Why Are Adversaries Expendable?

While reading Alan Jacobs’ book How To Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds this statement caught my eye.

When you believe that the brokenness of this world can not be just ameliorated but fixed, once and for all, then people who don’t share your optimism, or who do share it but invest in a different system, are adversaries of Utopia. (An “adversary” is literally one who has turned against you, one who blocks your path.) Whole classes of people can by this logic become expendable – indeed it can become the optimist’s perceived duty to eliminate the adversaries.

I’ve seen this attitude in action where people who disagree with someone are demonized or “unfriended” to use a Facebook term.

Unfortunately I think Jacobs’ explanation doesn’t go deep enough. Why? Because I know people who firmly think they know the answers to certain problems but they don’t demonize and marginalize those who disagree. This means there must be another, deeper premise at work. Over-optimism isn’t the answer.

I think this difference comes back to objectivity. Can we objectively evaluate what others think and feel without automatically casting them as harboring the worst possible motives? Can we restate their position in the best possible light before trying to refute it? (Thereby using what is referred to as “steel manning” as opposed to knocking over a straw man.) In fact Jacobs refers to this approach in a later paragraph.

One of the classic ways to do this is to seek out the best – the smartest, most sensible, most fair-minded – representatives of the positions you disagree with.

If we don’t try to be objective it becomes all too easy (and tempting) to demonize people who disagree with us. It spares us from facing the possibility we could be wrong, not the person who disagrees with us.

Thoughts on gun control - The Washington Post Article

I used to think gun control was the answer. My research told me otherwise. - The Washington Post

As part of the aftermath of the Las Vegas mass shooting the usual reactions have erupted. Gun control advocates use this as a call for imposing more measures to restrict access to guns while their opponents say these new measures won't prevent mass shootings like this.

I stumbled across this article by Leah Libresco, a statistician and former news writer at FiveThirtyEight, a polling aggregation website with a blog created by analyst Nate Silver. I'm citing it because Libresco arrives at interesting conclusions based on her analysis of the data. She admits to being in favor of stronger gun control but then her study lead her to different potential answers.

Before I started researching gun deaths, gun-control policy used to frustrate me. I wished the National Rifle Association would stop blocking common-sense gun-control reforms such as banning assault weapons, restricting silencers, shrinking magazine sizes and all the other measures that could make guns less deadly.

Then, my colleagues and I at FiveThirtyEight spent three months analyzing all 33,000 lives ended by guns each year in the United States, and I wound up frustrated in a whole new way. We looked at what interventions might have saved those people, and the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence. The best ideas left standing were narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns.

At the end of the article Libresco concludes that the following steps need to be taken instead of continuing to pursue stronger gun control legislation. 

Older men, who make up the largest share of gun suicides, need better access to people who could care for them and get them help. Women endangered by specific men need to be prioritized by police, who can enforce restraining orders prohibiting these men from buying and owning guns. Younger men at risk of violence need to be identified before they take a life or lose theirs and to be connected to mentors who can help them de-escalate conflicts.

Philosopher Stephen Hicks has posted some statistics comparing gun ownership by country and their homicide rates. He notes that there is no apparent correlation between the two and concludes:

Let’s think sadly about those who were injured and lost their lives. Let’s think angrily about the evil man who killed them. And then let’s also think sophisticatedly about the multiple influences and causes of homicide.