{"id":1378,"date":"2015-08-28T10:12:39","date_gmt":"2015-08-28T14:12:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=1378"},"modified":"2015-08-28T10:12:39","modified_gmt":"2015-08-28T14:12:39","slug":"thinking-seriously-about-the-virginia-murders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2015\/08\/thinking-seriously-about-the-virginia-murders.html","title":{"rendered":"Thinking Seriously About the Virginia Murders"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the morning of August 26, Vester Lee Flanagan, a former employee of WBDJ, shot and murdered WBDJ TV\u2019s Alison Parker and Adam Ward on live television. He shot a third person, Vicki Gardner, who Parker was interviewing. Fortunately, the latter will survive.<\/p>\n

Just as fortunately, the gunman is now dead (Too bad, though, that his fatal bullet wound was self-inflicted).<\/p>\n

The 20th<\/sup> century philosopher Hannah Arendt maintained that there was a connection between the \u201cinability to think\u201d and morality. Upon observing Adolph Eichmann during his trial, she was stunned by two facts: The first was that Eichmann, in spite of being responsible for great evil, wasn\u2019t particularly demonic or wicked at all, and, secondly, he was incapable of thinking beyond the stock phrases, clich\u00e9s, and conventionalities available to him.<\/p>\n

In other words, Eichmann was not unlike the vast majority of human beings.<\/p>\n

Yet this \u201ccurious, but quite authentic, inability to think\u201d accounts for much evil in the world. The reason for this is not difficult to grasp. Morality requires judgments <\/em>about good and evil, right and wrong, and sound<\/em> moral decision-making demands informed, critical <\/em>judgment. Moreover, in making moral judgments, we must be sure to honor particulars<\/em> as such even while we evaluate them in light of general<\/em> rules and principles.<\/p>\n

In beholding the chatter over the Virginia shootings, one is struck by how many otherwise (presumably) intelligent people are seized by the inability to think.<\/p>\n

Revealingly, yet unsurprisingly, before any details regarding this outrage were known, the usual suspects on the left were decrying, not the murderer, but some abstraction they call \u201cgun violence,\u201d while calling for more \u201cgun control.\u201d And, along with some Republicans, they wasted not a moment in drawing from the Zeitgeist\u2019s inventory of stock concepts in depicting this as a \u201cmental health\u201d issue.<\/p>\n

Equally unsurprisingly is that the left has not (as of yet) spoken to the racial dynamic involved in this double murder: Not only was the killer black and his victims white, but Flanagan left behind a 23 page \u201cmanifesto\u201d in which he explicitly identifies his sense of racial victimization<\/a> as a premiere reason for his actions. He as well purports to have been victimized because of his homosexual orientation.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s dare to do the unthinkable and actually think about this.<\/p>\n

First, the notion that this double murder was \u201ccaused\u201d by \u201cgun violence\u201d is patently offensive. It\u2019s offensive to the victims, certainly, and even to the victimizer.<\/p>\n

Alison Parker, Adam Ward, and Vicki Gardner were shot with<\/em> a gun. They were shot by <\/em>Vester Flanagan, a man who could\u2019ve killed them in any number of other ways, or chosen not to kill them at all. We divest individuals of their humanity, their uniquely human, indeed, divine-like moral agency, when we ignore the reasons <\/em>for their actions while instead attributing the latter to such impersonal \u201ccauses\u201d <\/em>as \u201cgun violence\u201d or \u201cmental health.\u201d<\/p>\n

Our penchant for citing \u201cstudies\u201d of one sort or the other doubtless proves politically and ideologically convenient, but such scientific (and pseudo-scientific) references constitute a black hole insofar as they swallow up the individual.<\/p>\n

Second, allusions to \u201cgun violence\u201d and \u201cmental health\u201d are especially pernicious inasmuch as they obscure the evil <\/em>nature of the deed being explained. To see just how egregious an offense this is, consider some analogies.<\/p>\n

Imagine if, while discussing the Holocaust, we spoke about \u201cgas chamber violence,\u201d or while discussing Islamic State mass beheadings, we talked instead of \u201cmachete violence.\u201d Or suppose that discussions of the lynching of blacks were peppered with references to \u201crope violence.\u201d None of this would sit well with decent human beings, for it is clear, or at least it is thought that it should be clear, that such descriptions miss entirely that which is fundamental to the phenomena being described\u2014the perpetrators responsible for these wicked deeds.<\/p>\n

The perpetrators deserve to be recognized for the moral agents that they are, and their victims deserve an honest account of their fates.<\/p>\n

Or imagine if we spoke of militant Islamic terrorist murderers, Nazis, and Klansmen, not as evil or wicked people, but as those in need of \u201ctreatment\u201d for \u201cmental health.\u201d This too, you can bet anything, wouldn\u2019t fly with most folks today. The reason is clear enough: If these notorious murderers are in need of \u201cmental health treatment,\u201d then they are sick. <\/em><\/p>\n

But if they are \u201csick,\u201d then they are to be pitied and made well, not condemned and punished. A mentally \u201cunhealthy\u201d person no more deserves blame, contempt, and punishment than does a physically unhealthy person.<\/p>\n

To repeat: Either a person is evil or he is \u201cmentally ill.\u201d He can\u2019t be both. Either his actions are evil, or they are symptoms of an illness. They can\u2019t be both.<\/p>\n

The reason that we would recoil from language suggesting that Nazis, Klansmen, and ISIS militants were \u201cmentally ill\u201d and\/or that their murderous actions were a function of some abstraction or \u201croot cause\u201d is that once we enter this verbal territory, we leave morality behind<\/em>. \u00a0The language of \u201ccauses\u201d is the language of science. <\/em>The language of morality is the language of good and evil, right and wrong.<\/p>\n

The verdict is clear: Three innocent people were shot, and two are now dead, because one man, <\/em>Vester Flanagan, freely chose <\/em>to shoot them.<\/p>\n

None of this, of course, is meant to deny that environment influences our choices. To be sure, our political environment today, and that particular strain of racial resentment and envy that currently finds expression in the Black Lives Matter movement, doubtless got inside Flanagan\u2019s head. His \u201cmanifesto\u201d revealed as much.<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s where things get really murky for the left:<\/p>\n

If, as the left is forever assuring us, America is a land of incorrigible \u201cwhite supremacy\u201d and \u201cracism\u201d\u2014if, in other words, \u201cracism\u201d is \u201cinstitutional,\u201d \u201csystemic,\u201d \u201cstructural;\u201d if, as the left insists, \u201cracism\u201d is the greatest of all evils; and if, as the left further maintains, whites are never eligible to judge whether blacks who cry \u201cracism\u201d are sincere or not, then it would seem that one conclusion follows:<\/p>\n

Vester Flanagan, who claims to have been the victim of racial oppression, acted justifiably <\/em>in gunning down three white people who, by virtue of being white, belonged to the oppressor class.<\/p>\n

Thinking is hard.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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