School Shootings & the "Violent Video Games" Canard

In the wake of recent school shootings, one of many diversionary culture-war issues has resurfaced. Public officials (like the Lt. Governor of Texas) and interest groups (NRA) have resurrected the claim that "violent video games" are to blame for children shooting up our schools. See, for example, this article:

School Threats Prompt New Look at Violent Video Games

The basic claim is that, by immersing themselves in realistic first person shooter environments like Call of Duty, impressionable young minds are turned towards wanting to do the same thing in real life.

If you're interested in this as an empirical hypothesis, there's plenty of evidence - all of which points in the direction of zero relationship. Millions of people (adults and children) play these games, and the percentage of those who actually shoot people is vanishingly small. No correlation has been found between playing these games and violent real-world behavior. Process studies of human psychology can't find anything that would link the two. On the basis of facts, evidence, and conclusions about how the world really works, it's clear that anybody pushing this claim is not interested in reality or truth.

All of this is old hat. What's interesting to me is that by focusing on video games, politicians and gun lobbyists are unintentionally opening a much larger can of worms. There actually is a point buried in this claim - it's just not the point they think they're making.

Video games, whether realistic like Call of Duty or fantastical like Legend of Zelda, tell stories. They differ from movies, television shows, books, and plays only insofar as they allow the audience to participate (to some degree) in how the story goes. They are essentially the same thing.

As video gamers know, there is always a pathway to follow. The game designers lay out the narrative they want, and you follow along. If I play Batman: Arkham City, for example, I can succeed in defeating the bad guys or I can fail to do so. What I can't do is "solve" the puzzle of the game using non-violent means. I can't negotiate with my foes, or engage them in meaningful dialogue to find out what they want and whether there's a joint solution. In Call of Duty, I can't call in the State Department to use diplomacy as a means to end the conflict. Violence is the solution.

To be fair, there is a separate genre of video games that doesn't follow this structure. These games are more focused on solving puzzles, or exploring environments, or growth and change. There's some fantastic work in that field. There are also gradations: Mario Brothers has "boss levels" and a narrative around defeating a villain, but it's not the same as Call of Duty.

In this regard, these video games are sharing a narrative incredibly common to our culture. Most of our movies - including many of the most popular - are based on this same narrative. TV shows are much the same: they set up heroes and villains, and the story is resolved when the former defeat the latter. This is true both of stories based on violence (Liam Neeson's "Taken", for example) and those based on shaming and embarrassment (think "Revenge of the Nerds").

Like most folks, I enjoy some of these stories myself. I'm a big fan of the Marvel Universe (movies and TV shows), which essentially tells this same story over and over and over again. I understand the appeal, and I don't think it's ubiquity makes individuals into real-life killers.

What it does do, however, is define the cultural air we breathe. All hero-vs-villain stories are zero-sum games. The villain is evil, the hero is righteous, the end always the same. When we apply these narratives to our own lives we are always the hero, never the villain.

I see this play out in the professional workplace all the time. You would think that beat-the-bad-guys narratives wouldn't have anything to do with an institution that supposedly has a common mission, staffed by people who are among the most educated in the world. Yet this is precisely the story that people live out all the time. As one college president recently pointed out, there's a whole literature of faculty-vs-administration narratives (see here for one recent hyperbolic example). I know a number of people in various positions who spend much of their time and energy not seeking common and cooperative solutions to our institution's problems but finding fault and looking for ways to defeat their enemies. Call it Call of Duty: University Edition.

President Trump, of course, represents this narrative personified. For him, everything is a battle to be fought and won. From his public statements and behavior, it appears that he cannot conceive of a world that might operate differently.

To borrow Alex Wendt's famous article title, our environment is what we make of it. When we tell ourselves stories about overcoming villains by force (whether that force is physical, verbal, or organizational), we convince ourselves that that's how the whole world works. We see villains everywhere, dragons to be slain.

Except that, in our own minds, we are all heroes. Our narratives don't line up. We create the things we claim to hate (conflict, anger, fear, violence) when we try to impose our narratives on others, and when they do the same to us. Unlike our movies and TV shows, there is no conclusive ending, no "peace in our time".

So while it's not true that video games turn 17 year olds into school shooters, it is true that we live in a culture saturated by violence of all kinds. We have forgotten that there are other stories, other ways of being. And so, like a nation of Don Quixotes, we tilt at windmills, imaging ourselves vanquishing ogres and wondering why others seem to intent on running themselves into buildings.

A Syrian Escalation Ladder?

Amidst the long run-up to last week's somewhat anti-climactic missile strikes against Syria, a few folks raised a concerning specter: could a US bombing campaign lead American into a wider war?

For all the talk of a "new Cold War" between the US and Russia, we're nowhere near that point. The Syria case illustrates this nicely, and helps understand why Syria is unlikely to be the flashpoint for World War III.

First, even with the end of the Cold War in 1991 the United States and Russia remain strategic nuclear-capable states, meaning that each possesses the capability to threaten the existence of the other as a functioning society, and indeed to threaten life on the planet. Strategic nuclear arsenals have declined from their peak in the early 1980s, but both sides retain plenty of capacity to effectively annihilate the other.

What has changed since the Cold War is that the US and Russia no longer seek to actively destroy or overthrow the other. Putin enjoys messing with the West, but largely because he wants to create some breathing space within what he regards as Russia's sphere of influence so he can do what he wants. Today's Russia, unlike Stalin's USSR, has no grand ideology for taking over the world. Putin may be a local megalomaniac, but a global megalomaniac he is not.

Because of this shift, the US is no longer nearly as concerned as we once were that Moscow could try to destroy us at any moment. This used to be a real, if debated, concern, but there is no equivalent to the Committee on the Present Danger today - no more talk of Nuclear Vulnerability Windows and Strategic First Strike capabilities and the other sorts of things we used to worry about.

All of this is to say that, compared to the 1970s and early 1980s, the global superpower stakes are a LOT lower. If anybody wants to replace the US as global hegemon, it's China, and they seem content to focus on economics as a tool for doing so. They also have the good sense to stay the heck out of Syria, and indeed the Middle East as a whole.

So what does all of this mean for the US involvement in Syria? In the short term, we got through the strikes over the weekend without any obvious escalation. Trump, despite his proclaimed aversion to telling people what he's going to do, had telegraphed the attack for a week, so everyone had time to prepare. The US military also had plenty of opportunity to warn the Russians, who do have personnel and equipment on the ground in Syria. That warning was undoubtedly passed on to the Syrian regime, possibly lessening the impact of the strikes, but the whole thing was mostly symbolic anyway.

The fact that the US military can warn the Russian military directly in a theater of operations shows how far the two sides have gone to avoid direct confrontation, which neither of them wants. Syria isn't important enough to either side to consider risking a broader crisis, and unlike the Cold War era there's no "domino theory" today that would link a conflict in a minor regional state to an existential threat to the US.

There are only two things the US can do in Syria that could provoke a significant Russian military response. The first is to kill actual Russian soldiers (not mercenaries, whom all sides agree are on their own - the whole point of those forces, on both sides, is plausible deniability). If the US were to target a Russian facility and kill uniformed Russian forces, particularly in significant numbers, Russia would almost certainly feel compelled to respond in some way. Ongoing communication between US and Russian commanders in the area is a way to keep this from happening by accident, which so far has worked well.

The other thing that could produce a significant Russian reaction would be to directly threaten the survival of the Assad regime. Were to US to launch a truly massive bombing campaign, possibly combined with ground forces, that threatened to overthrow Assad and replace him with a more pro-Western alternative, we would be forcing Russia to make a choice: risk war with the US in order to protect their ally, or abandon their alliance and retreat. That's a difficult choice, given all that Russia has invested in the Syrian regime.

Luckily, it's a choice that Russia will almost certainly never have to make. Current US foreign policy, taken collectively, doesn't care nearly enough about Syria to try to alter the outcome of the Syrian civil war. Trump himself dislikes the whole thing and, now that ISIS is mostly defeated, wants to get the heck out. Others in the administration may have other views, but together they haven't been able to come up with a coherent Syria policy. In the absence of consensus on Syria, and given Trump's indifference to its future, it is extremely unlikely that the US will do anything that might push the situation towards a Russian response.

So much, then, for starting World War III. The other escalation axis people have been watching is Israel-Iran, but this too probably isn't going anywhere. Iran's support for Syria, while significant, is mostly through weapons and money, not Iranian forces on the ground. Iran doesn't like it when Israel bombs things in Syria, but there's not much the Iranians can do about it. Iran lacks a counter-deterrent to Israel's nuclear arsenal, and it lacks any other significant capacity to strike Israel except through terrorist proxies. As many scholars in my field have pointed out, proximity is a major factor in the likelihood of war, and Israel and Iran are not near each other.

Syria is a good example of how the most powerful state in the system doesn't always get its way. In this case that's because the US, despite its significant military advantages over all competitors, doesn't care as much as others do about the outcome. The American body politic is extremely unwilling to suffer any serious costs over Syria - Trump may be able to shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose voters but if he gets a couple thousand Americans killed fighting in Syria he may see his support cut in half. There's no agreement in Washington among foreign policy elites (of any party) as to what to do either. And so we dither and muddle along, while those with clearer goals and greater commitment forge ahead.

This is unlikely to change any time soon, and the end result is likely Assad remaining in charge of a significantly damaged Syria. On the way to that outcome, we can at least rest assured that this war is unlikely to spiral outward into a wider one.

Laws, Norms, and War: We Have Met the Enemy (again)...

As President Trump continues to flirt with the idea of hitting Syria with missiles, some in Washington have started asking whether the President has the legal authority to do so. This question makes little sense to most Americans, who have long assumed that Presidents (whom we refer to as "Commander-in-Chief" more often than by any other title) can do whatever the heck they want with the US military.

But the question does bear consideration. Lame-duck Speaker Paul Ryan opined today that the President doesn't need any legal authority beyond the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) passed by Congress in the wake of 9/11. Others have pointed out that that particular AUMF is a little long in the tooth (nearly 17 years), and it's stretching the original meaning well past any reasonable interpretation of the original intent to suggest that an authorization to go after al Qaeda and its affiliates somehow covers military strikes on the Syrian government, which hates AQ and its ilk.

The Framers of the Constitution never intended the President to be the one to decide whether the US goes to war. The power to declare war is listed under the Enumerated Powers of Congress (Article I, Section 8). That same section also gives Congress the power to create (or not) an Army and a Navy. For all that conservatives in the vein of the late Antonin Scalia like to talk about the Doctrine of Original Intent, none have ever felt any qualms about the complete abandonment of the obvious intent of the Framers on this issue.

That being said, here we are. The US Congress has not declared war since December 1941, and appears unlikely ever to do so again, even though the United States has been involved (often heavily involved) in a great many wars since the end of WWII. Sometimes, in a salve to the Constitution, they pass an AUMF as a way of saying, "See! We still have a say!" But often, even that doesn't happen.

My friend Vaughn Shannon pointed out recently that, while President Obama came under a lot of criticism for not striking Syria militarily back in 2013 when the question of chemical weapons first came up, this is not nearly the whole story. President Obama believed that, in order to strike a sovereign government in Syria, he would need (at minimum) authorization from Congress. That Congress, controlled by Republicans disinclined to given Obama anything that might benefit him politically and still stinging from the Iraq debacle, declined. Under the rules as he understood them, therefore, President Obama could not strike Syria. The fault was not his, it was Congress'.

All of this is to say nothing, of course, of international law. The UN Charter expressly forbids an attack on a sovereign member state except in self-defense or under the authorization of the Security Council. Most Americans have long since forgotten that the United States wrote those rules, though we have long ignored them. (Bonus points for anyone who can name the two incidents in history where the UNSC actually did authorize war.)

Usually, the way to settle questions of law is to go to court. But US courts have long declared that they have no intention of touching this question with a 10-foot pole, so there's no help there.

Congress, of course, only exercises the war power when they feel like it politically, and when the President feels like asking them to. This has devolved into a situation where the President is given broad leeway, and where people support or oppose acts of war based on which party they belong to. So much for politics ending at the water's edge...

How did we get here? Like a great many bad decisions, the roots lie in fear. After the Cold War, we very quickly became afraid of a resurgent Soviet Union and the global Communist menace. In that fear, we allowed successive Presidents to commit US forces to various and sundry military adventures, including the Vietnam debacle now memorialized by over 50,000 names carved in black stone in Washington.

The problem with using law as a guide to the US' use of force is that the law must be interpreted first. As another friend of mine, Steve Saideman, pointed out recently, everyone in Washington has their own lawyers. The White House has lawyers, the Pentagon has lawyers (both in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and in the Joint Staff, which serves the military side), the State Department has lawyers, Congress has lawyers. Lawyers generally come up with arguments explaining how whatever their masters want is on the right side of the law - witness the infamous "torture memos" drawn up in the George W. Bush administration by John Yoo and his colleagues.

So the original question - does the President have the authority to launch strikes on Syria - isn't actually a legal question at all. It's a political question. And how we answer it turns very much on how we understand both the rules supposedly enshrined in law, as well as the norms underlying those rules.

In general, laws only function when people accept their legitimacy - that is, when they buy into behavioral norms that underpin the laws. Take those norms away, and the law becomes merely a rhetorical device, a talking point for pundits to argue about. The very idea of being a "nation of laws" rests on our willingness to actually behave as if the laws matter more than what we happen to want to do at any one moment.

As Steve Saideman and others have pointed out, this is where the Trump Administration has done perhaps more damage than in any other area. Norms have been eroding for years, of course, and any reference to a "golden age" of norms in the past is probably mythical. But Trump, who more than any other President is the embodiment of his own administration, actively rejects all norms. He doesn't think they exist, or if they do they only exist for suckers and losers. He believes himself to be unconstrained by any rules - laws, norms, social understandings of shame, you name it.

And so in the coming days, the Trump Administration may attack Syria with missiles or bombs. Such an attack will likely accomplish nothing, as I have argued elsewhere. But as it will come with neither blessing from the UN nor authorization from Congress, it will be one more erosion of the norms that once governed US military force, however imperfectly. In so doing, we model the behavior that the rest of the world will emulate. We are creating the world we claim we don't want, and then blaming everyone else for it. Perhaps we, like our President, need to grow up and face the world like adults.

Syria and Deterrence: A Depressing Primer

So here we are again. The Syrian regime has once again used chemical weapons against civilians, and the US is again faced with the decision of what to do about it. Same old, same old.

First, to give the current administration its due: complaints about the deal reached during the Obama administration to supposedly rid Syria of its chemical weapons are legit. That deal obviously didn't work, and I suspect that most of those involved in negotiating it at the time knew it wouldn't. Without verifiability and serious Russian backing, there was no way Syria would disarm. There was obviously no penalty for Assad to cheat, and so he cheated.

That said, whining about the past isn't a foreign policy. Trump owns this problem now, just as he owned it a year ago. Last year, faced with the same situation, he lambasted Obama's foreign policy and then proceeded to lob a few missiles at Syria. He declared victory and called it a day.

And here we are again.

To be clear, there are indications from those who know the situation that this recent attack is not an isolated incident. Syria has been using chemicals a lot. It just doesn't make the news very often, probably because most of the country is unreachable by outside media - it's just too dangerous, and Assad's forces aren't interested in press coverage of their war.

If this is the case, then the Trump administration's attempts to deter further chemical weapons use by the Assad government have failed. That certainly seems to be the case with this latest attack, even if we accept former Ambassador Ford's contention that this incident is unrelated to Trump's comment last week that he wants to get out of Syria.

The failure of US deterrence efforts was easy to foresee. Deterrence is remarkably straightforward, and rests on imposing costs significant enough to override all other concerns (cognitive or affective). For all that I tend to see emotion as the primary motivating factor much of the time, there are times when facts impose their will on the situation.

The basic deterrence equation is simple. I declare the behavior that I want my opponent to not do. In this case, the US government wants Syria to not use chemical weapons. This had been a fairly robust international norm in general, but we can see that norms alone don't influence Syrian behavior.

Once I've made it clear what I don't want you to do, I then issue a threat: if you do that thing, I will inflict punishment on you. That punishment has to have at least two characteristics to work:

1) It has to be sufficiently severe that it overshadows the gains you might get from doing the thing I want you not to do.

2) You have to believe that I will actually carry out the threat - that punishment is certain if you cross the line.

The Trump administration's deterrence efforts have failed on both counts. Previous rounds of military strikes have been relatively mild, a small price to pay if Assad thinks that chemical weapons use will help him win his long-running civil war. And we haven't been consistent in applying those punishments. If the Syrian regime thinks there's a chance it won't get punished at all (based on past experience), that increases the chances they'll cross the line again.

At this point, a year into the Trump Presidency, he's dug himself a pretty serious hole in terms of deterring Assad. The only way to get out of that hole would be to reestablish both of the criteria above, swiftly and decisively and above all consistently over time.

In practice, this would mean a sustained campaign of airstrikes against a wide range of Syrian targets, sufficient in both quantity and importance that they threaten Syria's increasingly-certain victory in its internal war. Assad is willing to trade punishment in exchange for victory - in order for a punishment to be strong enough (condition 1), it needs to put that victory in doubt. And in order for him to change his belief that he can just wait it out (condition 2), such strikes would have to be carried out over a long period of time, for months not weeks or days.

It's not clear that the US government (Trump's emotional volatility aside) has the stomach for such an undertaking. It would be enormously expensive, even if (or especially if) we keep pilots out of harm's way by using cruise missiles and other strike-at-a-distance technologies. Deploying the forces necessary would put a strain on US military efforts elsewhere (Korea, anyone?) Innocent civilians will die, which will create international pressure to cease and desist. And Russia, of course, will object, and may engage in further bad behavior aimed at us or our interests.

So Trump will bluster, as he always does. There may well be some limited strikes, which Trump will praise as the "big price to pay" that he promised. Assad will quit with the chemicals for a few weeks, and everyone will forget about it. Then he'll go back to doing what he wants.

This is lousy foreign policy, not least because it makes the United States look like a paper tiger. But bluster and Twitter rants aside, it's not clear that there are any good options here. A Hillary Clinton administration would likely be stuck in the same situation, with the same lousy choices and the same calculations. The Obama administration did face this same situation, tried things a different way, and failed, just as Trump is failing now.

In addition to the tragedy within Syria (which is horrific for the Syrian people caught in the fighting), the longer-range problem is that Syria, with active Russian and Iranian backing, is largely dismantling the international norm against chemical weapons that we spent decades constructing during the Cold War. It's not clear that there has ever been a point, post-1991, where the United States could have stopped that erosion, or what exactly we would have done to change that path. But it does mean that future use of chemical weapons is more likely by the day, and that future efforts to deter that use will be even less effective than they are now.

Violence in Charlottesville: The Dangers of Painting with a Broad Brush

The national conversation is filled with discussion of the violence in Charlottesville over the weekend. The death of one woman is both a tragedy and a crime, as is the injury of nearly two dozen others. Our justice system has much to do to address these terrible acts, and I have faith that it will.

As is often the case, I am more interested in the broader conversation and the conflict that it represents. I have a couple of points I want to make; because of the raw nature of recent events, we'll see how well I can make them.

First, the supporters of White Supremacy often like to wrap their political activities in the flag of Free Speech. The right to peaceably assemble is sacred to all, whether we agree with their views or not. This much is true.

But it is debatable whether "peaceable assembly" includes showing up with shields, helmets, body armor, and sticks. That's not a "peaceful" demonstration, it's intimidation and preparation for combat. So I'm not buying the "peaceful assembly" line. There was never any intention for this to be "peaceful". This is not a movement much interested in peace.

Second, at some point - probably already happened by now - some apologist for the marching racists will argue that it's not fair that they all be blamed for James Alex Fields' actions. He acted alone, they will say. You can't all paint us with the same brush just because of one violent man in our midst.

Bullshit.

The entire White Supremacist movement relies on painting with broad brushes. All blacks, all Jews, all gays, all Muslims, all Latinos - "they" are all the same. This is the entirety of their "argument". They don't care about individuals, only about groups. All of "them" are always the same.

If you marched on Friday night, tiki torch in hand, and you don't think this describes you, get the heck out now. You have taken up with a violent movement. Perhaps the icons of knives and axes might give you a clue. Or the hardware your fellow marchers are carrying.

So fine. Your group - each and every one of you - is violent to the point of being murderous. And we, the rest of civilized society, are justified in rounding you up and prosecuting you under the law.

Finally, this is the really key thing that these White Supremacists, neo-Nazis, and various KKK hangers-on don't yet realize. They've already lost. The vast majority of American society - including whites - rejects them, rejects their ideas, and most especially rejects their murderous attachment to violence. To borrow Ronald Reagan's memorable phrase, they are already consigned to the Ash Heap of History.

They just aren't smart enough to know it yet.

Let us not forget that it was the forebears of these rampaging rage-monsters that slaughtered 168 Americans, including 19 preschool children, twenty-two years ago in Oklahoma City. The mix of rage, incoherent fear for their white identity, and rejection of government authority has killed before.

I hope that the death of Heather Heyer will serve the same purpose as the deaths of those many innocent victims in 1995: a wake-up call to the nation and the start of another effort to drive this kind of violent hatred back underground. Given the current occupant in the White House, I'm not holding my breath, but I hope at least that his fellow Republicans will see the Faustian bargain they have struck and repent.

Many people have been quoting MLK's "arc of history" line. In this case, he is absolutely correct. The men (and yes, they are mostly men) who have bought into this violent insanity have been brought out into the light. But they have already lost. The nation unites in horror against their dystopian rage. They cannot win, not even a little bit, anything that they hope to achieve. They can't even keep the statues they are so keen to protect standing in the public square. All they can do is shriek helplessly as the arc of history leaves them behind.

Or, they can repent and join the rest of us. I, for one, would be happy to have them back if they can find a way to set aside their rage, fear, anger, and hatred. We need people working together to build a more perfect union for all of us.

Why "Fear for your Life" Isn't a Reasonable Standard

There's a lot of reaction this week to the verdict in the case of Philando Castile's shooting last year. Naturally, a lot of it has centered on race and the officer's defense that he was "afraid for his life".

As part of this conversation, a friend of mine posted a video to Facebook along with a request for thoughts. The video showed a white man resisting arrest by two police officers (both also white). The man, who is a pretty big guy, puts up quite a struggle, at one point seeming to reach for one of the officer's guns (though he does not obtain it). Eventually the police wrestle him to the ground and pin him. At no time did either officer reach for any of the weapons on his belt. While he was on the ground, they did not continue to strike him in punishment; they simply held him still.

Commentary attached to the video by the original poster suggested that this was evidence of white privilege, if not white dominance: that whites who struggle against police don't need to fear for their lives, while blacks who are compliant with police do. It was this contrast which my friend was seeking comment on.

In response, I wrote the following, more less as a stream of consciousness:

"Fear for your life" is a subjective state of mind. My fear is mine - it is based on the judgments and expectations I have in my own head about is going on around me. 

Juridical standards of "reasonable fear" assume that we can take an average of what "most people" would fear given a certain set of circumstances. In some cases, this is in fact "reasonable" - most people will fear if suddenly confronted with a rattlesnake, for example. Most people will also experience fear if a gun is pointed at them.

To believe that we can do this kind of "reasonable averaging" without taking race into account is folly. If I get pulled over, it would not be reasonable for me to fear that the police officer is going to shoot me. Were I black, it would be very reasonable to fear that outcome.

This isn't "White Supremacy", at least not in the sense that there is a conscious, guiding ideology that drives these differences. Rather, there are unconscious and semi-conscious biases that exist in people's heads. We tried to call these biases "racism", but that falters because most people think racism is a conscious thing, a set of beliefs I consciously hold.

We all make judgments in the face of ambiguous evidence. Those judgments are driven by our beliefs, our expectations, and our emotional responses to things around us. This is why negative media portrayals of black men, for example, are so problematic. TV shows don't turn people into conscious racists. But they build up in our mind unexamined expectations about how other people are likely to behave.

Our laws and judicial procedures were developed with an underlying assumption that all people are equal. And so we wish ourselves to be. But in our minds, we are NOT all equal to each other. To pretend otherwise is to deny reality.

The simple answer to this particular problem is rigorous, continuous, serious police training. You can train officers to respond the same to everyone, regardless of color. But you have to recognize that such training has to overcome the differences already existing in their own heads. It takes a lot of work, and a lot of practice, to overcome those mental differences. Some - I suspect many - police officers already have, and many have probably never been seriously tested on the street. I am surprised, in the light of these continuing tragedies, that no one is talking about how we support, train, and discipline our police forces, and what expectations we have for the way they do their jobs.

It seems to me that the legal question we keep asking in these cases - would a "reasonable person" be afraid for their life under a certain set of circumstances - is the wrong question, because there is no singular "reasonable" viewpoint. Our experiences, especially around race, are so vastly disparate that most of us cannot understand what "reasonable" looks like to someone who has a different race, a different background, a different set of experiences than we do.

We will never make progress in our national conversations until we recognize this basic truth: that "reasonable" is not an objective standard, and that fear is based on many things including prejudices. Just because someone is sincerely afraid does not make their actions in response to that fear reasonable.

Karate and Life: No First Strike

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about the first of Gichin Funakoshi's 20 Precepts: The Way Begins and Ends With Respect. I believe that Funakoshi's ideas go beyond karate-do, that there is wisdom worth sharing in his list of Precepts. This is the second post in that series; eventually, I hope to write about all 20.

Funakoshi's second Precept is perhaps his most famous:

Karate ni sente nashi.
There is no first strike in karate.

This is often understood in the martial arts world as tactical advice, and has given rise to endless debates about the nature and application of various blocks and strikes. For an excellent review of this debate, see my friend Dan Djurdjevic's blog.

But what about the rest of us? I believe that the meaning here is far more important outside the dojo than inside it. If more of us lived by this precept, the world would be a better place.

The Japanese word "sente" means not simply "strike" or "attack", but "initiative" - in this case, "aggressive initiative". What Funakoshi is referring to here is that moment in any conflict when one party take the first aggressive, escalatory step - the moment when the conflict leaves the path of mutual accommodation and problem-solving and instead becomes a zero-sum struggle in which each side seeks to beat the other into submission.

All conflicts have this "inflection point" somewhere. A disagreement, or a divergence of interests, in and of itself does not generate a conflict. What turns disagreement into war is a decision by one side to try to impose its will on the other - to try to achieve a unilateral solution in which I get what I want and who cares about the other guy.

Sometimes this point comes right at the beginning of a conflict, because one side has already decided to take what they want away from the other. Sometimes, it comes after a period of time in which both sides come to realize that there is a disagreement which neither was aware of before. In all cases, somebody has to make a decision to take that step - to throw the first punch, to launch the first attack, to throw away any hope of negotiating a mutually agreeable solution in favor of grabbing as much as you can get.

Prior to this point, mutual resolution is always possible. There are no conflicts on earth between humans that can't be settled in some fashion. Some of those settlements may require compromise - each side getting less than it fully wants. Some settlements may even require a redefinition of interests, even a redefinition of identity. Such things can and do happen - there are no laws in the cosmos that prevent any of this.

Peace, in the sense of resolving conflicts together, is possible. We just don't do it very well.

Funakoshi's dictum is a plea to all of us - don't be the first one to take a step down that road. Remain open to mutual dialogue as long as possible. Don't throw the first punch. Because once that first punch is thrown, disagreement becomes conflict and peace goes out the window. And everyone will suffer.

Political scientists and economists have known this by a different language. In our fields there is a game called "prisoner's dilemma" (or PD). I'll spare you the details, but in essence the game boils down to a choice between cooperating with the other player or stabbing him in the back. If both cooperate, both sides get something and are better off. If I stab and the other guy doesn't, I get everything and he gets nothing. If we both stab, we're both worse off.

Games like PD are great for modeling certain dynamics, but life isn't like that. We rarely play a game or make a choice once and then walk away. In life, we make these choices all the time, over and over again.

A Princeton scholar, Robert Axelrod, set out to capture this by inventing an artificial computer world in which players ran around and bumped into each other. At each interaction, they would play PD with each other. Each time, players had to choose not knowing what the other side would do (the game is played with simultaneous choices) - but each DID remember what the other player had done before. Players in Axelrod's game built up memories over time of what other players do.

In this virtual world, Axelrod asked a simple question: what strategy wins? That is, from a selfish perspective, what could players do to maximize their own gains in these interactions, assuming that they cared only about themselves and not the welfare of any other players in the game?

The winning strategy, which has spawned a wealth of literature, was what Axelrod called Tit-for-Tat (TFT). The essence of the TFT strategy is simple:

• On the first round of an iterated game, Cooperate.
• On every subsequent round, do whatever the other player did the last round.

Here is Funakoshi's karate ni sente nashi in action. My best strategy is to start by trying to cooperate with the other side. If they cooperate back, then we both keep cooperating with each other, with both of us gaining every round. Only if the other side betrays me first do I resort to similar responses. I never launch the first strike.

Amidst all the debate among academics about TFT, here's the reality: no one has ever come up with a better strategy. In the long run, you and I and everyone else will be better off if we start by assuming that cooperation is possible.

Most of us will never get into a fistfight or a physical altercation. But all of us have interactions every day with people near to us and far away. In every one of those interactions, we have a choice: do I want to seek cooperation, or do I want to lash out? Find common ground or try to "win"? Funakoshi's advice is as simple as it is profound: don't be the first to start a fight. Reach out with an open hand. Sometimes people will return the favor, sometimes not. But we will always be better off if we do.

Suggestion for Bystanders: Equip Yourself

Since the election of Donald Trump a week and a half ago, our national conversation has been abuzz with different reactions. Attention is turning to the obvious question: what next? What impact will this election result have, and is it already having, on our country? And what can I do to steer things in a better direction?

There are lots of things to look at here, but the one that has caught my attention is the rise in incidents of harassment, intimidation, and violence against a range of minorities and vulnerable groups both during and after the election. That rise has been extensively documented, including here and here. Near and dear to my heart, far too many of these are taking place on university campuses.

Earlier this week I wrote an Open Letter to supporters of President-Elect Donald Trump, inviting them to help make America great again by reducing incidents of harassment, intimidation, and assault against racial, ethnic, and other minorities. As of this writing, that piece has been read over 2600 times. I hope that it has an impact in empowering people on all sides of the political spectrum - but especially Republicans and conservatives - to stand up to the ugliness noted above.

At the end of that letter I wrote this:

In the end, there are only two futures for our country. We either all succeed together in building a society free of fear, a society that can prosper and grow and realize its fullest potential. Or we turn on each other in fear and hatred and loathing and tear each other apart. I know which future I want to build. I hope you will join me.

I believe this in the depths of my heart: of all of the sins humanity is capable of, the sin of hatred and violence is the one most likely to destroy us all. It is also the one that should be most easily fixed, because hatred is a choice that can be made or unmade largely at will. There is no "tragedy of the commons" here, where otherwise-reasonable individuals generate bad outcomes. Unprovoked violence (verbal or physical) is simply bad.

As Clinton supporters and others on the political Left have struggled with how to respond to the election, there have been many suggestions and pieces of advice. From wearing safety pins to adopting anti-harassment bystander tactics, these ideas have been extensively circulated and discussed. I've no doubt that people will try many of these, that some will work, and that the discussion will go on.

A friend of mine recently wrote a blog post collecting general principles which such "resistance" efforts can be shaped by. In that collection she included two important reminders:

• We must face the world as it actually is.
• No one is going to save us. It is up to us.

Along these lines, I would like to offer a suggestion to many of my friends and fellow-travelers who, like me, are alarmed by the rise in harassment, intimidation, and violence directed against vulnerable individuals. I make this suggestion because, of all of the ideas I've seen batted around so far, I'm pretty sure no one else has made this one and no one else will.

Put simply, my suggestion is this: If you want to be an active bystander protecting victims of harassment, or if you are concerned about becoming a victim yourself, learn to defend yourself. Equip yourself, in other words, to fight.

This is rare advice, especially in liberal circles. Most folks in the tribe on the left eschew violence in all of its forms. There are good moral reasons for doing so, and I am not one to argue that violence solves problems. I have made my own position clear: I am a self-defense pacifist. I believe in the use of force only when one is under attack, and only with just enough force to successfully escape the attack.

But the need to train is not primarily about fighting. It's about dealing with fear. If you are in a situation in which you need to defend yourself or someone else, you are much less likely to have to actually fight if you are prepared to.

There's been a lot of discussion online about bystander tactics and how sympathetic people can help stand up to harassment and bullying. A lot of this is driven by the fact that most of the time, bystanders remain bystanders. People don't intervene. And the reason for that is fear.

People don't intervene in harassment situations, or especially during a physical attack, because they are worried about becoming a victim themselves. They're worried that the aggressor will turn on them. When someone is screaming angrily at someone else, it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that the screaming could turn to violence, and that the screamer might direct his anger and hatred at anyone who gets in the way.

Fear paralyzes. For bystanders, it prevents them from getting involved. For victims, it keeps them from effectively standing up for themselves or repelling the attack - even when the attack is only verbal. In situations of harassment and intimidation driven by hatred, the fear is physical and visceral. The big guy yelling epithets looks scary, in part because the back of our brain is screaming he could hurt me.

The only effective counter to fear is confidence, built on learned and practiced ability. The first time we learn to drive a car, it's really frightening - a mistake could get us seriously hurt, and we've never done it before. Once you've been driving for a while, it's no big deal. The fear goes away. The situation didn't change - you did, through experience and practice.

Dealing with physical threats is no different. If you have no training and no experience, it's scary as heck. With training and practice, it becomes less so. And you will make better decisions.

Bullies and harassers are used to frightened people - they know how to push them around and get what they want, which is generally to assert dominance. They aren't nearly so good at dealing with people who aren't frightened, who are assertive. Many of them will give up, because they don't know how to handle resistance. Some will try to escalate the situation, hoping to reestablish their dominance. If you're prepared to deal with that escalation, you can usually prevail there as well.

None of this is to say that you have to actually physically attack an abuser. Most harassment is verbal, with only the threat of violence behind it. You may not engage the harasser at all - see the video linked above for strategies that are victim-centric rather than aggressor-centric. You will be more confident and capable in those strategies if you know you can handle a physical escalation by the attacker.

I've written lots previously on this blog about self-defense, its relationship to fear, and ways and means of developing yourself. If I've kept your attention this long, I encourage you to go read those posts. Read my friend Dan Djurdjevic's stuff at The Way of Least Resistance. Find training opportunities near you - workshops, classes, clubs. Treat it like a skill to be developed over time, rather than an inoculation you can check off your list once. Practice, practice, practice.

If we are going to be effective in standing up to the bullies among us who are now emboldened by this past week's events, we have to be prepared. We need a full set of tools in our toolkit, and we need to be confident in our ability to use them. Do you want to be an effective bystander, to stand up for vulnerable people when they come under attack? Then be prepared to fight. Chances are you won't have to - but you'll be glad you're ready.

There Are No Enemies

Back in July I wrote a post about "Enemies in Politics", taking what was a fairly easy shot at the pastor who said the invocational prayer at this summer's Republican National Convention. It's easy to call someone out for labelling members of the other party "enemies", and he was widely criticized for his remarks.

More recently, we've had another use of the word "enemies" in our political sphere, when the Maine Governor Paul LePage said this:

A bad guy is a bad guy. I don’t care what color he is. When you go to war, if you know the enemy, the enemy dresses in red and you dress in blue, you shoot at red. … You shoot at the enemy. You try to identify the enemy. And the enemy right now, the overwhelming majority of people coming in are people of color or people of Hispanic origin.

If you want to watch him say these things, you can see a video clip here.

Now, what Gov. LePage said was politically stupid - so much so that he is now considering resigning before the end of his term under a firestorm of protest. That's a pretty standard political story - say something stupid that angers a lot of people, pay a political price for it. His angry response to a state senator who called him out on it didn't help either.

But I want to make a much bigger point here. The point isn't just that Gov. LePage, or Pastor Burns from South Carolina, were wrong about who our enemies are. The point is that they are both wrong about whether there are any enemies at all.

Put another way: there are no enemies.

I'll say that again for emphasis: There are no enemies. "Enemies" are an illusion we create ourselves.

I'm hardly the first one to come up with this idea, though it's not common in the West. Morihei Ueshiba, founder of the art of Aikido and famous for his philosophy, had many variations on this theme:

• To injure an opponent is to injure yourself. To control aggression without inflicting injury is the Art of Peace.
• There are no contests in the Art of Peace. A true warrior is invincible because he or she contests with nothing. Defeat means to defeat the mind of contention that we harbor within.
• The real Art of Peace is not to sacrifice a single one of your warriors to defeat an enemy. Vanquish your foes by always keeping yourself in a safe and unassailable position; then no one will suffer any losses. The Way of a Warrior, the Art of Politics, is to stop trouble before it starts. It consists in defeating your adversaries spiritually by making them realize the folly of their actions. The Way of a Warrior is to establish harmony.

Or this:

Opponents confront us continually, but actually there is no opponent there.

People will immediately object, of course. "What about ISIS?", they will ask. "What about Russia? China? Terrorists? Weren't the Nazis enemies?" (Because Godwin's Law).

We live in a culture defined by enemy narratives. Almost all of our stories, our movies, our TV shows revolve around the struggle with enemies, "good guys" vs. "bad guys", black hats and white hats. There are exceptions, of course, but they are relatively rare. The Enemy Narrative is one of the most recognizable stories we have.

The problem is, it's all wrong. Or, put another way, it's all made up - a constructed story we tell ourselves about the world that hides and obscures more than it illuminates. We believe that enemies are real, that they really exist, just like trees and oceans and clouds are real. But they're not. Enemies are just people with labels we attach to them.

But what about people who attack us? Aren't they our enemies? If someone tries to do me harm, I'm not making that up - doesn't that make someone my enemy?

Imagine this story: I go out for the evening with my brother (who would, for the record, never do this...). We have dinner, maybe hear some music, walk to a couple of bars. He's feeling down about things in his life. Over the course of the evening he drinks too much, thinks about the wrong things too much, grows angry. Soon he's consumed by his anger and rage, fueled by alcohol. He bumps into someone, starts scuffling. I step in to restrain him, and he turns his anger on me. He lashes out to hit me.

Is he my enemy? Of course not. He's misguided, confused, and mistaken. Yes, he's trying to do me harm. But he's still my brother. And I will respond to him as such.

Now, substitute the word "neighbor" for "brother" in that story and it's a short step over to the question, "Who is my neighbor?" Those familiar with the Christian gospels know where that question goes. We are all neighbors, brothers and sisters, to each other.

Why, then, do we lash out at each other? Because we are confused, mistaken, misguided. Most conflict - maybe all conflict - is invented in our heads.

Much has been written in the study of conflict about the impact of a scarcity of resources. If there's not enough food to go around, people will fight over it. We will become enemies of each other quickly, in what most people would think of as "real" conflict with "real" enemies.

But there is no scarcity of resources. There is enough food, energy, water, and material for everyone on the planet. Neo-Malthusian concerns aside, we're not anywhere near the carrying capacity of our world. And if you look around at the conflicts in the world today, they're not really about resources. They're about some people wanting to control other people, because of ideology, religion, or a lust for power (or some combination of these).

During the Cold War, we used to argue in International Relations about whether the conflict was "real" or not. We had categories we called "spiral conflict" and "aggressor-defender conflict", and we argued about whether the Soviets were motivated by their own security (making it a spiral) or by trying to take over the world (making them a "real enemy").

But the argument itself was an invention. Yes, Soviet motivations mattered tactically, because they determined how the USSR might respond to various stimuli in the short run. But labelling them an "aggressor" and then claiming that the aggression made them an "enemy" wasn't an argument, but a circle of labels. No one asked, "why"?

This is not an argument for complete pacifism (a topic I've dealt with previously). If my brother is attacking me, I'm going to resist. I may even use force against him. But because he is my brother, not my enemy, I will use the least force necessary. I will do everything I can to keep him whole and unharmed.

Likewise, if a terrorist group is planning to attack us we should attempt to stop them. But in doing so, we should remember that, however confused or mistaken they may be, they are still fellow human beings. When Jesus called on us to love our enemies, this is exactly what he meant. If you claim to be a Christian and yet want to lash out in anger and hatred at terrorists (or Mexicans, or "thugs", or anyone else), you've got a problem.

Gov. LePage will not be the last politician during this electoral season to label someone else "the enemy". Partisans on both sides will do so, because the Enemy Narrative is a great way to mobilize your tribe and get them to go out and do things. Every time we do so, we dehumanize each other a little bit more. LePage isn't the cause of the problem, he's a symptom.

This brings me back to a frequent theme during election years: why I don't like politics. I would rather spend my time searching for peace and building better relations among people than waste my energy creating enemies that don't exist and fighting imaginary battles. There are so many better things we could do with our time, our resources, and our creativity. What a shame to waste them all on something that doesn't exist.

More Death, More Brokenness

More shooting. More violence. More death.

It has been a terrible week - not so much in terms of absolute numbers (with the number of annual firearm deaths in the US well north of 10,000, seven or so more doesn't really move the needle much) but because we are forced to confront them. We cannot look away. Most gun homicides and shootings in the US are invisible, often buried even in the local media, so we can pretend they're not there. This week we don't have that luxury.

More grieving. More spouses and partners left to put shattered lives back together. More children sobbing for their parent who they will never see again.

That the victims this time were police is a particular loss. Whatever else may be true of policing across the United States - and it is clear that there are a LOT of problems - police officers have tremendous potential for positive impact. They are role models. They intervene when no one else will, when someone is on the wrong track headed to destruction, and sometimes they turn those people around. And yes, they save lives. How many lives would these officers have impacted had their own not been cut short?

Early indications - and they are VERY early - suggest that the Dallas attack was in some way retaliation for the deaths of black men elsewhere at the hands of police. We know there are a few whites who, like Dylann Roof, would like to ignite a race war. It would come as little surprise to learn that there are a handful of blacks who feel the same. Time will tell whether that story fits the facts or not.

Rather than analyze or explain this specific event, all I can do is look at this in a larger context. I wrote yesterday that the world is broken, and that brokenness hurts. One of the greatest dimensions of that brokenness is our belief, held to the core of our bones, that violence solves problems. Those who carried out the attack in Dallas, whoever they were, decided that violence was their best option to create the world they want. Police officers who shoot first and ask questions later make the same decision, whether they think about it or not.

Of course race is an issue, in powerful and complex ways. There are no simple solutions to that problem - the chief of police in Dallas, for example, is black, which does not seem to have made the issue go away. Diversity among police is important, but it is not the cure-all.

But violence - that is the one thing that unites us. Our faith in the gun, in the efficacy of killing. In the right circumstances we cheer for killing for revenge, for "justice" (by which we mean far too often retribution), even for redemption. We exalt and celebrate those whose job it is to kill. Soldiers and armies may be a necessary evil in this world, but that doesn't mean that we should glory in the fact that we still have wars. Regardless of party or which side of these debates you're on, we almost all share a core belief that violence is a useful thing, a good thing. We only disagree about the appropriate targets.

This is where I think we need to reconsider. I mourn for the loss of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. I mourn for the loss of Brent Thompson and the other officers who died yesterday, whose names have not yet been released. I mourn for all of them, and grieve with their families, because it is clear that none of this violence is good. It is all brokenness.

If I knew more - if they weren't made invisible by our indifference - I would mourn for the thousands of others shot and killed each year in our country. If we examined their cases as closely as we examine the few that make it into the headlines, we would probably conclude that some were "justified". The suspect attacking a police officer with a knife. The criminal firing at civilians. We can easily call to mind these narratives, where the "good guy with a gun" saved the day against the "bad guy".

But we should mourn for the "bad guys" too - not only because Jesus told us clearly to love our enemies, but because when we hate and revile these people and cheer their deaths, we do so in the dark. We do not know them, or their histories, or how they came to be where and who they were. We judge in almost complete ignorance, knowing nothing about these people and yet absolutely certain of our moral righteousness in calling their death "justified". We're glad they're dead.

In my career I have attended many graduate ceremonies, and have heard a couple dozen speeches. None has ever been as good as the speech given at my own graduation from college 25 years ago by then-Yale Law School Dean Guido Calabresi. In his address he told a series of stories, one of which went something like this:

My third story also concerns someone in Italy, and also at the risk of someone's life. It concerns a farmer on some of our lands in Italy whom I went to see after the war. He had had the reputation that during the war he had hidden at the risk of his life allied servicemen who had been caught behind German lines and were escaping. Jews who were escaping from the Nazis. All the people on the right side of that conflict who were in trouble. But he had also the reputation that the moment things changed in 1944-1945, he hid the Germans who were running away. Now it wasn't at the risk of his life but when they came through, he hid them as well. And I went to see him because I was very young and I thought that this was terrible; that this was someone who did not understand the difference between right and wrong, that he couldn't distinguish between hiding people who deserved to be hidden and hiding criminals. I already sounded like a lawyer, I guess. And when I went to see him, I asked him and he said, "Politics, politics, I don't know anything about that. I don't know anything about those things. I don't care about them. When they came here, when they were running away, each one of them was in trouble. “Erun tutti e figli di mamma” -- They were each the child of some mother somewhere."

Each of us is some mother's child. Each of us is a child of God. What we do with our lives - good things, bad things, heroic things, terrible things - none of those things changes what we are.

When we cheer for violence, when we decide that this group of people needs to die, that those people over there deserve to be killed, we ignore this reality. We divide ourselves up and set upon each other with a zest and a zeal unknown almost anywhere else. We are one of very few species on the planet that kills its own, and we are far better at it than any other.

As we mourn and grieve for the lost, I hope (or wish, for hope is hard to find) that we will find the courage to talk about the things that really matter. One of those things is violence - our addiction to it, our beliefs about it, our misplaced faith in its power. We cannot heal ourselves through others' deaths. But until we really start talking, nothing will change. Tomorrow, and next week, and next month, and next year, more people will die by the hands of their fellow humans. And we will mourn again.

Knowing Pain, Feeling Pain

In my field, I have spent many years studying conflict. One of the characteristics this breeds is a certain level of dispassion. Most conflict scholars care deeply about resolving conflicts peacefully and without violence. But we don't let those passions affect our day-to-day operation as scholars. This allows us to look at often extraordinary events with a certain level of detachment, which is useful when trying to analyze and understand using the tools of logic and science.

In the past few years, I have written about many emotionally charged incidents. I wrote about Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, and about Michael Brown and Darren Wilson. I've written about any number of cases involving the interpersonal use of force by both police and civilians. In most of those cases, innocent lives were lost, which is terrible and tragic. In my writing I've tried to follow the channels of logic and reason, to draw meaning out of complex and highly charged events and to suggest ways of thinking that might lead to new and better outcomes. I do this, of course, because I care. But I do it using the tools most familiar to the academic.

Yesterday we were treated to two new cases, in very different parts of the country but with depressingly similar outcomes. Two black men confronted by police for minor offenses. Both ended up shot to death by police. Both became immediate media sensations because cell phone footage was released to the public which strongly suggested that both shootings were unjustified. Here we go again.

We've been over this ground often enough that the paths are well-worn and familiar. Some (not all, but some) white conservatives will defend the police in both cases, and even blame the so-called "Ferguson effect", as if all of this were the fault of one young black man in an over-policed poor town in Missouri. The NRA and gun supporters everywhere, who at other times are not shy about arguing that everyone should have a gun for self-defense, will grow suddenly and eerily silent when two black men, both legally armed, are shot by police. People will argue about whether this was or wasn't about race - white conservatives will say it's not, blacks and white liberals will say it is. Marches will be held, speeches given. Few if any of our words will bring about much change, especially in an election year when we're already yelling at each other and calling each other names.

For the academic, intellectual side of me all of this presents an interesting puzzle. Given the inertia of the system around race, policing, the use of force, and our criminal justice system, how can it be changed for the better? What mechanisms could actually effect real and significant change? Those are important questions that should occupy some of our best minds, and to which we should all lend our best efforts.

But this time, for me, it's a little different. I heard about the Louisiana case of Alton Sterling first. The facts seemed similar to many other cases - black man peddling his wares on the street, confronted, then tackled and shot, by police. Shades of both Walter Scott and Eric Garner. Same puzzle pieces, just reshuffled a bit. Because of the video, maybe the police will be charged. The FBI has stepped in to do an independent investigation. All of the usual, dispassionate facts.

As the story was playing out on the radio, professional journalism reporting what was known, they came to an audio clip of a news conference. At that news conference, the mother of Alton Sterling was talking to the press - the injustice, the demands for transparency, the outrage of yet another innocent black man killed by men who are supposed to protect the community.

What transformed the case for me was not her words, but her son who stood by her side. Clearly audible in the recording, Mr. Sterling's 15 year old son stood beside his mother sobbing. He wanted his father back. It was nothing more than a raw outpouring of emotion.

And in his voice, I heard my own son.

I have a 15 year old son, exactly the age of that boy. And in that moment, I heard the sound that my son would make if I were suddenly taken from him. I heard the breaking of his heart, and it broke mine.

This is the edge of language and ability, where words begin to fail us. Having spent my life mostly writing dispassionate prose, I can't explain the experience of that feeling. It was, for a few brief minutes, painful beyond description. And that pain left an impression, a burning mark, which will not soon fade.

I am a white, upper middle class male. I live in a community that has been described, with some accuracy, as sheltered. I live in a larger metropolitan area that is, on the whole, extremely safe. I was raised my whole life in similar communities, by people of largely similar background. I am, in a great many ways, privileged.

Because of this happenstance, I live my life about as far away as one can from the daily realities of poor, urban black men. I don't understand the economy of making a living by selling CDs from a portable table in front of a convenience store. I have never been stopped by a police officer who was afraid of me. I have never had to give my sons instructions on interacting with the police, because it is very likely that they will do so only a handful of times in their lives and all of those encounters will likely be polite and pleasant.

But despite all of that distance, in that one moment of listening to a boy my own son's age sob his despair to the world, I felt a little bit of the pain of my brothers and sisters, my fellow human beings, who live lives so very different from mine. We long ago made the phrase "I feel your pain" into a punch line, but there are moments when we really do feel each others' pain, at least a bit. This, for me, was one of them.

And because of that, I probably won't have much more to say about the shooting in Baton Rouge, or the similar shooting in Minneapolis. What can I say? I now understand, at least a little bit, the pain, the fear, the anger, even the rage that flows through other families, other communities than mine every day. But I don't yet know what to do with that understanding.

I would end only with an observation, all I can muster as yet. This is what the church means when we say that the world is broken. These are the wages of sin - not in some individualistic, "he did a bad thing" kind of way. We are so mired in brokenness that most of the time we don't see it. People like me have done a remarkable job of building communities and systems so we don't have to, so we're insulated. We live under our domes and pretend that everything is fine.

But our domes are not the Kingdom of God. The world is broken, in all communities and in many ways. That brokenness hurts - as it should. Perhaps sometimes, the best thing we can do is share the pain with each other.

Hate is Hate: Responses to the Orlando Shooting

Much has already been written about the terrible shooting in Orlando this past afternoon, and much more will be written and said in the coming days and weeks. A lot of what we hear will be predictable, because we've had this "conversation" a lot of times before. I've written a lot about gun control already; if you want to my thoughts on that subject, type "gun control" in the search box on this blog and have at it. The short form: guns are a terrible means of self-defense, and the answer to gun violence isn't arming everyone else in society.

What I want to offer here is a broader perspective, one that looks at the shooting in Orlando not as simply as a terrorist attack or an attack on the LGBTQ community or a mass shooting, but as another event in the long and frequent chain of human violence.

Viewed from this very broad lens, the specific questions about the precise motives of the shooter or the detailed connections between him and various other organizations become much less important. They matter for this case in particular, but if our intention is to have a dialogue about how to have fewer such incidents in the future then we need to move beyond the specifics and talk about violence.

We tend to be guilty of "fighting the last war" in our response to mass shootings. After Sandy Hook and Aurora, the answer was "better mental health"; after Columbine, "better parenting". After Orlando, some want to use the "terrorist" label to claim that we have a particular enemy (ISIS? Radical Islamism?), and that all we have to do to prevent such attacks in the future is to eradicate that enemy.

All of this, of course, misses the point. We had plenty of shootings (including mass shootings) in the United States long before the current flavors of radicalized Islam came along, and we will likely have more long after they are gone. Many recent attacks (including Sandy Hook, Charleston, and Aurora) weren't conducted by Muslims at all, nor did they have any particular political motive. Yet the action, and the result, was much the same: innocent civilians, going about their daily lives, gunned down by an individual bent on their destruction.

Politicians who offer simple solutions are deluding us, and possibly themselves. There are no easy answers, no "if only I was in charge everything would be better" actions. Crimes of mass violence are at the same time unique and the offspring of a particular set of (very broad) factors:

Opportunity: This is the one factor that we never talk about, because there's simply nothing that can be done. If someone is bent on killing civilians and can manage to hide their plans from law enforcement ahead of time, there will always be opportunities. A sporting event. A dance club. A concert. A shopping mall. A movie theater. An airport. A train station. A school. The fact that we live in community makes us vulnerable. We can tinker with these vulnerabilities at the margins, but only for specific targets and for limited periods of time. To live in society means to live in vulnerability to one another. The key here is to live with that vulnerability, but without fear.

Means: This tends to attract a lot of heat, and not much light. There are many ways for people bent on mass destruction to cause it. Some are more effective than others, and some are easier to contain or implement than others. Homemade bombs are possible, but tricky, and efforts can be made to monitor certain kinds of chemicals in certain quantities to try to prevent another Oklahoma City. Knives and other hand implements can be deadly, but usually in small numbers; it is difficult to imagine an assailant killing 49 people in a night club with a knife.
     Guns come in various types, from small pistols with few rounds to large rifles with many rounds and high rates of fire. Guns get most of the attention because, in the United States, they are the perfect means for anyone bent on causing widespread destruction: easy to acquire, easy to use, widely available, and highly destructive. We already have a few restrictions on firearms - fully automatic weapons are widely restricted from civilian ownership, for example. Further restrictions would reduce the means available for mass killings. It would not eliminate these events, but it would make them both less frequent and less deadly when they do occur.

Motive: This is the arena in which people love to engage in rampant speculation, most of it useless. More often than not (Orlando, Sandy Hook, San Bernadino, etc.), the killers die in the incident, leaving us to speculate afterwards about their motives. What particular ideology or mental illness fueled this particular rampage? We think that, if only we can get the right answer (or say the right words), we can solve the problem.
     This is where we are most at sea. For law enforcement purposes, it matters whether the Orlando shooter was working with others or not. But for the purposes of trying to reduce the quantity and severity of violence in our society in the future, it's irrelevant. We shouldn't care whether this individual was a follower of ISIS, or al-Qaeda, or the KKK, or the Westboro Baptist Church. There will always be ideologies and theologies that justify, even demand, violence against innocents. There is only one thing they all have in common: Hate.

On Sunday night as we were still sifting through information about the shootings, I happened to be watching the Tony Awards and was treated to Lin-Manuel Miranda's moving and emotional sonnet, which he read in lieu of an acceptance speech. The poem is anchored in an anthem of the LBGTQ community, "Love is love", and so it is. But the opposite is also true: hate is hate, whether born of Christian or Muslim ideology, whether directed at women or blacks or sexual minorities or other nations or people of different faiths or members of different political parties.

If you're looking for one root cause to these acts of inhumane violence, here it is: hatred. Hatred of particular groups, hatred of others who are different, hatred of random strangers, even hatred of self. Hatred, as Star Wars reminded us, leads to suffering - for both the hated and the hater.

The thing about hatred is that it feeds on itself. Read, if you can, this Storify compilation of live tweets from a recent rally for Donald Trump. The anger and hatred, as the correspondent reported, were "palpable". Insults, curses, angry words, threats, coming both from the candidate and the crowd - all combined to raise the collective level of hatred far beyond simply the sum total of the individuals. The more anger and fear we immerse ourselves in, the more we hate. The more hatred we encounter in others, the more we hate. And make no mistake - there is hatred inside all of us.

Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us of this many years ago:

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

If you want a more modern example, I encourage you to read this speech by the Lt. Governor of Utah. It is moving, it is eloquent, and it makes all the right points.

If we want to have less violence in our society, the answer doesn't lie in defeating an ideology or a religion. It doesn't rest on electing a strong man who promises peace but delivers only anger. It doesn't rest, in fact, on who we elect at all. It doesn't even rest, ultimately, on whether we put more money into mental health, or do better work with terrorist watch lists, or restrict guns - although all of those may be good things to do. The answer lies in us, every day. Every day we face opportunities to love more, to be kind, to come together. And we face temptations to give into fear, to express our anger, to hate someone a little bit more. We together decide which it will be.

Which will you choose today?

Don't Feed the Trolls

Unlike some of my more internet-active friends and colleagues, I don't have a very high profile in cyberspace. Yes, I write this blog, and occasionally contribute to another one; in neither case do I usually get much more than 100 readers. I'm not on Twitter, much less do I join things like Twitter Fight Club. I left my penchant for internet argumentation behind a long time ago, back when arguments were conducted on Usenet.

Because of this, I don't encounter internet trolls very often. I am especially unlikely to be the target of one. This blog does have a comments section, which I keep moderated (mostly to keep the spambots from filling the comments with links). But it rarely gets used, especially by people inclined to disagree with me in an unpleasant fashion.

So when I do get trolled, it's something of a novelty to me. This past week, somebody with a very different opinion apparently stumbled across one of my old posts (you can see the original post here) and decided to take umbrage with this retort (presented in its entirety and unedited):

"sticks" and "running away"? Are you kidding me? I'll keep my guns so anyone breaking into my house will have holes in them instead of me running away while my 6 year old tries to fight them off with sticks since she can't run as fast as an adult, thank you. You are clearly a moron.

Since I regularly encourage people to consider the ideas of others, I feel bound to do the same here. So setting aside the tone and the obligatory epithet, let me engage this particular bit of debate to see what we might learn from it.

There are two things that strike me as interesting about this response:

1) The poster assumes a specific threat scenario in isolation and insists on having a gun to deal with that scenario. In this case, that scenario is home invasion with intent to harm. If this person were more familiar with my work, they would know that I have acknowledged that guns are, in fact, a useful tool for self-defense in that setting. But I can't expect people to have read everything (or even anything) I've written before.

What's interesting about this particular threat assumption is that it is one of the most widely cited justifications for owning a gun - defending the home against someone breaking in with intent to harm. While such things do happen, they are exceedingly rare. Most burglars break in with intent to steal, and would rather not encounter anybody, because encountering people is always dangerous - that's why most home robberies occur while the occupants are away. You can see the relevant statistics, compiled by the US Department of Justice, here. Out of all home break-ins, the number of incidents of violence where the criminal was armed with a gun is a small fraction of a small fraction.

Even given such long odds, it might be reasonable to keep a gun at home to deal with those rare cases - if the presence of the gun did not also make other dangers more likely. But we know that having a gun in the house increases the odds of all sorts of other events, including suicides and accidental shootings. Just a couple of weeks ago I wrote about a father who thought apparently very much as this commenter did. The child he presumably wanted to protect is now dead by his own hand. Alternatively, what happens to the life of this mother or father if that 6 year old gets ahold of the gun? (Or if there's a younger sibling?)

If medical science offered a vaccine that was 99% effective against a very rare disease, but which increased your likelihood of dying from many other things, how many of us would take it? In medicine we weigh risks and benefits. This particular response suggests an unwillingness to do so, and an assumption that one particular kind of threat (home invasion) can be dealt with in isolation from all of the other potential side effects of having guns available in the home.

2) In addition to the rational and tactical calculations at play here, there is a moral calculation that I continue to find deeply troubling. It's contained in this fragment:

I'll keep my guns so anyone breaking into my house will have holes in them instead of me running away

The subsequent clause about leaving the 6 year old behind to fend for herself is classic troll-bait. Clearly no parent is going to abandon a child, but will stand and defend that child with whatever is available. Let's leave that aside for a moment.

The moral calculation here is this: if you break into my home, I am justified in killing you. I'm not interested in whether this is a legal defense or not, but whether it constitutes an effective moral justification.

My unease with this calculation starts with a point both unassailable and very difficult to acknowledge: the person breaking into my house is a human being. Yes, that person is transgressing some very fundamental rules. And yes, that person may have intent to do me harm - or he (or she) may not. But none of this takes away the person's basic humanity.

For those who share the Christian faith, this is a particularly difficult test of the Gospel's clear injunction:

38 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’[h] 39 But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. 40 And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. 41 If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. 42 Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you. (Matthew)

I do not know if the person who offered the comment above claims to be a Christian or not. I know that there are plenty of Christians who go to church on a regular basis, and who hold these same scriptures to be the Word of God, who would nevertheless agree with the commenter that it's appropriate to put  (lethal) holes in the home invader. These views, to me, simply aren't compatible.

Moreover, the Old Testament reference made here by Jesus is often itself misunderstood. The original language in Exodus 21 ("eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot") was intended not as a statement of vengeance but as a limitation on humanity's tendency to mete out disproportionate vengeance. A modern American version goes something like this quote from the movie The Untouchables:

You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. *That's* the *Chicago* way!

Limiting retribution in proportion to the harm suffered was, for the ancient Hebrew culture, a moral advance. It insured that no one would, in anger and fear, cause greater harm than had already been caused.

In this light, killing in response to a home invasion is (pun intended) moral overkill. It fails the moral test of proportionality which exists, in some form or another, in nearly all major world religions and philosophical systems. It is, as I have argued elsewhere, barbaric.


So while I can see to some degree where this particular troll is coming from, I cannot agree with any of the ideas he or she presents. They are, as I have said so many times before, rooted simply in fear - fear of a vividly imaginable (if highly unlikely) threat which leads to anger, hatred, and dehumanization. Others who share that fear will likely find the commenter's ideas laudable. I hope many of us can escape the same fate.