Recently,
we were confronted again with another mass murder in the United States. It occurred at a high school in Parkland,
Florida near Miami, and this time, the students have reacted by organizing
protests and marches. They are angry as
well they should be. Apart from their
loss of friends and teachers, they have lost their capacity to assume that
their scholastic lives can be conducted in physical safety. They have experienced something that will
leave a permanent mark on their lives.
And they are calling for much stiffer gun laws, so that it will become
much more difficult to obtain them. The
Florida legislature has just passed a new bill that provides greater control
over the purchase of guns, but it has refused to ban assault weapons like the
AR-15.
Would
stiffer gun laws give young people the relief that they want and need? Certainly, a better control by the government
over opportunities to obtain an automatic weapon could limit the casualties in some
rampages. And better background checks
and compulsory gun training could limit who would get a gun in the first
place. But there are already so many
guns out there in America. How is it
going to be possible to regulate the use of all of these?
America
is a very violent society. And I would
submit that guns play a very important role in the lives of many American
males, and this role would help to explain why and how these massacres
occur. The problem for these males
relates to a particular aspect of their lives that is very ambiguous, almost
nebulous, and yet it is still very palpably present. I am referring to the transformation of their
fields of experience as a result of the phenomenal growth of modern
technological living environments.
Although modern technology does create a lot of negative static
stimulation as a result of the overcrowding in modern cities - this abrasive
stimuli from so many people, speeding cars, noise pollution, air pollution, and
light pollution in the form of flashing lights - there are still many areas of
experience where people are understimulated as a result of so much
frictionlessness, mediation and speed stemming from modern technology. These are aspects of experience that make
things supposedly so much easier for people.
Mediation, as in doing things on a computer screen or watching a drama
on television, means that one doesn’t have to get one’s hands dirty getting too
involved in all the friction and imperfections that are involved in traditional
everyday primary experience. And then
there is increasing frictionlessness, as a result of all the processes that are
occurring in life that are being done automatically or practically automatically
as a result of modern technology. Modern
public washrooms are a typical example.
Put your hands under a faucet and the sensors pick them up and the water
goes on automatically. Put your hands
under the towel dispenser and towels are dispensed without touching
anything. Go relieve yourself and pull
away and the toilet flushes by itself.
These may seem like small examples, but more and more processes of our
daily lives are being done either automatically or with a minimal amount of
effort. Experientially, it leaves a
person without much traction in life.
And spending so much time watching other people live their lives in
movies or on television doesn’t help either.
It
may be hard to grasp the notion of experiential traction. It means that people need to feel textured
surfaces, even rough surfaces, in order to feel alive, to have rich vibrant
experiences, to have meaningful life narratives, to make and preserve organic
imprints, and to be able to prepare for death with a surrogate immortality. Textured experiential surfaces act as a
template that allow people to bond with one another and create
relationships. It is no wonder that so
many honeymoons occur in tropical resorts surrounded by nature. But with fewer and fewer of these textured
experiential surfaces, we increasingly experience ourselves as living in an
experiential vacuum.
Of
course, one of the things that increasingly makes it difficult for us to attach
ourselves to such textured surfaces is the speed at which everything moves
around us in a modern technological living environment. Trains, cars and planes move so much faster
than animals like horses, camels, and elephants as well as vehicles that are
carried along by animals. And we can
perform so many work processes so much more quickly as a result of modern
technological devices. And we like this,
because we like things done more efficiently.
But when we have things done more efficiently, we have less opportunity
to attach ourselves to the experience of the process, in order to feel alive
from the process, to be able to participate more fully ourselves in the process
and thus to make and preserve more imprints.
Without
these textured surfaces, we literally slide off the surfaces of our worlds into
an experiential vacuum. And this
particularly is a problem for males in America.
In spite of the loss of textured organic surfaces in the external world,
women still have a very importance source of organic stimulation that gives
them a sense of internal grounding: their menstrual cycle and their ability to
have babies. It might sound strange to
talk about periods – a situation that women don’t like – as something that in
some contexts has its advantages. And
childbirth can be a very difficult painful experience. But both periods and childbirth provide rough
textured internal organic experiences that give women a kind of traction that
men don’t have, a grounding through processes that are part of organic cycles
of nature. Furthermore, in becoming
pregnant and giving birth, women have a more immediate direct connection to a
preserved organic imprint, in which both men and women initially participate
together. To this extent, women are
going to be less affected by the experiential vacuum created in modern
technological living environments. Men
are going to experience more of the numbness created as a result of all the
frictionlessness, mediation and speed they encounter. Many of these men will try to control this
numbness through drugs or through experiences like yoga or shiatsu, all of which
create strong internal stimulation to compensate for the lack of organic
stimulation in the external world. Now,
of course, women do drugs, yoga and shiatsu too, but I would submit that they
are particularly important for men. Yoga
infuses men with the type of female energy that women have naturally. In addition, with meditation, people can
focus on an internal experiential vacuum that they can control as opposed to
the vacuum in the outside world.
But
some men choose to create abrasive tension-pocket friction to feel alive. Another
human body represents one of the few easily accessible naturally occurring
organic surfaces left in our modern technological living environments. So to overcome their numbness, men use
different forms of sexual abuse, both physical and psychological, as a form of
abrasive friction in order to feel alive.
Many sexual connections with a variety of women with whom there is
little or no emotional commitment. And,
of course, in many cases, these connections are simply predatory.
But
the behavior that is most problematic is the use of physical violence in what I
called in the past, crimes of numbness.
And, in particular, the use of guns.
In the U.S., guns are so available and so valued. The increase goes back to the notion of
individuals having guns to protect themselves and their families, not only
against foreign invaders but also against tyrannical governments. Having guns acted as a counterbalance to
governments like England before the War of Independence.
But
now guns are used by some men as a means to create big explosive destructive
experiences, and, in so doing, to simply feel alive. It is a means for these men to pull
themselves out of the numbness they feel as a result of the lack of traction
from textured organic surfaces within their field of experience, both external
and internal. Now, on some levels, an
explanation like this is not satisfying, because it pins as a cause of gun
violence something that is environmental and enveloping rather than easily
defined, delineated and focused.
Eliminating such a cause will have to involve a change of attitude in
society towards modern technology and towards one of the foundational beliefs
of modern society – that the best life is one that is frictionless, safely
mediated, and efficiently fast. It would
also involve a shift away from many of the entertainments that modern young
Americans now use: video games, violent movies and television programs and
violent websites. These are but stepping
stones for certain young men towards tension-pocket violence in the external
world in order to break out of the grip of the experiential vacuum. It would
take time to create such a shift in attitude, assuming it could be done. Unfortunately, until such a shift is carried
out, tragedies like Parkland will continue in the United States.
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