What causes school shootings? How right, center, and left all get it wrong
Discussions of what causes mass shootings almost invariably turn on two factors that are the presumed principal causes: guns and mental illness. Also, though less prominently in the national consciousness, another note cited regularly by the left is that racism and white supremacy have been motives in some of the killings.
This last is not false, but I would suggest that emphasis on it is as potentially misleading as the first two, if only because it may be a displacement. To say that racist thinking is a displacement is, after all, implied in the recognition that it is a false belief. And while we don’t know for sure what was on the mind of someone who didn’t say precisely, we can suppose that when people just out of high school (or in it) kill students and teachers at one while shooting up the joint, that their inarticulate message (so much of violence is that) is, in part, that they don’t like school.
They are not alone in this. Probably as many kids hate school as people in many jobs hate working.
Americans think that if you have a working-class job, it’s a source of pride - especially if it also comes with a middle-class income. Additional pride may attach to the idea of normality, which is what the “mentally ill” are guilty, or unlucky, of transgressing. But traditionally, the industrial working class (now being succeeded by a precariat that crosses the divide between educated and semi-skilled labor) was motivated to rebel, protest, and engage in political “class struggle” as much as anything by the recognition that work sucks, and other things in capitalist society suck, and therefore what is wanted is a different kind of society.
Those on the left who are taking the opportunity for more talk about racist violence, including by the police, are not wrong, but there may be a deeper story. Regarding the case at hand, what I propose is the simple recognition that some of the crazed young men who commit these horrifying crimes are: unhappy.
The most eloquent testimony by a mass school shorter might be the one immortalized in the 1979 Boomtown Rats song; the school killer when asked why, had replied, merely, “I don’t like Mondays.”
Now, is this unhappiness because they are mentally ill? Think about it: to say that someone is disaffected because they are mentally ill is a bit like saying they are unhappy and unwell because … because they are unwell; this term is a synonym for unhappiness or something like it. The attribution of mental illness explains nothing. Its use involves practices of trying, and often succeeding, to throw away certain people, place them “outside society,” while claiming they already were this of their own accord. The rhetoric of desocializing people through medically justified incarcerations fits the practice, since it is a black box explanation, one that throws aside the thing to be explained, basically disavowing any desire to. A mental illness that is shared by many people is, considered as a social phenomenon, not a cause but a symptom.
The stakes of a political “argument” are set by our media coverage of these terrorist attacks. On the one hand, the far-right articulates an ideology that is in fact directly reflected in the claims made by some of these suicidal terrorists, when they make any. They usually have grievances that they say are about race, or immigration, or something similar. Sadly, their views are not so different from our former President and many of his supporters and enablers, including at Fox News. At the same time, the liberalism that is effectively center-right only sees guns, mental illness, or maybe the bugbear of racist attitudes. What neither side is concerned about at all is wondering what these shootings might be a symptom of.
Violence can be strategic or it can be expressive. As expressive, it can be brutal in its lack of eloquence or the rigor of thinking. If there is a thought involved, it must be “about” something, and it might also be self-deceived as to what it is “really” about. And what might that be? Do we even want to know? Shouldn’t we?
Most people who find boring, oppressive, or otherwise unhappy school, work, family, their neighborhood or other aspects of their everyday life do not commit spectacular crimes, but a great many people, if they are honest with themselves, will admit that they don’t like school or work and its Mondays. In other words, our society suffers from too common social alienation. And the socially alienated are by definition not themselves the sufficient cause of their alienation. Just as precarity is at once economic and existential or affective, alienation is a relation, not a state. That mental illness designates a state and not a relation or situation is another reason to abandon the concept as inadequate for thinking those it designates, as any bad concept might. (Consider for example, that poor nations are “undeveloped” (immature): if you say this of some country, the question will not be whether that country with its supposed attribute exists, but whether it is best understood in that way). Boredom is a corollary of stupidity, as we know from Flaubert. It is also a form of what Marx called alienation and thus a political category.
At one level, that school seems boring to many kids is easily explained by saying that it is not interesting, which is after all what boredom means. Isn’t public school in America less about anything interesting than it is about conformity, obedience, and social control. Obedience is implicit in the idea of knowledge, oriented to multiple-choice tests that have a right answer that is known or remembered but does not involve any actual thinking. And liberals and conservatives only really debate what is the content of the body of true beliefs school kids are expected to affirm. It as is if religious fundamentalism had infected our ideas of education at the deep level of form. It is even true of middle-class schools, whose expenditures are based as everywhere in America on local property values. While everyone knows that for poor kids, school teaching is highly authoritarian and organized around punitive sanctions as a pipeline to prison.
For school to be interesting, it surely would have to be less oriented towards telling people what to believe and socializing them into work relationships. Many school kids are bullied, many more are just bored.
Many find that teachers and school staff act as nastily as many parents and any boss. Few are inspired, most not much. Some read a few works of great literature; the school classrooms I have seen that do that are either in European films or old American ones, in the latter case from before 1960. In countries like France, school is very rigorous and that can seem oppressive, but it would more difficult to call it boring, unless you have been persuaded that social media are more interesting than good novels, which probably means you have not read very many.
Once upon a time young people who felt that way (about school, work, family, whatever) would rebel. It was often thought that they were right to. That, and its meaning, have largely been lost. Young people and others rebel because they don’t like the way things they are. They rebel because they think the world they live in sucks, and maybe they are right.
Expressive terrorism, if I may coin a phrase, is not a rebellion in the political sense that is directed at making the world a better place. It is a death-driven refusal, an act of pure negation, typically suicidal, which can only understand that things suck, and, as the young girl in the song is immortalized as thinking, may thus suppose that the only thing that seems worth doing is to “shoot the whole day down.”
Our timid, conservative society is one where we have been taught to fear everything, including neighbors and, sadly, the real threat, ever-present, of something terrible happening to you or someone you love. In public, we say that a person who disagrees with a superior or a functionary is “raising their voice.” Virtual violence is imagined everywhere, while real violence is all too common. It is not enough to just blame the uneloquent malefactors for the message that they convey to the effect that they dislike the world they live enough to want to destroy some piece of it, and probably including themselves. We are not reading and interpreting these messages rightly. We need to understand much better than we do why some people - too many - are so unhappy. Thinking we can solve that problem by just treating the persons as individuals is a dangerous delusion. The right, which wants more policing and ad hoc armed vigilante heroes; the far right, which shares the racist and other hatred-prone grievances of the killers; the liberals, who want more compulsory mental health treatments and, inevitably, incarcerations; and the left, which cannot think injustice beyond racism and other bad attitudes towards some people, perhaps only if they are officially oppressed — together they all are failing to understand some of our society’s deepest problems. It sounds funny to say this, since in our heroizing culture we think being unhappy is no excuse - and of course, it isn’t, but that’s obvious - but that school, work, life are boring for many people is a real social problem.
The future, if there is one, belongs not to people who could never imagine not liking Mondays, but to those who know that all too well.
We don’t want to destroy the present day; we desire a future that is different from today, which is a constitutive feature of a future as such. Some of us desire this keenly, because the past is painful enough and the present weighed down under a burden of hopelessly seeming to portend only more of the same. This hope and faith make it possible for us to say that we don’t like the way things are here and now. We, the people of the future who belong to it even more than a problematic past, we have the courage to say: we don’t like Mondays, and it’s Monday still. What if, contra President Reagan, who famously said “It is morning in America,” it were only, something we must feel with interminable sadness, another Monday morning like those we know too well? If our world was more of a political world, and therefore, less of a violent one, we could, with no fear at all, say this. We should. In a free and democratic society, being a citizen or part of it all means being able to say no to the way things are. There are crude and stupid ways some people have in saying this; but there are others.