Can Jared Loughner help us get beyond good and evil?

Johne Cook <[email protected]> Thu, 20 Jan 2011 21:18:42 -0600

Newsgroups	gmane.music.dadl.ot
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/01/20/can-jared-loughner-h.html

Can Jared Loughner help us get beyond good and
evil?<http://www.boingboing.net/2011/01/20/can-jared-loughner-h.html>

Andrea James <http://www.boingboing.net/author/andrea-james-1/> at 12:30 PM
Thursday, Jan 20, 2011

Andrea James <http://andreajames.com/> is a
writer<http://www.andreajames.com/print.html>,
producer <http://www.deepstealth.com/>,
filmmaker<http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2092175/>,
and activist for consumer issues (including hair
removal<http://www.hairfacts.com/>&
transsexual <http://www.tsroadmap.com/> transition) plus LGBT
film<http://www.outfest.org/index.php>&
families <http://www.imatyfa.org/>. She's a long-time
Wikipedian<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jokestress>and recommends
noteworthy
films & books <http://astore.amazon.com/andreajames00-20>.

[image: ongchewpeng-devil-jesus.jpg]<http://www.boingboing.net/ongchewpeng-devil-jesus.jpg>Sarah
Palin was on Sean Hannity's Fox show this week, and between
breaths <http://boingboing.net/2011/01/14/sarah-palin-breathin.html> joined
the many commenters who've labeled the Tucson shootings suspect with the "E"
word: she mused on "...how, um, *evil* a person would have to be to kill an
innocent." Since prime suspect Jared Loughner cited Nietzsche's *Will To
Power* as a favorite, this seems like a good moment to bring up the problems
with "good vs. evil" ideology. It has a peculiar geek resonance because of
the ideology's heavy use in comic books and roleplaying: superheroes,
arch-villains, chaotic good, lawful evil, and what-not. It's also infused in
our political discourse, with someone like Palin or Obama being good or evil
depending on your point of view.

Nietzsche is frequently a fave of angry young men who might qualify as what
Pesco called confident dumb
people<http://www.boingboing.net/2010/05/12/confident-dumb-peopl.html>.
Nietzsche works well for the modern kook with web-induced attention
deficits: The fourth chapter of *Beyond Good and
Evil<http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4363/4363-h/4363-h.htm>
* is a series of 122 Twitter-length aphorisms, and his work is snarky and
occasionally humorous. Nietzsche wrote *Beyond Good and Evil* to criticize
earlier philosophers who made assumptions about morality based on
pre-Christian and Christian beliefs about "evil." Below I discuss why we
need to steal Nietzsche back from these people, and I look at a couple of
other writers who have examined what gets called "evil" and have attempted
to explain it in more nuanced and rational terms.

(Image: *Devil vs
Jesus<http://ongchewpeng.deviantart.com/art/Devil-vs-Jesus-98570960>
* (2008) by ongchewpeng <http://ongchewpeng.deviantart.com/> at Deviant Art.
Print available <http://www.deviantart.com/print/6105267/>. Used with
permission.)

For a little background, Matt Feeney posted a terrific piece in Slate last
week about the Angry Nerds <http://www.slate.com/id/2281133/> who embrace a
version of Nietzsche:

If your social world fails to appreciate your singularity and tells you that
you're a loser, reading Nietzsche can steel you in your secret conviction
that, no, I'm a genius, or at least very special, and everyone else is the
loser. Like you, Nietzsche was misunderstood in his day, ignored or derided
by other scholars. Like you, Nietzsche seems to find everything around him
lame, either stodgy and moralistic or sick with democratic vulgarity.

Feeney's piece is worth reading in its entirety, as is *Beyond Good and Evil
*. It's a lot to sum up in a blog post, but Nietzsche basically says there
are two types of moral systems: master-morality and slave-morality. His best
summary is section 260. In master-morality, the ruling class makes the rules
and thus considers itself noble, while in slave morality, there is a
suspicion of those in power and in what they consider "good." So in slave
morality:

Here is the seat of the origin of the famous antithesis "good" and
"evil":--power and dangerousness are assumed to reside in the evil, a
certain dreadfulness, subtlety, and strength, which do not admit of being
despised. According to slave-morality, therefore, the "evil" man arouses
fear; according to master-morality, it is precisely the "good" man who
arouses fear and seeks to arouse it, while the bad man is regarded as the
despicable being.

In other words, it's all a big misunderstanding based on your point of view,
kind of like how you might see Palin as evil when your neighbor sees her as
good. As Feeney points out, Nietzsche has been distilled into a nihilist in
popular culture, which isn't accurate or fair. His aphoristic style means
that quips like "God is dead" get stripped of meaning and turned into
soundbites. We need to reclaim Neitzsche from angry nerds and deists who
distort his writings.

In the case of someone charged with serious crimes like Loughner, there is
often a meeting of the minds on the E word. People want to create a simple
label to separate someone like him from the rest of us. We say he is sick,
or crazy, or evil. Two books on criminals made me rethink my use of those
terms: *Eichmann in Jerusalem* and *Speaking with the Devil*.

Pretty much everybody is in agreement that Adolf Eichmann or Jeffrey Dahmer
were not great guys, so Hannah Arendt and Carl Goldberg use them as
jumping-off points for larger discussions. Arendt of course summed up
Eichmann's action with the phrase "the banality of evil" (also a
meaning-stripped soundbite now). After sitting through his trial and
execution, she observed that he seemed to do everything by rote, even his
last words. He was able to do the unthinkable because he was "unthinking."
He didn't seem to have a fanatical hatred of Jews, he was just following
orders. What's interesting in relation to mass murders like the Tucson
incident is that people can rationalize their way into an internally
consistent logic that normalizes their thoughts and actions. I recommend
reading Arendt, because she also has a great deal to say about how incidents
and events get seized upon by people interested primarily in facts, and
therefore try to distort the facts, and intellectuals, who have little
interest in the facts and use them as a springboard for ideas. We've seen a
lot of both since Tucson.

Goldberg takes a much more behavioral approach to the question. He
recommends avoiding terms like "evil" and using the term "malevolence"
instead. Using Dahmer and other extreme cases as examples, he lays out a
case that most criminals engage in what he calls experimental malevolence,
where their bad behavior escalates over time. It's clear that in the case of
Dahmer that he had begun exhibiting signs of trouble in early life,
including aspects of the Macdonald
triad<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macdonald_triad>and a later pattern
of murders that increased in frequency and brazenness.
Looking at Jared Loughner's actions prior to his arrest, he had been ramping
up his troubling behavior with a number of incidents that raised red flags
with observers. Various opportunities to intervene and get Loughner some
help did not materialize.

What I find most interesting about people who justify violent actions is the
production of a script. They have a story they tell themselves about how the
world works, a story that explains why they need to do what they plan to do,
and often a fantasy about how their actions will play out. One of the things
they teach you in assault prevention classes is to try to get someone off
their script if you are being attacked. Many instructors suggest saying or
doing something unexpected, to snap them out of what's running through their
heads as they commit the attack. All people produce a script about who they
are and why they do what they do. That process only becomes a problem when
that script lacks empathy, the ability to comprehend and embrace the
thoughts and feelings of others.

When Giffords gave an apparently unacceptable response to Loughner's obtuse
question about language not being real, she seems to have caused him some
cognitive dissonance. He apparently expected her to recognize his
intellectual superiority, and when she didn't, he became fixated on what he
saw as a slight that threw his self-assessment into question.

It's entirely possible to explain these behaviors without resorting to some
facile descriptor like "sick" or "evil." Loughner's videos and writings
suggest he held a set of beliefs that were delusional, about himself and the
world and how it works. Everyone, myself included, probably has a delusion
or two in their belief system. Once in a while they combine with other
factors in a person to create a lethal combination: anger, incompetence,
rejection, isolation, lack of empathy, drug-induced hallucinations,
participation
in economies of
violence<http://www.boingboing.net/2011/01/20/mark-dery-on-america.html>,
unthinking behavior, production of a flawed script. That's not evil. It's
simply a tragic nexus of human flaws that can culminate in what is too
easily dismissed as evil.