If someone had asked that question a century or so ago, in most places in the world there would have been one of two answers.  In the western hemisphere, or in those areas dominated by western hemisphere culture, the answer most predominantly would have been, “Of course.”  And in the remainder of the world, the answer would most likely been, I suspect, a variation on “Has it changed?”

 The problem with trying to answer that question today is defining what one means by “better.”  If we’re talking about general health, better nutrition, less deadly and widespread violence, then, in general, the world is a better place, that is, if you’re not in Somalia, Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, parts of Africa… and similar locales. But other aspects of “better” aren’t so clear.

More people can theoretically read, if one defines reading as the ability to decipher the meaning of symbols in print… but, at least in the United States, based on what I and all too many others have seen in higher education, high level comprehending literacy and the ability to concentrate on written material has declined even as technical computer skills have increased. The retained knowledge database of most individuals has declined, most likely because any fact is easily found through smartphones or computers.  Better or worse?  That depends on the definition… and the priorities behind the definition.

 There are certainly more nations where citizens can vote, and according to various foundations, in general there’s more freedom, but given the political structures in many countries, that “freedom” often means little real choice, which means that matters may be “better” politically, but not nearly so much better as the Pollyannas claim.

 In the high-tech western nations, child labor is rare, and air and water pollution is far less than it was a century ago…but in all too much of the world, those conditions are likely worse.  Whether matters are better depends on where you are… and how high – or low – your income is.

 The problem with deciding whether the world is a better or worse place is that most of us decide based on where we live, and no one place is representative of the world.  More troubling than that is the fact that most of those who can make their views known about the state of the world are those who are anything but representative, because in a media intensive world, the vast majority of those who can even participate are the comparatively more affluent and advantaged. This isn’t anything new; it goes back as far as the invention of writing because, then, only the advantaged could write [and even the slaves who served as scribes were more advantaged than most others].

 In the end, it’s a good idea to remember that “better” is a comparative, and that it all depends on what is being compared by whom… and for what reason.

Absolutes?  I’m skeptical of them, if not downright hostile. Sometimes an absolute is a good guide.  After all, as a general matter of principle, it is not a good idea to go around taking other people’s things or shooting people. Or imprisoning them.   But… as I’ve noted on more than a few occasions, human beings have this desire for things to be black or white, absolutely good or absolutely evil.  We don’t live in a black and white world.  We live in a world filled with all shades of color and, for that matter, innumerable shades of gray, and we – and our societies – have to live in that world and, if we want even a modicum of civility and civilization, we have to create customs and governments that recognize that those shades and colors exist.

 The other day I got a posting on the blog insisting that the right to bear arms was a constitutional right and that my proposals to license and regulate firearms would negate that right because a constitutional right could not be restricted or taxed and still remain a “right.”  After I put my jaw back in place, I thought about the naiveté; the lack of understanding of what society is; the lack of knowledge about what the Constitution is and what it established, and what it did not; and the total self-centeredness represented by that comment… and the fact that all too many Americans share those views about “rights.”

 First, we need to start with the Constitution itself, and the first ten amendments, popularly known as the Bill of Rights.  The First Amendment states that the Congress shall make no law “abridging the freedom of speech.”  But more than a score of U.S. Supreme Court decisions have established that the freedom of speech is not absolute, especially where that freedom harms others or has the clear potential to do so.

 The Fourth Amendment prohibits “unreasonable” search and seizure and states that a search warrant cannot be issued without “probable cause,” but again, a number of Supreme Court cases have made clear that there are exceptions to those requirements, i.e., that the Fourth Amendment is not an “absolute right.”

 The same is true of the Second Amendment. One of the earliest Supreme Court decisions involving the Second Amendment was issued in 1875 and stated that the Constitution does not establish the right to keep and bear arms, but affirms an existing right.  A number of other Supreme Court decisions followed establishing the fact that the federal and state governments can establish reasonable limits on that right, and in 2008 the Heller decision stated “the right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose…”

 Those who object to the Supreme Court decisions in such cases often complain that the Court is perverting or destroying the Constitution.  Yet the Constitution plainly states that “The judicial Power of the United States shall be vested in one supreme Court…” and that “The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made…”  In short, like it or not, in cases of dispute about what is or is not Constitutional, the Supreme Court decides.

 Now… people can complain about such decisions, and they can try to change the laws or try to keep new laws on such subjects from being enacted, but what they cannot claim – not accurately, anyway – is that such restrictions are “unconstitutional.” Some will then reiterate the idea that any tax or restriction negates a “right.”

 What they seem to ignore or forget is that the entire concept of an unfettered “absolute” right is contrary to the entire idea of what we call civilization.  Of course, the fact that so many people want to assert their individual and “absolute” rights in so many areas suggests that civilization may itself be endangered. Take the idea of absolute property rights.  We do not allow individuals totally unfettered rights to property. A business or individual cannot dump whatever trash and toxic chemicals he wants into the river or stream that flows through his property.  As a society, we recognize, at least in theory, that many individual actions can adversely affect or kill others, and we attempt to restrict such actions because it is all too clear that there are too many individuals who will not restrict their actions for one reason or another. Now… one can complain that there aren’t enough restrictions or that there are too many or those that exist are too onerous, but the fact that some restrictions are necessary for any society to survive has been proven, as the founding fathers put it, “self-evident.”

 In the end, anyone who declares that he or she has any “absolute” right is merely declaring that their “rights” transcend the rights of others.  “Your right” to free speech through four hundred decibel speakers denies your neighbors right to a decent night’s sleep.  Your right to dispose of your wastes any way you want fouls the stream and denies those downstream equal rights to clean water.  Your right to smoke in close quarters endangers someone else’s health.

 Anyone who claims an inviolable absolute right either doesn’t understand the requirements of a civilized society… or puts what they think are their “inviolable rights” above everyone else’s inviolable rights.  Either way, it’s dangerous for the rest of us, not to mention being a form of narcissistic denial of reality.

In Aldous Huxley’s 1932 classic novel, Brave New World, the government keeps citizens in line with soma, a drug described as having “all of the benefits of Christianity and alcohol without their defects.”  The “original” soma, of course, was a legendary Vedic drink said to convey immortality.

 Personally, I wonder if the current candidate for “soma” might not be the IPhone/Android/whatever handheld electronic communications/entertainment device.  Everywhere I look, people are buried in those devices.  They walk totally absorbed in such devices through city streets and college campuses, cross streets and often get hit, ignore crossing gates and get killed by trains… or they text while driving or doing something else.

In nearby St. George, earlier this year, a fifty-year-old woman was speeding and texting. She hit another car, throwing it onto the sidewalk where it killed a man and so severely injured his wife that she had fractured bones all over her body, had to have her skull rebuilt, and suffered 15,000 stitches.  The texting driver has been charged with vehicular homicide and assault and faces up to 15 years in prison.

 Every single day in the United States, there’s another spate of accidents and fatalities or injuries resulting from texting or from using some handheld electronic device, despite the proliferation of laws against use while driving.  Yet, for all the publicity, for all the laws, the possible legal consequences or even death from usage in the wrong places, the near-total absorption in such devices by tens of millions of Americans continues.  Why?  It’s not as though people don’t know the dangers.

 Could it be addiction?

 Just look at people. If they’re not on the device, they’re always checking it, and when they get a signal that “something” is arriving on their device, their faces light up in anticipation.  It’s the sort of look that people in love once displayed upon seeing their significant other, and I’m not sure that even happens any more. More and more often, since Cedar City is a university town, we see couples together in public places. More than a decade ago, they use to talk to each other.  Now they’re silent, sitting together, yet totally alone, each on his or her electronic device, seemingly oblivious to their partner.

 And, as for those messages… well… lately some parents of young people who’ve died in accidents while texting have published those texts… and they’re all absolutely trivial.  There’s nothing earth-shattering, or even interesting.  Yet there’s obviously something more addictive about being electronically connected than being personally connected.  Otherwise all those couples would be talking to each other rather than texting someone else.  And, frighteningly, in some cases they’re actually texting each other.  This gets you closer?

 From what I’ve seen, the electronic communications craze isolates people.  The other day, my wife and I wanted to invite an acquaintance and his wife to a party.  We see them on and off, but when we tried to call them, we discovered both their landlines had been disconnected.  He didn’t answer his office line or the message left on it.  Nor did he even open the email offering the invitation. We still haven’t been able to reach them.  And frankly, I don’t think I should have to drive over to their house some three miles away and knock on their door to invite them.  Besides, they’re likely so engrossed in their electronic diversions that they might not even answer the door.

 This is far from unusual.  Several of our grown offspring have disconnected their landlines.  But the problem with all this is simple – no one can reach you who doesn’t already know your number…or your Facebook name or account [and, dinosaur that I am, I refuse to do social media].  If you’re so into your handheld device that you don’t look at anyone around you and aren’t accessible to anyone who already doesn’t know you… how can your circle of true friends and acquaintances do anything but shrink.  Given social media, the only online “friends” you’re likely to get are people who think exactly as you do.  And all that means is that social polarization and individual isolation are increasing with the growth and addiction to electronic soma.

 Orwell’s soma made the routine of his Brave New World bearable, and apparently the handheld device of choice is doing something similar for people today, but unlike the Vedic soma, reputed to convey immortality, the most likely outcomes of excessive electronic soma are social polarization, growing physical isolation and an early death because sooner or later the outside world will crash into you, or you into it, in some form or another.

These days, and for the past decade or so, in almost every venue of government and public works, the politicians and much of the public have extolled the virtues of operating everything from schools, universities, municipalities, and prisons according to the “business model.”   The current “business model,” as applied to government and public services, is based on application of capitalism and “no new or increased taxes’” for anyone or anything.  I honestly don’t know whether all these advocates of the “business model” are sincerely misguided or just uninformed idiots, but it’s time to put a stop to this nonsense.

 First off, I want to make one thing clear.  I am not anti-business, and I firmly believe that the only workable form of an economic system has to be based on capitalism.  That said, capitalism in its purest form is absolutely efficient, and absolutely merciless.  It rewards dedication, skill, luck or good fortune, and the advantages of position handsomely, and disadvantages those lacking in any of those qualities in proportion to their deficit.

 Moreover, in capitalism’s “purer” forms [i.e., those forms unregulated by government], as Americans discovered in the roaring 1890s and somewhat thereafter, such issues as ethics and fairness took a back seat, or were totally ignored, as a result of the quest for profit.  This is not an aberration.  Capitalism is the use of business (defined as the combination of ability, resources, labor, capital investment, and technology) to create a product or provide a service with the greatest differential between the cost and the price one can charge. If inferior or tainted resources are cheaper and the purchaser cannot tell the difference [and there are no laws to contrary, and sometimes if there are], someone will use those cheaper resources in order to maximize profits.  Period.  History has demonstrated this time after time.  We still see this occurring politically today.  If a company or an industry can influence Congress to obtain a tax break or a subsidy, then they have effectively reduced their costs and increased their profits.  If they gain an exemption from environmental rules, such as air or water pollution regulations, they gain a cost advantage, while shifting medical, health, and environmental costs to the general public.  

 The second distinguishing feature of capitalism is one so obvious that it is totally ignored in most economic and political discussion, and certainly in attempts to model public services and education along the lines of the “business model.”  Capitalism has no interest in providing goods to people who cannot afford them.  This is not cold-hearted, per se, but a fact.  A business will go broke if it cannot at least cover all its costs, and you cannot cover costs if you give goods or services away on a large scale or keep prices too low to cover costs, in order to provide more goods or services to those who could not otherwise afford them.

 The third distinguishing feature of capitalism, especially today, is that it must make a profit in the short-term.

 These three necessities for success in a capitalistic society are why capitalism requires some degree of regulation. The amount varies by the society and by political consensus, and how much corporate abuse the public will accept, but the necessity for some regulation is absolute.  These necessities are also why the so-called business model is an absurdity for providing such public services as education, police and fire protection, water, sanitation, and trash collection, not to mention environmental protection.

 Take education.  As we all know, or profess to know, education makes people better workers and benefits society as a whole, but the payoff from the investment in education is years, if not decades away… and contrary to what the proponents of emphasis on STEM education insist, one cannot tell which student benefits most from what education.  Attempts to “steer” education in a particular direction have invariably been, at best, marginally successful, if not disastrous, for societies.  Likewise, when the cost of education increases, the business model, particularly on the college and university level, is to insist on raising tuition, increasing class sizes, or eliminating classes for which demand is low.  The results are that: (1) some students are priced out of education or saddled with enormous debt that many will not pay (which in turn shifts the costs to society as a whole); (2) the quality of that education is diluted; or (3) certain skills and disciplines will not be taught at all, and future society will be impoverished as a result. That is the predictable capitalistic response to increasing costs, especially when “no new taxes” have resulted in state colleges and universities getting fewer and fewer resources compared to the number of students enrolled.

 If we take other public services, the same problem arises.  The current “business model” insists that municipal budgets must be cut, rather than increasing taxes. That means fewer police and firefighters, and slower response times and greater damages to people and their property.  In point of fact, that means that the costs are effectively shifted to those who can least afford the damages – capitalism at its purest, loss of goods and services for inability to pay.  This is particularly hard on the less advantaged when it is applied to vital services, such as food, housing, and health care.

 The result of applying the business model in this fashion is that, without public investment in those who have fewer resources, i.e., the poor and especially the working poor, the youth in those situations will have less opportunity to improve themselves, and this will contribute to the growth of income inequality.  Greater income inequality results in greater social unrest, and if that unrest becomes too great, violence becomes even more widespread.

 As one of the forgotten commercials said, “You can pay me now… or you can pay me later.” [And the cost later was enormously higher.]   But right now, the third aspect of this current business model is all that anyone considers – we want lower costs NOW… and the hell with what comes later.

 So… let’s hear it for the business model.

Now that the U.S. Senate has killed pretty much any attempt to place any meaningful controls on the use and sale of firearms in the United States, it’s time for a more objective look at the situation.  First off, there is no practical way guns are going to vanish in the United States, despite all the NRA and right-wing paranoia and concern about “big government” taking away guns.  It won’t happen.  Period.  Over 40 million U.S. households have firearms, over 320 million of them. Put in perspective, according to a 2007 United Nations study, fifty percent – half – of all the world’s guns were then held by U.S. residents, and since then U.S. gun sales have boomed.

Hard as those facts may be for some to swallow, U.S. guns are not going away and most likely never will.  Nor will measures such as restricting sales of certain types of weapons and ammunition, as commenters to this blog have noted repeatedly, be terribly effective.  At the same time, gun violence and accidental deaths and suicides caused by guns are epidemic. In 2010, guns took the lives of 31,076 Americans in homicides, suicides and unintentional shootings. 73,505 Americans were treated in hospital emergency departments for non-fatal gunshot wounds in 2010. Yet, as others have pointed out, the U.S. does not have anywhere close to the highest homicide rate in the world or even the highest number of total gun fatalities, BUT we have an astoundingly high rate compared to any other industrial nation in the world, so much so that’s there’s virtually no comparison.

So… what can we realistically do? Besides nothing, which seems to be the position of the NRA?

 As I’ve been considering the issue of guns in our the great American representative democracy, it occurred to me that there’s one aspect of the whole Second Amendment mess that has been totally ignored – and that’s the issue of responsibility.  Oh, everyone pays lip service to “responsible gun owners,” but the actual issue of responsibility in practice has been totally overlooked.  My suggestion is that instead of futilely trying to ban firearms, we give some firm legal support to all those “responsible gun owners,”  and by doing so provide at least some attempt to restore the “rights” lost by all the firearms victims.

 Let’s look at it this way.  If you own a car and drive, you have to be tested and licensed, and if you’re caught driving without a license, you face legal sanctions. If your vehicle causes damages to others, even if you’re not the driver, you have a financial responsibility.  Now… let’s do a comparison.  Guns result in 31,000 deaths and over 70,000 injuries in the U.S. annually.  Vehicle accidents kill 33,000 people and injure close to 100,000.  We regulate automobiles and who can drive them and under what conditions.  We require insurance, apply criminal sanctions to grossly unsafe vehicle use, and insist on wide-spread driver education and training.  The result of all this is that since 1972 automobile deaths have dropped 41%.  Why not apply the same approach to firearms?

Do we want people who can’t see being able to own and shoot a firearm?  We don’t let them drive. Why should we let them have a gun [And please don’t tell me that’s unconstitutional.  The Supreme Court declares what’s constitutional and what’s not, and it’s said that reasonable restrictions on the right to bear arms are constitutional.]  Why not require a firearms license?  And like a driver’s license, it could have categories.  If you want to drive a semi-trailer, you need more training and more insurance. If you want to have an arsenal of high-powered weapons, perhaps you need to be certified in handling them.  And the license, like a driver’s license, should require renewal.

 
A few other legal changes would also be helpful, such as licensing of weapons, just like cars – and forget all the screams about big government. Big government already knows all that about you anyway… and so does every major corporation, and I don’t hear any screams about invasion of privacy there. Besides, a nation that endorses social media such as Facebook has no right to claim privacy, anyway.

Perhaps we should also require firearms insurance, based on the number and class of weapons one owns, and a percentage of that premium could go to the various law enforcement agencies to give them the officers and equipment to go after real lawbreakers.  Perhaps we should impose an ammunition sales tax, like the gasoline tax that funds highway programs, in order to fund programs to support various aspects of firearms safety. There also ought to be a provision that if an owner doesn’t report the loss, sale, or theft of a firearm, and that weapon is subsequently used in a crime, the owner can be charged as an accessory after the fact.  None of these provisions should really trouble responsible gun owners.  I mean, after all, don’t they just require you to act the way you claim you should?  And make certain that anyone injured by your firearms, or their family, can be compensated, with, of course, an uninsured firearms operator provision as well.

And besides, it’s the American way – use a combination of required education, insurance, and financial responsibility.  More bureaucracy?  Of course, but it’s more than clear that simple solutions that have worked elsewhere in the world – like restricting firearms – haven’t worked here and won’t. So… we should do it our way, rather than doing nothing.