Crossposted from Cruel Mistress.
The chorus of right wingers defending the actions of the shooter in Tucson as mere insanity is beginning to blow my mind. Repeatedly, politically sympathetic folks seem to be emphasizing Jared Loughner's mental illness and not the nature of his act; or, at least, divorcing the two: he was sick, and he did a terrible deed as a result of that sickness. Others have taken the opportunity to cry politics, or to claim that we must wait to establish causality.
The left, on the other hand, is taking a somewhat stronger stance. Sandhya Somashekhar at the Washington Post asks whether it stemmed from the state of politics. Vaughan Bell at Salon makes the case that all this talk of mental illness is mostly an easy dodge. Paul Krugman has an eloquent piece arguing that it's all been building for a long time. Steven Cohen, of Columbia University's Earth Institute, has this to say.
Much as they may want to hang on to the idea that this was "merely" the act of a mentally ill person, there is at least one fact that cannot be accounted for by the mental illness of the shooter. That is, Giffords was targeted in political discourse, repeatedly, as someone who ought to be taken out. She was also the target of the shooter. Was she the random target of a deranged person? Possibly...but highly unlikely. She was selected by a mentally ill person in large part because that mentally ill person was under the impression that Giffords was someone to be rid of. That's what happened. That is an undeniable fact about Saturday's shooting... and you don't need to know much about mental illness to acknowledge that fact.
Friend and fellow philosopher Jeremy Bendik-Keymer (Case Western Reserve) put it to me this way:
My partner, Elaine, is a seasoned therapist. We watched Loughner's YouTube site last night. He's insane. But Elaine had no doubt that politics *channeled* or *guided* the direction of his insanity. Imagine your head has gone wild with internal anxiety -even voices. You cast about for a direction, an outlet, some way to turn the mess into relief. Now comes a message that for some idiosyncratic reason speaks to you and allows you a modicum of rationality inside your paranoia. And it tells you that you feel so bad because the government and the system --anything that's not your head- has warped reality & that you must tear it all down. And now there's a target over this one public officer's face. And others have shouted -others who say things like you- that she should be shot, or "taken out". And now you think one day when your head is going nuts -- this has been building for you for a while, you may even have been planning it as an apotheosis- this is the chance. Now I will do this. I have been planning to take out the government as the voices advise. I will do it. It follows from my logic, I will start to take down the system. That's how Palin & co. are responsible. & all of us in this country too -- not directly responsible, and not liable, but politically responsible for cultivating an ethos of respect in public debate & in the media. There's a 9 year old girl who was elected to her student council who is dead because of the way violence in the public sphere glommed onto to some sad, paranoid man's mind.
I buy this argument, as I think it offers an entirely plausible causality. But it is susceptible to the all-too-frequent objection that the causality is nevertheless unclear. I think there's a fair bit more to this.
That Loughner's act may have been caused by mental illness doesn't suggest that there is no blame to lay at the feet of those who incite people to violence...
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