Secular Right

A little over a week ago, renowned pediatric surgeon Ben Carson electrified the Right by giving a speech at the National Prayer Breakfast that was widely deemed a critique of President Obama’s agenda on health care, taxation, and stimulus spending.  Some in the media, including conservative columnist Cal Thomas, objected that Carson had violated an unspoken rule of the National Prayer Breakfast tradition to steer clear of partisan politics.  The Right has gleefully fought back, celebrating Carson for allegedly speaking truth to power and rejecting any idea that there should be any muzzle on speech in such a forum.  Carson is now being touted as a possible presidential contender in 2016, despite his own protestations to the contrary.

Carson is unquestionably impressive and was so during that speech.  I recently had the opportunity to observe him in person during a taping of a Sean Hannity special in which he was the featured guest.  He is superbly articulate and magisterially calm, and is an unapologetic and persuasive exponent of personal responsibility, free enterprise,  and limited government (with one odd exception for food stamps).   His contempt for redistributive politics is exhilirating and it would be a boon for the country if he had a wider platform.  (Sadly, however, Carson’s arguments have been made before in the political realm, sometimes as compellingly, yet they failed to win a sufficient number of converts.  The problem is not the messenger, but the message, I am increasingly coming to believe, pace conservative wishful thinking.)

With regards to the Prayer Breakfast protocol, however, the Right might have had a case if there were any chance that it wouldn’t make the identical argument if the roles were reversed.  Imagine if a liberal cleric giving the Breakfast keynote had objected to the Iraq War during President Bush’s realm, or had criticized Republicans for hurting the poor.  The Right would have howled with protest. 

Showing a similar oblivion to neutral principle, U.S. Representative Marsha Blackburn objected on CSPAN’s Washington Journal this morning to Obama’s declared intention to act on certain policy matters if Congress didn’t give him his way.  Few on the Right objected to Bush’s expansionist view of the executive war powers, which dismissed any Congressional check on his power.  One despairs at the lack of self-awareness.

President Obama once again conflated the Sandy Hook massacre with chronic gun violence in last night’s State of the Union speech:

in the two months since Newtown, more than a thousand birthdays, graduations, and anniversaries have been stolen from our lives by a bullet from a gun. 

Two weeks ago in Minneapolis, he spoke of the need to “protect our kids and address the broader epidemic of gun violence in this country.”  But Newtown-style mass shootings have almost nothing in common with garden-variety gun crime besides the use of a firearm, and the failure to distinguish them has resulted in overlooking the most effective means for reducing gun deaths. 

Mass shootings, especially mass shootings of school children, are exceedingly rare.  Identifying common causes and certain means of averting them is therefore difficult, and legislative fixes are likely to possess a high degree of over- and under-inclusion.  Requiring federal background checks for private gun sales would not have kept guns out of the hands of Adam Lanza, while the NRA’s proposal to put an armed adult in every school across the U.S. wins the prize for the most absurd overreaction to the Sandy Hook tragedy.

The most common gun violence, by contrast, is drearily predictable and is the source on average of nearly ten thousand homicides a year.  Such violence occurs overwhelmingly in certain locations of cities—over the past 30 years in Boston, for example, 75 percent of the city’s shootings occurred in 4.5% of its area, whereas 88.5 percent of the city’s street segments experienced not a single shooting.   Urban shootings are retaliatory or the product of the most trivial of slights.  They are committed by handguns, not assault rifles.  Victims and perpetrators usually know each other, absent bullets going astray.  Reforming the involuntary commitment laws and beefing up mental health services are largely irrelevant to these shootings, since though the shooters have serious problems with impulse control and are clearly a danger to themselves and others, few would be deemed mentally ill.  And both victims and perpetrators are disproportionately minority, by huge margins.  New York City is emblematic of the country’s gun violence.  According to victims and witnesses, blacks commit 80% of all shootings in New York, though they are 23% of the city’s residents.  Add Hispanics and you account for 98% of all shootings.  Whites commit a little over 1% of shootings, though they are 35% of the city’s population.  These disproportions pertain across the country.

The media loves to think of itself as a crusader for racial justice against the bigotry of red state Americans.  Yet it pays little attention to black on black violence, compared to the ubiquity of such violence.  Only in the extremely rare occasions when a black victim has been shot by a police officer or a white does it summon sustained outrage.  This selective concern undoubtedly stems as much from reluctance to recognize the flip side of the black on black violence phenomenon—i.e., the high numbers of black perpetrators—as from any selective compassion.

 
While it is unclear how to prevent mass shootings–short of the unlikely event of removing all guns from the public—we know how to reduce urban violence: data-driven, proactive policing.  New York has brought crime and homicide down an unmatched 80% since the early 1990s by identifying crime hot spots through the rigorous analysis of crime data, encouraging officers to lawfully use their discretion to question people about suspicious behavior, and holding police commanders accountable for crime on their watch.  After a street shooting, officers will be deployed to the area in anticipation of a retaliatory hit, where they will look for behavior that indicates that someone is carrying a gun or that gang activity is afoot. 

Gun control, however reasonable, has had only a limited effect on inner city gun violence, as the case of Chicago demonstrates.  Proactive policing, on the other hand, is a demonstrable success, saving thousands of minority lives in New York over the last two decades.  (Strengthening marriage, to increase the chance that sons grow up with their fathers, would also have an enormous effect on inner city shootings, but presents a much greater policy challenge.)  Mass homicides are getting most of the attention at the moment, for the simple reason, frankly, that whites identify themselves with the victims, but the real problem of American gun violence lies elsewhere, and the solution to it within reach. 

The X Games—the extreme sport events broadcast on ESPN—just had their first death, reports the New York Times.  A snowmobiler trying to launch an airborne back flip was run over by his snowmobile, fatally injuring his heart and brain.  Such high risk competitions have become so popular that there are now six annual X Games, up from one in 1995.  Meanwhile, less publicized tests to push the body to its breaking point–such as this (insane) 135-mile bike, ski, or foot race in sub-freezing Northern Minnesota, in which participants lug all their camping equipment and supplies–continue to grow in number, difficulty, and participation rates.

(The wife of a participant in this year’s Arrowhead 135 snow race in Minnesota describes his experience:

There was a very wet snowstorm—about 10 inches of wet snow that started about 7 p.m. of the first day.  By 10 p.m. he  was soaked to the skin and couldn’t get dry.  Plus the snow was so thick on the ground that he was pushing his bike (loaded with 50 pounds of gear) through the snow at a rate of about 1-2 miles per hour.  Finally, he thought he was heading toward hypothermia ( a real risk) so he got out his survival gear—an arctic sleeping bag and a tiny water proof tent, set it up, stripped off the wet gear, and called for a snowmobile rescue.  The ultra elite bikers who got through the hardest part of the race before the storm hit were able to finish and the rest either dropped out or took a very long time to finish—you must finish in 60 hours, and there were a few who went that long. )

It’s a curious thing, this persistent desire to scourge the flesh and to engineer the risk of death.  Even as life grows more and more comfortable, healthy, and safe, and as we become more fanatically risk-averse regarding any possible hint of chemical toxins (see the current campaign against fracking and other excesses of the environmental movement), an ever-larger portion of us seek new ways to inflict pain on ourselves and to court danger.  Are thrill- and pain-seeking genes an evolutionary advantage?   Perhaps it is the competitive and self-testing impulse that confers the benefit or perhaps it is the crown of victory that creates a leg up in reproduction.  Of course, if you die before you breed, you’re out of luck.

War used to be a regular outlet for young men seeking glory through the risk of an allegedly heroic death; Stendhal’s’ Charterhouse of Parma portrays one such young man (Fabrizio Valserra), desperate to join the resurgent Napoleon’s army.  As war has become de-glamorized and less common, males (and a lesser number of females) create non-military combat for themselves, pitting themselves against the limitations of their own flesh.   It’s as if there is a dynamic equilibrium for risk: take it out of the fixed environment and we will put it back in in controlled doses.  (If the military manages to shoehorn females into combat brigades, the appeal of war as a showcase for male valor will diminish further, given the inevitable lowering of physical standards.  No women, BTW,  finished the Northern Minnesota snow race.)

These ever more masochistic races seem to embody as well a lingering desire to mortify the flesh—we may no longer set off on flagellating pilgrimages, but we can punish our bodies in secular ways, including anorexia.  Cartesian dualism may be a scientific dead-end in explaining consciousness, but the mind’s separation from the body, to the point of antagonism or revulsion, seems to be a lived reality.