I know how much progressives love language. I share that love of language. It’s too bad that progressives don’t use it as effectively as conservatives. Linguist George Lakoff says that the concept of direct causation is built into our grammar, either syntactically or morphologically. Direct causation works like this: Cause => Effect. The cause is the antecedent, the effect is the consequent; so if the cause happens, then the effect follows. The assumption is that the world is made up of linear systems where effects regularly follow from effects, thus from the presence of a causal event we can predict the realization of an effect event.
I know how much progressives love language. I share that love of language. It’s too bad that progressives don’t use it as effectively as conservatives. Linguist George Lakoff says that the concept of direct causation is built into our grammar, either syntactically or morphologically. Direct causation works like this: Cause => Effect. The cause is the antecedent, the effect is the consequent; so if the cause happens, then the effect follows. The assumption is that the world is made up of linear systems where effects regularly follow from effects, thus from the presence of a causal event we can predict the realization of an effect event.
While assuming that causes precede their effects is probably one of the safest logical assumptions that we could make, assuming that causality works like a grammatical hypothetical does not hold over all phenomena. This is really a problem when explaining climate change. Anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming is happening. Global warming is occurring because as the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere increase the heat energy of the atmosphere increases and warms the surface of the earth. As the surface of the earth warms the bodies of water warm and more water evaporates into the clouds. As the amount of water that evaporates increases the amount of rainfall increases. As the amount of water vapor and moisture in the atmosphere increases, the process known as condensation occurs, where water vapor changes its physical state from gaseous to liquid water. As the upper atmosphere gets moistened, there is natural positive feedback, where a physical change causes more of the same kind of physical change. The more moisture in the upper atmosphere, the more radiation from the earth surface is blocked from leaving the surface of the earth, and thus the warmer the earth gets, and so on and so on. From there, the warmer earth melts the polar ice caps, which reflect radiation energy from space in the form of heat and light. And the less heat and light that is reflected from the earth’s surface by melting polar ice caps the more heat is absorbed in the upper atmosphere, the more the earth tends to warm, and thus the more the polar ice caps melt, and so on and so on.
Now this is tough to explain. It’s an explanation that appeals to something that is non-intuitive, namely systemic causation that occurs indirectly through multiple intermediate causal mechanisms and that experiences feedback effects through a positive feedback loop along the way. It is literally complex, in the sense that it is hard to make direct predictions because of the loopy causation and because the causal mechanisms through which implementation is achieved are not like our basic causal model: Cause => Effect. We cannot appeal to a primitive model of direct causation in arguing for the existence of anthropogenic climate change and the need for policy solutions. And we are getting desperate for policy solutions because, as the ocean temperature rises the methane sheets under the oceans start to release methane. Methane has one atom of carbon, but is a far more potent greenhouse gas than mere CO2.
Conservatives can negate all of this by appealing to direct causation. They can say things like “a global warming protest was snowed out by a massive winter storm; so much for global warming” (http://www.foxnews.com/...). It’s that simple: the amount of cold and snow on the East Coast in one winter shows the globe isn’t warming. If there is more cold and snow in some place, then global warming isn’t happening in that place. But global warming-induced heat and evaporation in the Pacific may have caused that heavy winter storm on the East Coast—but again, we have to appeal to systemic causation to make that effect. And in a media environment intensely constrained by concision, negating a simple, direct action explanation with a loopy, complex explanation is very difficult. Our framework of earth views the earth as an integrated living system with layers of sub-systems that interact in unpredictable ways. The conservative model of the earth is as a set of isolated, disjoint systems which do not operate through any means but local direct action. Such a model produces explanations via simple direct causation, and this appeals to our own intuitive and primitive model causality.
So, what does all of this have to do with gun control? If you inquire of progressives what causes gun violence, they tend to respond that gun violence is caused by people with guns. The policy solution follows as a simple corollary: if you want to reduce the frequency of gun violence, then reduce the frequency of people with guns. And if you want to reduce the frequency of people with guns, then reduce the amount of guns available to people. That’s pretty straightforward.
If you inquire of conservatives what causes gun violence, they are going to appeal to systemic causation: gun violence is caused by diversity in society (thank you for that, Charlton Heston), bad neighborhoods, drugs, gangs, mental illness, music, and so on and so on. Conservatives make the case that gun violence has systemic causes, and thus that reducing the frequency of people with guns is an insufficient solution. Conservatives bear the burden of explaining the systemic causal mechanisms of gun violence in our society. They have to appeal to multifactorial causality from social, material, and cultural influences. And, while the incidence of gun violence goes up, it is hard to predict when this these multifactorial causes are going to conspire to produce an incident of gun violence, so the effect of gun violence is probabilistic in this model of the explanation of gun violence—which only adds to the complexity.
Conservatives stumble over this complex explanation, especially as they deal with the added complexity of trying to localize high-frequency gun violence in minority communities without coming across as racist. Even if they succeed in so doing, they come across as blithe and utterly insouciant as they attempt to explain how violence in minority communities is driven by the internal dynamics of the community and not the frequency of easy access to guns.
Reducing gun violence by gun control starts to sound like a simple, common sense policy solution to a serious problem. If we want to negate the conservative framework for explaining gun violence, we can simply appeal to the basic model of causality by making an argument that conforms to the structure of it. The cause of gun violence is people with guns. If we block access to guns we effectively block the causal mechanism. Any barrier to the frequency of guns in the general population is potentially effective at reducing the frequency of gun violence. Guns aren’t for freedom, guns are for killing people. So if we want fewer killings, we make it so there are fewer guns. The model is built into the grammar of our language, and that’s where the advantage lies. This is a big advantage, and it is a card that progressives need to play over and over and over…