Mental illness; spectacular and everyday violence
It is weird to me that people bring up mental illness re: the Las Vegas shooting. Steve Paddock had no history of being diagnosed with anything, and from what we know, he had no history of displaying obvious symptoms of anything that would tend to suggest a mental illness. He was slightly reclusive and socially offish, but so are tons of people. More significantly, he was rude / controlling / verbally abusive towards his girlfriend in public, and gendered violence is a frequent and significant "warning sign" for men who commit acts of spectacular violence. But most people don't consider gendered violence or intimate partner abuse a sign of mental illness, per se, and most people wouldn't consider it a sign of mental illness, per se, if he had killed her. (I can imagine a society in which those things would be considered signs of mental illness, but that society is in the realm of speculative fiction, whether utopian or dystopian.) Quotidian acts of violence against partners or family members or even murders of non-family members with a clear motive aren't considered signs of mental illness, but killing a bunch of strangers in an act of spectacular violence is considered, by many people, to be in and of itself not only a sign of a mental illness, but irrefutable proof of one (if the killer is white, of course).
I'm not convinced there's any logical basis for this distinction between how we think about spectacular violence and quotidian violence. Leaving mental illness aside, for the moment, is murder an abnormal behavior? Is mass murder more abnormal than murdering one family member? Both are violation of social norms. I suspect that this is part of why the common sense identification of mental illness with spectacular violence is so strong: mass murder of innocents is a deliberate, theatrical violation of social norms done partly for the sake of being viewed, generating terror, outrage, or infamy. It is a violation of social norms par excellence. Meanwhile, quotidian forms of violence are proscribed by social norms but do not flout them or constitute an attack on them.
Social norms by themselves aren't enough to constitute psychological abnormality, though, since they are socially, culturally, and historically specific. (If we treat social norms as sufficient to establish abnormality, then we'd be left saying that an LGBT person living in 1950s America really was abnormal.)
And here we see that there must have been a shift with the rise of regular incidents of spectacular violence, especially in the US. (I'm not sure that the rest of the world is immune towards these dynamics; in fact, in the Daesh era, terrorism has moved away from its old purposes and towards the spectacular, affecting the Middle East, Europe, North Africa, and even South Asia; Europe has its homegrown purveyors of spectacular ultraviolence like Anders Breivik. The US is perhaps the epicenter of the industrialized spectacle which has then been exported to the world. Anyway ... I'm most familiar with the US.)
Mass shootings are now a regular feature of the US news cycle. They aren't that shocking, anymore. The theatrical flaunting of social norms is now in a larger sense within the norm of what's to be expected in a given few months' news cycle. Outrage at "sick" killers is something everyone can agree on in a very divided country. In a sense they might even be "useful" in the sense that mass killers present a unifying scapegoat, a common villain.
Also worth mentioning is that we live in a country and a world where spectacular ultraviolence is quite acceptable as long as it is exercised through the state's monopoly on legitimate force and/or as a subject of Hollywood fiction. I spend too much time on Leftbook, perahps, but I'm tired of the whataboutism comparing recent single-killer, non-state mass shootings to Wounded Knee; I'm pretty sure those posts don't convince anyone who didn't already know and care about Wounded Knee. Besides, we don't have to go to the 19th century to find US military forces engaged in a mass killing. Maybe we have to go to the 19th century to find them engaged in mass killing *within the boundaries of the US*, but that proviso is just as artificial as the provisos that say, Vegas had the most casualties of any *recent* shooting *by a lone shooter* that allow us to exclude Wounded Knee from consideration in the first place. Within the lifetimes of everyone of voting age in the US, the US military killed tens if not hundreds of thousands of people, both armed and civilians, from the sky in Iraq. Of course the decision was made to avoid the spectacle of dead bodies, this time, and to favor instead cool, controlled video game detachment. Is that legitimate violence less monstruous? (My own ultimately uninteresting whataboutism; and yet, the whitewashing of history is well underway. The best sad/resonant sentence I have read this week, about George W. Bush: "He’s a war criminal, but he’s funny." I feel that these ghosts will follow all of us American citizens who failed to stop that war for all of our days.) I suppose the comparison with early 1900s race riots is slightly more interesting, if only because the memory of those events has been so thoroughly erased from mainstream discourse about US history.
I'm not really suggesting that we need to define mass/spectacular killing as normal. It's worth observing, though, that when we are talking about everyday forms of violence, whether small scale gun violence or whatever else, the question of whether it's normal doesn't inspire a lot of hand-wringing and isn't very interesting at that level of generality. It seems like our way of evaluating spectacular violence ought to evolve in that direction.
I'm not convinced there's any logical basis for this distinction between how we think about spectacular violence and quotidian violence. Leaving mental illness aside, for the moment, is murder an abnormal behavior? Is mass murder more abnormal than murdering one family member? Both are violation of social norms. I suspect that this is part of why the common sense identification of mental illness with spectacular violence is so strong: mass murder of innocents is a deliberate, theatrical violation of social norms done partly for the sake of being viewed, generating terror, outrage, or infamy. It is a violation of social norms par excellence. Meanwhile, quotidian forms of violence are proscribed by social norms but do not flout them or constitute an attack on them.
Social norms by themselves aren't enough to constitute psychological abnormality, though, since they are socially, culturally, and historically specific. (If we treat social norms as sufficient to establish abnormality, then we'd be left saying that an LGBT person living in 1950s America really was abnormal.)
And here we see that there must have been a shift with the rise of regular incidents of spectacular violence, especially in the US. (I'm not sure that the rest of the world is immune towards these dynamics; in fact, in the Daesh era, terrorism has moved away from its old purposes and towards the spectacular, affecting the Middle East, Europe, North Africa, and even South Asia; Europe has its homegrown purveyors of spectacular ultraviolence like Anders Breivik. The US is perhaps the epicenter of the industrialized spectacle which has then been exported to the world. Anyway ... I'm most familiar with the US.)
Mass shootings are now a regular feature of the US news cycle. They aren't that shocking, anymore. The theatrical flaunting of social norms is now in a larger sense within the norm of what's to be expected in a given few months' news cycle. Outrage at "sick" killers is something everyone can agree on in a very divided country. In a sense they might even be "useful" in the sense that mass killers present a unifying scapegoat, a common villain.
Also worth mentioning is that we live in a country and a world where spectacular ultraviolence is quite acceptable as long as it is exercised through the state's monopoly on legitimate force and/or as a subject of Hollywood fiction. I spend too much time on Leftbook, perahps, but I'm tired of the whataboutism comparing recent single-killer, non-state mass shootings to Wounded Knee; I'm pretty sure those posts don't convince anyone who didn't already know and care about Wounded Knee. Besides, we don't have to go to the 19th century to find US military forces engaged in a mass killing. Maybe we have to go to the 19th century to find them engaged in mass killing *within the boundaries of the US*, but that proviso is just as artificial as the provisos that say, Vegas had the most casualties of any *recent* shooting *by a lone shooter* that allow us to exclude Wounded Knee from consideration in the first place. Within the lifetimes of everyone of voting age in the US, the US military killed tens if not hundreds of thousands of people, both armed and civilians, from the sky in Iraq. Of course the decision was made to avoid the spectacle of dead bodies, this time, and to favor instead cool, controlled video game detachment. Is that legitimate violence less monstruous? (My own ultimately uninteresting whataboutism; and yet, the whitewashing of history is well underway. The best sad/resonant sentence I have read this week, about George W. Bush: "He’s a war criminal, but he’s funny." I feel that these ghosts will follow all of us American citizens who failed to stop that war for all of our days.) I suppose the comparison with early 1900s race riots is slightly more interesting, if only because the memory of those events has been so thoroughly erased from mainstream discourse about US history.
I'm not really suggesting that we need to define mass/spectacular killing as normal. It's worth observing, though, that when we are talking about everyday forms of violence, whether small scale gun violence or whatever else, the question of whether it's normal doesn't inspire a lot of hand-wringing and isn't very interesting at that level of generality. It seems like our way of evaluating spectacular violence ought to evolve in that direction.