The Washington Post has several excellent articles, this morning, about the Virginia Tech shootings. One, in particular, caught my attention.
Campus Shutdown Never Considered
What I'm becoming impressed about in the Post's reporting is the same quality that has me drawn to their opinion page: they engage the debate. The Post definitely has a liberal bias, but it also has an enormous array of columnists with a diverse array of ideological orientations and opinions.
And, these days, many of its journalist, in my experience, are doing the same thing with its reporting of fact: they are engaging the debate. There are far too many one-sided attempts to portray reporting from a particular viewpoint as objective fact. That much Fox News has right. Pretending that your reporting is fact when it clearly represents a particular viewpoint is dishonest. Much better to just acknowledge that you have a particular point of view and engage the debate. And the Post articles I've been reading have been doing one better than that. They have been engaging the debate inside their articles, openly considering different points of view. It is refreshing and important to see that kind of open debate, thought, and engagement animate our public discussion.
It is sad to watch the campus police for Virginia Tech get grilled about their decisions when they, clearly would have done anything to stop these murders had they known what was going to happen, as we all would have done in their shoes. They are right that a campus lockdown could have very well trapped an angry Seung Hui Cho in a dorm or on campus (though they are also right that a lockdown would have been very difficult to impose on an entire campus, and Seung Hui Cho might have still roamed the campus, as well) and caused more carnage.
Campus lockdowns, metal dectectors, security cameras. These are all legitimate options to consider for future school security measures, for Virginia Tech and every school, none of which seem immune to this kind of mayhem. What is not constructive is hurt and angry and pained family members, school officials or self-righteous journalists, and activists always playing with hindsight and trying to find someone to blame. As Lionel Shriver, a novelist writing about school murders, puts it in his Post column, What the Killers Want:
"Even more than these gruesomely gratuitous incidents themselves, I have come to dread the campus shooting's ritual media aftermath -- a secondary wave of atrocity, all conducted under the guise of grief, soul-searching concern and an ostensible determination to ensure that no demented loner ever opens fire on his classmates again."
As Shriver and the Virginia Tech campus police both argue, it is fruitless and counterproductive and unfair to point fingers at people who are in good faith because we are saddened and in pain about what happened here. Looking forward and considering what we might do next is helpful and an important and legitimate discussion and debate to engage. But as with the endless 9/11 commissions and investigations and the myriad of efforts to look into how officials could have prevented a terrible tragedy that had already happened and could not be taken back, no matter how painful or horrific, recrimination serves as a hopelessly ineffective and counterproductive means of preventing tragedy.
When I think about it, it is likely the reason why humanity operated for bulk of its history in unreason and brutishness and repression. Because all we could see in front of us was our need to inflict pain on those who inflicted pain on us, or who we believed we could or should point fingers at for letting that pain happen. And if entire populations were repressed or kept mired in the self-fulfilling prophecy that such repression and violence and force created, then so be it. It was not until important religious figures like Martin Luther would argue for the fundamental rights of conscience and secular political thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Alexis DeToqueville, and John Stuart Mill would argue for thinking about government in terms of reason and what it could accomplish and not according to the mystical, self-perpetuating and illiberal terms that governments had operated previous to their conceptions that people began to imagine and embrace liberal futures which would prove to provide for their security and their needs far more substantially.
While Hobbes' Britain languished in sectarian civil war and thoughts of revenge and recrimination and regaining power, Hobbes was thinking about a world where reason rather than religion would justify and animate our thinking about governance.
And during moments like this one in Blackburg, Virginia there are those who languish in pain and recrimination and finger-pointing, and there are those who look forward to a constructive debate and discussion about what can be done to prevent this sort of thing and to substantially improve our capacity to avoid such tragedies.
Many things have occured to me as I've read so much of the coverage about Seung Hui Cho. It's not just that's he was a loner and harboring all sorts of repressed anger and grudges and hurt feelings and that his interest in violent video games may give us a clue into his mentality (I am definitely of the opinion that such features of our vast array of media are a reflection of internal mental states and cultural attitudes much more than causing them, if they have any causal influence at all; they do, however, give us insight into the mentality of individuals and a culture that is obsessed with violence or sex or whatever appetites people might have).
Lionel Shriver, the novelist in today's post, has some important observations. Such killers and their copy-cats often crave the fame and the media attention that they must receive from the media after such a tragedy if we are going to have any shot at preventing such tragedies in the future. They crave the attention. My experience with kids and personally is that such attention-seeking - which is endemic in our culure; kids like Seung Hui Cho just go to horrific ends to get it - is that it is both common and borne of our desire to be valued by others. As Shriver argues, it is also solipsistic, self-pitying, and self-centered. But it also may be reinforced by so many efforts that I believe we foolishly make to try to isolate and pressure and take down those who we want to let know that we do not value, or at least we don't value their actions.
Isolation and exclusion is a means of telling people, "You are not welcome." Pressure is a means of telling people, "You're behavior is not welcome." Often it is deserved. Often enough it is underserved. We certainly don't welcome into our homes someone who has just killed a member of our family. But neither should be exclude or pressure members of our family who are gay or who think differently than we do. But adopting attitudes and policies that are centered around how we use isolation, pressure, exclusion, and other forms of manipulation to enforce societal norms often overwhelms the already limited mental and emotional capacities of those we seek to control. It also often leads, much more tragically, in some ways, to treating people in good faith with suspicion and fear, out of our own fears of being hurt or burned.
Had we known that Seung Hui Cho would strike out like he did, I am sure that any of us would have advocated the need to isolate him and shut him down by any decent means necessary (I would hope that none of us would literally argue for Malcolm X's call for accomplishing our ends "by any means necessary," since doing so rationalizes a long litany of ugly and barbaric means of dealing with this kind of situation - who would advocate bombing Seung Hui Cho's dormitory, for instance? - as well as many less dramatic but still ugly and wrong-headed options). There is an important discussion that needs to take place in schools and universities about how metal dectectors, security cameras, lockdowns and the like can be used to keep people safe in such situations, and not cripple the freedom that make educations and schools such critical and necessary institutions in a liberal democracy.
But there is an equally important discussion about how people like Cho or Kleibold or Harris or any number of such people are treated leading up to their murderous rampages that can much more substantially impact their ugly and deadly ambitions.
The larger question than even the very important and practical question of security on school and university campuses and in the community at large - the Economist surprised me with this lead editorial lamenting what they call, "America's Tragedy," which they describe as American politicians' unwillingness to engage the gun debate and to enact stricter gun control (despite the fact that since 1996, 1 year previous to Britain's ban on handguns, Britain's violent crime rate has risen 69%, according to this 2005 article I read from the Lake County Record-Bee, during a similar period when America's violent crime rate was reaching record lows until 2005 and 2006, when America's crime rate spiked during a period of "get-tough" criminal justice) - is how do we treat people like Cho or Kleibold or Harris or whomever that leads them to act even in this self-pitying, self-centered, solipsistic, and clearly wrong and ugly way?
My experience with working with such kids is that they, like too many of us, really, often harbor a lot of pain and many petty grudges against peers and authority figures. And every time we give them more pain and petty opportunities for nursing grudges, it just accumulates in their hearts without the safety valve that forgiveness and letting go provides. They, like their cultural counterparts in more repressive parts of the world - Palestine, Iraq, North Korea, Cuba - are weak, emotionally and as a matter of deeper perspective and thought, in a world they often don't understand and make enough effort to try to understand, largely as a function of and as a self-fulfilling prophecy of pain and heartache, disrespect and insensitivity, emotional defenses and limited understanding, and made weaker still by their failure to forgive and let go of petty grudges and even more serious and real pain and tragedy that they have experienced in their lives.
It is no mistake that liberal democratic cultures are more forgiving and stronger in so many important ways that more repressive cultures take for weakness because of a failure of understanding and perspective on why their cultures suffer so many hardships. The liberal democratic world and those infused with its values more solidly are stronger because they forgive so easily. It is their relatively stronger ability to look forward, to stay engaged in a dynamic and forever evolving world, rather than get mired in grudges and hardships and pain from the past, that makes their cultures stronger in their capacity to deal, more effectively, with the many different challenges and problems that life offers us, strong or weak. And our democracy offers us more choices and checks on the capacity for any one group or ideology or individual political leader to dominate those most important questions for too long a period (although, it does often seem like groups or people or ideas dominate for too long, despite our best efforts, largely because too many of us still romanticize a time when one group or individual or idea will finally dominate and make all of our troubles go away).
And individuals like Seung Hui Cho, very much like violent or recriminatory cultures like Palestine, are weaker for their harbored pain and grudges and disgruntlement.
The last thing that we want to do in such situations, then, is give them more excuse to harbor pain and lash out at others. That doesn't mean we should appease them. We shouldn't. What it means is that we should make more effort to make such people and all people feel valued for what constructive, healthy, and sustaining contributions that they have to offer.
Right now, we are going through a period where even the most self-sacraficing and contributing members of our society - like those campus police - are being treated consistently and without wavering, with suspicion, force, and aggression. It is overwhelming even for the strongest among us. It is more especially so for the weakest and most pained and grudging among us.
The efforts to force society to shape up have, in great part, been well-meaning, I believe. I don't think they've been carried out by bad people, to say the least. To the contrary, those who believe in their capacity to force people to shape up (and I have, sadly, counted myself among them, at times) are some of the best people I know or have familiarity with.
They are not bad. They are mistaken, I believe. And failing to look more honestly at their failures. I count myself among that category as well, I believe. I am getting much better. I think many people are, these days.
Clearly, if any of us had known what Seung Hui Cho was going to do that day, we would or should have all been prepared to force Cho, if possible, to give up his weapon and his crusade. Those officers were clearly prepared to do so. They just had no idea what Cho was planning. None of us did.
But the saddest thing about this period of human history is that the world entire has been rationalizing its worst impulses - its weaker, more recriminatory, more cynical, more pained, more grudging, more self-sabatoging, more self and otherwise destructive impulses - which are the exact impulses that animate the weaker, more destructive, more violent, more repressed and repressive members of humanity. Our fear of such people - of school shooters and terrorists, of opposing political parties and their operatives and ideological counterparts, of despots and the repressive cultures that too often support them - has led us down a dark and tempting path of hoping to control and punish and force them to leave us unthreatened by their weaker, more destructive impulses. And contrary to all of our hopes for such a strategy, such efforts have, generally, led to greater ambitions on the part of those we fear to cause us destruction and suffering and pain.
Western religious culture refers to this tendency as living by the sword and dying by the sword. Do unto others as they would do unto you has a dark corollary, as it turns out. If we treat others with fear and suspicion and with ambitions to overpower them, they will often do the same. Even, and often especially, if they are too weak to do so for any sustained period of time.
And our weakness inspires the weaknesses of others. Mine too, as it turns out. All of us, as it turns out.
But the brilliance of the promise of liberal democratic values and society is that our growth comes not from the illusion that fighting weakness will make it go away (though clearly we must stop Al Queda's and Seung Hui Cho's of the world from committing their evil deeds). Our brilliance is in recognizing, better, that embracing our weakness, our weakest members, and especially our weakness and our pride in our belief in power and aggression to make our fears and our problems go away, forgiving ourselves that weakness, and learning from it, is where real strength lies.
Strength and progress does not lie in pretending that a weaker approach is a stronger one, despite consequences to the contrary. Progress lies in embracing our weakness, especially our pride, and taking more genuine responsibility for it as a matter of conscience rather than as a matter of fear. That was the point of more genuinely liberal and progressive authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter or Herman Melville and Billy Budd, or more genuine liberal leaders like Jesus, the Buddha, Mohatma Ghandi, Martin Luther King, or Desmond Tutu.
Their point was not that we would not sin, nor that we should sin, including and especially the sin of pride, violence and destructiveness, and the abuse of power.Their point was that individuals and communities would and do sin and cause harm and destruction to one another. Ghandi was fully aware and saddened by the destruction promised by Hindus and Muslims on one another following independence. King was aware and concerned about the destruction that blacks were threatening and would rain down upon their own communities, sadly, more than on whites, after his death. Desmond Tutu was anticipating such a reaction when he developed a truth and reconciliation commission in South Africa to ward off exactly that temptation by South Africa's majority black population, which has now become the template for truth and reconciliation efforts in war-torn areas of the world like Bosnia, East Timor, Iraq and elsewhere.
Their point was not that the sins of humanity, including its more destructive and violent impulses, would go away forever through forgiveness. And to the extent that they believed that forgiveness alone would stop such ugliness or any of the ugliness that we face in the world, today, they were wrong. Force is clearly necessary in as limited of circumstances as possible to prevent violence and destruction towards others.
Their point is that forgiveness is the essence of the only decent path forward. That vengance and destructiveness are our basest, weakest impulses betraying us. And that betrayal has unintended consequences. Seung Hui Cho may or may not have learned of those consequences as he shot himself dead after taking the lives of so many others. Al Queda is likely not learning that lesson as they exact their revenge on the American infidel.
Most people, though, do learn that lesson, I'm confident, given our largely progressive historical record.
Amidst all of the mess that humanity makes of this central fact of life, the only path forward, for individuals and for humanity, generally, is one of forgiveness and reflection and thought and conscience learning the lessons from our failures as much as celebrating our successes.
In Blacksburg, it means having a discussion about the future of school and campus security that both tries to deal with the practical ramifications of preventing this kind of rampage and learning to treat one another more compassionately and decently and teaching, as much as they will learn the lesson, people like Seung Hui Cho, to do the same. With others, but especially, with himself.
The most serious problem for people like Cho or Kleibold or Harris is not how they are treated by others, though this is certainly a place where we can and must improve our capacity to prevent these kinds of tragedies. The most serious problem they face is how they treat themselves, perpetually nursing, and holding on, and not giving adequate voice to their grudges and hurt and self-pity. And the most important place that we could start to effect change in this respect is to be better examples and to do a better job, ourselves, of treating ourselves better rather than perpetually nursing, holding onto, and not giving adequate voice to our own grudges and hurt and self-pity. And the most important way that we could make this more available to people is to stop making people afraid to do so, for fear of punishments that do more to repress problems and make them go unspoken rather than be given voice and an opporunity for resolution.
That is the central failure of repression. It causes more pain to people who need to have healthy and open avenues for expressing their present pain, and to more openly discuss even their most awful and ridiculous thoughts if they are to better and more consistently let the pain go, to engage discussions about how to deal with their problems better, and to take responsibility for their lives. And, sadly, repression undermines the ability of even the most constructive and thoughtful among us to engage such discussions to get at better solutions.
That is the failure of repression in the life of Seung Hui Cho. And it is the failure of repression in the land and culture of Palestine. They are one and the same. One at the individual level. One at that cultural level.
And the sad and tragic irony of the beginning of the 21st century is that we have begun this new century by rationalizing all of the worst, most destructive, most repressive impulses and ideas and governing philosophies of the 20th century and earlier human history out of our failure to come to terms with the failure of such destructiveness and repression to resolve so many of our problems, and our own illiberal logic from which they spring, and to, instead, very much keep those problems in place.
Our hope lies in embracing that weakness, and all of the weaknesses that we are subject to. Our hope and our future lies in accepting and forgiving our humanity so that we can be responsible for it and take more authentic steps forward.
I am very much susceptible to this weakness of fear and aggression and the temptations of power. And I and noone will move forward in this regard by rationalizing that weakness, or any of our weaknesses. I and everyone can only move forward by embracing it, forgiving it and more genuinely moving forward.
I've already seen that work far too thoroughly in my own life to easily dismiss it. Our challenge, now, is when, more than if, we will embrace that as a culture, and not just as individuals, and certainly not as passive observers waiting for prophets or martyrs to sacrafice themselves for us.
We need to decide if we are going to continue to take the path of Stalin and Hitler, Mao and Mussolini, Al Queda and Seung Hui Cho - the path of repression and vengeance and power - or the path of Hawthorne and Melville, Jesus and Buddha, Ghandi and King - the path of patient reason and forgiveness and genuine liberal progress. We need to decide if we are going to give into the pressures and temptations that terrorism and school violence and so many of our worst ills create to follow a reactive like path of repression and destructiveness. Or if we are going to embrace the risk and uncertainty and possibility and opportunity that freedom affords us to deal with problems more openly, honestly and thoughtfully and without a false pride that we have arrived at final answers that we have not.
Right now, we are taking the road of more aggression and force and repression. And perhaps that is best, if only to face its clear failure to resolve our problems.
But in its place we will need an understanding of the use of force and aggression that does not play to this false choice that we have created in these most recent debates about force or not. We will need a conception of force that creates a presumption about its use that assumes that we should use it as constructively as possible, which means as little as possible and only as much as necessary. We have been deferring to an idea of force and power without limits, in the most recent years. We are and will continue to discover that such limits are present whether we acknowledge them or not.
I do grow discouraged every day that I have to face another colleague or another administrator angrily or aggressively push or pressure me around this or that issue, and fail to listen to me when I make perfectly clear for them how counterproductive such efforts are and have been. My most profound hope is that such ugliness cannot possibly be sustained since they cannot sustain us. What they do is undermine and take for granted my trust in their good intentions despite their miserable results and, more important to me, their miserable treatment of me. It makes life less worth living, except in the knowledge that I can soon be out of their presence and engaged in more worthy or constructive efforts.
And this weekend very much reinforced for me that it is a calm reflection and discussion and exchange and civility and human decency that are now and forever the future of humanity, including how we thoughtfully engage matters of safety and security. I am quite tired of our more aggressive and forceful ways. It was nice to have a couple days off from people being nasty and mean and aggressive with me and to get more done by being nicer and more relaxed in my efforts to complete work.
I've decided that this is what I want most of all. In my relationships and friendships. In my work. In my off-time. I just want to spend as much time as possible with people who treat me decent even as we rigorously consider important questions or don't so rigorously consider less important questions. I'm tired of having people be dicks to me, all the time, not ever take responsibility for it. I'm tired of people being too weak, personally, intellectually, or otherwise, to acknowledge that their being a dick undermines mine and their goals, rather than facilitating either, since it leaves me dreading to communicate or discuss anything at all with them, important or not. And I am tired, in general, with everyone pretending like being dicks doesn't have anything to so many of the problems we face today, even though many of our problems seem to get worse the bigger dicks we are.
Maybe if it all isn't so repressed, we can see, better, why it doesn't work. I can only hope. Because all I want is to spend time with people, more, who understand this. Or at least understand to treat me better. I'm tired of being the subject of peoples' aggression and force rather than just having grown-up conversations with people. And what I am sure of is that more conversations like this one are not grown-up in ways that get us to solutions of our problems. And they drain all the energy out of me to tackle such problems in the meantime.
Love,
Ben
