Body Parts

America is historically a nation of politically displaced peoples who have celebrated mass killing their oppressors; that culture has consequences.

Since the eighteenth century, America has been filled with politically displaced peoples who, defeated in their home nations, have in exile supported and celebrated killing their oppressors in their home states. This political ferment has generated a broad cultural strain romanticizing and justifying political mass killing. I would argue that this cultural strain long ago seeped out of its category boundaries to glorify mass killing in general that can be justified somehow, if not necessarily to resist political oppression, then to resist any kind of oppression. Extension of cultural categories beyond their logical definition is especially seductive for disoriented or disturbed minds; in those broken prisms, logical fractures into the psychological. This cultural theme is hardly the entire extent of American cultural values, and countervailing values exist; but it is a real component of them, waiting for its potential to be released.

Even the American colonials who revolted against England can be seen in the light of this tradition. The 2nd amendment right to bear arms itself originated in colonial resistance to British oppression. To prevent the colonials from arming, the British ordered the confiscation of all firearms around Boston. This was a traditional British tactic to thwart rebellion. After the Jacobite rebellions in Scotland and Ireland, England confiscated all the native populations' weaponry. It was to prevent such disarmament and to preserve the ability of the formerly colonial citizenry forcibly to resist governmental oppression, that is, to obtain or to preserve liberty, that the 2nd amendment's right to bear arms was added to the Constitution.

The French Revolution was central to the ideological formation of the nation's first political party system. The Revolution, which destroyed the monarchy and aristocracy in the name of the people, added ideology as well as vocabulary to the tradition of resistance to oppression. Jefferson supported the French Revolution (though he frowned upon mass mobs in cities while living there). He spoke favorably of armed rebellion and the bloodshed it brought to defend liberty.

Before the Civil War, Scots and Irish immigration to the US dispersed throughout America a huge population of persons who had resisted the English. They settled especially in the Appalachian Mountains  and other frontier areas, where they, as rural, farming people, felt comfortable and knew how to make a living. Their warrior traditions and legendary opposition to English government were ingrained in regional cultures.

It is worth observing here that the popular expression of gun culture is simply an appropriation and expression of the pre-existing gun culture of the aristocracies of England, Germany, France, Russia, and other originating countries of America's displaced peoples. In monarchies, the military officer class were drawn from the aristocracy who owned most of the land and were tied to the crown. Guns were expensive and only the land-owning aristocrats could afford them. Guns were used to suppress rebellion and enforce rent laws on peasants. It was natural, not only that former peasants would take up firearms as effective weapons, but also adopt the values of the aristocrats' gun culture.

We don't ordinarily think of the frontier wars with the American Indians as political wars, but of course they were. The expansion of the frontier Westward, establishment of territories, and the organization of the territories as states was a political as well as governmental process. The political struggle over expansion of slavery is proof of the political character of American state formation. So the justification of mass killing of native Americans, appropriation of their lands, their evacuation further West, the whole troubled history of nation formation and native destruction, is part and parcel of the American culture of celebrating political mass killings. It was only the great romanticization of the native American at the end of the nineteenth century, when they had ceased to be a military threat, that led to the cultural amnesia we experience today regarding the political context of their mass killing.

The slavery issue before and during the Civil war also stimulated and hardened the culture of justifiable mass political killing. Slave planter resistance to abolitionism generated new content for this culture. After the slave rebellions identified with Toussaint L'Ouverture (Haiti 1791), Vesey (South Carolina, 1822), and Turner (Virginia, 1831), the culture of the American slave South was filled with the justifiability of mass killings, in the process of suppressing rebellion, to enforce racial segregation, overlaying political and economic rationalization (maintaining planter power) with ideology. After the civil war, this racist ideology supported the opposition of the KKK to Reconstruction of Southern social relations.

It took a long time for the former Black slaves to obtain a similar culture (probably subculture is a more accurate descriptive) celebrating killing of oppressors, but it certainly  developed in the 1960s with the Black Power movement. The Left, particularly, justified this ideology as an explanation of the Black "ghetto" riots in the 1960s, which were typed as "uprisings" against oppression: Los Angeles Watts riot ("Rebellion"), 1965, 6 days, 34 deaths, 3438 arrests; Detroit riot, 1967, 5 days, 43 dead, 467 injuries, 7200 arrests; Chicago riots, 1968, 39 dead; Los Angeles riots ("Rodney King riots"), 1992, 6 days, 53 dead, 2000+ injured, over 10,000 persons arrested (1, 2, 3, 4).

Marxist revolutionary tradition has been since the late 19th century a fertile ground for the romanticization of political mass murder in the name of destroying the capitalist oppressors of the working class. The use of mass bombings, armed combat, assassination, purges, extermination, of internal and external opposition are now widely understood to be product of the long march to totalitarian rule for the purpose of imposing socialism and communism. The US experienced some of these violent outbursts, as with the bombings associated with unionization (the Los Angeles Times bombing of 1910 killed 20 persons, the Wall Street bombing of 1920 killed 38 persons).

Opposition to the Vietnam War generated justification for killing politicians and police and the celebration of killings involved in native uprisings abroad against European colonial powers. William Ayers, Marxist and Communist, celebrated on the Left as an educational theorist and a friend of President Obama and his wife when they lived in Chicago, "participated in the bombings of New York City Police Department headquarters in 1970, the United States Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972" (*). Bombs are always a popular option for mass killing, whether successful or not.

The history of terror bombings since the 1960s, in the US and elsewhere, conducted in the name of decolonialization, or anti-imperialism, or anti-semitism, or promotion of Islam is filled with blast and blood. While it is popular since 9/11 to decry such terror mass murders, it is also true that for fifty years such terror mass murder has been accepted or justified or variously celebrated in the US by a subterranean culture of protest.

Of course, popular culture has been infected with celebration of mass murder and cold-blooded killing. "Bonnie and Clyde" glorification of murder, if not celebration, replete with harshly, intensely, realistic depiction of murder, but without empathic depiction of suffering of victims, has been a staple of movies, video games, and comics. But seldom have these portrayals been without a nod to rebellion against oppression. We see such glorification in the theatrical depiction of organized crime, neighborhood gangs, and cowboys.

The claim that sexual frustration caused by repression of sexual expression leads to violence was hallmark of Beatnik literatuare and has also been a favorite of Hollywood in the past two generations. The implication of the claim is that sexual repression is a technique of social oppression by the ruling classes.  My point in the discussion above is that these popular theatrical genres are but manifestations of a deeper, more historical, often more political tradition that looks sympathetically upon mass murder.

The difficulty in keeping a category like mass political murder tightly defined is that in total war, including total social war between classes, or races, or religions, or castes, or ethnicities, murder in the name of liberty against oppression is loose, porous, and easily justifies mass murder on other grounds. Or in moments of glory, or in moments of hubris, on no justifiable grounds at all. During the second world war, the line between combat killing and killing noncombatant civilians disappeared when civilians went to work in the munitions factories. Similarly, total social war justifies killing of children of oppressors, because they will grow up to continue the oppression their parents perpetrated with the social, legal, and political power their parents bequeathed to them. Children of oppressors are born guilty. Killing children is not a new phenomenon.

The school mass killings, workplace mass killings, mass killings of upper class families in their homes (see, Manson murders and attempted murders of Sharon Tate, et. al. [*]), post office mass killings, mass killings at theaters and malls, mass killings in urban "uprisings" are not outside this deeply ingrained American culture. Culture seldom stays confined to tight categories, but spreads to new unrelated situations.

We are not going to stop these mass killings, against innocent shoppers, or innocent co-workers, or innocent movie-goers, or innocent school children, by banning guns, or expanding government authority to new areas of our lives, such as mental health. Indeed, such policies, such politics of governmental intrusion, are the fuel that feeds the historical American culture of justifiable mass killing.

If all the guns are confiscated, if the 2nd amendment were amended to prohibit private possession of firearms, then agents of mass murder would just turn to bombings. Bombings are already an intrinsic feature of the culture of rebellion against oppression. It takes only patience, hiding of explosive materials, and a modicum of intelligence to assemble ingredients to make a bomb and deliver it to a school. The Oklahoma city blast of April 1995 "claimed 168 lives, including 19 children under the age of 6, and injured more than 680 people. The blast destroyed or damaged 324 buildings within a sixteen-block radius, destroyed or burned 86 cars, and shattered glass in 258 nearby buildings."(*)

If we confiscate all bomb making materials, confiscate all library books and close the Internet, agents of mass murder would turn to mass poisoning. Jim Jones managed to murder 914 persons at Jonestown in 1978.(*) Jones' victims included 200 children. How easy would be free Kool-Aid at school soccer games?

It's not the tools of mass killing that need confiscating. It is America's political culture that justifies mass killing that needs reforming.

America has a historical culture of mass violence, but not because of the presence of guns. America has a mass of guns, because of the presence of a culture of mass violence. It is the culture, not the guns, that instills the value of killing.

What, we ask, might changing such a cultural pathology involve? How could such a change be defined that does not give, in the name of security, legitimacy to a creeping totalitarianism of American social life?

 

Revised December 23, 24, 25, 2012, January 7, 2013.

 

The Contexts of the Sandy Hook Elementary School Massacre

It is difficult even to think about this massacre. I have no calloused soul and fill easily with grief. I am surprised nonetheless with the rapidity and vigor with which the gun control debate has erupted after the massacre. Are people not willing to think and engage others before they voice opinions on what might or should be done, if anything, after the murders? Alas, it's ideology surging to the fore.

I would like to suggest several ideas about the contexts of the massacres. My suggestions are based on the notion of overdetermination, familiar to social philosophers. Overdetermination is the idea (a hypothesis, really) that many social phenomena, including individual behavior that is socially determined, are the product of multiple, sometimes contradictory, causes (in the scientific sense of causality).

We are unlikely to find a single determinative social causality that produces non-political mass murders in America. The misguided search for such causality is result of a legislative drive, the effort to write and enact laws that will regulate the social phenomenon. This legislative framework almost certainly will obscure, rather than reveal, the underlying social forces and influences that produce massacres, such as those which have shaken our emotions in the past decades.

In the spirit that delineating overdetermination is going to be a more helpful approach to understanding, I offer the following suggestions.

1. School massacres and other nonpolitical mass shootings by individuals (distinguished from law enforcement shootings), exist in a spectrum of violence ranging from nonlethal assault to attempted murder to successful murder to mass murder. Individuals who are candidates for one kind or scale of violence are capable of committing other kinds of violence on greater scales. It is a hypothetical issue whether they would be likely to commit violence close in quality to a kind of violence they have already committed, but there is no prohibition in them against their committing other kinds of violence.

We need, therefore, to understand the sources and influences that produce violence all along the spectrum, not just mass murder, in order to understand mass murder.

2. When we look at the full spectrum of violence, we note that most physical criminal violence is committed by young men. Most attempted and successful murders, most felony battery, most gang violence, are committed by young men. There are racial characteristics to the murder phenomenon, with young black men committing a disproportionate percentage of murders, and young white men committing a disproportionate percentage of mass murders. I have addressed this issue before after the James Holmes' murders in a theater: young males are a social problem, in ways that young women are not.*

How do we understand the problem of violence among young men? There are several causative chains research about which have been and would continue to be enlightening:

• the absence of older men to dominate and control the expression of violence by younger men (e.g. absence of fathers or effective fathering in lives of young men);
• the role of testosterone in triggering behavior, especially because testosterone can be raised quickly by social situations and excitement;
• the abolition of universal military service for men, which deprives men of a strict authority structure within which to emerge from adolescence into adulthood;
• the persistent high unemployment rate among young men;
• increasing social tolerance towards petty crime and deviance committed by young men, inoculating the conscience of young men against the notion of absolute prohibition against criminal and violent behaviors;
• cultural traditions with legacies of male violence - some immigrant groups to America, such as Irish and Scots, have historic traditions of rebellion against a colonial state, which bequeaths legacies of the honorableness of violence opposition - this is the real source of romanticization of outlawry - computer shooting games are unlikely to have been nearly as influential;
• political traditions that justify (men) killing oppressors - justification can be generalized outside its political purpose, example, the romanticization of the Black Panthers in the 1960s and 1970s;
• inter-generational transmission of gang cultures;
• mental illness exists in a spectrum of disorder, seldom exists by itself separate from social situations and social influences, and seldom by itself explains specific behaviors;
• lack of familiarity with, lack of education about, and lack of supervised use of guns for personal protection and hunting - it could be argued that understanding guns and their use and their power would help people not to use them against other persons.

3. Banning and confiscating assault weapons will not prevent mass murders. The murderers can use bombs, with which they could kill more persons more quickly.  The Oklahoma city blast of April 1995 "claimed 168 lives, including 19 children under the age of 6, and injured more than 680 people. The blast destroyed or damaged 324 buildings within a sixteen-block radius, destroyed or burned 86 cars, and shattered glass in 258 nearby buildings."

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* The objection might be raised that young women are also implicated in violence through participation in abortion. Late term abortions particularly raise for many persons the issue of how we conceptualize destruction of the fetus or baby that might be able to survive outside the womb with intensive medical care. This issue is complicated, however, because in my opinion as many as 75% of abortions are performed under the severe influence of men who do not want the woman to have the baby.

I Was Wrong about Spielberg's "Lincoln"

I convinced myself that the Lincoln movie would not address two central aspects of Lincoln's political career and of the abolitionist movement: that Lincoln was a Republican of the same Republican party today, and that much of abolitionism was motivated by revivalist Christianity. I was wrong on the first assumption and correct on the second. Party politics was central to the movie - bravo to Tony Kushner. But the omission of the Christian motivation among abolitionists in the North and Midwest lessened the depth of understanding of abolitionism's radicalism.