8. The
biochemistry of stress-reactivity and emotional disorders does NOT
uni-directionally determine social outcomes like gun violence; social processes
and human biological processes are mutually determining (overdetermined).
Having spent the last
part of my rant advancing the proposition that mental illness is neither as
simple nor as discrete and susceptible to government regulation of access to
firearms as it is currently being portrayed (or as it will be codified
within statutory law and judicial precedence), I want to devote this section to
explaining why I hold out hope for the possibility of diminishing
gun violence by addressing its social inducements (notwithstanding the best
efforts of the federal and state governments to inflict more lethal violence
(homicides, suicides, collateral casualties) on American society). If I begin from my more broad conception of
mental illness that includes the potential for large numbers of young men to
experience extreme emotional duress (i.e. “nervous breakdowns”), then the
potentiality for mental illness must be shaped and conditioned by the social
processes experienced in the lives of young men. By addressing the social conditions that overdetermine gun
violence, we have some ways of addressing the possibilities for lethal
incidents without changing the legal conditions for access to firearms. The critical thing here is that we cannot
take either individuals or society, as a whole, as inflexible givens –
crises of economic development, the organization of families, sexuality,
spiritual growth and religious life, education, and the nature of citizenship
and civic/political culture all have impacts on the continuous (physiological
and psychological) formation of individuals and, as a consequence, of
the communities in which they live.
Gun violence, in the particular, is not the problem in and of
itself – it is a symptom of the collapse of community in the U.S.
induced by prolonged crises in the development of the lives of
individuals. For this reason, more gun
control laws could only ever constitute a band-aid on a sucking chest
wound. What is needed is a more radical
reconsideration of social life in the U.S. on many different fronts.
I could go off in this direction for an entire
book-length discourse (like that of Putnam (2000) with his concept of “social
capital”), but, in general, we need to philosophically reframe the experience
of civic life to emphasize community over individualism; redefine individual
success in terms that accentuate belonging within the neighborhood,
municipal civic life, the workplace, the congregation/parish, the reading
group, the pool league, etc. This could
imply some conservative and parochial understanding of society,
not seeing the potential for individual and community growth and improvement
and not comprehending connections outside of the community with the wider
world, but it need not be this way.
We need a conception of community that is dynamic and entrepreneurial,
on the one hand, and networked and globally connective, on the
other. In this sense, I have the
picture of individuals always collectively engaged, asking each other about
their needs (explicitly or implicitly through, say, markets), and continuously
devising new ways to secure their realization (i.e. new manifestations of
market and/or social entrepreneurship).
All
of this demands new educational/training processes, exploiting new and
innovative pedagogies that emphasize group collaboration over
individualism and interpersonal communication over competition. Pedagogical changes emphasizing collectivity
over individualism have to be matched by broader reinforcing transformations in
cultural and economic life. We need
more economically democratic organizations, especially cooperatives
of all kinds (consumer, producer, investor, and mixed forms). In this sense, I am including organizations
as tiny and insignificant as a neighborhood vegetable garden – just some
manifestation of economic life established to help people in a community to
satisfy some of their material needs and simultaneously come together with
other people through some mechanism other than a market. Pure market processes are great for their
capacity to support and develop individual choice, but we need to supplement
them in ways that prevent the anonymity of market forces, especially in
contemporary globalization, from overpowering the ethics of community (e.g.
maintenance of the peace, freedom, and general welfare of individuals and
families, democratic self-rule, indivisible social belonging). We also need economic institutions that
undermine the dependency of people on either market activity or the largesse of
government handouts – economic processes where people can relearn how to take
at least a small part of their destinies into their own hands with the hope of
making their lives just a little better.
Even if cooperative organizations end up composing a very small
component in the economic lives of individuals, they enjoy the capacity to
expand an individual’s sense of democratic empowerment beyond civic political
processes and, at least in certain ways, reframe the economic self-interests
of individuals around the success of some small collective endeavor.
More
generally, the civic lives of individuals demand an expansion of the
opportunities to participate in democratic institutions, where democracy, as a
principle, pertains to self-rule through active participation, making one’s
voice heard, and coming to collective decisions about shared aspects in the
lives of many individuals. This does
not just mean government – democracy also needs to have a place in the economy
and in cultural institutions like religious life. On the other hand, democratic governance is critically important,
and the more that governmental processes, particularly at the municipal level,
get professionalized, the more disempowered citizens become – democratic
involvement gets lost as a virtue in the organization of society. The less empowered people feel in their own
self-rule, the more apt they are to feel oppressed by a government that is
alien to them, within a society that produces concentric governmental and
non-governmental forms of oppression, alienation, and disconnection. Maybe we need more organizations of
community governance, like restructured community-watch/policing programs,
volunteer-based maintenance groups for parks and green spaces, neighborhood
emergency/natural disaster response committees, self-governing adult athletic organizations,
and volunteer student-adult mentoring partnership groups for public schools
that can augment the roles of teachers and parents.
These
kinds of organizations constitute inconveniences in the everyday lives
of individuals, especially when they involve pure, uncompensated voluntary
action. They eat up the free time of
otherwise busy people, often get very little accomplished, and bring people
together for discussion who seem to have a fondness for disagreeing with one
another. The point, however, is that
community is a labor process. There is
something seductively easy about sitting alone (or even with family members) at
home in front of a television set or a computer terminal in one’s free time,
especially in the landscape of suburban America, rather going out and getting
involved in the community (or, rather, creating community through
organizing). It is entirely the point,
however, that the diminishing quality of community life in the U.S. contributes
to the alienation of individuals who, under certain circumstance when faced
with certain levels of stress, turn to violence to resolve their emotional
duress.
In
positing the importance of community organization as a component in addressing
the social causes of gun violence, I do not want to avoid the most intimate
manifestations of community.
Specifically, if we really want to create a society committed to
nurturing community, we have to address the building blocks of personal
socialization in the family and in sexuality. Enough attention has been given to the
crisis of the family in America, as well as the threats to the institution of
marriage as the foundation of the nuclear family. For the record, if divorce rates in the U.S. are any indication
that a problem exists with the nuclear family, the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention (it is a wonder that this federal agency collects
marriage and divorce statistics!) reports rates of divorces per marriage, both
per thousand individuals, that range around 50 percent for most states in
2011(see “Marriage Rates by State: 1990, 1995, 1999-2011” at: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/dvs/marriage_rates_90_95_99-11.pdf, and “Divorce Rates by State: 1990, 1995, 1999-2011”
at: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/dvs/divorce_rates_90_95_99-11.pdf). Moreover,
a cursory glance of these statistics seems to suggest a slight
diminution of divorce rates among states like Massachusetts that have legalized
homosexual marriage rights (a trend that I feel confident will shortly
disappear!). The larger point here is
that there appears to be a problem with the institution of marriage that may
impair its capacity to secure the emotional lives of married individuals. Beyond this, and reflecting further upon the
institutional instability of marriage, there may a problem with parenthood in
America. Taking for granted, further,
the assertion that two parents are better than one, 29.5 percent of U.S.
households with children in 2008 included only one parent (see “Table 1337.
Single Parent Households: 1980 to 2009,” at:
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1337.pdf). The
collapse of the community in the U.S. may be linked, in part, to the collapse
of family life. In turn, problems of
the family relate to larger problems in the way sexuality (e.g. sexual
practices, sexual orientation, fidelity/promiscuity) is lived. That is to say, the way that we understand family
as a concept is shaped to a great degree by our understandings about
sexuality and love and the relationship between these concepts and
parenthood. There is nothing, in this
sense, obvious or natural about the nuclear family as either a dominant
social institution or a preferable one.
If
we want to be serious in asking what sort of social institutions will be best
suited to nurturing children, in particular young males, in an effort to
undermine the social inducements to aggressive/violent behavior in response to
emotional duress, then, following from the hypothesis that communal
engagement/belonging undermines violence, maybe we need to reconsider the scale
and the range of relationships involved in our conception of the family. In earlier periods and within particular
ethnic communities or particular regions, extended families, including
grandparents, uncles, aunts, and other blood relations played a larger role in
the everyday life of children than they are currently expected to play in the
typical scenario of suburban life for the nuclear family today. Such extended family relationships probably
played an important role in addressing particular acute shortcomings of
parental skills by biological parents (in effect, biological parents may have
enjoyed the capacity to draw upon the beneficial influence of parental surrogates, with a different base of experience or different, positive psychological attributes). By this logic, why draw a boundary in
reference to biological linkages in the effort to find good parental/mentoring figures for children? If
the whole notion that “it takes a whole village to raise a child” might
have any pertinence, then maybe we need a far more expanded conception of
parenthood, including non-biologically linked mentoring figures, integrally
involved in steering children through the course of youth, adolescence, and
young adulthood.
Divorcing,
in part, the conception of the family from the idea of biological parenthood in
the nurturing of children, we still have the role and influence of sexuality to
deal with. At this point, I want to interject
the radical idea, perennially reintroduced as an adjunct to various liberatory
agendas (from Plato’s Republic to the Bolshevik Revolution to “second
wave” feminism), that monogamous pair bonding might be both unnatural
and socially disadvantageous. Most recently, Ryan and Jethá (2010) have advanced an argument in
this direction, based, in part, in evolutionary human physiology, that I find
quite convincing – specifically, that humanity evolved, until the dawn of
sedentary agricultural settlements with individual or collective/group property
rights about 10,000 years ago, as a sexually promiscuous species. I want to comment on this idea at length at
some point, but, for now, it will suffice to take the idea/ideal of promiscuity
and run with it. If, as suggested in
the previous section from Bureau of Justice Statistics evidence, lethal
violence among “intimates” is a legitimate problem in the U.S., it may be, in
part, because we culturally champion a monogamous ideal that is too difficult
for either sex to live up to. Moreover,
if monogamy has its place in certain forms of sexual relationship, the social
requirement of monogamy, likewise, nurtures psychological behaviors rooted in
jealousy, possessiveness, and other negative emotions constituting precursors to impetuous and/or premeditated lethal violent
action.
Parenthood
and the responsibility of physically and emotionally nurturing children is one
thing – sexual desire/pleasure and emotional connection/love among adults must
be another. If we have the technologies
(i.e. birth control) to separate these social institutions, then we enjoy at
least the potentialities apparent in a vast expansion of the opportunities for
sexual pleasure and its associated psychological and physiological effects
through promiscuous activity. We need
to at least ask where this sexual piece fits into the equation of reducing gun
violence among young men, stewing in testosterone, seeking both the
interpersonal physical and emotional contact to make life feel a little more
fulfilling. In this regard, I
absolutely do not want to suggest that the relationship between mental illness
and gun violence can be reduced to a problem of young men not getting laid
enough, but I definitely do want to argue that we cannot ignore the way that
we, as a society, approach sexuality if we are going to transform ourselves into a society that
is less violent, more open to community, and more emotionally committed to discovering more open conceptions of love.
We need to approach sexuality, in general, more positively, accept
sexual activity among adolescents more openly, and recognize the contextual
merits of both monogamy and sexual promiscuity as social institutions in
the formative development of individuals and the life of communities.
For
anyone who wants to believe that mental illness, or the internalized emotional
precursors of lethally violent behavior by individuals with firearms, can be
reduced to a pharmacological problem, solvable with a few doses of
anti-psychotic medication and/or seclusion, this section of my rant must be a
waste of time to read. For my part, I rigorously
believe in the role of society in the formation of individuals and can only
accept that the way to transform the present social reality of gun violence in
the U.S., short of banning firearms (a political and constitutional
impossibility) and hoping that the criminals who use guns will be sparingly
few, is by changing the society in which we live to make it a place where
individuals value community, love their neighbors, and feel continuously
involved and empowered in life. The
sort of processes necessary to bring this sort of society to fruition are many,
and it demands a greater effort by many, many people – many more than would be
required to pass a law establishing a useless assault weapons ban that would
eventually be declared unconstitutional in a 5-4 decision by nine men and women
in black robes. If seriously tried, the
effects of a social crusade to change the way we see ourselves, do work, govern
our communities, raise and educate children, and have sex would be far more
enduring!
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