While I take for granted that gun control is a proper response to the atrocity in Newtown, not all do. This is the second of a two part extended exchange (part 1, here ). My friend Thomas Cushman, who holds libertarian views, challenged me and proposed a different interpretation and a different course of action. I hope this will open a deeper deliberate discussion.

Tom: Jeff, I wonder if we as sociologists could bring some kind of understanding to this situation that does not sink down into the extreme positions on either side? Otherwise it’s just politics as usual. Consider, for instance, that Connecticut already has severe gun control measures. They did not stop the atrocity. Vermont is a state where any resident can buy as many guns, and as much ammunition as they want, carry concealed handguns, own assault rifles, and it has the lowest homicide rate in the country. I am not a fan of the gun culture by any stretch, but it seems shallow to imagine that some amorphous, state induced “gun control” is going to ever stop these kinds of things. As you know, the problem is cultural. We live in a degraded cultural environment full of simulated and prosthetic violence,. Our children, especially our boys, are immersed in violent culture produced by Hollywood. Why not start there?

Jeff: Agreed the problem at its base cultural. Gun culture, the culture of violence and its glorification.   And yes, violence in popular culture is a problem. But why have so many guns? I would like to work on all fronts. I would start with a discussion about gun controls in the political arena. Certainly some weapons shouldn’t be in private hands. Certainly, also, we should have a discussion about depictions of violence in films and music. If you want to start there, fine. Figure out how to address a degraded cultural environment, and do so. These discussions needn’t be in competition.

Tom:  There is a group of cultural producers who control the content of popular culture. They degrade the cultural environment with violence, yet,  many of them are liberals who clamor for gun control. That inconsistency bears as much scrutiny and critique as it is humanly possible to give….. To keep this on a positive note, we could do a study of how people react to events such as the CT shootings. I’ve become more and more vexed by trying to understand evil sociologically; the contingency and agency of it beguiles any explanatory/causative vocabulary. Theodicy seems better than sociology for me right now. I want to see cultural sociology address these issues. As for politics, I think a very appropriate action that would appeal to libertarians, conservatives, liberals –something everyone might like – would be to do a concentrated boycott of the next Hollywood film that glorifies violence. Everyone stays home and evokes the memory of those poor murdered children and their teachers and sends the message, without state intervention, that we’ve had enough. Ditto with the video games. Why not organize a “buy and burn day” nationwide? There is no censorship, just people using their 1st amendment rights to say “no more.”

Jeff: Hollywood liberals and conservatives make violent films. Why Hollywood liberals and not just Hollywood? I am not afraid of characterizations but of stereotypes. Last time I noticed Clint Eastwood was not a liberal. Nor are other heroes of violence whose names I don’t know. My ignorance about such cultural products is almost complete. I always boycott such products and recommend that all do. But I am rather convinced that gun violence occurs not by viewing films but by people having guns readily available, and I am not thinking about hunters in Vermont. Really why semi automatic weapons, handguns? Why not tanks and missiles?

Tom: I am trying to be a sociologist here. The fact is that most filmmakers and producers are on the political left. If they are truly concerned about violence, why do they continue to make films that saturate our children with it? It’s the hypocrisy that irks me. The cultivation hypothesis in media sociology is something I’ve taught for years: when the culture is saturated with violent depictions of murder and mayhem, people come to see it as normal and it provides the cultural base that activates action. That guns are are readily available makes it possible to translate more ideation into action. I agree with that. But my main point is this, sociologically: the ready availability of guns is not necessarily the main cause of massacres. I keep mentioning Vermont, because it is not all hunters, as you say, Jeff. The place is infested with guns. You can buy a gun, load it, conceal it and carry it, no permit, nothing. And huge numbers of people do. So the availability of guns has nothing to do with the rate of violence there: how do you explain that? If your theory that access to guns is the cause of violence, Vermont should be drowning in bloodshed, yet is has the lowest death by handgun rate in the nation. The person who committed these heinous acts in CT got his guns from his mother, who went through rigorous process to get them, permits, etc. Access was difficult. And he did not use assault weapons. One could also use the case of Brievik in Norway, one of the hardest place in the word to buy guns. I’m trying to understand this more sociologically?

Jeff: I too am trying and in fact am a sociologist. Most filmmakers are liberals, also a disproportionate number of Jews, but their work should not be reduced to their politics or their identity. Is there anything in the work that is a function of their politics or identity? My criticism of such reductionism has been central to my professional life as a sociologist of culture. As far as guns: we agree that the issue is cultural. For me the arguments for guns are pernicious. The arguments constitute a culture of violence: purported individual defense of the safety of the home and defense by oneself from state tyranny. These NRA positions are very dangerous, perhaps more dangerous than gun ownership. I think that having many guns at home make matters worse, as in the Newtown case. My fundamental concern is with the culture of guns in people’s lives, not as they and violence are fictively depicted. Though as I said, I agree it would be better to turn away from such depictions as individuals and as a society.

Tom: A libertarian would be as ferociously against the misuse of weapons to harm people as the liberal statist would. We live in a violent society where police powers are not sufficient to protect the basic right to life. The question is what we should do about that.

I keep trying to find conservative contributors, without much success. Perhaps this is not an accident, but a consequence of the nature of the conservative mind. Thinking about my experience, and reading Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind, gets me wondering.

Sure, when I asked in my last post, where are the conservative intellectuals, there were a number of sensible suggestions. Michael Corey pointed to a conservative institution of higher learning, Hillsdale College, and Regina Tuma and Lisa reminded me that there are some individuals, self-identified as conservatives, who are worth reading, David Frum and Andrew Sullivan (though if I am not mistaken, Sullivan has recently publicly renounced his identification with the label, given its crazy turns in recent years).

But I am looking for debate and for intellectual power, which forces me to pay attention and question my commitments, looking for committed conservatives that require respect. I have been reaching out to some conservative professors, with no success thus far. And while Frum is occasionally interesting, he is not really challenging, and Sullivan is fleeing from conservative orthodoxy. He is hard to pigeonhole. Perhaps that’s a hint of where I should go, seek “un-gated contributors.” Indeed, that is what I often do, as the editor of Deliberately Considered and in my reading, writing and teaching.

Over on my Facebook page, some friends have suggested that I may be delusional in my search for conservative contributors. One friend declared, “You are a Diogenes for our time, although with worse odds.” Another asked “Where is Ann Coulter when you need her?” Another wondered, “Are you going to play with necromancy?”

I realize that these ironic remarks imply a serious judgment. Perhaps, there is something fundamentally problematic with the conservative position, and that, therefore, my search is mistaken. Could it be that serious reflection on the events of the day shouldn’t include those on the right? Could it be that the center has shifted so far to the right that those who are now called conservatives are in fact beyond the pale of intellectual interest and decency, that  the reactionaries, the counter revolutionaries and the conservatives are all the same, and fundamentally indecent? If this is so, therefore, conservatives should be appraised and opposed, but not taken seriously on their own terms.

This is how I understand the position of Corey Robin in his book. It is a provocative and illuminating collection of inquiries. It has opened a serious discussion about the significance and meaning of the power of conservative thought and practice in the last decades of the twentieth century and the opening years of the twenty-first. The Reactionary Mind received the full New York Review of Books treatment. A prominent scholar, Mark Lilla, has negatively reviewed the book, dismissing it by outlining the book that he thinks should have been written. Robin has rightly called foul, and Lilla has gotten in the last word. Lilla thinks that a book should be written to explain conservatism, to recognize its distinguished contributions, and to critically appraise its present intellectual quality and political application in its diversity. He gives an outline. I think it would be an interesting book. He criticizes Robin for not having written it. This criticism is not fair. Robin’s project was to present an argument, a sharp reading of conservative, counter-revolutionary and reactionary thought (he identifies the three) as a defensive reaction against social emancipation. It’s a strong, though of course not complete, argument.

Robin formulates his project in a variety of different ways. In the opening pages he explains: “conservatism is: a meditation on — and the theoretical rendition of — the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.” A few pages later, he explains a bit more fully. After discussing John Adams’s resistance to Abigail Adams’s proto-feminism and the resistance of slave owners to emancipation, he presents some details of what conservatism is and is not:

Conservatism, then, is not a commitment to limited government and liberty – or a wariness of change, a belief in evolutionary reform, or a politics of virtue. These may be the byproducts of conservatism, one or more of its historically specific and ever-changing modes of expression. But they are not its animating purpose. Neither is conservatism a makeshift fusion of capitalists, Christians and warriors, for that fusion is infused by a more elemental force – the opposition to the liberation of men and women from the fetters of their superiors, particularly in the private sphere. Such a view might seem miles away from the libertarian defense of the free market, with its celebration of the atomistic and autonomous individual. But it is not. When the libertarian looks out upon society, he does not see isolated individuals; he sees private, often hierarchical, groups, where a father governs his family and an owner his employees.

The libertarians, according to Robin, like all other conservatives and reactionaries, defend challenged hierarchy. I have no doubt that there is something to this, but I am also sure that there is more involved. What he calls the byproducts of conservatism, may include the real cultural accomplishment and intellectual challenge.

I also must make myself clear. I sometimes want to be on the other side of the revolutionary barricades. I know that defending established ways is sometimes imperative, that some social projects enacted in the name of emancipation actually enslave. Being a veteran Central European hand, a long- term observer of the politics and culture of the old European killing fields, the contrasts in Robin’s account between progress and regress are too sharp for me. I am reminded of an essay of Adam Michnik, first given as a public lecture at the New School, beautifully entitled. “Grey is Beautiful.” (I wonder: perhaps my difference with Robin can be ultimately be explained by the fact that when he thinks about the cold war, he thinks about Latin America, while I think about the Soviet Union and its neighbors.)

In a quick Facebook post, I called Robin’s approach reductive. He responded and rightly called me out. I was overly casual (and dismissive) in the style of the social networking site. His position is richer than my quick post suggested. He provoked me to write this piece, publicly recognizing and critically appraising his work. Robin knows that the conservative position starts with a defense of hierarchy, but then goes on in a variety of different ways to cover a lot of ground, “from Burke to Palin.” He has interesting things to say about Anthony Scalia, Hobbes, neo-conservatives and, ex-neoconservatives (I found these reflections particularly intriguing). The essays taken separately linger on the details of the cases he studies, but the frame of the book makes the big statement, and the details recede. I am more interested in the cases than the frame, which I think is too roughly drawn.

But, I must admit, I have some self-doubts. Robin’s argument could explain why my project of breaking down the gates is mistaken. On balance, I still don’t think so, but it is a possibility.