Wilmot Understands Our Gun Obsession

Johnny Depp as John Wilmot in “The Libertine”

This past week I taught John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester’s poem “Satyr against Reason and Mankind”(1674) and came across a reminder of why meaningful gun control legislation is going to be difficult to pass in the United States, even after Tucson and Aurora and Sandy Hook. The culprit doesn’t surprise us—it’s fear—but Wilmot helps us understand why through memorable couplets.

To set up how human beings operate, he points out first how perverse we are. Unlike other animals, we kill out of “wantonness”—which is one way of describing Jared Loughner, James Holmes, Adam Lanza and many of the other serial killers. With these examples before us, it’s hard to argue with Wilmot that humans are worse than beasts:

Be judge yourself, I’ll bring it to the test:

Which is the basest creature, man or beast?

Birds feed on birds, beasts on each other prey,

But savage man alone does man betray.
Pressed by necessity, they kill for food;

Man undoes man to do himself no good.

With teeth and claws by nature armed, they hunt

Nature’s allowance, to supply their want.

But man, with smiles, embraces, friendship, praise,
Inhumanly his fellow’s life betrays;

With voluntary pains works his distress,

Not through necessity, but wantonness.

Wilmot then points to the very fear that that the NRA exploits: we fear guns and so we arm ourself with more guns. Thus our fears build on themselves in a vicious circle as we successively betray the safety that is in our best interests:

   For hunger or for love they [animals] fight and tear,

Whilst wretched man is still in arms for fear.
For fear he arms, and is of arms afraid,

From fear, to fear successively betrayed . . .

Wilmot’s poem draws heavily on both the grim pragmatist Thomas Hobbes and the sophisticated cynic Francois de La Rochefoucauld as he notes that something as base as fear underlies even our noblest actions. This alerts us to another dimension of gun extremists: if they think they’re valiant heroes standing up to tyrannical oppression as they reject all attempts at reasonable compromise, it’s because they’ve found a way to dress up their basic fear:

Base fear, the source whence his best passions came:

His boasted honor, and his dear-bought fame;

The lust of power, to which he’s such a slave,
And for the which alone he dares be brave . . .
The good he acts, the ill he does endure,
‘Tis all from fear, to make himself secure.

Merely for safety, after fame we thirst,

For all men would be cowards if they durst.

Gun extremists have never forgiven Obama for calling them out for their fear, which he did while campaigning in the 20008 Pennsylvania primary. Trying to explain the antagonism that certain voters had for him, he cited economic insecurity as the reason that “they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment.”

Unfortunately, the statement sounded like it was coming from a professorial know-it-all. Or, for that matter, from Rochester’s lofty satiric stance.

That doesn’t mean Obama was wrong.