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Malcolm Gladwell and Wendy Kaminer

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from: Wendy Kaminer

Schools, Guns and Charlton Heston

Posted Tuesday, June 9, 1998, at 5:35 PM ET

I was the worst math student I knew in high school. Sitting through calculus was especially humbling; it helped me understand what stupidity felt like. I always thought of my failure as intellectual, but I guess it was partly aesthetic. The beauty that mathematicians revel in was always inaccessible to me. But from algebra class on I do remember being both awed and discomfited by the sense that all the enigmatic numbers and formulas represented some cosmic order that, for me, would always be unknowable. It made me feel less free. Math made me anxious in a way that religion never did (maybe because it seemed irrefutable; there wasn't much to argue with.)

I like knowing that when I come up with a hypothesis - about culture, say, or politics or law - I don't have to measure it against any absolutes. It doesn't have to be entirely accurate or true to have value; it just has to be plausible, intriguing - and elegant. I'm not sure that it's only physicists and mathematicians who evaluate theories by their elegance. What drives social theory too is the desire to make sense of our messes.

Law is supposed to be elegant, although in practice it's a slob. But, ideally, the laws we create for society (as opposed to the ones we discover about the cosmos) are supposed to elicit fairness, to provide opportunities for justice. Of course, sometimes, law does the opposite and nature has to step in, speaking of today's papers and the death of General Abacha, the now late Nigerian dictator. According to the Times article he appears to have died of natural causes, though some ascribed his departure to divine intervention: "God is capable of wonderful things," one opposition political figure told the Times reporter.

It's always refreshing to hear people speak ill of the dead. I've never understood why it's okay to say nasty things about people when they're alive and apt to be bothered but not okay to trash them when they're dead.

How to restore democracy to Nigeria? New NRA president Charlton Heston would probably advise arming everyone. The NRA does harbor a fondness for the idea of revolution (or civil war), although it appeals rhetorically to people's fear of their neighbors (owning a gun supposedly protects you against crime) more than their fear of the government.

Actually, I have some sympathy for the NRA's position on the Second Amendment. It's a bit hypocritical for liberal civil libertarians to read the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendments as grants of individual rights - and assert that the Second Amendment only provides for the collective right to own a gun. Still, speaking ill of the living, Heston and other NRA leaders are even more selective in their reading of the Bill of Rights. Listening to them advocate a "tough" criminal justice system that would eliminate rights like bail and the presumption of innocence, you'd think that the Second Amendment somehow stands alone - that all we need and all we have is the right to own a gun. That's an elegant solution, I suppose, but not an especially pretty one.

the breakfast table
entries
123456789101112131415161718
from: Wendy Kaminer

Schools, Guns and Charlton Heston

Posted Tuesday, June 9, 1998, at 5:35 PM ET
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Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Wendy Kaminer is a fellow at Radcliffe College.
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