Tuesday
There are few fallacies more toxic than the NRA’s mantra, “A good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun.” The fallacy was spectacularly exploded in Buffalo and Uvalde, where determined killers overwhelmed local law enforcement with their weapons of war—including the Uvalde killer, who at one point was shooting children while 17 armed cops stood in the hallway. But the mantra is also delivered in bad faith, ginning up fear and tapping into a wild west myth in order to sell guns. We saw Donald Trump invoking the myth when, after the Parkland shootings, he imagined himself running into gunfire to save students. Only fanatical Trump cultists can imagine that happening, and even for them it’s probably a stretch.
Bertolt Brecht provides a powerful counter to the mantra in his play Galileo. “Unhappy the land that needs heroes,” asserts the scientist late in the drama. Which is to say that, if we’re expecting heroic cops and gun enthusiasts to protect us from the epidemic of guns and loose regulations, then we are indeed screwed.
Galileo’s insight is hard won. Under the threat of torture, he has recanted his revolutionary discovery of Jupiter’s moons, thereby disillusioning some of his supporters. These want him to become a martyr to scientific truth, regardless of personal cost. It’s their version of wanting “good men” who, brandishing their guns, will always run towards the killer. (In this fantasy, these good men are always cool under fire, are always skilled marksmen, and never hit innocent bystanders.)
Here are Galileo’s followers and admirers praying that he will stay true to his beliefs and refuse to recant. The bell is supposed to ring at 5 if he recants:
Federzoni: Five o’clock is one minute.
Andrea: Listen all of you, they are murdering the ruth.
[He stops up his ears with his fingers. The two other pupils do the same….Nothing happens No bell sounds.]
Federzoni: No. No bell. It is three minutes after.
Little Monk: He hasn’t.
Andrea: He held true. It is all right, it is all right.
Little Monk: He did not recant.
Federzoni: No
[They embrace each other, they are delirious with joy.]
Andrea: So force cannot accomplish everything. What has been seen can’t be unseen. Man is constant in the face of death.
Federzoni: June 22, 1633: dawn of the age of reason. I wouldn’t have wanted to go on living if he had recanted.
Little Monk: I didn’t say anything, but I was in agony. O ye of little faith!.
Adea: I was sure.
Federzoni: It would have turned our morning to night.
Andrea: It would have been as if the mountain had turned to water….Beaten humanity can lift its head. A man has stood up and said No.[At this moment the bell of Saint Marcus begins to toll.]
Shortly afterwards they hear the town crier calling,
I, Galileo Galilei, Teacher of Mathematics and Physics, do hereby publicly forswear this teaching with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith and detest and curse this and all other errors nd heresies repugnant to the Holy Scriptures
When Galeleo emerges, his followers first turn their backs before Andrea confronts him:
Andrea (in the door): “Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.”
Galileo: No, Andrea: “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.”
Everyone is angry at the Uvalde cops at the moment, but the right is particularly incensed because of how their lack of heroism makes NRA types look particularly bad. At first the authorities tried to make the facts fit their preferred narrative. They told us that cops engaged the killer and then that they breached the door and shot him. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, meanwhile, told us it could have been much worse. Only later did we learn that the cops hadn’t in fact engaged the killer and that they stood around for 45 minutes until someone found a key and unlocked the door. Abbott complained bitterly that he had been misled by the cops, but everyone was just giving him the narrative he wanted.
In Galileo, we see how powerful a preferred narrative can be. Several years after Galileo recants, he gives Andrea a copy of his Discourses to smuggle out. As the work will revolutionize science, Andrea revises his narrative: Galileo is a hero after all! Galileo, however, won’t allow him to hold on to his illusion:
Andrea: You gained time to write a book that only you could write. Had you burned at the stake in a blaze of glory they would have won.
Galileo: They have won. And there is no such thing as a scientific work that only one man can write.
Andrea: Then why did you recant, tell me that!
Galileo: I recanted because I was afraid of physical pain.
Andrea: No!
Galileo: They showed me the instruments.
Andrea: It was not a plan?
Galileo: It was not.
[Pause]
Andre: But you have contributed. Science has only one commandment: contribution. And you have contributed more than any man for a hundred years.
Galileo: Have I? Then welcome to my gutter, dear colleague in science and brother in treason: I sold out, you are a buyer. The first sight of the book! His mouth watered and his scoldings were drowned. Blessed be our bargaining, whitewashing, death-fearing community!
Brecht’s brilliance lies in his showing us how our preferred narratives win out over actual facts. In Andrea’s fantasy vision, heroic science wins out over a world of superstition, regardless of Galileo’s professed motives. In the NRA’s fantasy vision, a good man with a gun wins out over a bad man with a gun. In the world of facts, scientists and gunslingers alike are fallible, and the latter won’t save us in a state like Texas, which is inundated by weapons of war that anyone over 18 can buy, no questions asked.
Yes, unhappy indeed is the country where the only solution put forward by one of the two major parties is for us to rely on gun-toting heroes.