Guns don't kill people; people kill people

      It’s true. Guns don’t kill people; people kill people. Bulldozers aren’t ripping up Cache valley, Utah; people are ripping up Cache valley, Utah. Bob’s credit cards didn’t bankrupt Bob; Bob bankrupted Bob.

    People are a means of affecting people and nature. And people will be more affecting as they gain means that are more facilitating. Guns are facilitating means. Bulldozers are facilitating means. Credit cards are facilitating means.

    What brought on this post is that in the midst of Sauntering through Act IV, ii, of Shakespeare’s play, King John, our eyes fell on these lines of King John speaking to Hubert:

How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds / Makes deeds ill done!

    Suppose we take facilitating means to the limit: suppose anyone in the world could kill anyone else simply by wishing the person dead. The car in front cuts us off: wish him dead. The professor gives us a D; wish her dead. Would people deny themselves the use of death by wish? Or would the census figures plummet as the Golden Rule crumbles?

    Or suppose the day the Saunterer dreads comes, when the headline reads, “Cheap method of getting unlimited energy from water by hydrogen fusion is invented.”

    Facilitating means are not categorically a good thing. Can you think of any you wouldn’t want invented?

    How often does progress in facilitating means bring progress in the ends of living? Our answer to this vacillates, dipping every time we see a student using a cellphone.

    Won’t progress in facilitating means bring restrictions, laws limiting personal freedom?

    We Saunter out of this post with Henry David Thoreau’s line (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 320):

Thank God man cannot lay waste the heavens as he has the earth!

Comments

[Michael Jablonski]

It's true. Guns provide a means for people to kill others and bulldozers make it easier to destroy wildlands.

Progress has its flip side too. Guns helped saved the world from Nazi Germany and bulldozers prepare the foundations for libraries.

I am compelled to refer readers of these pages to The Progress Paradox, by Gregg Easterbrook. Mr. Easterbrook makes a compelling argument that by all objective measurements life has never been better.

Here are three quotes taken from The Progress Paradox:

"History's plagues--polio, smallpox, measles, rickets--have been defeated, along with a stunning reduction of the infectious diseases that for pre-antibiotics generations instilled terror. Every one of our great-great grandparents would have known someone who died of a disease that today is shrugged at."

"As recently as the 1960s, it was common for the life of a fifty-year old man to end as he fell down dead from stroke or heart attack. Now this is rare and shocking."

"...gas station minimarts now sell cabernets and chardonnays far superior in quality to the wines once drunk by the kings of France."

[Dave Iverson]

Michael and others,

We do love our "objective measurements" don't we? Yes, we who have bought into modern Western culture -- particularly those of us who are fat (too-often literally), dumb, and happy here in the U.S. -- do enjoy the fruits our cultural labor. But many who struggle with the losses to their cultural heritage (and many more if their cultures we're still around) disagree with Easterbrook's assessment.

History tends to be written (reconstructed) by winners, not losers in the culture wars.

What we seem to deny, is that we are losing much on our quest for ever-more-elegant creature comforts and so-called labor saving devices. Nature and culture, along with the quest for enlightenment and human betterment, need to be talked about much more than they tend to be in the popular media.

Thanks Charles, for helping us talk them over here.

For interesting reading on our losses, don't miss Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business" and Aldous Huxley's nonfiction "Brave New World Revisited."