Giffords' Shooting and Politics
11/01/11 19:24 Filed in: Human Nature
Much has already been written about the shooting in Arizona of Gabrielle Giffords and many others. I think, however, Jon Stewart of the Daily Show has one of the more interesting and thoughtful pieces on this incident. Stewart, like the rest of us, I imagine, is disheartened. He is also thoughtful. One thing he points out, and I think he is correct, is that trying to find one direct line of cause from something Sarah Palin said or from some violent video game to Jared Loughner’s shooting spree is pointless. It cannot be done.
Human motivation, and this is what is at the center of this subject, is much too complex to pick out one cause and effect line for any event. We often ask, why do two people who were abused when they were younger end up being different -- one turning into an abuser and the other not? These sorts of questions rest on the premise that Stewart is questioning: that one cause leads to one effect or, more appropriately, one effect has one and only one cause.
My friend, Grant, pointed this out when he wrote, “Every time there's a shooting the left says ban guns & rhetoric & the right says ban video games & be less permissive. Yet there are more permissive 1st World countries with more guns per capita & the same games & divisions. Maybe we need to dig a little deeper?” Every time we try to find some concrete evidence for how something causes some other thing, we look for a direct cause. Perhaps we need to think more clearly about this and look more deeply. We are trying to use the methods of math and science and apply them to society and human action. This approach cannot work. It is an approach that is more and more accepted in our country and trumpeted by people working in evolutionary psychology who try to link human aggression to what human life was like 10,000 years ago in the Serengeti.
This fact is why it is wrong for political parties -- and the Left and the Right are both doing this -- are trying to lay the blame of the shooting at each other’s feet. Political parties are still playing politics in the face of this tragedy partly because, I suspect, they can’t help themselves and partly because of this underlying belief that every event has one and only one cause, when human motivation is much more complex. This point is why we need a much better account of human nature than has hitherto been provided.
We have to think more broadly, as well. Why there so many gun crimes and murders in the United States? We can see something about our culture, here. Something that might clue us in about why Loughner went on a shooting spree, how he was able to purchase a gun when he was known to be mentally unstable, and why he went after this particular group of people. But there won’t be an easy answer here.
And one thing that we -- you and I -- have to do is something that the political rhetoric refuses to do and won’t allow us to do -- question who and what we are as a society.
Human motivation, and this is what is at the center of this subject, is much too complex to pick out one cause and effect line for any event. We often ask, why do two people who were abused when they were younger end up being different -- one turning into an abuser and the other not? These sorts of questions rest on the premise that Stewart is questioning: that one cause leads to one effect or, more appropriately, one effect has one and only one cause.
My friend, Grant, pointed this out when he wrote, “Every time there's a shooting the left says ban guns & rhetoric & the right says ban video games & be less permissive. Yet there are more permissive 1st World countries with more guns per capita & the same games & divisions. Maybe we need to dig a little deeper?” Every time we try to find some concrete evidence for how something causes some other thing, we look for a direct cause. Perhaps we need to think more clearly about this and look more deeply. We are trying to use the methods of math and science and apply them to society and human action. This approach cannot work. It is an approach that is more and more accepted in our country and trumpeted by people working in evolutionary psychology who try to link human aggression to what human life was like 10,000 years ago in the Serengeti.
This fact is why it is wrong for political parties -- and the Left and the Right are both doing this -- are trying to lay the blame of the shooting at each other’s feet. Political parties are still playing politics in the face of this tragedy partly because, I suspect, they can’t help themselves and partly because of this underlying belief that every event has one and only one cause, when human motivation is much more complex. This point is why we need a much better account of human nature than has hitherto been provided.
We have to think more broadly, as well. Why there so many gun crimes and murders in the United States? We can see something about our culture, here. Something that might clue us in about why Loughner went on a shooting spree, how he was able to purchase a gun when he was known to be mentally unstable, and why he went after this particular group of people. But there won’t be an easy answer here.
And one thing that we -- you and I -- have to do is something that the political rhetoric refuses to do and won’t allow us to do -- question who and what we are as a society.
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