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Every philosopher has their pet questions, questions that motivate their study of philosophy, questions they return to continually and which frame every or nearly every philosophical question they ask. Among the questions most central to me in this way is the matter of basic human morality: is human nature basically good or not? Or is the question undecidable or unknowable? I think there’s an argument to be made that human beings are the worst thing known to exist. We might think of a crocodile devouring a still-living gazelle and remark on the cruelty of nature, but this is purely metaphorical. The crocodile is, at worst, completely apathetic to the gazelle’s suffering. It is effectively an amoral force of nature, no more capable of being cruel than a hurricane or a sunset. Humans, on the other hand, are uniquely, pervasively, and persistently cruel.
This might make it sound as though I’m decided against basic human goodness, but that’s not the case. For all our cruelty, I’m not convinced that we are naturally malicious, and in fact I suspect—though I’m far from certain of this—that our true nature is actually kind, gentle, and altruistic. The problem is that the environment we’ve created for ourselves is radically different from the one in which we evolved to exist, and this creates certain pressures which amplify certain otherwise-latent traits. My suspicion, in other words, is that nature did not make us cruel; rather, we made ourselves cruel.
On Tuesday, May 24th, an 18-year-old man named Salvador Ramos entered an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and killed, as of this writing, 19 children and two teachers. Such an act exhibits what we might call an extraordinary level of evil, but we must remember that the word “extraordinary” clearly delimits those things which are unexpected or surprising. Mass shootings in the United States are now quite commonplace: the Wikipedia article “List of mass shootings in the United States in 2022” documents, as of this writing on the 144th day of the year, 202 incidents. That’s an average of about three mass shootings every two days. And even mass shootings in elementary schools—an absolutely unconscionable targeting of one of the few demographics of humans who can actually be considered truly innocent—are not unprecedented.
One of the articles I read in the course of researching for this essay is titled “Children Deserve the Honest Truth About Mass Shootings,” by Caroline Mimbs Nyce. In the article, Nyce interviews social worker Michelle Palmer on the matter of how to talk to children about mass shootings and the general possibility that they may be randomly murdered. It’s a great article and a great interview with lots of good information for parents, but it’s also absolutely heartrending and clearly indicates to me that our society is very deeply broken.
I’ve seen articles and posts making statements to the effect of “America has a mental health problem disguised as a gun problem.” This suggests that what appears to be a gun problem is in fact not a gun problem but rather a mental health problem, but clearly this is not the case. According to data collected by GunPolicy.org, global gun violence correlates strongly with gun ownership (Narea, Zhao, & Millhiser, 2022). The United States is a radical outlier in both metrics, but actually falls very close to the correlation line, which means that we can accurately say that American gun violence is actually normal, given the number of guns. So we have good reason to believe that the problem has something to do with guns at the primary level.
But the mere availability of guns cannot, in itself, possibly drive this kind of senseless violence. We might say that mental health problems may be exacerbating the gun problem, but this seems unsatisfactory as well. It seems reasonable—though I’ll be troubling this assumption in a moment—to say that anyone who commits this kind of act in the first place has a mental health problem, but then, so do about one in five Americans (“Mental Illness,” 2022). So while we might tautologically say that all mass shooters have a mental illness, there does not seem to be a predisposition towards mass shooting among the mentally ill, and so mental illness as an explanation for mass shootings comes up short.
And even the assumption that mass shooters are necessarily mentally ill is problematic. Again, it seems almost a tautology: how could one who commits a mass shooting not be mentally ill? Let’s consider another phenomenon often claimed as being linked to mental illness: religion. I’ve seen numerous claims on the internet and elsewhere that religion is a mental illness because it involves delusional beliefs. Atheist thought leader Sam Harris famously stated, “If you wake up tomorrow morning thinking that saying a few Latin words over your pancakes is going to turn them into the body of Elvis Presley, you have lost your mind. But if you think more or less the same thing about a cracker and the body of Jesus, you’re just a Catholic” (TehPhysicalist, 2012). And Harris is likely correct that both claims have the same ontological status—that they’re both completely false—but that doesn’t make them equivalent in other respects. Let’s proceed under the assumption that the claims of at least some religions are false. Does that then mean that those who accept such claims are mentally ill?
This is clearly not the case. Believing something false does not in itself indicate mental illness. Mental illness is a pathology: it is a cause, not merely an effect. People can have wrong beliefs for a number of different reasons, most of them not related to pathology. In fact, it’s not at all difficult to construct scenarios in which someone is entirely justified in a false belief. And if someone then acts on those beliefs, we may even be able to say that they are acting rationally, given that they believe what they believe.
With this in mind, let us consider the motives of another recent shooter, Payton Gendron, who, on May 14th, killed ten people in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. Gendron, a self-described fascist, white supremacist, and antisemite, subscribed to a racist theory known as “white replacement” (Prokupecz et al., 2022). The idea behind white replacement is that some group, typical Jews or liberals, are trying to replace white people with demographics that are more favorable towards their agendas. Those who believe the theory have described it as a kind of genocide against white people. Of course the entire idea is ridiculous; shifts in American demographics are part of long trends that are largely understood, and there’s no reason whatsoever to believe that there’s any sort of sinister intention driving those trends. Regardless, this bizarre and racist conspiracy theory has established itself in mainstream political discourse, having been repeated by the popular pundit Tucker Carlson and Iowa Republican Representative Steve King (Cillizza, 2021). Gendron’s belief in this theory was no symptom of mental illness, but rather the result of successful programs of propaganda and indoctrination by public figures and of a manifest failure of critical thinking. And if we take Gendron’s belief in white replacement as a given, his actions become entirely rational. If he believed that he and his people were the target of a genocide, then it is reasonable to expect that he would try to fight back against this in some way.
The broader problem, then, cannot be ascribed to mental illness.
This general situation of frequent mass shootings was not always the case. April 20th, 1999, the day of the Columbine High School massacre, was one of my final days in my own high school, only about ten miles away. Shock at the incident was widespread; I remember being shocked as well, but not entirely surprised. As it turns out, I had a great deal in common with the shooters. We listened to the same music, played the same games, had the same fantasies of murdering the people who had tormented us for our entire lives. I was a “weird” kid, as such things go: a sensitive, socially-awkward cis boy with a decidedly feminine appearance who grew his hair long and listened to heavy metal. I was teased, tormented, and, on occasion, physically assaulted on a regular basis for almost my entire childhood. I was told by my parents and teachers that this was normal. The most popular students were often the same ones who brutalized me, and I thought it monstrously unjust that they should have adoration and I scorn. But I had no recourse: I couldn’t fight back as I was smaller and weaker than they. I could excel at my schoolwork but that only made them resent me. And so I found my revenge in my daydreams, in which I murdered each and every one of them. The difference between me and the Columbine shooters is not a moral one but rather purely circumstantial: it’s merely a matter of access to weaponry. Had I guns, I may well have used them.
My intention here is not to mount a moral defense of people who shoot up elementary schools; only to recognize that my reasonable reaction to oppressive circumstances put me in a position in which I felt that evil was my only recourse. I don’t believe this excuses acts of evil, but it does clarify for us that evil is not simply a matter of individual choice. Evil is about our relationships to each other: it is necessarily social in nature. And as we are social creatures, both motivated by our biological sociality and individually shaped by our social environments, evil cannot be considered apart from that context. And this leads us to consider our moral history. Humans have been around for hundreds of thousands or even millions of years, depending on how you count, but this sort of intra-species violence, this trend of malicious attacks on the innocent, is new.
What changed? Because humans have not always been this way. In these last couple centuries, not only the scale of cruelty but its intensity have radically amplified. The cruelty is worse and there’s more of it. Is it merely a matter of technological capacity? Have we always been this way, lacking only the means to carry out our darkest wishes? Or have we, by being the one creature capable of modifying the circumstances of their existence and actually having done so, altered as well our basic moral character?
There’s an interesting book by German philologist and student of Greek religion Walter Burkert called Homo Necans (1983), which examines the practices of sacrifice in ancient Greek religion. Burkert reminds us that humans did not evolve to be hunters and killers. We evolved from other primates, who were omnivorous by nature but whose diet was primarily herbivorous. We became hunters as a matter of necessity and opportunity, and, as Burkert describes, we created sacrificial rituals as a means of mediating between these dual aspects of our nature. Being communal creatures, we found violence innately horrific. It caused us anxiety and guilt, and we established these rituals almost as a kind of therapy. This concept was explored as well, albeit more abstractly, in the contemporaneous work of French philosopher Georges Bataille (1989), who described how sacrifice allowed us to return the animal to the “lost intimacy” from which we had appropriated it and turned it into an object of utility.
A decade earlier, the anthropologist Desmond Morris described in his book The Human Zoo (1996) how the radical increase in human population density since the advent of agriculture has brought about a similarly-radical change in our biological sociality. We evolved in what Morris refers to as “personal societies,” societies in which a given person could reasonably be expected to know every other member of their society. Although we were hostile towards outsiders, we were, internal to these societies, altruistic towards and cooperative with our fellow humans. Post-agricultural-revolution, however, we transitioned to life in “impersonal societies” in which no one person could possibly know every other member of their community. This brought with it certain changes; to put it simply, our biological sociality functions differently within impersonal societies than in the personal societies in which that sociality evolved in the first place, and these changes were largely negative in nature and have since been magnified by our technology.
Let us consider technology as amplification. Objectively, humans have basic faculties and drives which we fulfill by means of those faculties. Technology amplifies those faculties. And this is something robustly documented in the work of Marshall McLuhan (2003), but consider, just as an example, social media as a technology relative to our intrinsic social nature as human beings. We know that some species of life are more social and more communal than others. Ants are very communal, tigers not really at all. We, being a kind of ape, are not massively social as ants are but certainly have this basic biological sociality which Morris described as having evolved in the context of human personal societies.
Let us suppose that there are characteristics of our sociality which are morally negative but which are latent under small social scales. In other words, there are ways in which we are inclined in social contexts to be “bad,” “evil,” what have you, but that these inclinations do not emerge in significant ways when social groups are sufficiently small, say around the size of paleolithic bands, which we believe were generally no larger than a hundred people.
Now let us suppose that any technology which amplifies our sociality also universally amplifies the various traits associated with our sociality. In other words, if we were to say that our tendency towards altruism came part and parcel with our general sociality, then we would then be saying that social media, as a result of amplifying our sociality in general, also specifically amplifies our altruism. Then we would also see the morally negative qualities of our sociality amplified. It might even be possible that this sort of amplification affects latent morality differentially; in other words, technology may amplify the negative traits more than the positive ones, or may amplify negative traits and repress positive ones. I think that, in any case, that general trend explains the chaotic and violent behaviors we’re observing within our society right now.
What I’m saying here is that we may be able to look at human behavior the same way that we look at the Big Bang. Over the last couple hundred years that we’ve been observing the large-scale structure of the universe, we’ve been observing that everything everywhere is flying away from us at a rate that varies with distance. What does this mean? It means that the universe is expanding everywhere. From this empirical situation, we then reasoned backwards to the Big Bang: if space expands as time progresses, then it contracts as time recedes, and as we run the clock backwards, the universe approaches infinite density everywhere. Similarly, human behavior is approaching greater and greater extremes: more violence, more cruelty, bigger wars, greater oppression. Now, human behavior is dynamic and unpredictable: we may not be able to say that human aggression, violence, hatred, etc. have always been increasing from some idyllic state. However, we can, at the least, say that we are not always like this, because we haven’t always been like this. There is at least the possibility of variance in our negative traits. What is it that is driving that variation?
As I’ve described, I suspect technology and population as being primarily responsible. Both are amplifiers. What we do naturally, we do to a greater extent through our technology. What we do because of our social condition, we do to a greater extent as our population grows at an exponential rate. But what this reveals is that we are in fact basically good. In this sense, the “fallen nature” arguments of religion are correct: we descend from some more natural state in which we were morally better creatures because our negative potentials were latent. Either we tend towards this state periodically, or we have been descending away from it for our entire existence.
Take cruelty, for example. What incentivizes cruel behavior? Seems to me that there’s not much incentive for cruelty within a paleolithic band. There may be an incentive for strong aggression against other bands, but there would seem to be no purpose whatsoever towards cruel behavior in general. What would it accomplish? Cruelty, it seems to me, mainly acquires usefulness at larger social scales. In bands, it is not difficult to enforce a behavioral culture in which certain actions are taboo: everyone can keep tabs on everyone else, and the leaders of the bands could reasonably be expected to know the goings on of a hundred or so people. But when you get early monarchs like the pharaohs of Ancient Egypt, if they wanted to enforce a certain behavior or taboo, there’s no way they can be sure that every one of their hundreds of thousands of subjects is behaving in that way, but they can make an example of anyone who behaves otherwise, ensuring that the risk of getting caught—the probability of getting caught combined with the consequences of getting caught—exceeds any possible benefit that might come from, for example, stealing grain from the royal grainery.
What remains is necessarily that we are better, essentially, than we are presently acting. This gives us reason for hope. So, then, what can actually be done to address this epidemic of violence?
Remember what I mentioned earlier, that the level of gun violence in America is actually very close to the global norm given the level of gun ownership in America. That means that it’s likely that the problem can be substantially ameliorated by reducing the number of guns in private ownership. We have good reason to believe that such measures would be effective, because we’ve tried them before, and we have evidence that they worked. In 1994, the U.S. Congress passed a 10-year ban on the manufacture of assault weapons for sale to civilians. The Wikipedia page for the law states that “Studies have shown the ban had little effect on overall criminal activity, firearm homicides, and the lethality of gun crimes.” However, the section documenting this claim is much less conclusive, with one study mentioned reporting a 70% decrease in mass shooting fatalities during the period, and a more recent report that I found that is not included in the Wikipedia page documents a “significant decrease in firearm-related homicides in three of the most dangerous cities” in the United States during the period when the law was in effect (Huang et al., 2022).
Even if we were to look at the data and decide that they’re insufficiently conclusive, reducing the availability of guns still seems like a reasonable starting point for addressing the problem. After all, there are no studies that I’ve been able to find suggesting that mass shooting fatalities increased during the ban, so if such a ban certainly wouldn’t make things worse and might make things better, why not start there? Here we’ll run into the counterclaim that the loss of freedom to own powerful firearms is worse than whatever good might be accomplished by such restrictions. Such claims often fall back on the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, so let’s take a look at that.
The full text of the amendment reads as follows: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Now, there are three general approaches to interpreting the Constitution of the United States. The only one of these that I consider the least bit reasonable is called judicial pragmatism, and holds that the Constitution is a living document that needs to adapt to the changing reality of the nation. Another approach, originalism, holds that the Constitution should be interpreted according to the intentions of those who wrote it, and yet another, textualism, holds that we should precisely follow the exact wording of the document. But these are completely absurd: the authors of the Constitution could not possibly have predicted or even comprehended contemporary American society and its technological circumstances. Nor does it make moral sense to strictly adhere to the guidance of genocidal, slave-owning patriarchs, even if we were to grant that their ideas about democratic government were fundamentally sound.
Given such interpretive approaches, it seems clear to me that the Constitution is fully compatible with strong restrictions on gun ownership. Looking at it logically, the stricture against infringing upon the right of the people to keep and bear arms is dependent on well-regulated militias being necessary to the security of free states. However, there are numerous examples of states which are free and secure but which do not have militias of any sort. Take Norway and Japan as examples. Logically, if the antecedent of a hypothetical is false, then the consequent need not be true, and so “infringement” of this right is entirely constitutional, given that it is not the case that militias are necessary to the security of free states.
Of course, the authors of the Constitution were not logicians, but if we take a more heuristic approach, we’ll find ourselves coming to much the same conclusion. The “right of the people to keep and bear arms” is presented in the text in the context of two things: well-regulated militias and the security and freedom of the state. At present, private gun ownership clearly threatens security more than it protects it, and even were that not the case, the text of the document strongly implies that this right is understood as being restricted to well-regulated militias.
And in any case, we shouldn’t take anything the Constitution says as intrinsically good, as being good in and of itself. The Constitution itself acknowledges this in its own preamble, which reads: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” The Constitution and its articles and amendments are, at best, instrumental goods: good because they accomplish the intrinsic goods described in the preamble. If they fail to “establish justice,” “ensure domestic tranquility,” “promote the general welfare,” “secure the blessings of liberty” for anyone, or to accomplish any other good, then we should discard them and replace them with more effective ones.
Of course, any measures directed against the instrumental means of carrying out mass shootings will only address the symptoms of the larger problem, doing little or nothing to address the underlying cause. If someone wants to kill a large number of people, preventing him from getting the weapons to do so will not change the fact that he wanted to do so in the first place, and he may be able to find an alternative way of accomplishing this goal.
Speaking at a press conference held by the National Rifle Association after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre said, “The truth is, that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters. People that are so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons, that no sane person can ever possibly comprehend them” (Remarks, 2012). So the claim being made here is that some people are just like this and there’s nothing we can really do about it. And perhaps this is true, but this does not describe the profile of many mass shooters. As I mentioned earlier, the motives of the Buffalo supermarket shooter were entirely comprehensible. The voices that possessed him were those of Fox News. Shooters very often have aggressive personalities, and that’s not at all incomprehensible. I think all of us have, at one time or another, done something out of anger that we later regretted. That doesn’t excuse or even compare to shootings, but it does make them at least comprehensible to us. Many shooters were bullied or abused, and again, that doesn’t excuse anything, but we can at least understand people lashing out violently when the world has treated them badly. I want to be very clear about this: these aren’t excuses or exculpations of any sort. These actions are deranged and evil; LaPierre was entirely correct about that. What he was wrong about was that these people are incomprehensible monsters whose motives and behaviors are mysterious and inexplicable to us.
Here’s a question: if LaPierre’s monster theory is correct, why are almost all the shooters men? A Statista survey which looked at 128 shootings committed in the U.S. between 1982 and 2022 found that only three were committed by women (U.S. Mass Shootings by Shooters’ Gender, 2022). But psychopathy, while not being evenly split by gender, is fairly close (Ramsland, 2019), and in general, if the propensity for mass shooting is indeed random, wouldn’t we expect the numbers to be more evenly matched when broken down along gender lines? Even if we were to say that anyone can be one of LaPierre’s monsters but that only men are ultimately socialized so as to commit a shooting, or if we were to say that there are non-random factors which cause more men to be monsters than women, shouldn’t we looking at those causes as being causal in mass shootings?
So no, we shouldn’t accept LaPierre’s claim that shootings are randomly caused by inscrutable monsters. The data confirm with as near certainty as we can find in anything that there are non-random causes at work, causes to which men are almost uniquely susceptible. So we must ask: what social and biological phenomena affect men in particular, men of all races and ethnicities—shooters break down along those lines more or less proportionally (Mass Shootings by Shooter’s Race in the U.S. 2021, 2022)—but almost never other kinds of people? What is different about being a man, physically and within the context of society? There may be other contributing factors that are more universal, but there is at least one thing about men that only they experience that tips them over the edge.
I’m speculating a bit here, but here’s my thinking: of such forces, the strongest one is patriarchy. Patriarchy is one of the strongest social forces period, and being largely about sex and gender itself, it affects people of different sexes and genders in different ways. How does it affect men in particular? Well, in order for patriarchy to operate, men in general must feel entitled to dominance. If you had men in general saying things like, “Hey, you know, maybe it isn’t supposed to be just us in charge,” the whole thing would fall apart. So, one, men in general need to believe that things are supposed to be like this. Two, being that it is unjust that the people in charge are primarily men, there’s resistance to patriarchy, and men must maintain dominance in the face of this resistance. Which means, again, they have to believe that things are supposed to be like this, and they also must be willing to establish, maintain, and defend the status quo. Now, suppose this resistance were ever to become forceful, as it justly might in the face of such injustice. Then the status quo must be maintained by force, and by greater force than is presented by the resistance.
So, in order to maintain itself and the power, status, and wealth that it entails, the patriarchy is going to construct society so that men believe and feel this way. And it’s going to go about this in various ways: media, institutions like the police and the military, religion… it need not even be consciously driven by malicious actors, though I suspect that in some cases it may well be. The point is, if there weren’t forces working to that effect, we wouldn’t have the patriarchy in the first place. The problem is, though, all of this entitlement and aggression needs to be controlled. The patriarchy has to maintain not only its own abstract power structure in which men in general have headship but also the specific and concrete power structures of our real society in which certain men in particular have the most power. So there’s a balance that has to be maintained between inspiring violence and suppressing it. Tip too far in one direction, the patriarchy collapses. Too far in the other direction, and you get an environment in which it is likely that a few men, feeling entitled to power or wealth or women that they don’t have access to for whatever reason, will occasionally “go rogue,” in a manner of speaking, and just go off on their own and kill a bunch of people. And that’s exactly what we see. Furthermore, the incentive would be to push towards that side of the balance rather than risk the collapse of the patriarchal power structures of society.
To sum it up, I think that mass shootings are the latent and intrinsic violence of the patriarchy spilling over the boundaries in which the patriarchs work to contain it.
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Works Cited or Referenced
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Burkert, W. (1983). Homo necans: The anthropology of ancient greek sacrificial ritual and myth (P. Bing, Trans.). Univ. of California Press.
Cillizza, C. (2021, April 15). Analysis: How the ugly, racist White “replacement theory” came to Congress. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/15/politics/scott-perry-white-replacement-theory-tucker-carlson-fox-news/index.html
Huang, D.-D., Manley, N. R., Lewis, R. H., Fischer, P. E., Lenart, E. K., Croce, M. A., & Magnotti, L. J. (2022). The sustained effect of a temporary measure: Urban firearm mortality following expiration of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. The American Journal of Surgery, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amjsurg.2022.03.027
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Narea, N., Zhao, L., & Millhiser, I. (2022, May 26). America’s unique, enduring gun problem, explained. Vox. https://www.vox.com/23142734/uvalde-mass-shooting-gun-violence-control
Prokupecz, S., Maxouris, C., Andone, D., Beech, S., & Vera, A. (2022, May 18). What we know about Buffalo supermarket shooting suspect Payton Gendron. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/15/us/payton-gendron-buffalo-shooting-suspect-what-we-know/index.html
Ramsland, K. (2019). Why Female Psychopaths Are a Different Breed | Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/201906/why-female-psychopaths-are-different-breed
Remarks from the NRA press conference on Sandy Hook school shooting, delivered on Dec. 21, 2012 (Transcript). (2012). Washington Post. Retrieved May 30, 2022, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/remarks-from-the-nra-press-conference-on-sandy-hook-school-shooting-delivered-on-dec-21-2012-transcript/2012/12/21/bd1841fe-4b88-11e2-a6a6-aabac85e8036_story.html
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