Food for thought

An entertainingly provocative argument in How martial a country should the United States be? #guncontrol by Tyler Cowen.

Here's the core of the argument:

Chris Blattman cites a recent estimate that Americans own 42% of the civilian guns in the world.

You’ll also see estimates that America accounts for about half of the world’s defense spending. I believe those numbers are a misuse of purchasing power parity comparisons, but with proper adjustments it is not implausible to believe that America accounts for…about 42% of the defense spending. Or thereabouts.

I see those two numbers, and their rough similarity, as the most neglected fact in current debates about gun control.

I see many people who want to lower or perhaps raise those numbers, but I don’t see enough people analyzing the two as an integrated whole.

I don’t myself so often ask “should Americans have fewer guns?”, as that begs the question of how one might ever get there, which indeed has proven daunting by all accounts. But I do often ask myself “should America be a less martial country in in its ideological orientation?”

Note that the parts of the country with the most guns, namely the South, are especially prominent in the military and support for the military.

More importantly, if America is going to be the world’s policeman, on some scale or another, that has to be backed by a supportive culture among the citizenry. And that culture is not going to be “Hans Morgenthau’s foreign policy realism,” or “George Kennan’s Letter X,” or even Clausewitz’s treatise On War. Believe it or not, those are too intellectual for the American public. And so it must be backed by…a fairly martial culture amongst the American citizenry. And that probably will mean a fairly high level of gun ownership and a fairly high degree of skepticism about gun control.

If you think America can sustain its foreign policy interventionism, or threat of such, without a fairly martial culture at home, by all means make your case. But I am skeptical. I think it is far more likely that if you brought about gun control, and the cultural preconditions for successful gun control, America’s world role would fundamentally change and America’s would no longer play a global policeman role, for better or worse.

Wonderful observation. Is the logical argument true? I have no idea, but Cowen puts out a reasonable position that warrants debate and discussion. I argue all the time that we provide simplistic cause-and-effect predicated solutions to issues that arise out of complex, dynamic, non-linear, unstable systems and then are surprised when there are unintended consequences.

I don't want to argue Cowen's case (see the comments to his article for a start on that front). But one of the first steps is always to consider the inverse. Cowen argue's that a muscular global policy requires a domestic martial culture. (And as an aside, what is the linkage between honor culture and martial culture?) Are there any countries that have had muscular global policies but pacifistic domestic cultures? I suspect Cowen's argument has to be restricted to representative democracies as opposed to autocracies or single party dictatorships such as the Soviet Union, Russia, and China. None come to mind.

Britain might be an interesting historical example where you had a probably pacifistic domestic culture in England but joined at the hip with martial cultures out of Scotland and Ireland. It is notable how prevalent Scots and Irish were in the far reaches of the British Empire and even in its army today.

I suspect that Cowen's hypothesis would not stand up to hard scrutiny but the value is in the discipline of the argument not in the outcome of the argument.