Eugene Robinson on Mass Murder

REFERENCE: Eugene Robinson, "Sadly, the carnage will never cease," Ventura County Star 3 October 2017: 13A ; "The carnage will continue," The Washington Post, 2 October 2017

  

            Eugene Robinson will get corrected frequently for his assertion that Stephen "Paddock was using a fully automatic rifle" in the massacre on the Las Vegas Strip on Sunday, October 1, 2017. Apparently Paddock had instead a number of legal semi-automatic rifles with legal "bump stocks," that in the words of Lisa Marie Pane of the AP "allow a semi-automatic rifle to mimic a fully automatic weapon by unleashing an entire large magazine in seconds" and were all he needed for his point-and-spray approach to marksmanship with human targets.

            I wish to correct a less technical assertion in Robinson's fine column: "There can be no rational motive for mass murder"; unfortunately — tragically and worse than tragically — here Robinson is wrong. Mass murder is always and necessarily evil, but it can be the result of rational — measured, calculated — choices.

            If you're one Great Khan or other and have united the tribes on the Eurasian steppe and need to keep them united and producing income and not revolt, it is rational to set them moving into China and Europe. With Genghis Khan, the most impressive of the lot, the project killed some forty million people.

            If you've come from Europe to the New World to kill and conquer for profit, and you come across a mountain of silver and cities rich in gold, and if the local inhabitants are only lightly armed and frequently just die off from diseases you survived as a child — then it is rational to do what you came to do and enslave and kill as best calculated to maximize profit. An occasional Jesuit might ask you rhetorically, "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?" (Mark 8.36), but you can answer, "He gains the world, father," and as long as you keep sending back to your royal masters a big portion of the loot, and convert some of your new slaves to the true faith — you won't get into trouble in this life.

            Or if you're in California for the 1849 Gold Rush or in the Congo Free State for ivory and rubber around 1900 and you've been brought up as a committed or casual racist, then push the locals off any land you want or reduce them to serfs — or "Exterminate all the brutes!"

            The belief in evil is dangerous, especially believing in it as an absolute that allows you to judge guilty whole cultures for celebrating murderous conquests or slavery or female infanticide; "Evil" is a necessary concept, however, precisely so you can condemn mass murder (etc.) as evil and not have to fall back on calling irrational a tactic well calculated to fulfill one's greed or lust for power and fame.

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Ayn Rand Will Enslave You! (2 Feb. 2013)

            Okay, "Ayn Rand Will Enslave You!" is a little over-stated, but I think I can pull off a snarky variation on a theme by F. A. Hayek and argue that fully-achieved, radical Libertarian capitalism would put us on a road that ironically returns to the essence of serfdom.

            Let me start with that "most of us."

            We humans have the bad habit of hearing stories or reading histories and identifying with the winners. (Americans nostalgic for the Confederacy are an exception: The rebel-traitors lost, pendejos! Get over it.).

            We humans have a bad habit of identifying with the winners and the privileged, and this is odd in Americans 'cause if our ancestors were doing all that well Over There, most of us wouldn't now be Over Here.

            I'm Over Here, in the US of A, in part because in 1903 my father's father fled Russia ahead of the Czar's police after him on a murder charge. He'd killed a Cossack; in the family version of the story — which we're sticking to — my grandfather killed the Cossack while the Cossack was raping his (my grandfather's) sister during a pogrom. Still, if my grandfather had murdered a Cossack in a fit of unfortunately premature revolutionary zeal, that would be all right with me.

            A lot of us are here in the USA because our ancestors mistimed their revolutionary zeal or lack of zeal or found themselves POWs at a time and place where POWs were sold to the local slave traders — or preferred not to starve to death in a potato famine or fled press gangs and conscription or a bad marriage and debt collectors; in short, for whatever reasons, they found it best to get the hell out.

            Granted, some were aristocrats who had to get the hell out: a few revolutions succeed, or nobly-bred conspirators took the wrong side in a coup that failed; but there never were that many aristocrats, not relatively speaking, not relative to the masses of peasants and lower.

            I had a friend who bragged that his family was on the losing side of wars and rebellions going back at least six generations; you probably lack bragging rights that impressive, but there's a really good chance your ancestors like mine were among that teeming "wretched refuse," the mongrels of the Earth.

            So none of this identifying with the aristocrats, already! It's not just un-American but unhistorical and disloyal. The odds are your people were peasants or lower on the food chain, and you'd damn well better be capable of thinking like a peasant or, in this case, a serf.

            So: What's the essence of being a serf?

            It's going to piss you serfs off that you're trapped in the precursor of a company town and have to get your grain ground at His Lordship's mill and get ripped off on assessments when His Lordship gets captured in battle and you have to help ransom his ass — or pay for his son's getting knighted or his daughter getting married. It will piss you off if His Lordship and Ladyship can't be hauled into court by a peasant like you when their thugs mug and rob you: "a jury of his peers" meant exactly that, his peers, not necessarily yours. And your heirs will be pissed off when the Lord gets the best of whatever you have to leave when you die.

            Sure, but the essence of your lowly estate is the demands on your time.

            That's the essence of serfdom and more so of slavery: the day-to-day, routine expropriation of time and labor.

            "But," you say, or should say, "but," you say, "freedom from oppression is exactly what capitalist Libertarianism is all about. Freedom from oppression by the State!"

            There wasn't much "State" back in the bad old days of feudalism, so let's all accept the idea that "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" primarily from the State but also from other possible oppressors and exploiters. And let's accept the idea that exploitation nowadays can get subtle. A "wage slave" isn't a slave and "working as a serf in a cube farm" isn't being a serf in Imperial Russia. But …

            But consider day-to-day life in a necessarily imaginary actually-existing capitalist Libertarian utopia: that's life as lived by you, a probable descendent of a slave, serf, peasant — or even an aristocrat not too good (or lucky) choosing sides in power struggles.

            So you're probably not an Ayn Randian general of industry leading the Makers of the world. You're probably a wage-earner pushing virtual buttons at home or in a cube farm and wondering if a capitalist Libertarian utopia offers a union you can join.

            What interests me more, though, is everyday life outside of work for a grunt like you or me in a rigorous market economy, life spent mainly as a consumer, and a consumer who is highly unlikely to have a staff.

            What's life like in a hyper-capitalist, high-tech world, where you're surrounded by choices in a grand array of overlapping free markets — mostly unregulated markets — caught up in the swirl of dynamic, rapid, capitalist change?

            With the money to hire a staff, life could be very good.

            Without a staff, though, I think you'd be trapped in a system that expropriates your time as much as — if far more gently than — in feudalism.

            Consider what happens when you have to negotiate and contract for health-care, paying for health-care, arranging public health services — good luck with that! — contracting for school, water, power, police and fire protection? And what happens when you have to negotiate those contracts more and more frequently as corporate persons fine-tune ways of maximizing profit by tweaking contracts as often as Travelocity changes rates for plane flights?

            There isn't much of a State in a capitalist Libertarian utopia, but what there is will spend most of its energy enforcing contracts. What happens when you really have to read all those agreements for Terms of Use?

            Choice is good. Change is often good. Choices forced upon you, however, continual and rapid change: those are not so good.

            If you have no choice but to spend large hunks of your time shopping around and operating as a "Midas-Plagued," product-consuming, free-market economic animal; if you have to negotiate your way through the day knowing that tomorrow you may have to renegotiate — what then?

            The bitter joke in recent, economically modernized and liberalized Eastern Europe has it that Karl "Marx was wrong about everything about Communism; unfortunately, he was right about capitalism." As Marx and Frederick Engels said about the slow-speed capitalism of their time: "Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air […]."

            The turbo-charged capitalism of our time has placed even more strain on people. A capitalist-Libertarian "utopia" of rampant markets would be worse. The markets might be free, but those systemically coerced into using them are far less free. The working conditions will be a whole lot better, but like our "huddled masses"/"wretched refuse" ancestors, much our time and labor will have been appropriated: appropriated by the aristocrats of the new world, with money to hire us peasants as staff to do the grunt work of consumption.

Slavery: Continuum, Continuity — Cruelty (21 Oct. 2013)

I'll start with a disclaimer of sorts.

            The word "presentism" apparently has technical uses in philosophy and for literary and historical analysis, but I found an almost colloquial usage more immediately useful. In this sense, "presentism" is the dumb-ass cousin of a belief in progress and is shown when people too literally think, "In every day / In every way," people have grown "better and better and better," and believe the way we live today is, across-the-board, the norm. If that's the case, then — given where we are today — our ancestors must have been pretty damn stupid and unsophisticated.

            I ran into this attitude when some of my 18-20-something students made clear they thought pretty ignorant and unsophisticated such folk as noble and royal politicians in the courts of Richard II and Elizabeth I, or London theater fans ca. 1600. There are a lot of things you can say about rulers and courtiers in the late medieval and early modern periods —words like "criminal" and "immoral" are frequently apt — but, as a rule, unsophisticated they were not. King Richard II had some weird weaknesses of character, but he wasn't stupid, and when it came to running the family business (England and such), the Tudor Queen Elizabeth was very, very, very bright, sophisticated, and good at her job. And, of course, London audiences ca. 1600 supported a good deal of crap, but they also saw, heard, and apparently appreciated some of the best drama ever produced.

            It is useful to avoid "presentism" in this sense when doing literary criticism so you don't find yourself thinking that the writing of Chaucer and Shakespeare and such couldn't be as sophisticated as your instructors have suggested because Chaucer and Shakespeare and their audiences couldn't have been that sophisticated. Now one or more of your instructors may have been overly ingenious or, well, even just full of shit with a reading or two  — but not because an idea we can have was necessarily too clever for the likes of our ancestors.

            If useful to avoid presentism in this sense in LitCrit, it is actually important to avoid it when doing politics — nothing in LitCrit is truly important — it is important to avoid presentism in talking politics since we shouldn't often change current practices on the assumption that our ancestors were idiots when they came up with them.  (For example, after the 2008 financial crises, the "Glass-Steagall" Banking Act of 1933 looks like a really good idea after all.)

            Sometimes our ancestors were stupid, of course; see above on professors sometimes being stupid and apply the rule broadly: even bright humans, even bright humans acting where we're experts say dumb things and do even dumber. But not all that often: Usually our predecessors knew what they were doing, thank you, and the conservatives are correct in the traditional conservative belief that we shouldn't muck around changing things unless we have strong reasons to change things.

            So, our ancestors weren't generally stupid, or incompetent.

            Having said that, however, I want get to what is, as I write, a newly-released movie I have not seen (and may not) and to the serious implications of the idea a character in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness summed up in his reference to his "criminal ancestors": i.e., us and those predecessors I've been defending.

            The movie I want to take off from is 12 Years a Slave (2013) and the inevitable viewer reactions to the cruelty of nineteenth-century Black slavery in the southern United States. The reactions are better nowadays than with Roots in 1977, when I heard and read from some of my fellow Americans — adults, and people who could read — "Why didn't they tell us?!" i.e., why weren't we told that slavery was so bad. Well, indeed they didn't tell us as much as they should have, but the basic information was there. People are told more nowadays and at least quieter about being shocked ("Shocked!") that cruelty was going on, but I want now to point out that in many ways, important ways, things were worse in the past than most of us assume.

            Sorry gang, but you need to know this — and the upshot will be rather hopeful.

            In Origin of Totalitarianism (1951) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Hannah Arendt makes clear that people won't understand the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews if they think of it as the Holocaust and don't put the Shoah in its historical context, including a tradition of massacres. Furthermore, those of us who talk of the eleven million victims of the Hitlerian Holocaust, and not just the five to six million murdered Jews, sometimes have the prudent political motivation of reminding people who are not Jews that they have more at stake here than sentimental sympathy for victims. The "First they came for …" litany has become a cliché, but it remains one of the most practical bits of wisdom that history can teach. "The Final Solution of the Jewish Problem" was central to the Nazis systematic slaughter, but the machinery of exterminations found a variety of victims and had roots in soils in addition to anti-Semitism.

            And even as you have to have some feeling for the history of massacres to understand the Hitlerian Holocaust, even so you need to know the continuity of the cruelty of slavery, and you need to know that slavery was at the extreme end and a logical extension of a continuum of cruelty that lasted into modern times, and came back for a season of hell in the 20^th century.

            Since my form in these blogs is the meditation or personal essay, I'll start with a personal observation from my PhD candidacy in the late 1960s, when, in theory, I learned to read Latin.

            I was using for homework The New Collegiate Latin & English Dictionary (1966) and one day noticed how often on the way to looking up something else — we were mostly reading Aesop's Fables, for God's sake! — how often I saw Latin words referring to things military, violent, and/or violent in relationship to managing slaves. Slavery was woven into the fabric of the Latin language, as was the idea that slaves had to be kept in line, fairly often through terror: beatings, blindings (altero oculo captus 'to blind in one eye'), breaking bones, branding, … well, a series of horrors up to and including crucifixion. Educated and valuable slaves might be treated well; however "Unskilled slaves, or those condemned to slavery as punishment, worked on farms, in mines, and at mills. Their living conditions were brutal, and their lives short." Legal testimony from slaves was admissible only after slaves had been tortured.

            Roman slaves gained rights as time went on, but there was continuity, with some slavery in the European Middle Ages, moving more toward serfdom, which got into full gear in parts of Russia in the 17^th century and lasted until fairly recently: 1861. Literal slavery in Russia got a significant boost from the medieval Mongol and Tatar invasions and lasted until 1723.

            There was also continuity of slavery in areas in more constant contact with western Europe than most of Russia: The Mideast slave trade lasted from the 7^th century C.E. through the 19^th, and it ranks #8 on Matthew White's list of "The One Hundred Deadliest Multicides" in human history, accounting for some 18.5 million deaths, to say nothing of families torn apart and lives reduced (by definition) to slavery.

            So slavery was known in Europe from their neighbors, and when the Reformation and Renaissance got into full swing, such knowledge was increased by reminders that slavery had been regulated but accepted in the now much-translated and much-read Bible and had been accepted and defended by the now born again, so to speak, classics: the revitalized and revitalizing admiration of ancient Greece and Rome and their cultures (renaissance). If the Hebrews practiced, and the noble Greeks and Romans accepted, practiced, and, as we used to say in academe, theorized slavery — how bad could it be?

            In his "General Introduction" to The Norton Shakespeare (2000), Stephen Greenblatt has a beautiful little quotation attributed to Elizabeth I referring to Her Majesty's Loyal Pirate, John Hawkins and his first slaving voyage, where he transported "some three hundred blacks from the Guinea coast to Hispaniola." She "is reported to have said of this venture that it was 'detestable and would call down the Vengeance of Heaven upon the Undertakers.'" As I said, Elizabeth was bright and sophisticated, and as Head of the Church of England she knew a wicked act when she learned of one. However, Hawkins's venture grossed £10,000 — a huge sum during the period — and so "she invested in Hawkins's subsequent voyages and lent him ships" (23); business is business.

            And business for some was most excellent in the early part of early modern times as the voyages of exploration and  discovery discovered silver mines in the New World and empires loaded with gold to plunder and new marketing opportunities with sugar and then tobacco and rum (making fortunes through drug-dealing is old news in the Americas).

            There was money to be made, and if some of the methods were "detestable," well …. Well, by the late 17^th century, racism would theorize why a little detestable slavery was OK for Black people, and there was the tradition of slavery from the Holy and semi-holy scripture of the Bible and the classics. Say what you will about the Romans, they were equal-opportunity oppressors. If they could enslave the two known races of White and Black, plus every ethnicity they could conquer, surely Europeans could enslave Africans, who could be presented, in a Christian variation on Aristotle, as by nature servile and, indeed, who could profit infinitely from contact with Europeans, and getting Christianized (although that Christianizing bit got problematic with conservative or proto-liberal Christians — depending on how you saw them — who disapproved of enslaving other Christians).

            There is one other item to add to the hell-broth as we moved into the slavery inherited in the New World colonies that became the United States. The detestable cruelty of slavery in itself, the terrorism required to maintain people in slavery, was less obvious in its time, including in the years of the Atlantic Slave Trade, from 1452-1807 (#10 on Matthew White's list, with 16 million dead), until the end of slavery in the United States in 1865. Slavery was indeed opposed by an abolitionist movement that over time moved from the political fringe to the mainstream; but that movement took a long time, in part precisely because Black chattel slavery was the extreme end of a continuum of cruelty but definitely part of a continuum.

            In 2011, Steven Pinker published an impressive book on The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, which required him to come up with some strong hypotheses on Why Violence Has Declined but more so required for him to demonstrate that, indeed, violence has, in fact, declined.

            He was able to perform that demonstration for a reason crucial here: Violence in our time is less than in earlier times, even acknowledging the horrors of the "hemoclysm" (blood deluge) of the two world wars of the 20^th century; but violence is less not because this generation is all that good but more because life for many people before quite recently was very, very bad. As Pinker summarizes much of his book: "Tribal warfare was nine times as deadly as war and genocide in the 20th century. The murder rate of Medieval Europe was more than thirty times what it is today. Slavery, sadistic punishments, and frivolous executions were unexceptionable features of life for millennia, then suddenly were targeted for abolition. Wars between developed countries have vanished, and even in the developing world, wars kill a fraction of the people they did a few decades ago. Rape, battering, hate crimes, deadly riots, child abuse, cruelty to animals — all substantially down."

            Pinker has been critiqued, and figuratively attacked, for his conclusions, but they jibe with a Latin-English dictionary of decades earlier with no political agenda, and with such works as Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (1978), and the fictional but very well researched BAROQUE CYCLE by Neal Stephenson (2003-4). They also go along with a side comment by the US Army colonel who taught my American military history course ca. 1961. In 1776, the Continental Congress increased the maximum number of lashes a court martial could order from the Biblical 39 to the decimal 100; as the colonel noted, it could have been worse, since the 100 limit "at least meant it was unlikely you'd be whipped to death," as could happen in the British tradition of having someone "whipped through the fleet" or receiving up to a deadly 200 lashes. And then there was reading Herman Melville's, White Jacket (1850), the book arguably most responsible for ending flogging in the US Navy. One memorable and undoubtedly effective — if problematic — sentence: "The chivalric Virginian, John Randolph of Roanoke, declared, in his place in Congress, that on board of the American man-of-war that carried him out Ambassador to Russia he had witnessed more flogging than had taken place on his own plantation of five hundred African slaves in ten years."

            In the words of an old joke, as H. Rap Brown (of the Black Panther Party) might've said of the chivalric slave-owner John Randolph, "damn White of him." Still, the point remains that sailors and soldiers, servants and prisoners were often treated with great cruelty. As Pinker stresses, it was part of everyday life to encounter brutality toward non-human animals, children, wives, and others in positions of weakness, people in culturally-sanctioned and enforced inferiority. And one definition of "liberty" included the liberty to practice such brutality without interference by the state in family matters or labor management or doing what the social superior thought right to do with "my own."

            Books like Pinker's Better Angels and essays like mine here are — or should be — unpleasant to read, but there is that hopeful upshot. Things really have gotten better, and there is hope for getting them actually pretty good for increasing numbers of people.

            As part of that improvement, it's necessary to remember that sympathy for the oppressed is nice as a form of altruism, but politically more effective when aspects of good character are reinforced by insightful self-interest.

            It wasn't just Jews caught up in the Nazi exterminations, and it was not just Blacks who suffered: these atrocities happened in worlds that kept up traditions of cruelty and fitted them to newfangled ideologies of racism and very old-fashioned sins of pride and greed. Jews and Blacks are strong contenders for the "Grimmy Award" for some areas of worst suffering, but there are many out there to join us.


            Americans in the 21^st century or not particularly exceptional nor are we all that much smarter than our ancestors; and our current relative decency is a matter of culture, inheritance, and, in a sense, fashion. There was great continuity of slavery and other oppression, and bad old days can return. One way to prevent them is to be at least smart enough to do the arithmetic: slavery is a great way to live, for a rich slave-owner; an oppressive hierarchical society is great, if you're on the top. But that's not how the numbers work: If we return to worlds with a long continuum of cruelty, there's a good chance each of us will be receiving most of that cruelty, not dishing it out.