John Locke's political philosophy continues to define the parameters of what passes for acceptable political discourse in the United States. In large part, as previously discussed, Locke's legacy has contributed to the dysfunction and gridlock that characterize American politics today, but the influence of his ideas have also had a number of broader, more far-reaching social and cultural consequences.
Crime and violence are among the starkest manifestations of
anti-social behavior in America. Today, the United States is among the
most violent and crime-ridden countries in the developed world.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, during the period between
January and December 2006, more than 75 million crimes were reported to
police and law enforcement officials at all levels of government. Given a
U.S. population which consisted of an estimated 303,824,646 inhabitants
as of July 2008, this statistic is quite startling Further, the number
of violent crimes, including murder, robbery and burglary increased
approximately 1.3 percent.
Of the total of
reported crimes in 2006, almost 22 million occurred in non-metropolitan
areas. In addition, as of 2006, the number of adult and juvenile
prisoners in federal and state correctional institutions numbered
2,050,205, of whom 1,853,386 were men and 196, 820 were women. By
2008, the United States had the dubious distinction of having, by far,
the highest rate of incarceration in the entire world: 2.3 million
Americans were imprisoned, which amounted to one in 100 adults, one in
fifteen black men between the ages of twenty and thirty-four, and one
out of every thirty-six Hispanic males.
By contrast,
during the Colonial Era, potential offenders had fewer opportunities to
act out. The behavior of the village criminal was restrained by the
presence of his neighbors who could identify him and by the existence of
a long list of swift and sure punishments for anti-social behavior.
Over the past 250 years, however, these residual communitarian
restraints, a legacy of the English village life that emerged during the
later part of the Middle Ages, have dissipated as the influence of
liberal individualism upon American culture and political thought has
become more pronounced and entrenched.
Easy
access to firearms has also contributed to the epidemic of violence
which has gripped U.S. culture. According to the Violence Policy
Center, more than one million Americans have died in firearm-related
suicides, homicides, and unintentional injuries since 1960. In the
years between 2001 and 2011, more than 330,000 people in the United
States died from gun violence, whetherby accident or intent.
Sadly, the inability of government to prevent gun deaths by
reducing the availability of these weapons is often excused based upon a
misreading of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Until recently, that amendment had universally been construed to grant
to the people--and not to individuals--the right to keep and bear arms as
members of a well-regulated militia (today's National Guard) as
previously confirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court.
However, the Supreme Court's 2008 decision in District of Columbia, et al v. Heller,
554 U.S. 570 (2008), illustrated once again the intellectual
stranglehold that the political philosophy of anti-social individualism
exerts upon current federal jurisprudence. Justice Scalia's tortured
constitutional analysis and his inability to comprehend the grammatical
interconnection between a subordinate clause in a sentence --"A
well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free
State..."--and the main clause--"... the right of the people to keep and
bear Arms, shall not be infringed" --are a unfortunate consequence of the
eighteenth-century ideological bias in which his legal analysis remains
mired. Lamentably, Scalia's bias--his commitment to the tenets of
anti-social individualism--is so complete that he ignores the primary
duty of a government --to protect its own citizens.
In the
name of an abstract right of the individual and his putative right to
own a gun, Scalia denies the right of concrete human beings--who have
died and will continue to die because of handgun violence--to be safe
from harm: "We are aware of the problem of handgun violence in this
country," Scalia piously intoned, "but the enshrinement of
constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the
table."
The often unconscious but pervasive imprint of this
one, narrow interpretation of John Locke's political philosophy upon
American political discourse may, in large part, explain the inability
of many Americans to grasp the semantic and political distinctions
between persons qua individuals and a collectivity called "the people."
Unfortunately, because of that continuing inability and the enormous
success of powerful lobbyists such as the National Rifle
Association--whose incantations are often echoed by equally reactionary
federal judges and legislators who compound that confusion--incidents of
gun violence, including massacres such as Columbine and Virginia Tech,
and Aurora, Colorado and Newtown, Connecticut will inevitably increase.
Illegal immigration is another indication of the collapse of the rule
of law in contemporary America. Depending upon whose statistics one
wishes to accept, before the financial meltdown that began in 2008,
there were anywhere from 12 million to 20 million illegal immigrants
present in the United States. Although these individuals violated
American immigration law, their crimes were compounded by the thousands
upon thousands of American employers who illegally employed and
exploited them while feigning ignorance of their status as ineligible
employees. Current federal laws require that prospective employees
present proof of citizenship or show that they are lawful alien
residents.
Once again, the fear of government control along
with purported concerns about privacy and individual rights have stymied
the adoption of a very simple mechanism to ascertain citizenship status
and to control immigration--a national identification card, which
virtually all policy analysts concede would be effective.
By
contrast, European social democracies--even Spain, which, as of 2010
still had a Socialist government--have embraced the use of national ID
cards with little difficulty or divisive political debate. In the United
States, however, the debate focuses almost entirely upon concerns about
alleged government intrusion and threats to privacy and individual
liberty. Ironically, by contrast, the enormous and intrusive amount of
personal financial information and data that Equifax, Transamerica and
Experian--three unelected, private, for-profit credit reporting
agencies--currently compile and maintain on almost every American citizen
barely elicits a critical comment.
One explanation for these
differences may be found in the differing political traditions.
European democracies, in contrast to the individualism of American
liberal democracy, are communitarian cultures. Even those European
countries which experienced the Protestant Reformation in some form--such
as England, the north of Germany, or those in Scandinavia--were able to
retain a cultural reservoir of traditional Catholic conservative
values--the ancien regime. To the present, those residual
cultural values emphasize the importance of family and community and
support the notion that there exists something called the public
interest, or, to use Rousseau's phrase, "the general will," which is
separate and distinct from the interests of individuals. Consequently, a
number of these European democracies have successfully made the
political transition to social democracies with broad safety nets.
Canada has accomplished the same.
In the United States, by
contrast, the persistence of the traditional consensus constrains the
ability of citizens and policymakers alike to imagine, or to advocate,
policies which promote a social or public good, as opposed to the
policies which are calculated to benefit only individuals or special
interests.
The ideological constraints imposed by Locke's
political philosophy have also contributed to the conviction that crime
is a personal rather than a social phenomenon, and that it may largely
be explained by character defects and bad morals. Consequently, state
legislatures and the U.S. Congress, and, through them, citizens, have
responded, in part, to the perception of increasing violence by adopting
punitive laws that increase the penalties for many crimes. As discussed
above, as of 2008, the United States had the highest rate of
incarceration in the entire world: 2.3 million Americans were
imprisoned, which amounted to one in 100 adults. Four decades earlier,
in 1970, there were fewer than 200 thousand inmates in state and federal
prisons.
Another response to concerns about crime and
violence has been for citizens to move, often in search of what are
perceived to be better, safer communities with more economic
opportunities. In fact, the data shows that, prior to 2008, one in five
Americans moved each year. Many of the communities into which these
people moved lack basic public services. This phenomenon has inspired a
host of "privatized" services, many of which were historically provided
by local governments through taxpayer funds.
Naomi Klein of The Nation
magazine ("Rapture 911: Disaster Response For The Chosen," November
19,2007) has reported that the American International Insurance Group
(AIG)--which in September of 2008 was the recipient of an $85 billion
dollar bailout by the U.S. Treasury, courtesy of the American
taxpayers--provided a special service to the company's Private Client
Group known as Firebreak Spray Systems: these wealthy clients, many of
whom lived in Southern California, paid an average of $19,000 to have
their homes sprayed with fire retardant; during the wildfire season,
"mobile units"--in imitation red fire trucks--race around hot spots to
extinguish only the fires which threaten to engulf their clients' homes.
All others are on their own.
The constant movement of
population has also contributed to an ever-increasing suburban sprawl
and, since the 1980s, to the emergence of walled, gated communities. In
purpose if not appearance, these gated communities are reminiscent of
the response of the European population to the collapse of the Roman
Empire--castles, moats and walled cities. By 1997, it was estimated that
there were "as many as twenty thousand gated communities, with more than
three million units."
Mobility and gated communities
compound, rather than solve, the problems of social isolation and
lawlessness. As Harvard University political scientist Robert Putnam has
documented in his book Bowling Alone, individuals who move
frequently have lower rates of participation in the communities in which
they reside. Further, the acceptance of increased mobility as a virtue
has, not surprisingly, spawned its own antithesis: anonymous mobility
enables criminals and sociopaths to troll the interstate highway system
in search of victims and prey.
Crime and mobility,
because each represents acts of individual behavior which carry with
them attendant anti-social consequences, represent two sides of the same
coin. So long as the primacy of the individual is extolled and
glamorized, Locke's political philosophy will continue to hold Americans
in its vice-like grip, while the ability of America's political system
to devise rational, public solutions to the issues of crime, violence,
suburban sprawl and ecological disaster becomes increasingly
problematic.
In his now-famous essay, The Tragedy of the Commons, the ecologist Garrett Hardin commented
upon the deleterious effects which the pursuit of unbridled
self-interest has upon the public interest. To Hardin, the Commons was a
metaphor for the Earth and its environment, which belongs to all, and
for which each of us has a special, collective obligation to protect;
and he warned that it cannot withstand the incremental effects of
individual anti-social acts.
Hardin's prophetic essay underscores the difficulties of overcoming personal predilections and self-interest, even where important public concerns are at stake. The prognosis for a political culture such as the United States in which citizens have been acculturated to think only in terms of "me, myself, and I" suggests the dangers about which Hardin warned will only worsen unless the mindset of the population changes and begins to think in terms of the first person plural, "We."
