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Here is my most recent comment on the conservative gun-idolater thread that has inspired many of my recent posts, in response to the somewhat correct allegation that it has devolved into nothing more than a shouting match:

A shouting match between fact and reason, clearly stated, on the one hand, and blind fanatical dogma, repeated endlessly despite being debunked (e.g., the constant insistence that any and all gun regulation is by definition an infringement of your Second Amendment rights, despite a universal rejection of that notion by Constitutional scholars, including uber-conservaitve Justice Scalia, as quoted above), on the other. You live in a world of fabrication in service to crude prejudices and bigotries and belligerence toward the world, and abhor those who stand for reason and for humanity. You invent your own caricature of the law and of the Constitution, your own caricature of history, your own reality, and then laugh like jackals when confronted by the reality you have simply defined out of existence.

You can persist, pretend, and posture to your heart’s content; it will only serve to convince those who are already as lost as you in your own shared arbitrary ideological delusions that the idols of your tribe are undisputable absolute truths, and to convince those who are not that you are yet another dangerous, violent cult posing as a political ideology. The fact that you are a large and well-established cult does not make you a benign one, or even one of mixed value. You are organized ignorance and brutality, a familiar perennial of human history, always popping up anew, with one shared constant: Rabid anti-intellectualism. You share that with the Inquisition, the Nazis, the Soviets, the Khmer Rouge, and Islamic terrorists, to name a few. You are on the side of ignorance and tribalistic ideological brutality, in opposition to reason and humanity.

The most telling distinction is that, by your own account, precisely those professions that methodically gather, verify, analyze and contemplate information are the ones you dismiss as bastions of liberal bias, without ever addressing why that would be so. Why would there be a positive correlation between the professional processing of fact and logic, on the one hand, and liberalism, on the other? The answer, while complex, is rooted in the fact that active and curious minds, immersed in observation and thought and the use of disciplined reason, tend to arrive at conclusions diametrically opposed to your dogma, because your dogma stands for the opposite of such modes of thought.

You stand in opposition to fact and reason and a commitment to humanity, which is why you simply ignore and dismiss the avalanche of statistics debunking the obviously absurd notion that there is no connection between our overabundance and overly easy access to instruments of deadly violence in comparison to other developed nations, and our extraordinarily high rates of deadly violence in comparison to other developed nations.

And the fact that there is a statistical correlation between laxity of gun laws internationally and homicide rates? The fact that the overwhelming majority of guns used in the commission of crimes in the US are put into circulation by being bought in those states with the laxest regulations? The fact that for every use of a gun in self-defense, one is used multiple times in a suicide, multiple times in a crime of passion, multiple times in an accidental shooting; the fact that a gun in the home INCREASES the likelihood of a member of that householder dying of a gun-inflicted wound; the fact that a gun-owner is more likely to be shot than a non-gun-owner, are all, to you, “spurious statistics” that you dismiss with the casual misuse of the word, thus never having to consider or acknowledge inconvenient realities. That’s not rational. It’s the intentional preservation of ignorance.

No, the problem is not just, or even primarily, a function of our gun culture; it is, more broadly, a function of extreme individualism, of the reactive rather than proactive orientation to our shared existence that you impose on us, of the social disintegration that you confuse for “liberty.” Our Founding Fathers were committed to the construction of a wise and just society; you are committed to its destruction.

The fact that you are certain that the Constitution verifies every last ideological conviction you happen to hold, and that therefore the thousands of legal and constitutional scholars over the last two hundred years who would and have argued subtle and complex points about that Constitution and how to interpret it are all wrong, are all irrelevant, because you know the one absolute truth, is the voice of ignorance, the voice of fanaticism, the voice of irrationality. You argue legal positions that are dismissed or challenged by almost all legal scholars, economic positions that are dismissed or challenged by almost all professional economists, historical positions that are dismissed or challenged by almost all professional historians, and not only commit the intellectual error of clinging to those positions as favored by reason, but insist that they are incontrovertible absolute truths. That is not the voice of reason, but rather of irrationality.

Of course you couldn’t stop engaging me, because you can’t stand to leave fact and reason disinterred and visible to all any more than I can stand to let you shovel unchallenged the dirt of your ignorance and barbarism over it once again. You have to bury the facts; you have to bury the rational arguments; you have to bury any authentic understanding of human history or economics or sociology; you have to bury any humane orientation to the world, because none of those supports your blind ideological fanaticisms.

Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards

Click here to buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards for just $2.99!!!

One of the underlying and defining dynamics of our social institutional landscape is the interplay of centripetal and centrifugal social forces that simultaneously are pushing us together and pulling us apart, across levels and in overlapping configurations. Neither is inherently good nor inherently evil, though system-wide imbalances in one or both directions undermine rather than contribute to the production of human welfare.

Centripetal forces are necessary to sow and reap the fruits of cooperation, of coordinated efforts, of being members of a society. All of our social institutions are primarily instruments of cohesion, at least on one level, while they may be instruments of violent conflict, or social disarticulation, on a higher level (national militaries are a good example), or of controlled conflict, or social decentralization, on a higher or lower level (competitive markets are a good example). Just as teams compete in leagues, corporations compete in a market economy, and nations compete in a global contest with emergent and precarious rules. Alliances form, symbiotic relationships, client-patron configurations, and fault lines among them, where animosities are more noticable than amistades. But all relationships, from the most intimate to the most belligerent, are characterized by some combination of convergent and divergent interests, and by some combination of cooperation and conflict.

Conflict can be energizing, a catalyst for innovation. Military conflict, for instance, has possibly been the single most robust historical catalyst for both technological and social organizational innovations. Economic competition is well known for its robustness. But it is social organization, the creation of coherence and cooperation, that reaps those benefits.

In terms of the pursuit of interests, these two social forces, centripetal and centrifugal, determine effectiveness, for in any social entity competing with others (e.g., nations with nations, corporations with corporations, political parties with political parties), too little organizational coherence dooms the social entity to impotence and defeat, while too much dooms both those within it to excessive subjugation to organizational or authoritarian will, and the organization itself to lethargy and ossification.

Members of organized groups can, intentionally or unintentionally, catalize either force, centripetal or centrifugal, either beneficially or detrimentally for the group itself, and either beneficially or detrimentally for other groups with which it interacts. For instance, some forms of solidarity are oppressive within and/or predatory without, while others are more liberating within and/or more amenable to partnerships without. For maximum benefit to group members, network ties need to bind those within the group into a coherent whole, avoid binding members of sub-groups within it so tightly that they in effect secede from the main group, and form and maintain bonds across group boundaries, if generally fewer and weaker than those within groups, then at least sufficient to create a basis for communication, coordination, and cooperation.

A group that becomes too “coherent,” with tight cognitive and social bonds within but too few such bonds without, can become predatory (as, for instance, Nazi Germany was), while  sub-groups that become too rebellious and demanding undermine the ability of the overarching group to act effectively in its competition with other similar groups. (Economist Mancur Olsen wrote a book in the 1970’s or 80’s called The Rise and Decline of Nations, discussing the enervating effects of too much time and energy being diverted from economically productive activities to distributional struggles, and used it to provide an explanation of the paradoxical economic phenomenon of “stagflation”).

In fact, implicit and explicit alliances between internal dissenters and external belligerents are frequent in human history, even when they are ideological opposites (e.g., the Bolsheviks and the Germans during World War I, when the latter funded and assisted the former in order to weaken and distract Russia from within while they attacked Russia from without; or, in an example of greater ideological compatability, the French alliance with the American Colonies, in which the French assisted the colonies in order to weaken Great Britain from within while continuing to engage in sporadic military conflicts with Great Britain from without).

We see such an implicit alliance today in modern American partisan politics. On the left, there are those who are trying to disarticulate the Democratic Party, just as the far right is ascendent with a passionate social movement. By doing so, that faction with the Democratic Party is inadvertently contributing to the success of that far-right social movement, rather than to the reform of their own party that it is their intent to effectuate (Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t: Why Our Tea Party Future Will Be The Left’s Fault).

One of the factors that will contribute to Democratic Party losses in Congress (and in state governorships and state legislatures and local governments) in the 2010 midtern elections is occasionally organized, somewhat coherent disenchantment with the pace and boldness of legislation pursued by our Democratic President and Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress. When the disenchantment rises to the level that they are declining to vote, then it is quite analogous to an implicit alliance with the far right in the latter’s take over of the country, contributing to the centrifugal forces of their own party at the very moment when highly passionate centripetal forces are mobilizing a sufficiently coherent far-right movement to effect a major shift in the distribution of political power.

While competing ideologies tend to explicitly emphasize either more coherence or more disarticulation, in reality, they are all jumbles of the two. The Tea Party is all about “liberty” and individualism, but its members are also more inclined to be highly nationalistic, moralistic, and militaristic. Progressives are all about using government to address social issues and invest in our collective welfare, but also emphasizes civil rights and multiculturalism.

The distinguishing traits between conpeting political parties do not actually involve a consistent commitment to either more social cohesion or less, but rather to more empathy or less. The right coheres around aggression and authoritarianism (in order to defeat others), while the left coheres around human welfare (in order to enrich all). The right disarticulates in order to possess and exclude, while the left disarticulates in order to enjoy and permit.

But, for both, discipline determines effectiveness, a discipline which either permits or does not permit internal discord, but which always contextualizes it in terms of internal consolidation. The United States began with a document that facilitated only discord, and not cooperation (The Articles of Confederation). It drafted a new one, that contextualized individual and states rights within the context of a strong federal government.

The ultimate goal is to create an optimal distribution of centralization and decentralization, neither too much nor too little of either, at any level of social organization. The future belongs to those, whether nations on the world state or political parties on the national stage, who are able to consolidate with enough discipline to compete with others who have done so. Factions that preach against compromise within the more liberal or progressive political parties are also, in effect, fighting to diminish the efficacy of their party.

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