Blame the fireworks, not the hand that throws them. Those who want to ban firecrackers now follow this logic. This is of course cheap because it distracts from one’s own failure and the question. And then there’s the baseball bat thing.
Pick up a banana, dear reader. It can also be a carrot or any other oblong object. Now imagine that the thing in your hand is a firecracker that you just set off. The fuse burns and crackles. Now what are you going to do with this thing? If it doesn’t occur to you to toss the firecracker immediately into the nearest ambulance or through the open window of a patrol car, you were probably just as stunned by the pictures from New Year’s Eve in Berlin as I was. Voices are now being raised everywhere to ban the firecrackers. Because the fireworks are to blame, not the hand that throws them. Just as the knife is to blame, not the hand that guides it into bellies and throats. So also ban knives? And what about cars, trucks or ladders? Don’t laugh, because if you don’t want to see the hand that is at work, you also equate accident and negligence with crime.
But I don’t want to get polemical here or accuse the Senate of Berlin or any other left-wing German government of developing an almost obsessive desire for a ban. The bans are not the goal of this policy, but the sad consequence of it. But first, a little flashback.
The Lunar Module of Apollo11 had already completed a few orbits and was about to land in the Sea of Tranquility. It was July 20, 1969, when at 4:19 pm New York time the words “THEYRE ON THE MOON” flashed on the Yankee Stadium scoreboard.
The game was interrupted, prayers were murmured, the national anthem was played. The camera pans to the grandstands, where hundreds of fans are baseball bats in the air, which they received with their admission tickets. Because it was again „Bat Day“ and the Yankees included a real solid wood bat with every fully paid-up ticket if the visitor was accompanied by a child. This promotion has been going on since the 1950’s without incident.
Nika Uprising in Constantinople
On this day Incidentally, the Yankees won 3-2 against the Washington Senators. I know absolutely nothing about baseball, but I know enough about today’s rules for gatherings of large numbers of people and therefore think it impossible that the distribution of a few hundred to a thousand wooden baseball bats in a stadium would be possible today without producing results like those of the Nika Uprising in Constantinople in the year 532. 30,000 dead in the hippodrome alone back then.
Fans of the defeated “Senators” took their baseball bat gifts and went home peacefully on July 20, 1969, while fans of the Moroccan national team, for example, razed Brussels to the ground after the 2022 games in Qatar, whether they won or lost and “groups of young people” used the celebrations with fireworks in Berlin on New Year’s Eve to attack rescue workers and the police. In the USA, by the way, it is now recommended that if you are transporting a baseball bat in the car, you should also carry a catching glove. Just in case the suspicion has to be refuted during a police check that it is a weapon and you are on the way to or fleeing the scene of the crime or even want to attack the police. If both are on board, it probably serves the sport.
When did that tip? How did that tip? And what are the mechanisms at work here? You still have the imaginary burning firecracker from the beginning of the text in your hand, don’t you? Can we rest assured that you realize that you do not intend to harm anyone, that you understand the danger that pyrotechnics in your hands can pose, and that you will make sure that no one is where you throw them want? So you’re not going to drop it in a school mailbox, or in a group of people, nor in an open ambulance, are you? Of course you know that all this is forbidden. But you also know that you don’t do that. Nobody has to remind you. And even if you have already indulged a little too much in the Jägermeister on New Year’s Eve, you don’t have to have a police officer or a special task force standing behind you to prevent you from violating the applicable rules. You know neither the name of the law nor the wording of the corresponding paragraphs in which this is regulated.
Transaction costs continue to rise
The difference between the images from the Yankee Stadium in 1969 and those from Berlin 22/23 on New Year’s Eve or Cologne 15/16 on New Year’s Eve is the level of social transaction costs. Laws that by and large do not apply as a matter of course and “by themselves”, but have to be enforced, eventually no longer apply at all because the costs of enforcing them increase indefinitely. That’s why there are no longer any real baseball bats in the audience in US stadiums today. That is why bengalos and glass bottles are banned in soccer stadiums. That’s why there are sometimes degrading security checks at airports and why there are efforts to ban Germans from New Year’s Eve firecrackers. The bans are the result of failed policies. In particular – although not exclusively – integration and migration policy. And the bans are increasing without the trend being reversed: transaction costs continue to rise.
But now you have to slowly get rid of the firecracker in your hand. So you look around and see some other guys also holding firecrackers. Where will they throw? How well can you judge their intentions? Do you know if they can have faith? They could take refuge in politics and shout: “Merkel said that criminal offenses are forbidden here!” and hope for the best. Shouldn’t the others know, like you, not to throw firecrackers at people? Can you be sure it is? Do you have confidence? Who are the others? Do they tick like you? My theory is that every human being carries around a fixed set of prejudices. When the positive falter, they make way for the negative. And vice versa of course! Even if it is far more difficult because it has to be done more consciously.
The elephant in the room
Aminata Touré is Minister for Social Affairs, Youth, Family, Seniors, Integration and Equality in Schleswig-Holstein. “What an honor…” she tweeted on the occasion of her appointment at the end of June 2022. Apparently she liked the new office, maybe even the task. Berlin is not exactly part of Touré’s training, but the minister felt so annoyed by the debate after New Year’s Eve that she suggested the following “simple solution”:
“Of course we can now have stupid meta-debates about integration for 18 weeks, or we protect emergency services and the population with a ban on firecrackers. How hard can it be to find such a simple solution to a clear problem?”
Her honor has become a burden, because in view of the group of perpetrators 145 who have since been released “Party people” could come to the conclusion that something like this belongs less in the area of an interior minister than in the area of the integration minister, i.e. in the effort to reduce the social transaction costs between those who have been banging here for a long time and the easily flammable. However, Touré’s answer to the question of who is to blame here, the firecracker, or the hand that throws it, is: Forbid the firecrackers! This is of course cheap for her and her colleagues from the integration front, because it distracts from their own failures due to completely utopian ideas of integration and the question of who actually has to integrate into what.
A handful of angry men with a certain background should now be the reason to ban the New Year’s Eve fireworks. Apparently, some politicians think it’s more reasonable to spoil the fun of a large group than to get a smaller group to follow the rules. The fact that there is a good deal of racism in the form of lowered expectations is not without a certain tragedy, especially in the case of the proud “Person of Color” Aminata Touré.
A completely wrong idea of integration
Of course, politicians also do the calculation with the transaction costs. They just don’t think they should ideally be very low. If rules are observed “by themselves”, where is there room for shaping, taking and picking up politics? Of course you first increase the pressure where you don’t get a bloody nose and stop Karl, Karin and Kevin from the fireworks instead of calling Karim to order. And if politicians can tinker a few more laws, all the better!
The immaterial part of our commons, the set of traditional, uncontradicted rules of interaction and togetherness, is becoming smaller and smaller and, in the spirit of Aydan Özoğuz, is being renegotiated every day. That alone takes a lot of strength. The result is the alienation of the population from politics and the fragile rules that they are elected and appointed to uphold. The common basis of values is disappearing, also because politicians like Aminata Touré have a completely wrong idea of integration. They also see their clientele where there is no nosebleed, with Karl, Karin and Kevin, while Karim doesn’t even think about adapting. That certainly doesn’t apply across the board, but New Year’s Eve has shown that one can no longer speak of exceptions.
And so social transaction costs will continue to rise. How high they are now certainly varies from region to region. On a scale from zero (paradise) to one (open civil war), Berlin has probably come close to 0.8 on a trial basis. Only Hamburg was further ahead at the 2017 G20 summit. That is why it is now important to intensify the fight against climate change. And for more migration! And of course against the right! And be sure to vote red-green for Berlin in February!
And don’t throw away the firecracker in your hand. It’s actually just a banana.
This post first appeared on Roger Letsch’s blog Don’t worry.
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