Individualism and Guns
The gun debate and recent Supreme Court decisions concerning the 2nd Amendment has opened a gaping hole in the very fabric of democracy and the historical metaphysics of individualism.
In Justice Scalia’s majority opinion in District of Columbia vs. Heller he states:
There are many reasons why the militia was thought to be “necessary to the security of a free state.” First, of course, it is useful in repelling invasions and suppressing insurrections. Second, it renders large standing armies unnecessary—an argument that Alexander Hamilton made in favor of federal control over the militia. Third, when the able-bodied men of a nation are trained in arms and organized, they are better able to resist tyranny.1
He further states:
Besides ignoring the historical reality that the Second Amendment was not intended to lay down a “novel principl[e]” but rather codified a right “inherited from our English ancestors,” petitioners’ interpretation does not even achieve the narrower purpose that prompted codification of the right. If, as they believe, the Second Amendment right is no more than the right to keep and use weapons as a member of an organized militia, that is, the organized militia is the sole institutional beneficiary of the Second Amendment ‘s guarantee—it does not assure the existence of a “citizens’ militia” as a safeguard against tyranny.
He appears to agree that 2nd Amendment is more than the right to keep arms in an organized militia; it is a “safeguard against tyranny”
In 2012 a Rasmussen telephone survey found that 65% of American Adults think the purpose of the Second Amendment is to make sure that people are able to protect themselves from tyranny.2
The CEO of the NRA, Wayne LaPierre, has stated to Congress, “Senator, I think without any doubt, if you look at why our Founding Fathers put it there, they had lived under the tyranny of King George and they wanted to make sure that these free people in this new country would never be subjugated again and have to live under tyranny,”3
In Ancient Greece at the time of Aristotle there was much discussion on the ‘one’ and the ‘many’. Aristotle tells us in Politics,
Again, for the exercise of any faculty or art a previous training and habituation are required; clearly therefore for the practice of virtue. And since the whole city has one end, it is manifest that education should be one and the same for all, and that it should be public, and not private- not as at present, when every one looks after his own children separately, and gives them separate instruction of the sort which he thinks best; the training in things which are of common interest should be the same for all. Neither must we suppose that any one of the citizens belongs to himself, for they all belong to the state, and are each of them a part of the state, and the care of each part is inseparable from the care of the whole.4
As human, our greatest liberal virtue as Aristotle calls it5 and evolutionary adaptation is not individualism but our ability to hunt and gather as a collectivity. There were many animals in our early history that were stronger and faster than the genus Homo. Only by banding together were we able to overcome enormous obstacles. Our language is the ultimate proof that we are not all isolated monads each with a private language. The very basis for what we call ‘reality’ is ‘thought’ and can only be ‘thought’ in terms of language.
The trend in the Austrian School of Frederick Hayek6 and taken up by the populist Ayn Rand has been to discount collectivism as the history of tyranny. Instead of the virtue Aristotle assigned to liberalism they have made liberalism into a vast history of collectivity which gave rise to every evil from Fascism to Communism. Their fictional account of individualism is then taken as everything collectivism was not and the greatest virtue that Aristotle missed completely.
The modern metaphysics about individualism makes the individual the sole determinate for truth, the diviner for goodness and the only antidote for liberalism. Democracy, born in the city-states of Athens7 and built into the U.S. Constitution from the ground up as representative democracy with checks and balances does not hold the individual as the sole determinate of freedom, it holds the union of free individuals as a higher standard than the war of all against all. Thus, the rule of law is not up to each individual capriciousness and whim but acceptance of a greater good than ‘me’. In the notion of guns as the ultimate arbiter of the good vis-à-vis the individual deterrent against tyranny the most obvious dilemma is what happens when two individuals disagree?
Individualism and the State of Exception
In a previous post I discussed Agamben8 and the state of exception. A state of exception is a ‘state’, a union, which can only exist when it allows itself to essentially undo itself to preserve itself. In other words, the union is determined outside itself in what it allows as exceptions to its union.
The state of exception is not a special juridical order (the law which regulates the state of war,) rather it is a suspension of the whole juridical order itself which marks it for the limits, the threshold of the juridical order. It is for that reason that in public law there is not such a thing as a theory for the ‘state of exception.’9
If the citizens militia and the right for individuals to keep and bear arms is an essential deterrent to tyranny then this is tantamount to saying that there is a legal and constitutional basis for the dissolution of our union, built into our union, for its own state of exception whereupon the individual, any individual, has the ‘right’ to throw out any or all of our union based on a personal decision, judgement or dictum. This exceptional state needs no basis outside of itself. It need not justify, defend or legitimize itself before a system of government. It may violently assert itself at any cost without any legal or Constitutional concerns or with its own private interpretation of the Constitution. This notion has been called terrorism in other circumstances.
Is there, built into our constitution, a legal exception for terrorism, for violent overthrow with arms for any ‘citizens militia’? Are guns the ‘state of exception’ for the U.S. Government? Wouldn’t we call every individual’s war of all against all tribalism? Why would we assume that the individuals overthrowing tyranny are not equally capable of tyranny? Is it just because they are ‘individuals’? From a purely and simply logical point of view, on what basis could the Supreme Court deny its own purpose for existence, the judicator of the Constitution, to uphold the dissolution of itself in an individual’s right for a state of exception? Is there any kind of legal basis for an individual to violently determine the correct interpretation of the U.S. Constitution? Why would we need a Supreme Court if this is to be maintained? Do we need the Supreme Court to validate the absoluteness of the individual? Do we need a tyranny to make individualism real? There is a glaring contradiction in having a ‘union’ and denying that union in favor of the individual. It is symbiotic and the reckoning of insanity as before and above all reason. Haven’t we really just pseudo-legally recognized anarchy as essence in denial of how we have survived to this point as a species? If we allow every one with an assault weapon to determine what tyranny is and isn’t we are only left with a war of all against all and face the logical and necessary consequence of our own extinction. The judgement of the people should be made with consensus, voting and law not lead accelerated at high velocities!
_________________
1 SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, et al., PETITIONERS v.
DICK ANTHONY HELLER
2 65% See Gun Rights As Protection Against Tyranny
3 Some Gun Control Opponents Cite Fear Of Government Tyranny
4 Politics [8.1], By Aristotle, Written 350 B.C.E
5 And politics appears to be of this nature; for it is this that ordains which of the sciences should be studied in a state, and which each class of citizens should learn and up to what point they should learn them; and we see even the most highly esteemed of capacities to fall under this, e.g. strategy, economics, rhetoric; now, since politics uses the rest of the sciences, and since, again, it legislates as to what we are to do and what we are to abstain from, the end of this science must include those of the others, so that this end must be the good for man. For even if the end is the same for a single man and for a state, that of the state seems at all events something greater and more complete whether to attain or to preserve; though it is worth while to attain the end merely for one man, it is finer and more godlike to attain it for a nation or for city-states. These, then, are the ends at which our inquiry aims, since it is political science, in one sense of that term. Nicomachean Ethics [1.2], By Aristotle, Written 350 B.C.E
7 Ancient Political Philosophy