Sympathy for the Devil: Thinking About School Shooters

“[the] demands of civilization issue a culture that is a priori rooted in suffering”
-Layla AbdelRahim, Wild Children, Domesticated Dreams (2013)

“Today’s schoolyard shootings are disturbing because they are attacks on the
very core of our culture.”
-Mark Ames, Going Postal (2005)

Most kids hate school and adults are generally fine with that.

But given the number of hours, days, and years that children are legally required to be in school, to hate school is dangerously close to hating life. It is not an occasional inconvenience but is their everyday reality. They are pulled from their homes, separated from people they care about, segregated by age, and forced into the company of others who may torment them.

There is almost literally no end in sight for a young person who hates school. Elementary and middle school students may not have the ability to look beyond high school. How very young people experience time is radically different from how adults experience time. And what if, hypothetically, they did have a perspective that allowed them to look far enough into the future to a point when they would no longer be in school? As the saying goes, “if you liked school, you’ll love work”. And if you didn’t like school…then what? This is a situation that must be perceived as a life sentence; a situation where a vast number of young people have no hope and little to lose.

Mark Ames, the author of Going Postal, writes: “[the] misery built into the modern school culture…is so obvious, and so common, that only a kind of adult amnesia, combined with powerful cultural propaganda, could edit away such a widely-held bad memory”

Of course, few young people offer much in the way of resistance to the school system. So-called “good students” acclimate and find that compliance is the least difficult path. They react to ringing bells with the prescribed behavior. So-called “bad students” may sometimes try to avoid classes, refuse to complete assigned work, or perhaps defiantly look out a nearby window to the world outside rather than facing forward. Both sets of students may hate school but their coping mechanisms are not genuine challenges to that which threatens them. The school system knows how to handle both good and bad students.

This is a point that is made after every high-profile school shooting: homicide (and suicide) in schools are statistically uncommon. It could happen anywhere but it generally doesn’t. A child is far more likely to kill or be killed elsewhere such as at home. But Ames writes:

Most Americans know that the low homicide rate doesn’t mean that schools are really safe so much as it reflects effective policing, snitching, and zero-tolerance repression, keeping many more would-be rage murderers, by a factor of tens or hundreds, from crossing the line from plotting to killing.

Success is apparently defined as a situation where students merely wish to kill themselves and others but find themselves unable to do so for one reason or another. This is evident in the immediate calls for gun control. Annette Fuentes, author of Lockdown High, has explained “without guns, Columbine could never have occurred.” True, but somewhat simplistic; without schools Columbine could never have occurred as well. Lack of guns could have averted the massacre but would have done nothing to remove what has been described as a “toxic culture”. The despair felt by students would have remained in place. But again, most kids hate school and most adults don’t care.

Almost by definition, the “well-adjusted” do not resist. Resistance tends to be quite literally a suicide mission. In the face of repression, the well-adjusted tend to, well…adjust. Resistance must then come from those who are not so well-adjusted; those who fail to adapt to the school setting, who find no safe space in the school hierarchy, and nothing to look forward to in the workplace.

These are young people with brains that are still developing, placed in high pressure, arguably intolerable, situations, who feel they have little to lose. It might as well be a social science experiment designed to see what people can endure before lashing out. To quote Ames again:

“The whole country is infested with this meanness and coldness, and no one is allowed to admit it. Only the crazy ones sense that it is wrong—that what is “normal” is not at all normal—and some of them, adults and kids alike, fight back with everything they have.”

Consequently, it is unrealistic to judge their actions based on normal measures of efficacy or even fairness. Rebellions are not always fully understood in the time they are carried out. Indeed, they are not always even fully understood by the people who carry them out.  Brenda Spencer was sixteen in 1979 when she opened fire on an elementary school located across the street from where she lived. When asked about her motive, she explained, “I just don’t like Mondays.” And while only the most uncurious of societies would be willing to except that explanation; the explanations that are on offer are not much better.

Furthermore, almost never will the negative consequences of such rebellions fall exclusively on the most culpable; innocent people will almost necessarily be harmed especially when the target is both ubiquitous and abstract. The target is both more and less than the school building, other students, teachers, and administrators. But this harm cannot be laid wholly at the feet of those who resist injustice but must be attributed in large part to those who created and maintained the injustice that generated such violence. When an animal has been place in a cage lashes out, even wildly and without direction, it is the person who locked the cage that is culpable.

The question that we should be asking after each school shooting is not what is wrong with a particular individual who happened to snap before any his or her peers did but rather: what is it about schools that continues to generate such violence?

School violence is not simply a problem but rather a symptom of a problem. Schools are often referred to as a microcosm of society. It is therefore revealing that they are bastions of repression with occasional outbursts of violent rage.

 

Holy Zoltan, Batman!

“We didn’t evolve through billions of years to remain animals.” -Zoltan Istvan

Only a troubling amalgam of self-hatred, stunning arrogance, and (I charitably presume) willful ignorance could make the above sentiment possible; only a culture where such dysfunctional traits are widespread yet unacknowledged could interpret the statement as profound rather than pathological.

Self-hatred because it cast our fundamental identity as animals as something to be denied, belittled, and ultimately escaped. Arrogance because it positions humans as qualitatively different from and above all other animals.  And (willful) ignorance because even an elementary understanding of evolution reveals that no species is “more evolved” than any other. It is not as though evolution is a race where some individuals opted to drop out early (reptiles, perhaps?), others made it a considerable distance (chimpanzees, for example), but only one group finished the race (human beings!) and can now claim the prize of shedding their animality altogether.

Zoltan Istvan is the author of The Transhumanist Wager which has been described as transhumanism’s Atlas Shrugged (sometimes as praise and sometimes as criticism). He has allegedly (by Huffington Post at least) been described as a “visionary” and yet at their core his views represent what must be the most common prejudices in the western world: we are not animals, we are above animals, we are more evolved than animals, we can overcome death.

His ideas are promoted as cutting edge and yet they are not radically different than Descartes’ division between humans and other animals (except that for Descartes it was other animals who were the automatons whereas transhumanists anticipate a day when humans are essentially the automatons).  And despite his avowed atheism, Zoltan’s prejudices are similar to those of the Catholic Church which deny our animality, grant us dominion over other animals, and place us closer to God than other animals.

A few recent ideas from Zoltan:

• In February, he wrote about transhumanism and environmental concerns: “While New York City, Boston and Miami may be partially underwater by 2100, many futurists don’t plan to be around in the flesh by then. And if they are, they’ll have the technology to walk on water.” He elaborates:
  

   
  “There are probably zero futurists who feel good about damaging our beautiful planet. However, many of them realize that the benefit of the species’ rapid evolutionary ascent outweighs the harm progress is causing to Earth. Our planet is strong; it can handle climate change and an expanding human population while our species prepares for the transhumanist age. The evolutionary outcome of humanity will be better of by turning a blind eye to Mother Earth.”

• In April, Zoltan called for “one-time 1 percent life extension tax” which he refers to as the Jethro Knights Life Extension Tax (naming it after the lead character in his novel). In the article, he suggests that “the world can conquer death in about a decade’s time if enough resources are put towards it” and that “no sane and reasonable person wants to die if it can be avoided.”

• Last December: “the birth of an advanced artificial intelligence will become far more important than the birth of Christ…reasonable people will celebrate AI Day, the real moment in history the savior of civilization was born.”

Zoltan himself acknowledges that it would be easy to dismiss such ideas as science fiction.  It would also be easy to dismiss his articles as well-designed click-bait for sites such as Huffington Post.  And yet the popularity of transhumanism appears to be growing.  The most noteworthy of all transhumanists, Ray Kurzweil, currently works for Google which is not exactly a fringe outfit.

Furthermore, the ideas need not be plausible or even desirable in order for the individuals infected with such ideas to be dangerous; even a fairly sympathetic review of his novel points out “some fascist measures” that are taken by the putative heroes in realizing their transhumanist goals. Evidence that those fascist tendencies are not necessarily limited to the pages of a novel or the minds of fictional characters can be found in a January 2014 article in Psychology Today titled: “When Does Hindering Life Extension Science Become a Crime?” in which Zoltan laments that “America continues to be permeated with anti-life extension culture” and argues that “[s]tifling or hindering life extension science, education, and practices needs to be recognized as a legitimate crime.” To not support radical life extension policy is, by Zoltan’s lights, to “prematurely [end] human lives” and thus “criminal manslaughter”.  Presumably refusing to pay your Jethro Knights tax might invite a harsh punishment.

(Note: for information on the above pictured Zoltan arcade amusement, visit here.)

Letter to the Editor re Rose on roadkill

Letter to the Editor re:Joseph Rose: Handling Roadkill
Date submitted: June 1, 2014
News outlet: The Oregonian

Based on the fact that we spend a lot of money on dog toys and a lot of time on cat memes, America tends to think of itself as a nation of animal lovers. And yet, there is a demonstrable hatred toward animals that cannot credibly be denied. It’s not necessarily a hot searing hatred but rather a cold, callous hatred; a hatred that manifests less often in acts of rage and more often in passively accepting the suffering and making light of the killing of other animals.

For example, in response to a reader’s question about the legal requirements that fall upon a driver who has struck and killed an animal, Oregonian columnist Joseph Rose singled out opossums and rats as particularly unworthy of our concern should they be killed and he concludes his brief reply by quoting a trite bumper sticker that read “Cats: The other white meat”.

The number of animals killed on American roadways is staggering.  Light-hearted jokes about this fact send a message to others that these deaths are unimportant and not worth caring about or addressing. Such jokes help enforce a norm that says concern for animals is inappropriate and that their suffering can be laughed at. In such an atmosphere even those who do empathize are apt to remain silent.

Bodies on roadways and the jokes they illicit confirm that we are not really the nation of animal lovers that we pretend to be.