This one was a little different. Most school shootings are mentally ill young men from broken (specifically: fatherless) homes who have presumably surrendered to nihilism and want to make some mark on the world before destroying themselves. This one was a mentally ill female claiming she felt like a male who targeted a Christian school, probably deliberately. I'd say the rates of persistent mental illness in this country justify greater mental health spending, but the fact that psychotherapists are just writing the trans-claiming blank checks to do whatever they want to themselves makes me wary. In any case, gun ownership has been rife in American life for over two centuries, and not until recently did we see spats of violence like this. Firearms do not magically force people to go out and shoot people. Mental illness and society in dramatic decay are the problem, not 'the power of guns compels you!'. Seizing guns because some people use them irresponsibly is like barring car ownership because some drive irresponsibly -- and violently. I was nearly killed this past October because some manic decided to pass (using my lane!) while I was coming right at him. My options were 1) risk that he could get back over before hitting me head on at highway speed or 2) go off road and hope to hell I could control the car. I went sideways through a ditch. At any rate, given how many people die in Chicago every weekend by illegal guns, gun laws would only effect law abiding citizens -- or create more illegal guns, as gun owners frequently discuss ways they'd skirt registration and seizures if they became a thing.
So.... Taking for granted that it's *not* a gun issue, but a mental health issue.... Two questions immediately come to mind:
Why there? - as in the US where mass shootings in general and school shootings in particular are *way* beyond outliers when compared to ANY other advanced country
and
Why now? - why have all mass shootings increased so radically in the last 50+ years?
TLDR: Modernity and its children (consumerism, the sexual revolution, identity politics) has destroyed what little there was of a common American culture and created a country beset by a growing wave of nihilism, substance abuse, and mental illness.
To be sure, the advent of repeating firearms has contributed, because deranged people can do much less damage with a Colt 6-shooter than with, say, a Tec-9 or an AR-15. The thing is, automatic firearms have existed since at least the trench warfare of the Great War, and they were used by organized crime during Prohibition. They were limited, though: police and guys like the Pinkertons used them, as did the Mob, but they used them in predictable circumstances: the Pinkertons used them to suppress labor (see the Ludlow massacre), and gangs used them to attack other gangs. I've never seen reports of people going beserk and shooting others in public with Tommyguns, though. The deeper question is, as you have asked, why are we seeing this now?
It's a big question, and I don't think anyone in authority is asking it because they're fixated on the tools used rather than the problem that creates them, or they want to inject tired narratives into the suffering. (See the attack on the Pulse nightclub: everyone said it was homophobic, but the guy who did it literally just picked a place off of Google Maps.) Personally, I think it's the complete unraveling of society since the late sixties, the triumph of the Individual -- not against the State (which uses individuals quite ably), but against society. We have aggrandized the Individual against the little layers that create society, but especially against the family, which every single traditional society that I know of relied on as the cell, the building block, of everything else. Since 2010 I've been torn between libertarianism and something like communitarianism, but in the last couple of years I've shifted far more to the communitarianism bit because the trans stuff has made me realize that the Individual is an inadequate foundation for people to base their lives, and for society itself to base itself around. Individualism is a necessary seasoning to prevent the sieg-heilism of ancient Egypt, or 1930s Germany, or 1950s China, or whatever -- an antidote to collectivism that reduces people to mere cogs -- but it cannot be the main dish. Biology & anthropology tell me that man is not himself alone, but a Member -- a member of a family, of a tribe. Before science we understood this from the beginning -- "it is not good for the Man to be alone." There are a lot of things that have contributed to this -- consumerism, the sexual revolution, etc. I think the Old World has survived it to a greater degree because premodern civilizations have a deep bank of traditional cohesiveness to draw on. It grows shallower and shallower by the day, but it has kept Europeans, Indians, Chinese, etc from descending into the egotistic pit that America is now in. Americans are a 'modern' polity, a 'modern' culture: our cohesivness was too shallow to survive being undermined by modernity, and now we are nothing but consumer creatures trying to create identity through labels or what we buy. It's not enough. We need Burke's little platoons. Humans need more than egoism and walmart to make a life.
I'm going to stop now because I realize this is a wall of text, and it's the result of interiorly debating things for 10+ years. I still haven't quite resolved it myself, these are just hunches and a bit of thinking out loud that I can get away with because you've been watching my reading (and I yours) for 10+ years now, and I trust you realize that while we disagree on many things, we both want human beings to prosper and to have fulfilling lives.
@ Stephen: This might surprise you (or not!) but I actually AGREE with almost everything you said. I think the underlying problem (or cause) of a *lot* of the things we see - and most especially in the US which has taken some things to more extreme levels than the rest of 'The West' - is Modernity coupled with Toxic Individualism. Humans were never meant to be purely atomistic individuals. We are 'designed' through millions of years of Evolution to be GROUP creatures with around/up to 150 others in our immediate social set (the Dunbar number). When we move around too much, lose contact with our Group and no longer know where we came from or what our roots are, we fall apart. So it's no great surprise that these issues are most pronounced in the US. Of course being a relatively young country with a 'melting pot' of incoming nationalities and cultures struggling for some kind of 'new' identity doesn't really help. Without the aid of a significant ancestral root system you guys are going to get blown about quite a bit.
I think that the recent explosion in interest in Ancestry as well as the longer term interest in History and even historical novels and TV shows/movies shows an almost subconscious desire/need to regain the roots SO many people are missing right now. Again the explosion of Identity Politics is a symptom of this - people want/need to know WHO they are. But I think the danger (to use an emotive word) is when we look inwards too much and outwards not enough. Too much focus on *individual* identity isn't healthy IMO. Knowing your 'place' (in a good sense) matters much more I think. If you're struggling to know who you are, go find where you came from and where your grandparents came from. Go find your roots.
I think we both (largely at least) agree on many of the problems/issues facing us. What we tend to disagree about - and not *that* overly to be honest - are the proposed solutions, which does make for interesting discussions!
Agreed! BTW: I just bought Robin Dunbar's book on gossip and language, which I think is the source for the Dunbar number.
It's a challenging problem figuring out when identity stops being supportive and starts becoming both toxic and divisive -- toxic, in that it becomes the person's focus and they drift into things like militant nationalism, and divisive in that groups start squaring off one another. I know people, both black and white, for whom being black or white is their ONLY THING. There's a difference between knowing and celebrating one's heritage and making it a religion in itself. Oddly, it was getting into Marxist thinking that made me think about this -- thinking about global capitalism were homogenizing so much at the cost of the richness of human experience. Think about folk songs, for instance...people used to inherit songs, pass them down, improvise with them, generate culture. Now most of us just buy pop and hum commercial dittos. I started learning traditional British and American folk songs in rebellion and have become steadily more reactionary since. :p
8 comments:
*mic drop*
Indeed..... Saw the Nashville shooting on the BBC yesterday..........
What can I say that hasn't been said *FAR* too many times already?????
This one was a little different. Most school shootings are mentally ill young men from broken (specifically: fatherless) homes who have presumably surrendered to nihilism and want to make some mark on the world before destroying themselves. This one was a mentally ill female claiming she felt like a male who targeted a Christian school, probably deliberately. I'd say the rates of persistent mental illness in this country justify greater mental health spending, but the fact that psychotherapists are just writing the trans-claiming blank checks to do whatever they want to themselves makes me wary. In any case, gun ownership has been rife in American life for over two centuries, and not until recently did we see spats of violence like this. Firearms do not magically force people to go out and shoot people. Mental illness and society in dramatic decay are the problem, not 'the power of guns compels you!'. Seizing guns because some people use them irresponsibly is like barring car ownership because some drive irresponsibly -- and violently. I was nearly killed this past October because some manic decided to pass (using my lane!) while I was coming right at him. My options were 1) risk that he could get back over before hitting me head on at highway speed or 2) go off road and hope to hell I could control the car. I went sideways through a ditch. At any rate, given how many people die in Chicago every weekend by illegal guns, gun laws would only effect law abiding citizens -- or create more illegal guns, as gun owners frequently discuss ways they'd skirt registration and seizures if they became a thing.
So.... Taking for granted that it's *not* a gun issue, but a mental health issue.... Two questions immediately come to mind:
Why there? - as in the US where mass shootings in general and school shootings in particular are *way* beyond outliers when compared to ANY other advanced country
and
Why now? - why have all mass shootings increased so radically in the last 50+ years?
TLDR: Modernity and its children (consumerism, the sexual revolution, identity politics) has destroyed what little there was of a common American culture and created a country beset by a growing wave of nihilism, substance abuse, and mental illness.
To be sure, the advent of repeating firearms has contributed, because deranged people can do much less damage with a Colt 6-shooter than with, say, a Tec-9 or an AR-15. The thing is, automatic firearms have existed since at least the trench warfare of the Great War, and they were used by organized crime during Prohibition. They were limited, though: police and guys like the Pinkertons used them, as did the Mob, but they used them in predictable circumstances: the Pinkertons used them to suppress labor (see the Ludlow massacre), and gangs used them to attack other gangs. I've never seen reports of people going beserk and shooting others in public with Tommyguns, though. The deeper question is, as you have asked, why are we seeing this now?
It's a big question, and I don't think anyone in authority is asking it because they're fixated on the tools used rather than the problem that creates them, or they want to inject tired narratives into the suffering. (See the attack on the Pulse nightclub: everyone said it was homophobic, but the guy who did it literally just picked a place off of Google Maps.) Personally, I think it's the complete unraveling of society since the late sixties, the triumph of the Individual -- not against the State (which uses individuals quite ably), but against society. We have aggrandized the Individual against the little layers that create society, but especially against the family, which every single traditional society that I know of relied on as the cell, the building block, of everything else. Since 2010 I've been torn between libertarianism and something like communitarianism, but in the last couple of years I've shifted far more to the communitarianism bit because the trans stuff has made me realize that the Individual is an inadequate foundation for people to base their lives, and for society itself to base itself around. Individualism is a necessary seasoning to prevent the sieg-heilism of ancient Egypt, or 1930s Germany, or 1950s China, or whatever -- an antidote to collectivism that reduces people to mere cogs -- but it cannot be the main dish. Biology & anthropology tell me that man is not himself alone, but a Member -- a member of a family, of a tribe. Before science we understood this from the beginning -- "it is not good for the Man to be alone." There are a lot of things that have contributed to this -- consumerism, the sexual revolution, etc. I think the Old World has survived it to a greater degree because premodern civilizations have a deep bank of traditional cohesiveness to draw on. It grows shallower and shallower by the day, but it has kept Europeans, Indians, Chinese, etc from descending into the egotistic pit that America is now in. Americans are a 'modern' polity, a 'modern' culture: our cohesivness was too shallow to survive being undermined by modernity, and now we are nothing but consumer creatures trying to create identity through labels or what we buy. It's not enough. We need Burke's little platoons. Humans need more than egoism and walmart to make a life.
I'm going to stop now because I realize this is a wall of text, and it's the result of interiorly debating things for 10+ years. I still haven't quite resolved it myself, these are just hunches and a bit of thinking out loud that I can get away with because you've been watching my reading (and I yours) for 10+ years now, and I trust you realize that while we disagree on many things, we both want human beings to prosper and to have fulfilling lives.
They’ve increased since since the expiration of the Federal Assault Weapons ban.
@ Stephen: This might surprise you (or not!) but I actually AGREE with almost everything you said. I think the underlying problem (or cause) of a *lot* of the things we see - and most especially in the US which has taken some things to more extreme levels than the rest of 'The West' - is Modernity coupled with Toxic Individualism. Humans were never meant to be purely atomistic individuals. We are 'designed' through millions of years of Evolution to be GROUP creatures with around/up to 150 others in our immediate social set (the Dunbar number). When we move around too much, lose contact with our Group and no longer know where we came from or what our roots are, we fall apart. So it's no great surprise that these issues are most pronounced in the US. Of course being a relatively young country with a 'melting pot' of incoming nationalities and cultures struggling for some kind of 'new' identity doesn't really help. Without the aid of a significant ancestral root system you guys are going to get blown about quite a bit.
I think that the recent explosion in interest in Ancestry as well as the longer term interest in History and even historical novels and TV shows/movies shows an almost subconscious desire/need to regain the roots SO many people are missing right now. Again the explosion of Identity Politics is a symptom of this - people want/need to know WHO they are. But I think the danger (to use an emotive word) is when we look inwards too much and outwards not enough. Too much focus on *individual* identity isn't healthy IMO. Knowing your 'place' (in a good sense) matters much more I think. If you're struggling to know who you are, go find where you came from and where your grandparents came from. Go find your roots.
I think we both (largely at least) agree on many of the problems/issues facing us. What we tend to disagree about - and not *that* overly to be honest - are the proposed solutions, which does make for interesting discussions!
@ V V: That probably doesn't help!
Agreed! BTW: I just bought Robin Dunbar's book on gossip and language, which I think is the source for the Dunbar number.
It's a challenging problem figuring out when identity stops being supportive and starts becoming both toxic and divisive -- toxic, in that it becomes the person's focus and they drift into things like militant nationalism, and divisive in that groups start squaring off one another. I know people, both black and white, for whom being black or white is their ONLY THING. There's a difference between knowing and celebrating one's heritage and making it a religion in itself. Oddly, it was getting into Marxist thinking that made me think about this -- thinking about global capitalism were homogenizing so much at the cost of the richness of human experience. Think about folk songs, for instance...people used to inherit songs, pass them down, improvise with them, generate culture. Now most of us just buy pop and hum commercial dittos. I started learning traditional British and American folk songs in rebellion and have become steadily more reactionary since. :p
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