Yet another school shooting, yet more media frenzy. Blame the guns, blame “hearts without ‘God’“, blame violent video games, blame bad parenting, blame bullies, blame a lack of world peace, blame Canada… We blame everything but the root cause- because that root cause is so deeply fundamental to the way our world works that the alternative is terrifying- a vast chasm of unknowns howling with our worst fears for the future.
That root cause is our definition of “peace”- namely that we tend to define it in terms of stability, prosperity, security, and predictability. In other words- power and control.
This falsehood dates at least as far back as the end of the Roman Republic and rise of the Empire, which Seneca the Younger termed the “Pax Romana“, or “Roman Peace”. While the exact dates are subject to much scholarly debate, by its strictest definition, this period lasted only about 206 years.
Yet, this was not actually a time of peace, Rome fought plenty of battles during this time. It was also rife with internal tyranny in the form of an emperor and relied upon the unpaid labor of hundreds of thousands or even millions of chattel slaves.
What it was, was a time of relative comfort and security for the average Roman citizen- a period during which Juvenal wrote this reflection on Rome’s decadence:
“Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions, everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.”
“Bread and circuses” or “panem et circenses” in Latin. You might recognize “Panem” as the name of the tyrannical government in The Hunger Games.
The Pax Romana is not unique in history. Indeed, another common misuse of “Pax” is the Pax Britannica, during the height of the British Empire. So too with the Pax Mongolica, referring to the “peace” imposed upon Asia by Genghis Khan. The Pax Ottomana referred to the period of Turkish hegemony over much of the Middle East and the Balkans. Finally, the Pax Americana- also known as the Cold War, which if you haven’t noticed lately, is actually still going on.
Fun facts:
- The Pax Britannica lasted about a century.
- The Pax Mongolica lasted about about a century and a half.
- The Pax Ottomana survived for about two centuries.
- Thomas Jefferson envisioned the United States becoming a continent-spanning “Empire of Liberty“, so cool your jets on my calling us an empire- Tom did it first.
Of course, all of those empires existed before and after their “Pax”, but those periods are generally the point of greatest internal stability and broadest global power.
So, back to the point. Historians, politicians, and even us plebian citizens are confusing “imperial power and control” with PEACE.
Human history has been largely nothing but one attempt at empire after another, all of them falling from their height after a few generations. Why?
Because the nature of empire is “zero-sum”.
Empires exist because of the notion that something desirable, maybe essential (like farmland), is in short supply and that in order to secure that something for the “in” group, it must be taken from other people who are “out” of that group.
The truth is that PEACE, real peace, what the Norse called “frith” or what Hank Hill might call “Jesus peace”, is not zero-sum and isn’t achieved by violence.
Right now, some yahoo reading this is about to spout Marx… Guess what- Marx was a zero-sum imperialist, too. He also believed that resources were finite and so should be taken away from the Bourgeoisie by force and divided up amongst the Proletariat.
Here’s the deal- in many cases, zero-sum thinking is still necessary. As we are discovering, unlimited productivity does have drawbacks- like pollution, resource exhaustion, and lack of sleep.
HOWEVER…
What is NOT necessary is how that creates in us an obsession with using violence to achieve control over the zero-sum resource. We have equated “peace” with stability, leisure, and security for the in-group at the expense of everyone else. Don’t believe me?
Why is white, middle-class America obsessed with school shootings but largely uninterested in the substantially larger number of dead children of color caused by everything from poverty, being an innocent bystander to gang violence, to police brutality?
Because school shootings hurt the in-group.
They disrupt the false notion that “these things don’t happen here” or “it doesn’t happen to us“. The unsaid part of those statement is the speaker’s implicit comfort with it happening to members of the out-group: people of color, poor whites, and so forth.
The truth is that mass murders happen everywhere. They have always happened everywhere, and until we can break the imperial, zero-sum cycle of oppressing others for our own security… they will always happen.
Yes. We brought this upon ourselves. No, I’m not blaming the victims of school shootings. I’m blaming us, the adults, who continue to perpetuate a culture that encourages violent domination.
Right now, you’re saying, well… how come it doesn’t happen in Europe?
Well, it does- just not nearly as often… anymore.
The major reason is that the first part of the 20th Century was a period of unmitigated horror for much of Europe. For all of our recorded history, Europe was a pressure cooker roiling with would-be empires. When World War I erupted in 1914, the drive for Pax had built up such a head of steam that only a sea of blood could cool the fire.
But not even the “War To End All Wars” was bloody enough. It took another world war, and tens of millions more innocent lives, before Europe had generally grown tired of trying to impose Pax on each other by force. However, the United States and Russia, long weary of playing second-fiddle to the “civilized” states of Europe, each wanted their own chance at imposing Pax for their own people.
As a result, Americans enjoyed a short period of enormous prosperity and (internal) peace. Well, white, middle-class America did. By the 1950s, the lack of parity between America’s in-group and out-groups led to the Civil Rights Movement, an important attempt to fix our nation’s Original Sin.
What was our Original Sin? Say it with me… “Empire”.
With few exceptions, our ancestors did not build this nation by dealing fairly and peacefully with people of other ethnicities. They cheated, and murdered or enslaved the natives. They enslaved, tortured, and murdered Africans brought here against their will, then did the same to their children. They marginalized non-English, non-Protestant people of European descent- a process that created so-called “White Nationalism”. In other words, they mortared together the foundations of our nation with blood.
Jefferson tried to address this when writing the Declaration of Independence. Sadly, he surrendered this principle to the whim of the Continental Congress. Not much later, he gave in personally as well- witness the Sally Hemings case.
When, in the 1960s, it looked like there might finally be some peaceful resolution to our Original Sin, the Pax crowd doubled down. They declared a “War on Drugs”, which was really intended as a war on brown people and “undesirable” whites.
Under the pretext of this so-called “war”, our nation militarized policing, ignored important parts of the Constitution, and enslaved and disenfranchised millions of people of color under the pretext of punishing them for made-up crimes.
In other words, just when American power and prosperity reached their height, instead of taking the opportunity to break away from zero-sum thinking… we instead redefined the American Dream as something out of Conan the Barbarian:
“To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women!”
Seriously. We stopped considering a business successful unless it dominated the market- not a new idea, but one that had faded for a time. We stopped caring about equal rights and equal justice and equal opportunity, instead embracing prejudice and discrimination by all groups against all others. We stopped actually thinking like pioneers who work together to survive, and started thinking like decadent Roman citizens fighting over the next loaf of bread and the best seats for the next circus.
Today, we don’t do a great job, we “crush it” or “kill it”. A player who defeats another at a game “owns” the opponent. People “destroy” their competition. Rape and other sexual violence have become popular metaphors for success and cunning.
Sure, violent metaphors have been around for a long time, but during many parts of our history they were tempered with a sense of shared civility and humility. The times when they weren’t often corresponded with periods of internal tumult.
That said, the problem isn’t competitive masculinity, physical competitiveness, sexual competitiveness, or even zero-sum thinking itself. The problem is when those things combine to become toxic.
Whoa, there, pardner! You thought I was going to equate masculinity with toxic masculinity, didn’t you?
Well, I’m not. In fact, toxic femininity is a substantial part of the problem as well, and not just because it creates conditions that reinforce and sustain toxic masculinity.
What’s toxic masculinity? Well, pretty much Conan the Barbarian. He might be an interesting character, but far too many males look to that fictional stereotype as a real-life role model. One can be strong, even martially strong, without taking delight in conquest, violence, and oppression.
Okay, so toxic femininity is Red Sonja? Yeah, no.
It is, in fact, the inverse of Conan- the woman who aspires to parasitic leisure, paid for by, protected by, commanded by, and essentially owned by, her man. If you can stomach it, try watching Real Housewives of Whatever.
Notice that those women are just as interested in destroying each other as Conan is other men. In their mind, “their” man is a zero-sum resource that they have to dominate and control, as well as protect from his own inner weaknesses and outside non-physical dangers that his “man brain” can’t understand. Other women- especially strong, independent women, represent threats to the toxic woman’s hegemony in the same way other strong, independent men represent a threat to the toxic man’s.
Both of these are sicknesses that reinforce each other.
We like to believe that these toxic gender identities are rooted in our pioneer past, but in fact the most successful pioneers were typically cooperative as well as competitive. Sure, it was great to be the “big man” around town, but if everyone starved… well, no one could tell you how special you are anymore, right?
What was that line from the Spiderman movie that everyone makes fun of?
So here’s the point- the crux of this whole frustrating article:
By falsely conflating “peace” with the in-group’s security and prosperity at the expense of the same for the out-group, we have normalized the use of violence BY anyone AGAINST anyone for the purposes of establishing oneself as superior and thus “morally” worthy of security and prosperity.
What does that mean?
It means that when we teach girls that their only hope of having a “good life” is to “catch” and “keep” a powerful man, we are encouraging them to become courtesans to would-be emperors.
It means that when we teach boys that the only way to have any hope of a “good life” is to create their own empire by dominating others, we imply tacit permission to cheat, steal, rape, and murder.
It means that when we violated our most sacred social contract so our government could do the Ku Klux Klan’s dirty work, we essentially authorized everyone else to do the same.
It means, like the Romans, we run the risk of surrendering our human birthright to a charismatic strongman who promises us security and “greatness”.
It means that we are all scrambling to scrape together and protect our own heap of crumbs, fearful of anyone who might take it away.
“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” – Yoda, shortly before the fall of the Galactic Republic
Fear. It all comes down to fear.
We humans build empires out of fear. We dominate each other out of fear. We take resources from others out of a fear that we won’t have enough for ourselves. We demand surfeit to assuage our fear of famine.
We Americans pride ourselves on independence.
But independence cannot be built upon the backs of the oppressed. It’s not independence when our farms are watered with the blood of innocents- unremembered and unmourned. We are not independent when we take from others without giving fair dealing in return.
Heck, it’s not even really independence when we turn our backs on the world and just take care of ourselves.
Unless and until we can all break the cycle of empire IN OURSELVES, there will always be some petty tyrant seeking to impose his (or her) will on others, through violence, through trickery, through emotional abuse, and yes… through mass murder of the innocent.
To break that cycle, we must not only tolerate, but actively accept people who are wildly different from us. It also means accepting the impermanence of our security and prosperity. It means not getting into fights with people who wear, do, or say things we find offensive. It means understanding that, for a time at least, random people will be running around with guns that might feel frightening to us. It means legalizing drugs and other things we might personally find objectionable.
It also means backing off on what we ask the police to do and focusing them ONLY on crimes that do actual, measurable harm to others.
Most importantly, it means accepting our fear of things beyond our control and living IN SPITE OF THAT FEAR instead of trying to assert our dominance over others to make ourselves feel better.
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” – Paul “Muad’Dib” Atreides
Those of you familiar with the source of the quote above might recognize that Paul himself later falls into the fear trap as emperor. Fear is the natural state of empire.
Peace, real peace, means giving up the illusion of security and prosperity, because that is the only way to get even close to true, lasting security and prosperity.
If history has shown us one thing, it is this- so long as we attempt to impose our will upon others, they will take delight in our misery… and our inevitable downfall.
