Pulling to the left
In target shooting, hits that cluster to the left of the bullseye indicate various unfortunate maneuvers of the fingers while firing, something that can be corrected by intelligent practice—the specifics being dependent on which is the shooter’s dominant hand, with many gun designs (safeties, slide release levers, grips) favoring the right-handed among us.
In political terms, the stereotype of the gun owner is of someone who skews hard to the right wing, though I am seeing increasing interest on the left in the value of being armed for personal—and indeed democratic—protection, given the continued strength of Trumpist fascism in America.
I include protection of democracy there seriously as it is my continuing assertion that a free society in which all are able to participate at least at the level of voting is the best mechanism so far discovered for guaranteeing the exercise of individual rights. More about that in a bit. First, I must address the fundamental question of what justifies society, since judging which variety is better than any current contending models depends on agreement as to why we would ever do such a thing as gather together in groups.
The answer proposed since the days of the Enlightenment has been that we organize into societies for mutual defense and other forms of aid, with endless debates ensuing between liberals and classical liberals about how much collective activity would be too much and how we ought to pay for whatever amount we are willing to tolerate. But these discussions often have the flaw of being stuck in the seventeenth century or thereabouts, a time when medicine was limited to setting bones and letting blood and when wide stretches of land were seen as free for the taking—even if people were already living there.
Today, it is unrealistic to suppose that we could ever open up territory for the oxymoron of an anarchist society, until, that is, we have a practical way of getting people and their goods into space. For the present, there are eight billion of us on this planet, and all the productive land has been taken.
This does not excuse us from having to justify the inevitable. We may have few to no alternatives, but we can improve the doing of what we must by examining its morality. With conscious analysis, we can shore up the foundations.
The sine qua non of a society, the one that those Enlightenment thinkers and their American followers spent so much time on, is the protection of individual rights. No sane person would voluntarily surrender those rights, and any society that deserves to exist will not violate them on the fait accompli of already existing.
So far, the libertarians will agree with me. Where we part intellectual company will be in my next two conditions needed to explain why society ought to be: the creation of opportunity and the promotion of human achievement.
Mutual protection is a strange thing to cite if being together in groups does not produce results that cannot be achieved individually. Why bother to put up with the irritations and costs of living with others if this condition gives each of us nothing more than we could manage on our own? Thus, a society that only provides the negative benefit of freedom from the assaults of barbarian hordes or from broken contracts really has nothing to defend. It is not in fact a society, but is instead merely an accidental accumulation of mostly isolated persons.
I am told that taxation is theft by the aforementioned libertarians, but I have to wonder how we might have a society without paying for it. In fantastical speculations, there might be a society in which people combine entirely voluntarily for each project who then achieve great things, but I have yet to see any example in the real world in which this is done in any significant way in terms of numbers and duration. Society is structure, and structure means rules and sustenance.
What makes the constitutional democratic republican model the best so far is its ability to make real at least to some degree the aspiration of universal equality. I mean here both the legal equality in which everyone is subject to and protected by the same laws and also the leveling up of access to economic, political, and cultural resources. We in the United States have a long way to go in fulfilling that, especially in terms of wealth, but we have been at some periods moving in the good direction.
The right wing objects to such programs as Social Security, public education, Medicare, and so forth as attacks on freedom, but I have to ask them how free anyone is who is sick, poor, and without meaningful opportunity to make things better. If their proposals of fewer regulations and lower taxes would ever lead to increases in health and wealth for all, they would have an interesting argument, but I am not going to be persuaded when, as Bono puts it, “the rich stay healthy, and the sick stay poor.”
I stand with those who say that the possession of personal weapons must be included in any list of individual rights while at the same time observing that if we pull steadily to the left, we can keep our guns and stave off dying with them in our hands that is so frequently the result of violent revolutions brought about in the absence of progress.