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In the past months a spate of shootings once again focused public attention on armed violence in the United States. Most of the attention focused on the group shootings in Illinois and Wisconsin.
Strangely enough, the liberal-progressive media gave scant attention to two other shootings which occurred at the same time. In Anaheim, California, the police carried out a curbside execution, in plain view, of a suspect who was lying helplessly on the ground. Not covered at all, was a story reported in the U.K.’s Guardian,
“Friday 3 August 2012 13.21 EDT. The FBI says it is "monitoring" the case of a police suspect who officers claim fatally shot himself in the head despite having his hands cuffed behind his back in the rear of a patrol car. • • • The incident has raised questions, not least over how officers apparently failed to find the gun on Carter during an initial search. It has also been said that the suspect died as a result to a gunshot wound to the right temple. Carter was left-handed ....” [ Full Article ]
The police executions triggered predictable protests from the minorities involved but were mostly ignored by middle class liberals who continued to tear their hair out over the Second Amendment. Once again, political discourse suffered from curious disconnects, an ignorance of history and an undue focus on one’s own immediate wants -- or as increasingly the case - on one’s private injuries and fears.
Gun control and cop control are two sides of the same political coin. The solution to both aspects of the problem is greater citizen training and participation in the policing of communities. This solution is not just a choice among policy options. The necessity for individual civic participation is a constitutional assumption. Keeping and bearing arms is correlative with the right to bear witness and render jury verdicts. These two rights are cornerstones of civic duty and implicate direct popular involvement and control over the essentials of public life.
Gun control and cop control are two sides of the same political coin. The solution to both aspects of the problem is greater citizen training and participation in the policing of communities. This solution is not just a choice among policy options. The necessity for individual civic participation is a constitutional assumption. Keeping and bearing arms is correlative with the right to bear witness and render jury verdicts. These two rights are cornerstones of civic duty and implicate direct popular involvement and control over the essentials of public life.
This legal conclusion begins with a sociological question.
On reading about the Aurora killings, we wondered if such armed insanity occurred when people were habituated to living with and using arms on a daily basis. It did not seem to us that it did. Certainly crime and lunacy have always existed; but gun advocates are right when they insist that it is people -- not guns -- who commit crimes.
Liberals can dance around this fact all they want, but the sum and substance of their arguments is that since we can’t trust people to be mature and law abiding it is best to keep arms out of their hands. At bottom, this argument tacitly accepts a society of belligerent, lumpen morons as an unalterable reality. The argument is all the more curious coming from that same political faction which in the next breath talks about cultural sensitivity, liberal education and bringing back the philosopher-peasant.
The socio-historical fact is that the Second Amendment presupposes a mature and responsible citizenry. The Amendment serves as a barometer of social equity and health. The kind of society America ought to be is one in which citizens can be trusted to keep and bear arms. If that is not the case, then we are not the kind of society we ought to be.
The argument between gun control and gun rights creates an historically false dialectic which disconnects what was originally viewed as one and the same thing. Put another way, a political philosophy which espouses freedom necessarily presupposes personal self-control. Conversely, self-control presupposes the existence of things in relation to which control is exercised.
It is thus that the Second Amendment has its rude genesis in the right of freemen to participate in the defence of the realm. In medieval times, the distinction between a right and a duty did not exist in its modern anti-podal form; rather, the capacity for self-defence and for self rule were two sides of free-born status.
Upon assuming the throne (such as it was) in A.D. 872, King Alfred the Great issued an edict that all who could afford to do so should assemble to repel the pagan Danes who had seized London. His contemporaneous organization of towns into fyrds of a hundred families reflected a loose socio-military structure akin to the Krumper System or what might be called an army-on-call. [ FN-1 ]
A little over a century later, as the emergencies of war gave way to the routines of peace, Alfred’s system coalesced. Under the laws of Edward the Confessor (1042-1060), “the inhabitants of each Township regulated their own local police. They were bound to keep watch and ward. If any crime was committed in their district, they were to raise the hue and cry and to pursue and apprehend the offender. ... Even the poorest or almost propertyless Churl, was personally free. He was law-worthy. The Churl had the right of bearing arms. He was a legal witness. He had political rights with regard to the magistracies of his township, ... both as an elector, and as himself eligible to office.” (British Common Law, Francis NigelLee, DCL., Part VI, Ch. 23 (1993).)
The situation remained much the same after the Norman Conquest. King Henry II’s Assize of Arms (1181) prohibited ownership of weapons by Jews and, of all others, required ownership of arms according to wealth and status, viz “...every free layman who possesses chattels or rents to the value of 16m. shall have a shirt of mail, a helmet, a shield, and a lance....” The Assize of Arms of 1252 required all males between 15 and 60 to keep specified arms and to quell breaches of peace when summoned by nominated local constables.
On reading about the Aurora killings, we wondered if such armed insanity occurred when people were habituated to living with and using arms on a daily basis. It did not seem to us that it did. Certainly crime and lunacy have always existed; but gun advocates are right when they insist that it is people -- not guns -- who commit crimes.
Liberals can dance around this fact all they want, but the sum and substance of their arguments is that since we can’t trust people to be mature and law abiding it is best to keep arms out of their hands. At bottom, this argument tacitly accepts a society of belligerent, lumpen morons as an unalterable reality. The argument is all the more curious coming from that same political faction which in the next breath talks about cultural sensitivity, liberal education and bringing back the philosopher-peasant.
The socio-historical fact is that the Second Amendment presupposes a mature and responsible citizenry. The Amendment serves as a barometer of social equity and health. The kind of society America ought to be is one in which citizens can be trusted to keep and bear arms. If that is not the case, then we are not the kind of society we ought to be.
The argument between gun control and gun rights creates an historically false dialectic which disconnects what was originally viewed as one and the same thing. Put another way, a political philosophy which espouses freedom necessarily presupposes personal self-control. Conversely, self-control presupposes the existence of things in relation to which control is exercised.
It is thus that the Second Amendment has its rude genesis in the right of freemen to participate in the defence of the realm. In medieval times, the distinction between a right and a duty did not exist in its modern anti-podal form; rather, the capacity for self-defence and for self rule were two sides of free-born status.
Upon assuming the throne (such as it was) in A.D. 872, King Alfred the Great issued an edict that all who could afford to do so should assemble to repel the pagan Danes who had seized London. His contemporaneous organization of towns into fyrds of a hundred families reflected a loose socio-military structure akin to the Krumper System or what might be called an army-on-call. [ FN-1 ]
A little over a century later, as the emergencies of war gave way to the routines of peace, Alfred’s system coalesced. Under the laws of Edward the Confessor (1042-1060), “the inhabitants of each Township regulated their own local police. They were bound to keep watch and ward. If any crime was committed in their district, they were to raise the hue and cry and to pursue and apprehend the offender. ... Even the poorest or almost propertyless Churl, was personally free. He was law-worthy. The Churl had the right of bearing arms. He was a legal witness. He had political rights with regard to the magistracies of his township, ... both as an elector, and as himself eligible to office.” (British Common Law, Francis NigelLee, DCL., Part VI, Ch. 23 (1993).)
The situation remained much the same after the Norman Conquest. King Henry II’s Assize of Arms (1181) prohibited ownership of weapons by Jews and, of all others, required ownership of arms according to wealth and status, viz “...every free layman who possesses chattels or rents to the value of 16m. shall have a shirt of mail, a helmet, a shield, and a lance....” The Assize of Arms of 1252 required all males between 15 and 60 to keep specified arms and to quell breaches of peace when summoned by nominated local constables.
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| Hue & Cry |
There can be no question that, under these laws, the possession of arms was “regulated” and that the bearing of arms was connected to a feudal military obligation. However, proponents of present day gun-control overwork the military connection by ignoring the political context which was one in which the individual was directly and immediately connected to exercising attributes of sovereignty: not only answering a call to arms, but policing the town, bearing witness and giving judgement.
It is a canard of 18th century liberal propagandists that the Middle Ages were an undemocratic time. On the contrary, both in England as on the Continent, feudalism entailed a high degree of rough but real freeborn political participation by fee-holders of arms-bearing age. To say that the “right to bear arms” was subsidiary to the existence of a “well regulated knighthood” ignores the more predicate reality that the militia in those days was “self-regulating” and that its self-regulation fit within a scheme of immediate, local self-governance.
This concept of local self-governance is at the core of the Bill of Rights which, today, is too often thought of as enshrining merely individual rights as if these existed in isolation from their social context. A brief and summary over-view will illustrate the encompassing medieval roots of the Bill of Rights.
A century after Edward the Confessor, the Constitutions of Clarendon (1164) affirmed that no layman could be accused except that twelve lawful men from the neighboring ‘hundred’ were summoned, placed on Christian oath by the Sheriff, and thereupon returned a true-finding or veredictum on the matter. (Const. Art. 6.)
The procedure was amplified in Articles 17 and 39 of Magna Carta (1215) which declared that ordinary lawsuits should be tried locally and that “[n]o Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed or outlawed or banished or in any way destroyed; .... except by the legal judgement of his peers or by the law of the land.”
Magna Carta also provided the germ of the Fifth Amendment by specifying that “no official shall place a man on trial upon his own unsupported statement, without producing credible witnesses to the truth of it” (id., Art. 38) and that “no constable or royal official shall take corn or other movable goods from any man without immediate payment ....” (id, Art. 28).
The laws of King Canute (A.D. 995-1035) had provided that “merciful punishments shall be determined upon for the public good; and the handiwork of God and the purchase which He made at a great price, shall not be destroyed for trivial offences” (II Cnut 1-4). Magna Carta confirmed that, “For a trivial offence, a free man shall be fined only in proportion to the degree of his offence, and for a serious offence correspondingly, but not so heavily as to deprive him of his livelihood. (Carta, Art. 20.)
Most famously, of course, the first article of Magna Carta -- providing that “the English Church shall be free, and shall have... its liberties unimpaired” -- protected the freedom of the Church from subordination to Royal power and, through historical adaptations, became the First Amendment’s freedom of conscience and expression from government infringement.
This brief sketch illustrates that the Bill of Rights is an organic whole which incorporates a medieval political philosophy of chartered liberties for districts and so called “free cities.”
It is a canard of 18th century liberal propagandists that the Middle Ages were an undemocratic time. On the contrary, both in England as on the Continent, feudalism entailed a high degree of rough but real freeborn political participation by fee-holders of arms-bearing age. To say that the “right to bear arms” was subsidiary to the existence of a “well regulated knighthood” ignores the more predicate reality that the militia in those days was “self-regulating” and that its self-regulation fit within a scheme of immediate, local self-governance.
This concept of local self-governance is at the core of the Bill of Rights which, today, is too often thought of as enshrining merely individual rights as if these existed in isolation from their social context. A brief and summary over-view will illustrate the encompassing medieval roots of the Bill of Rights.
A century after Edward the Confessor, the Constitutions of Clarendon (1164) affirmed that no layman could be accused except that twelve lawful men from the neighboring ‘hundred’ were summoned, placed on Christian oath by the Sheriff, and thereupon returned a true-finding or veredictum on the matter. (Const. Art. 6.)
The procedure was amplified in Articles 17 and 39 of Magna Carta (1215) which declared that ordinary lawsuits should be tried locally and that “[n]o Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed or outlawed or banished or in any way destroyed; .... except by the legal judgement of his peers or by the law of the land.”
Magna Carta also provided the germ of the Fifth Amendment by specifying that “no official shall place a man on trial upon his own unsupported statement, without producing credible witnesses to the truth of it” (id., Art. 38) and that “no constable or royal official shall take corn or other movable goods from any man without immediate payment ....” (id, Art. 28).
The laws of King Canute (A.D. 995-1035) had provided that “merciful punishments shall be determined upon for the public good; and the handiwork of God and the purchase which He made at a great price, shall not be destroyed for trivial offences” (II Cnut 1-4). Magna Carta confirmed that, “For a trivial offence, a free man shall be fined only in proportion to the degree of his offence, and for a serious offence correspondingly, but not so heavily as to deprive him of his livelihood. (Carta, Art. 20.)
Most famously, of course, the first article of Magna Carta -- providing that “the English Church shall be free, and shall have... its liberties unimpaired” -- protected the freedom of the Church from subordination to Royal power and, through historical adaptations, became the First Amendment’s freedom of conscience and expression from government infringement.
This brief sketch illustrates that the Bill of Rights is an organic whole which incorporates a medieval political philosophy of chartered liberties for districts and so called “free cities.”
The salient character of medieval English law is that while it allowed a common law throughout the realm, it also sought to restrain royal encroachments and safeguard local control over local affairs. Within this context the right to bear arms, the right to a local jury trial by one’s equals upon corroborated evidence were of the same weave which preserved citizen participation in his own safety and justice.
What is astonishing is the consistency with which these medieval rights were maintained as England progressed through the revolutionary upheavals giving birth to the modern era.
In 1688, King James II, as King John before him, sought to extend Royal Prerogative at the expense of individuals and the Church of England hoping, it was feared, to reimpose Catholic (and French) hegemony over Britain. He was overthrown by an armed populace in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 which re-instituted England’s by then established concept of constitutional monarchy.
In the revolution’s aftermath, Parliament enacted the 1689 Bill of Rights which became the most immediate predecessor of the American Bill of Rights.
In pertinent parts, the 1689 Bill prohibited: “the raising or keeping a standing Army within the Kingdome in time of Peace...” (which became the Third Amendment’s prohibition against quartering of soldiers) [2] “that the Subjects which are Protestants may have Arms for their Defence suitable to their Conditions and as allowed by Law” (which became the Second Amendment) [3] “that Jurors ought to be duely impannelled and returned...” (which became the Sixth Amendment) and [4] “that excessive Baile ought not to be required nor excessive Fines imposed nor cruell and unusuall Punishments inflicted.” (which became the Eighth). [ FN-2 ]
(The one modern addition to this medieval cluster of rights was the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures which arose from the 18th century trans-Atlantic uproar over the rummaging and seizure of the North Briton’s presses which had published nasty things about the King’s minister. (Wilkes v. Wood, (1763) 98 Eng. Rep. 489 (C.P.); Entick v. Carrington, (1765) 95 Eng. Rep. 807 (K.B.).) [ FN-3 ]
One of the idiocies of the Received Standard Version of American Education in the 20th century is that the Constitution and Bill of Rights were, if not inventions of the quasi-divine genius of the Founding Fathers, at least products of Enlightenment liberalism.
Another idiocy is the utterly upside down notion that the Stuarts based their rule on obscurantist medieval ideas about the Divine Right of Kings. In fact, James II, as King John and the Tudors before him and as the Borbons, Frederick, Bonaparte, Hitler and Stalin after, were all believers in the modern concept of the centralized, unaccountable, supreme state. The idea was not so much l’etat c’est Moi as it was l’Etat c’est tout.
The English legal historian, Theodore Plucknett, put it this way:
What is astonishing is the consistency with which these medieval rights were maintained as England progressed through the revolutionary upheavals giving birth to the modern era.
In 1688, King James II, as King John before him, sought to extend Royal Prerogative at the expense of individuals and the Church of England hoping, it was feared, to reimpose Catholic (and French) hegemony over Britain. He was overthrown by an armed populace in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 which re-instituted England’s by then established concept of constitutional monarchy.
In the revolution’s aftermath, Parliament enacted the 1689 Bill of Rights which became the most immediate predecessor of the American Bill of Rights.
In pertinent parts, the 1689 Bill prohibited: “the raising or keeping a standing Army within the Kingdome in time of Peace...” (which became the Third Amendment’s prohibition against quartering of soldiers) [2] “that the Subjects which are Protestants may have Arms for their Defence suitable to their Conditions and as allowed by Law” (which became the Second Amendment) [3] “that Jurors ought to be duely impannelled and returned...” (which became the Sixth Amendment) and [4] “that excessive Baile ought not to be required nor excessive Fines imposed nor cruell and unusuall Punishments inflicted.” (which became the Eighth). [ FN-2 ]
(The one modern addition to this medieval cluster of rights was the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures which arose from the 18th century trans-Atlantic uproar over the rummaging and seizure of the North Briton’s presses which had published nasty things about the King’s minister. (Wilkes v. Wood, (1763) 98 Eng. Rep. 489 (C.P.); Entick v. Carrington, (1765) 95 Eng. Rep. 807 (K.B.).) [ FN-3 ]
One of the idiocies of the Received Standard Version of American Education in the 20th century is that the Constitution and Bill of Rights were, if not inventions of the quasi-divine genius of the Founding Fathers, at least products of Enlightenment liberalism.
Another idiocy is the utterly upside down notion that the Stuarts based their rule on obscurantist medieval ideas about the Divine Right of Kings. In fact, James II, as King John and the Tudors before him and as the Borbons, Frederick, Bonaparte, Hitler and Stalin after, were all believers in the modern concept of the centralized, unaccountable, supreme state. The idea was not so much l’etat c’est Moi as it was l’Etat c’est tout.
The English legal historian, Theodore Plucknett, put it this way:
“Out of all the confusion and disaster of the middle ages, there arose a uniform cry for law, which should be divine in its origin, supreme in its authority, rendering justly to every man his due. ... When we come to Machiavelli we reach the spirit of the Renaissance... A double standard between public and private morality introduces a sort of polytheism utterly repugnant to medieval thought. The issue of this conflict is perhaps still uncertain, but medieval thought is today fighting hard for the cause of law against the amoral, irresponsible State. It was the medievalists in England ... who ended Stuart statecraft, and the Constitution of the United States was written by men who had Magna Carta and Coke before their eyes. Could anything be more medieval than the idea of due process or the insertion into an instrument of government of a contract clause?" (Concise History of the Common Law (1928) Cambridge. Univ. Press.)
Could anything be more medieval than the idea of jury trial and nullification?
From the perspective of French or Continental liberalism, such medievalisms are an absurdity. In their view all rights derive from the Social Contract and it is an oxymoron for the State to guarantee rights against itself. This was precisely Hamilton’s argument as to why there was no need for a Bill of Rights to be appended to the Constitution. (Fed. Pap. # ) The State being established to promulgate the General Welfare what could be more absurd than allowing ad hoc groups of citizens to hobble and oppose its operations?
But Madison was English, and when the American Colonists sought their independence from royal authority they did so “as Englishmen” in the same tradition and manner as the Barons at Runneymede. And it is certain that when the barons forced King John to sign Magna Carta, they were not leaning on their quills.
The right to bear arms against the state was at the core of the Supreme’s Court decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) 554 U.S. 570. In his majority opinion, Justice Scalia emphasized the Second Amendment’s role in providing a safeguard against tyranny. He noted that,
“Under the auspices of the 1671 Game Act, for example, the Catholic Charles II had ordered general disarmaments of regions home to his Protestant enemies [at p. 593] ... and of course, what the Stuarts had tried to do to their political enemies, George III had tried to do to the colonists. In the tumultuous decades of the 1760's and 1770's, the Crown began to disarm the inhabitants of the most rebellious areas. That provoked polemical reactions by Americans invoking their rights as Englishmen to keep arms. [at p. 598].”
Charles II and James II were the legitimate sovereign authority and as such had every prerogative to punish or execute those who violated duly promulgated laws. But what of the situation when the lawful authority is itself subverting constitutional underpinnings? To appeal to “the law” in its official manifestation would be to spit in the wind. As in 1215, so in 1688 and so too in 1776, the right to bear arms was the right to resist, to compel, to overthrow. No one thought otherwise.
While bearing arms against the Crown might be the most primary and the ultimate act of popular nullification, it is not the only one provided for by the Constitution. The Second Amendment is properly viewed in conjunction with the Sixth Amendments’s guarantee of a jury trial.
The State has always eyed the popular jury with suspicion. Just as the Stuarts sought to disarm Protestants, the Crown sought to bend juries to its will. Medievalists thought otherwise. In Bushel’s Case (1670) 124 E.R. 1006, Chief Justice Vaughan forbade punishing jurors for returning verdicts the Crown disagreed with. Once empaneled, the jury was absolute and its verdict once given was unimpeachable. As explained by the Supreme Court,
“[T]he very reason the Framers put a jury-trial guarantee in the Constitution is that they were unwilling to trust government to mark out the role of the jury. ...¶¶... Our Constitution and the common-law traditions it entrenches, however, do not admit the contention that facts are better discovered by judicial inquisition than by adversarial testing before a jury. (Blakely v Washington (2003) 542 US 296, 308, 313, [Maj. Opn., Steven, J.].)
“[Justice Bryer] sketches an admirably fair and efficient scheme of criminal justice designed for a society that is prepared to leave criminal justice to the State. (Judges, it is sometimes necessary to remind ourselves, are part of the State — and an increasingly bureaucratic part of it, at that.) The founders of the American Republic were not prepared to leave it to the State, which is why the jury-trial guarantee was one of the least controversial provisions of the Bill of Rights. It has never been efficient; but it has always been free.” (Apprendi v New Jersey (2000) 430 U.S. 466, 498 [Conc. Opn., Scalia, J.].)
Thus, whereas the Second Amendment reserves the right of physical resistance, the Sixth preserves the right of political impedance. Neither contemplates purely individual obstruction; both enable the raw sentiment of the community to make itself felt.
As the power of the centralized State grew, the politically negative role of the two rights came to be emphasized. However, that was never their only function. Tracing roots back to the days of Edward the Confessor, it can be seen that raising the hue and cry, bearing witness and giving judgements marked out an ambit of positive, daily participation in local civic life.
While this ambit may have shrunk as England became more industrialized and urban, by an accident of history, it found new life in the United States where a sparse population living in isolated settlements hearkened back to medieval demographic conditions.
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| American Jury Trial (1849) |
It was not until the 20th century, when the United States itself became urbanized, that direct citizen responsibility and control over his immediate civic circumstances slowly gave way to management by professionals and supervision by a standing police. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has not been zealous in protecting the right to be safe from police.
The English and Colonial opposition to standing armies was not based solely on the policies they enforced as much as on what they intrinsically represented. Any standing force by its very nature introduces a principle of alienation into society, because any line, whether red, green, grey or blue, of necessity creates two sides.
In the inevitable conflict between authority and autonomy, the English answer was predictable. William Pitt, on the occasion of a debate in Parliament on the searches incident to the enforcement of an tax on cider, eloquently expressed the principle:
“The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storm may enter; the rain may enter; but the King of England cannot enter -- all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!” (Miller v. United States (1958) 357 U.S. 301, 307 [maj. opn., Brennan, J.].)
Of course, Pitt did not mean that the King’s Men could not enter at all, but rather than they could do so only upon warrant, after knock and notice and in a reasonable and restricted manner.
In the first half of the 20th century, a growing recognition by the Supreme Court of the importance of the Fourth Amendment led it to review and restrict the license with which police were allowed to act. Critical to the restrictions was the judicial rule that refused to give any legal effect to illegally seized evidence.
Unfortunatley, one of the more inane and destructive idiocies ever uttered by a judge was the quip by “liberal” Justice Cardozo that the exclusionary rule meant the “criminal is to go free because the constable blundered.” Waving the banner of innocent blundering, an organized cry against “shackling” the police and against “criminal” rights, was used by the police, ardent prosecutors, pandering politicians and supine judges to turn the Fourth Amendment into a meaningless piety riddled with exceptions.
“The Court's rhetoric cannot disguise the fact that when it not only tolerates but also provides an affirmative incentive for warrantless and plainly unreasonable and unnecessary intrusions ....” (Segura v United States (1984) 468 U.S. 796, 840 [Diss. Stevens, J.].)
Taking their cue, trial court judges routinely play deaf dumb and stupid to police excuses and evasions on the stand. The police themselves jokingly refer to their bearing witness as “testilying.” Such habits, now entrenched after 50 years of habituated indifference, have created a culture of impunity among the police.
This culture of impunity is built upon a subtle but fundamental alienation of police from society which is reflected in their self-differentiation from so-called “civilians” and in their opposition to “civilian review boards.” In legal fact, police are themselves civilians but the accepted nomenclature has allowed them to become viewed as and to act as a de facto para-military force which, being free from “civilian” oversight, is an actual army of occupation.
To say that the Founding Fathers would be scandalized is an understatement.
In the Common Law tradition of which it forms a part, the Bill of Rights is not merely a catalogue of enumerated me rights but rather a reservation of us-rights in a presumed social context. It marks out an ambit of reserved activity and self-governance not as mere options but as commitments.
When the Bill of Rights is understood as an organic whole it can be seen how far we have fallen from the social and political reality it presupposes. In lieu of direct and personal involvement in his immediate economic and social affairs, the average American is alienated from both his labor and his franchise.
The result confirms the grimmest prophecies of both Durkheim and Marx. The vast majority of Americans do not work for themselves but for hire; they are not directly involved in the management, cultivation and protection of their own communities but hire out civic services; they do not create their own culture but passively accept the entertainments and recreations provided to them by purveyors of inanity and junk. The picture of Americans in their Third Century is one of slothful political obesity.
Police violence, drug violence, domestic violence, and deranged violence are equally symptoms of the underlying economic and political anomie which afflicts American society. To call for gun control without addressing the toxicity of police culture, to call for police control without addressing the toxicity of ghetto culture to call for control in lieu of civic participation only serves to perpetuate the underlying alienation.
Alas, the wasteland of American society is so de-educated, fragmented, degraded and impoverished that it falls into the category of a Quixotic fantasy to call for the restoration of civic chivalry.
Nevertheless, there’s always hope and prayer. As with physical fitness, people gain in responsibility the more they are given responsibility. Out of the chaos and disaster of American urban life there should arise a unanimous cry for a re-communalizing of the metropolis in such ways that citizens directly and actively participate as a matter of duty and right in the policing of their communities.
Civic participation does not require a degree. It is based on animated involvement guided by common sense. Those of us who have worked with (or on) juries are left with an abiding wonderment at how well the system works even when we disagree with the result and even when the result is the occasional outrage. Communities have experimented with “youth juries” for juvenile offenders with promising initial results. Jury trials should be encouraged rather than discouraged and jury service should be compensated according to financial need on a progressive scale so that a broad spectrum of citizens can look forward to serving.
Similarly, mandatory firearm education should be part of secondary education so that all youths are taught how to use weapons with an abiding respect for their lethal consequences. Both youths and adults should work with a smaller core of professional police in patrolling neighborhoods and in supervising and setting standards for their patrolling.
It follows, almost without saying, that a broad spectrum of national services should be established. But these services need not be drawn on lines requiring two or three year full time commitments. They should be administered locally and can be calibrated to dovetail with a variety of individual circumstances at different stages in life.
Until the global capitalist economy collapses, it is not possible to return to the days of truly local agrarian economies. But as Herbert Croley, the founder of the American Progressive movement, understood, even in an industrial and national context it is possible and desirable to stimulate civic and economic participation “from below.”
Until the Bill of Rights is taken as a charter for political participation, the country will continue to be victimized by its own failings.
©Woodchip Gazette, 2012
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