun ownership should differ so widely from that of other democracies.  It is that we have an ethos in America of rugged individualism, shaped by our early frontier history; that ethos rejected the social niceties of European civilization in favor of solitary exploration, gun in hand, of a new continent. In that ethos, any stranger is danger, the Other, and a gun must be always ready for protection.  John Wayne is almost as much a symbol of America as Uncle Sam.  But in Leviathan, written at the same time as America was first being explored, Thomas Hobbes was describing that American frontier living when he called the life of mankind outside civilization one of “continual fear and danger of violent death … solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."   As Hobbes pointed out, the purpose of civilization is to move us beyond that.  Frontier living is a pathway to something far better, not a goal in itself.  When we enter real civilization, we check our guns at the door.

It is no coincidence that America not only ranks far in front in terms of violent deaths per capita, but that the American mortality rate for those under the age of 50 is the highest among the 17 nations of Europe, Canada, Australia and Japan.  Older Americans, as Harold Myerson of the Washington Post points out, have available a Medicare system that has much in common with the universally available health systems of the other countries. Younger Americans must rely on the rugged individualism of private provision of health services.  Our education systems that we like to believe are the best in the world are currently ranked about 26^th internationally and still falling. Other measures of the quality of life show the same kind of at best mediocre American performance.  As Myerson notes, what truly sets us apart internationally is the indifference we show our fellow citizens about the quality of their lives, and our own.  Behavioral psychologists describe our American culture as having an “empathy gap.”  Our emotional ties to frontier values ensure that our lives remain, relatively speaking, “solitary, nasty, brutish and short.”  It is time we set aside the emotions and values of the frontier and claim the civilization we first came to this continent to build.