Guns

The question of how to reduce gun violence in the U.S. and to eliminate or at least drastically curtail the number of public massacres is always a hot topic for debate.  In a nation where the gun genie was long ago let out of the bottle, there are no easy answers.

First of all, there can be no debate about the fact that the U.S. has a lot of guns of all types.  There are more guns per capita in the U.S. than any other nation in the world.  In fact, the U.S. has 35-50 % of the world’s civilian-owned guns divided among only 5% of the world’s population.  We have almost one gun for every man, woman and child in the country.

Second, the homicide by firearm rate in the U.S. is about 3 per 100,000 people, which is about eight to ten times higher than almost every other developed nation.  Interestingly, the developed country that comes closest to the U.S. in homicide rate, Switzerland (with a 0.7) is also number three in the gun ownership ranks.  Most Swiss men go through military service and keep some sort of weapon afterwards – probably a rifle.  But the U.S. still has more than four times the homicide rate that Switzerland does.

So one question is whether high rates of gun ownership can be correlated to high rates of homicide.  I don’t believe there can be any doubt that this is the case.  However, countries with low rates of gun ownership can also have high homicide rates if the countries have high crime rates and are politically chaotic.  In this case, the actual number of guns in circulation may be much higher than the statistics show.

Some nations with fairly high gun ownership do not have big problems with homicides.  Australia, Austria, Norway, New Zealand and Canada are examples.  My guess is that the gun ownership in these nations is generally focused on rifles and shotguns for hunting purposes as opposed to handguns for self-defense, but I am not certain about that.

Clearly the gun violence problem in the U.S. is not solely due to gun ownership or availability.  The U.S. also has more crime and more people in prison than any other developed nation.  One of the primary reasons that there is major opposition to more stringent gun control or even gun reduction (God forbid!) is the fear that more gun control will only result in less available guns for law-abiding citizens who want to protect themselves against the criminal element, who can always obtain guns. 

The public does not generally believe that gun control will reduce crime and homicides.  Gun control opponents point to Mexico with its very tight gun control laws and very high homicide rate to show the supposed folly of such an experiment.   But given the drug cartel situation in Mexico, which is, of course, a result of our insatiable hunger for drugs, it is not clear that Mexico is a good example of the results of gun control.  One can point to other countries with strong gun control laws in Europe that have had tremendous success – Great Britain being a good example.

But in the end crime and guns must be addressed together to make any real progress on this front.  Why is there so much violent crime in our country?  Why are so many of our citizens behind bars?  Why are we so different in this regard from Great Britain and Germany and France and Australia?  Is there any relationship between our gun culture and the level of violent crime we have?  What is the relationship between violent crime and drugs, or gangs?  It is estimated that about 12% of the homicides in the country are gang-related.  Now we face a triad of related issues – guns, crime and drugs.

But this triad does not explain the frequent occurrence of massacres such as Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora and Sandy Hook Elementary.  Is there something else in our culture or society that increases the probability of such attacks?  Is some potent mix of cultural decadence, violent video games and movies, and gun mania to blame for these horrific all-too-frequent national nightmares?

A mass shooting is clearly the act of someone who is mentally deranged.  But why does the U.S. have such a large number of mentally unbalanced or psychotic people who are willing or motivated to commit these horrible acts?  Do we have a larger problem with psychosis, or a problem with identification, or is the availability of weaponry the critical factor?  Some have argued that more rigorous background checks would reduce the incidence of these events, but it is not clear that any of the recent assailants would have been identified as psychotic before they acted.

At a minimum, it would seem reasonable to aggressively outlaw and eliminate the civilian ownership of multi-round semi-automatic rifles, which generally are the main weapons used in these tragedies.  Why is there such resistance to this proposal?  Both Australia and Great Britain took similar steps after massacres and have had great success.

But the opposition to gun laws is very deeply embedded in our society.  Why is it so uniquely vociferous in our country?  Part of it is the libertarian abhorrence of anyone telling people what they can or cannot own or do.  Part of it is a gun fetish that goes far beyond a healthy interest in hunting and sport shooting.  But the most intriguing and disturbing part of it is the anti-government paranoia that makes people want to stockpile guns in preparation for fighting against the government when they feel it has gone too far in controlling their lives.  This is what the 2^nd amendment really means to many Americans.  And it has taken on an almost religious symbolism and significance.  The NRA is the church organization for this religion.

So gun control is opposed for four reasons:  hunting, sport shooting, self-defense and protection against a future over-zealous government.  Hunting and sport shooting don’t really have much to do with the current gun debate.  Strong gun control and elimination of automatic weapons would not impact these hobbies.  The real opposition to gun control runs in a much deeper vein of government distrust and fear of the criminal element.

Recently, the gun lobby has changed its strategy from a defensive posture against more stringent gun control to an offensive strategy of supporting open carry and stand-your-ground laws. The argument is that if more people openly carry firearms there will be less crime and Sandy Hook/Columbine-type massacres will be curtailed. 

The counter-argument is that guns at-the-ready will cause far more accidents and moment-of-passion shootings (road rage, domestic arguments, bar fights, etc.) than the number of crimes or shootings they will prevent.  If handguns are available at a moment’s notice, then a moment’s fury or a youthful indiscretion is all that it takes to create a tragedy.  Are we really ready to sacrifice so many lives in accidents to make us feel a little bit more secure in our cars or homes?  Would we really be any more secure?

In the end, having more people carry weapons can really only be characterized as a cynical and short-sighted response to the problem of crime and mass shootings.  If we do not address the deeper problems of crime, incarceration, gun availability, mental illness and drugs, we will decay into a third-rate nation of fortress communities and frontier justice.  That would not be a place that many of us would choose to live.

Conscience, Morality and an Argument for the Existence of God

 I wrote this piece several months ago while going through yet another wrestling session with questions of faith.  It is just one aspect of this continuous debate.

The Enlightenment sparked a firestorm of intellectual debate about religion.  A Newtonian universe did not seem reconcilable with the miracles and myths of ancient religions and many began to question whether traditional religious dogma could be believed.  A profound confidence in man’s ability to reason caused many to view theology through the prism of rational thought and to acknowledge a belief in some sort of Deity, but not in the institutions of any religion.

American thinkers like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, and later Ralph Waldo Emerson and many others, were strong adherents of this ‘Deist’ wave of thought.  Jefferson famously cut out all of the so-called mythical parts of the New Testament to create a ‘Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth’ that was in his view a masterful expression of ethics and morality, but not a story about the son of God.  Jefferson and the others did not appear, though, to reject the notion of God, but merely the dogma of the church.

This skepticism about religion was sent into warp drive by the 19^th century development of the theory of evolution and discoveries about geological aging that seemed to preclude any literal interpretation of creation events.  As the impact of ‘Darwinism’ made its way into the intellectual landscape, many abandoned any belief in God at all and defined themselves as atheists.

This trend of intellectual rejection of God has continued to the present day.  It is probably safe to say that the majority of college professors and scientists are at least agnostic, if not defiantly atheistic.  But once one leaves the lofty domain of the intellectual the religious question is much murkier.  In the western world, church attendance has continuously diminished over time.  Yet the percentage of people that believe in some sort of God and heaven is still fairly high (typically greater than 50% and often as high as 75-90%), even in Europe where church attendance is almost non-existent.  This may be due in some cases to a ‘hedge your bet’ or ‘wishful thinking’ attitude rather than a thoughtful consideration of the arguments pro and con, but it is an interesting statistic nonetheless.

The Question of a Non-Religious Morality

One of the most basic characteristics of religion or theology is a set of moral precepts.  It is often stated that the biggest area of similarity in the world’s religions is their morality.  To be sure, there are plenty of gray areas, and ethicists make a good living exploring the nuances of moral and ethical laws, but the similarities are indeed striking and the basic moral structure is clear.

When one rejects God and religion, then morality and ethics become an interesting puzzle.  How does one derive a moral structure in a completely material world with no higher authority dictating it?  Is there a morality among the plants, or the animals, or the planets or the cosmos?  Is morality whatever we as humans define it to be?

Perhaps we should derive our morality from the laws of nature and the theory of evolution?  If we do this, how would it differ from what is generally accepted as moral behavior today?  We often cite Darwinism as ‘survival of the fittest’, a moniker that is probably not really completely accurate.  But there is certainly an element of truth in it. If the universe’s morality is based upon whatever causes it to become more efficient or more complex or more optimized or more highly developed, then certainly we must be willing to make some fairly hard-hearted decisions.

This logical train of thought is what actually occurred in the latter part of the 19^th century and into the middle of the 20^th century.  It included Nietzsche’s Superman and his belittling of the Christian ‘slave morality’ or morality of the weak.  It included the strong interest in eugenics to allow for a pruning of the human race to eliminate the weak-minded or physically impaired so as not to hinder the rapid progress of humanity.  It included the economic and quasi-philosophic (a la Ayn Rand) theories that celebrated (and still do!) the entrepreneur and the fabulously wealthy tycoons over the lowly worker, and argued for total free markets to propel the human race to ever higher achievements.  This morality was a morality of the strong, because the strong dictated the pace of development and progress.

Some of this morality took on nightmarish forms in the 20^th century – the Nazis and their eugenic holocaust for one - and became discredited.  But it can be argued that its logic is still incontrovertible if one believes only in a material world, perhaps just less dramatically or arbitrarily applied.

When one rejects the notion of a higher authority dictating morals, then the question of conscience becomes very interesting.  Why do we recoil at the thought of sterilizing the handicapped or the mentally deficient?  Why are we reluctant to kill others to get their food or possessions?  Is it because our conscience will not allow us to consider it?  And what is this conscience and where does it come from if not from some sort of higher authority?  Is it a product of evolution?  Why would we evolve to have such a conscience?  The animals don’t appear to be troubled by such concerns.  When they are hungry they eat another animal without the slightest bit of remorse!

Now we can argue that our higher evolved state has developed a conscience to allow us to form a more complex society to achieve ever more wonderful states of being.  This is certainly feasible where it concerns certain parts of the moral code – killing and stealing for example – that would otherwise cause society to unravel and create a less ideal situation for all.

But what about our compassion for the mentally deranged or the physically malformed or the developmentally disabled?  Or even those who appear not to have much motivation to work or contribute?  What a huge drain they are on our society!  We could develop our perfect world much more rapidly without dragging that part of the gene pool along with us!  Surely the part of our morality that prevents us from finding a quiet ‘solution’ for the infirm is a relic from the silly old religious times and ought to be jettisoned!

But our hearts ache for the weak, the sick and the downtrodden; for the mentally ill and the dispirited.  We continue to find powerful inspiration in acts of mercy, love and charity.  What imbues us with these emotions and feelings?

I find the argument that our consciences and moral pre-disposition are totally a result of evolution and its psycho/biological mechanics a weak one.  The logical path would be for human evolution to develop a very pragmatic moral code – to optimize the gene pool and focus attention and energy on the strong and successful.  But our hearts (souls?) will not accept that pragmatism, even when we do not embrace a spiritual belief system.

What is going on here?  Can it be that we all really do have a God-given conscience from some higher authority that is somehow innate and a part of some sort of soul or spirit?  Can our consciences and morality be interpreted or explained without including an external influence?

So in the end it is somewhat ironic that many of our most vociferous protectors of the weak and the downtrodden also claim to be atheists. Why do so many ardent advocates of social justice and moral behavior choose to totally deny any possibility of the divine?  For many it is a sincere belief that there is no valid evidence for any kind of spiritual phenomena.  For others it is a profound distaste for the human expressions of religious dogma.

The argument can be made that the fashionable intellectual rejection of God and religion is a combination of intellectual hubris and a very understandable reaction to the ills of institutional religion.  Intellectual hubris is the notion that anyone can truly categorically state that God exists or does not exist – an all-too-human example of pride.  To doubt is eminently reasonable, but to be certain is arrogance. 

Defiant atheism is surely a type of intellectual bravado, an affectation that feels good in the moment (or for many years) but probably does not have quite the same zest when contemplated on one’s deathbed.  Who in their final moment would not agree to continue to exist (or be resurrected) in some blissful form or another?  Only a stubborn fool would reject such an offer!

The other side of the atheistic trend is perfectly understandable as a reaction against the innumerable crimes perpetrated in the name of God by the world’s religions.  Is it any wonder that so many flock to the banner of non-belief when one considers the persecutions, wars, hatred, intolerance and enslavement in which religion has played a role?

So this is my modest attempt to demonstrate that the stubborn resilience of compassion could be an indication that we are indeed linked to something more than just the material world; that the divine, or God, fills our hearts with this compassion in the face of all logical and philosophical arguments against it.  For me, it is a comforting thought.

The Apollonian and Dionysian Dialectic

As a college student I was fascinated by philosophy.  Having returned from 8 months in Germany in 1975 with a reasonable competency in the language, I took a series of three courses at Stanford in German philosophy called Deutsche Geistesgeschichte.  One of the books we read was Nietzche’s The Birth of Tragedy.  This was Nietzsche’s first significant work.  At the time he was under the spell of Richard Wagner, the great opera composer, and the spirit of Wagner’s music was undoubtedly a big influence on Nietzche’s thinking.  The full title of the book was actually “The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music”, though it is generally known by the shorter title.

In this book Nietzsche argued, among many other topics, that art, and indeed the human condition, was a struggle between Apollonian and Dionysian forces.  For Nietzsche, Apollonian is used to describe the light-filled, measured and rational impulses in man.  Apollo, of course, is the god of light, and is also associated with refined beauty and aesthetic taste.  Apollonian character attributes are those that express individuality, control, refinement and intellect.

Dionysus, on the other hand, is the God of the wine harvest and the festival, of uninhibited, often sensual release and inebriation.  From Nietzsche’s perspective, Dionysian impulses connect us to a more primitive state of being, without the rigid boundaries of individuality, allowing us to connect to the energy and intoxication of a communal life force.

For Nietzsche, and here I agree from my own experience, music is primarily Dionysian in its effect, allowing us to transcend our egos and individuality to experience a state of primordial unity and experience a rush of pure, ecstatic emotion.

But the Dionysian is also seen in other aspects of culture – in our efforts to lift ourselves out of the tyranny of the day-to-day and the sometimes stultifying effect of our disciplined, sober lives.  Drinking, eating, dancing, laughing, sex, sport, gambling all have elements of the Dionysian, because they challenge the order and restraint of our lives.  Dionysus offers chaos, excess and ecstasy as an anti-thesis to Apollo’s discipline and ‘know thyself’ restraint.  Dionysus encourages total immersion in contrast to Apollo’s maintenance of a critical intellectual and aesthetic distance.

Isn't this dialectic, though presenting us with a lifelong contradiction of impulses, the very source of life’s most sublime moments?  Doesn't the art of living consist of finding the proper balance, not suppressing one or the other?

For surely those who view the Dionysian as sinful and try to order their lives in a purely Apollonian manner become dry husks of human beings with no ecstasy and a very narrow scope of joy.  And those who totally indulge the Dionysian lose the edges of their individuality and self-control, slipping into the abyss of debauchery and hedonism.

But balancing the dialectic is not an equation or a recipe in the battle of life.  There is no formula for success and there is risk at every juncture.  We careen from one corner of the ring to the other, a self-righteous, arrogant creature on one side and an inebriated, profligate mess at the other.  It is naive to hope for perfection, for order, for peace, for harmony.  Life is a struggle.

A Liberal Arts Education

College students are all choosing business majors and educators are wringing their hands, wondering what will become of the liberal arts education!

The definition of the so-called liberal arts education has long been elusive.  I would define it as a thorough grounding in literature, languages, history, philosophy, theology, the arts (music, theater, painting, sculpture, etc.), math and science. 

But with this definition we would have to confess that a liberal arts education has been rare for some time.  Long ago students began to divide themselves into math/science types and non-math/science types, neglecting any education in the opposite realm after secondary school.  This may have been partly due to the volume of accumulated knowledge in all fields, which made it difficult to become conversant in the full spectrum.  But it also occurred because of a growing chasm between the arts and the sciences, with certain personality traits and characteristics being ascribed to each group that made it difficult to bridge the gap.  The ‘renaissance man’ archetype, once a common aspiration of many intellectuals, became a relic, discarded on the dustbin of history. 

One of the things I am proudest of in my life is that I made a big effort to avoid this distinction, getting both a B.A. in German Studies and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering.  Now admittedly, this was partly because I have never been able to focus very well, but it has proven to be one of my best decisions and has provided my intellectual life with a rich diversity of passions.

But the current economic conditions have sent tremors through the university system, and everyone is trying to identify ‘practical’ majors that will ensure a job upon graduation.  The liberal arts major is seen as a monument to irrelevance, and its adherents are viewed as useless intellectuals with nothing to contribute to the heroic efforts of ‘job creation’ that have become the mantra of modern business.

In addition to the lemming-like movement to business and management majors, now there is a growing urgency in education to teach everyone to ‘code’.  This is a reaction to the ubiquity of information technology, which is built on software.  But the fad of teaching programming skills to every child seems as misplaced as an effort to teach everyone how to design machinery in the industrial age.

Education is not ‘one size fits all’!  Germany, one of the few nations that has been successful in avoiding the loss of middle class jobs in the globalization time, long ago instituted a state-funded spectrum of educational paths that has served it well.  A university education is only available for a minority of students.  The rest have a cornucopia of options, from highly hands-on technical to purely administrative, and everything in-between.  Students pay a modest fee for this training if they pay anything at all.  The system is not perfect, but what system is?  The decision to prepare for various paths is made fairly early and it is not a simple matter to change once that decision has been made, which leads to some frustration and wrong choices.  But overall it seems to be a much better system than ours, especially for the non-university students.

The U.S. has long had a rather absurd goal of sending every person to a university.  This is foolhardy.  How many college students truly have the desire to immerse themselves in deep study of literature, political science, economics and the like?  Certainly only a small percentage of those that actually attend.  But because a college education is seen as a pre-requisite for any well-paid career, legions of students spend their parents’ or their own hard-earned treasure to pay their dues in uninspired academic languor, all the while focusing most of their energy on the serious business of partying and watching college sports.

As jobs have become more scarce, the masses of students in university have become more utilitarian, choosing job training subjects that were not even options a couple of decades ago.  The most popular choice is the so-called business major – emphasizing accounting, organizational behavior, marketing and other business world topics.  Formerly, these topics were only taught in business schools, and typically to students who had already been out in the real world and returned for an MBA.  But now, in the desperate quest to gain advantage in job searches, students have turned away from traditional liberal arts subjects in the belief that this more practical knowledge will give them the edge.

This is precisely the type of education that Germany has put in a separate category from university education.  There is no need for a four year university education to learn business fundamentals.

Many will argue that a classic liberal arts education is no longer relevant, that majors such as history or literature do not prepare one for the workplace.  But I strongly disagree.  The skills that one obtains by deep study of history, literature and other liberal arts are exactly the enduring skills that allow one to become a profound contributor to society – critical thinking, complex logical analysis and writing, a sophisticated understanding of the nature and progression of civilization.

These are skills that are still immature at the end of high school.  It is a sad fact that most people read their last piece of classical literature or philosophy in their senior year of high school when they do not have the intellectual depth or foundation to truly understand or incorporate its message in their lives.

Similarly, many people never pursue a rigorous study of history or the evolution of political and social thought because they equate it to the memorization of facts, figures and dates that they abhorred all through high school.

Ideally, a liberal arts education in college gives a person a basis for lifelong learning and a capacity for deep inquiry and comprehension that will contribute to success in any endeavor.  This can certainly be acquired outside of the university, but it rarely is.

Many students will not have the passion to continue liberal arts studies.  They should not be encouraged or required to do so.  Having large hordes of indifferent students attending universities taking courses that hold meager interest for them is a waste on many levels.  And perhaps the transformation of many universities into ‘trade schools’ that focus on business majors is simply a way of backing into this realization. But the simultaneous disparagement of the liberal arts education and the associated decision by many parents to pressure their kids into ‘practical’ majors is indeed a sad trend.

Are we living vicariously?

It seems civilization moves ever more rapidly toward voyeurism.  Modern man spends much of his life watching someone else do something or immersing him or herself into a virtual reality that bears little resemblance to real life.

We watch people act in movies, on television or at the theater.  We observe as entertainers sing or play instruments; we view dancers on stage.  We pay handsome sums to be awed by athletes performing their heroics on a dozen different fields of play.  We spend hours and hours entranced by social media and video games.

Before television, the cinema and mass communication; before the computer and the Internet; before organized professional sports; before video games and facebook and twitter and snapchat – there was a communal life: creative social, artistic and athletic activity that demanded local organization and participation.  People came together to sing, dance, play sports, create art, even make skits or plays. 

It seems there was a time when one didn't have to be a Pavarotti to sing in three part harmony with a group of friends.  Everyone was familiar with folk and popular songs and took every opportunity to join in song with their neighbors, whether in church or for celebrations, or whenever people came together. 

In those days every person who was fortunate enough to own an instrument found other musicians and contributed whatever talent they had to any social gathering.  Now, how many people study a musical instrument in their youth only to abandon it, the instrument rusting away sadly in a closet or attic? If one is not good enough to make a profession of it or compete with the virtuosos, then why continue goes the thinking.  But is watching a talented performer even half as fulfilling as participating, even if the standard is much lower?

There was an age when men and women danced for the sheer joy of movement and romance, rather than on the rare occasion of a drunken grinding ritual.  How many men past the age of 22 can one get out on a dance floor today? Where are the folk dances or even the parlor dances of yesteryear?  It is a sad indication of our cultural decay that a wedding is the only event these days that will inspire most people to leave their seats for the dance floor.

There was a time when weekends were an opportunity to go outdoors for walking and exerting oneself physically; to explore and experience nature amid the companionship of friends or family.  All too often now, the weekends are spent in stubborn isolation, anchored in front of a TV watching sports or a movie, or trapped in the addictive grip of video games or social media.

And where has the art and joy of communicating via the written word gone?  Letter writing, once an important component of any educated person’s social life, has now completely vanished.  Well-developed ideas and thoughts are rarely encountered.  In their place are the quick witticisms and the endless superficial patter of facebook and twitter quips.

Part of our addiction to voyeurism can be laid at the feet of the media – the insidious manipulation of Hollywood and Madison Avenue.  How can our trifling efforts to create and enjoy an active world of our own compare with the exotic super-lives that the rich and talented lead, or that movies and magazine conjure up, or a virtual reality offer?  And of course it is partly due to sloth.  It is so easy to watch - to sit and vicariously experience all that life and the world have to offer.  But what kind of ‘experience’ is that?

The true joys of living cannot come to us secondhand.  They must be experienced directly through a deliberate participation in the everydayness of life.  The glamorous lifestyles and the virtual realities that are offered up as wishful fare for spectators are spiritually hollow - a self-deception and a sham existence, where at best our voyeurism is self-indulgence and at worst a kind of living death.

On Happiness and its Relative Nature

It is cliché to say that our happiest times were our student days – unencumbered, full of vigor, health and good friends.  But what does it really mean to be happy, and why does happiness seem so elusive that many of us feel compelled to state wistfully that our best times were in the distant past?

Happiness is a multi-faceted state of mind, with influences from many different aspects of our lives – family, health, occupation, and so on.  In this essay I will only concern myself with the happiness that appears to be associated with our experiences and material well-being.

For many years I have been convinced that happiness is a ‘relative thing’.  Clearly, happiness is in the mind.  Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet ‘There is nothing either bad or good but thinking makes it so’.  The pleasure we find in life depends on the highs and lows we perceive, and these in turn are measured relative to our life’s circumstances.

As our life circumstances change, so do our ‘thresholds’ for pleasure.  A trivial example is food.  In my student days, just going out to any restaurant was a joyous event.  My palate was undeveloped, and my expectations were low.  But I have been fortunate to eat in many fine restaurants since that time and my ‘threshold’ for good food has risen commensurately.  Going to a marginal restaurant brings me no joy these days, and I must be careful not to become so snobbish about food that I lose my ability to enjoy that simple pleasure.

A similar situation occurs in play.  As children, we are enchanted by the simplest objects and ecstatic over the most basic elements of play.  We see children all over the world smiling and shrieking in joy in the most impoverished of circumstances, making good use of an abandoned tire or a few sticks and rags, so long as they are not hungry or sick.  Are they any less happy than the little princes and princesses of our own culture with their endless array of electronic devices and playthings?

As we grow older, our play becomes more sophisticated and complex.  A game of hide and seek will no longer send us into a state of unbridled glee.  Pleasures become hierarchical, more nuanced, and we are manipulated to desire more grandiose titillations.  But is there any reason to believe that a simple walk in a beautiful forest produces less pleasure than a cruise on some tycoon’s yacht?  Only thinking makes it so!

As our circumstances change, so do the thresholds of our pleasure. The wealthier and more experienced one becomes, the higher the thresholds of pleasure. One might even argue that a rich person has a narrower range of thresholds and thus a more challenging task to avoid boredom and depression than a poor man does.  But then there is the problem of envy and its negative effect on happiness!

Envy is one of the seven deadly sins and is a logical adjunct to our egos.  Envy has been with us since the beginning of time.  But the modern age with its ubiquitous information and advertising seems specifically tuned to creating perceived needs based on envy.  We buy things not because we know that they will make us happy, but rather because we want to feel better than, or at least equal to, our neighbor.  Of course we also are seduced by the idea that these things will make us happy, but I believe that is secondary.

The problem of envy would seem to favor the rich man (if I were a rich man . . .), and perhaps it does ever so slightly, but ironically envy is an equal opportunity affliction.  No matter how rich or successful one is, there is always someone richer or more successful or more famous, and again we have the situation of thresholds.

Now I am not saying that being poor is a happy state, nor am I trivializing the tremendous disparities in our world.  True poverty brings a host of burdens – debt, creditors, poor health, lack of opportunity, etc. – that can indeed weigh upon a person and create misery.  But I would argue that some poverty occurs because of a perceived desperate need to acquire material things that do not actually produce their desired effect.  And more importantly, I am arguing that there is no need for anyone to think they have less joy in life than the movie stars and the global business elite, and thus waste their invaluable time in frustration and envy, and the pursuit of phantom pleasures.

We are all creatures of our culture and time.  It may be naïve to think that people can resist the temptation to scratch and claw their way to ever higher thresholds of material and experiential pleasure based on the riches and toys they see around them.  If the scratching and clawing is pleasurable, then by all means have at!  But beware the great equalizing effect of pleasure thresholds, and do not be dismayed if your success is not accompanied by an equivalent measure of happiness!

The Culture Wars - American Sniper

The Culture Wars – American Sniper

I haven’t seen American Sniper, nor have I read the book.  I haven’t yet decided whether I shall do either. But I have read a lot of interesting articles and comments from both the right and the left.  American Sniper seems to have become a symbol of the tremendous chasm in American society.  Clint Eastwood and Bradley Cooper have tried to de-emphasize the film’s political aspect, protesting that it was only ever meant to be a study of a single man’s experience in war.  But in a nation that seizes upon every cultural event to express its outraged disgust with the other side, American Sniper was tailor made to be the newest front in the culture wars.

From the right’s perspective, Chris Kyle was the type of warrior that made America great; the type that we especially depend on in this time of terrorism and threats from multiple extremist groups.  His loyalty to his country and his comrades, and his willingness to sacrifice his life if necessary, is the noblest expression of the American spirit.  His simple religious faith provided the strength and courage that he needed to see him through the extraordinary challenges he faced.

From the left’s perspective, Christ Kyle was a remorseless killer in a war that never should have been waged; a bigot who speaks disparagingly of a people he only saw through a lens of hatred and propaganda; an egotist who was so full of himself that he invented heroic events to embellish his reputation.

So who was the real Chris Kyle, and what does American Sniper tell us about ourselves and our country?

The uncomfortable truth is that Chris Kyle was probably all of those things – a human being with the myriad contradictions, and good and bad qualities that we all possess.  He was both a hero and a fraud, a noble warrior and a cold-blooded killer.

Any of us could have been Chris Kyle’s friend, and we would probably have loved him.  We would have been in awe of his accomplishments, but possibly also a bit cynical about his motives and some of his outlandish claims.  We would know that if the chips were down, Chris Kyle would be the guy we would want backing us up.  But we would also not want Chris Kyle to be making decisions about foreign policy or helping us understand a complex world and how to deal with it.

Chris Kyle was a warrior, and apparently about as good a warrior as one can be.  We put him in Iraq and gave him a mission that he executed with incredible success and skill.  To revile Chris Kyle is to make the same mistake we made with soldiers returning from Vietnam – to blame the soldier for a war that may have been a huge mistake, but was certainly not his mistake.

But Chris Kyle was only a warrior.  He was not a saint or a prophet or a symbol of what we want Americans to be.  We will always need Chris Kyles, because there will always be wars and terrorists and dangerous threats to our country and ourselves.  And perhaps we will always need to celebrate their accomplishments - even though it is a celebration of death and tragedy - to ensure that we give them the psychological support necessary to deal with the horror of war and to thank them for their sacrifice.

There is anger and the potential for violence in all of us, even the most ardent pacifist. The rage provoked by the smallest slight on our highways is strong evidence that human beings will never live totally at peace with one another.  This anger in our psyche seems to find expression in a fascination for violence, whether in war or crime or horror, and we flock to the theaters or settle ourselves in our TV rooms to indulge our insatiable appetites.

Men are particularly enchanted with the special ops mythos.  The challenge of overcoming incredible physical and mental obstacles is seductive to us, probably reflecting primitive instincts and genetic pre-dispositions.  Most men also ponder the question of how they would fare in combat – whether they would find courage and perform heroically or be gripped by paralyzing fear.  Movies like American Sniper allow us to fantasize with no danger or consequences. 

We cannot in good conscience blame the Clint Eastwoods or the Bradley Coopers of the world for exploiting our love of good violence and our Walter Mitty-like fantasies, even if their specific rendering may offend our political views.  Was it helpful for world peace to have a movie that more or less glorifies the clinical killing of numerous simplistically portrayed Muslims, even if the producers were probing a more subtle issue?  Probably not.  But then we are right back into the culture wars again . . . .