Horrifying, we're told, national highs we can verify for ourselves...--but they seem like such small numbers, no? I mean, 1% of every 100,000 residents would be 1000, which gives you less than .1% chance of getting killed. And that's if we fool ourselves and try to say that every race, every level of education, every economic disposition, every man, woman and child regardless of these material assignations is equally likely to find his or her way to a bullet or a knife in the coming months....
And yet. And yet perfectly rational people when contemplating visiting this ruined and unforgiven city balk, pause, avert full of fear. And yet there it is in the national psyche: New Orleans as the Lower 9th Ward of the country that never made it out from under all the water and all the Martial Law, the town people are leaving, the people who are leaving being written about in national papers, the national papers read by you, me, and plenty of other educated and otherwise rational people in the living rooms of the world. And yet famous couples who adopt babies from war-torn African countries are adopting houses in the French Quarter, too. And yet there I am, every day after dark, walking that last stretch of unpopulated pavement before I get to my RV park, wondering if I'll get to keep the computer I carry in my hands, the blood I carry inside my veins.
On pace to hit 225, maybe 250 if the summer's heat does its violence-inducing thing; on pace to make it a clean 100 per 100,000 residents. Leaving the rest of the country behind in its dust.
And yet.
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This is of course nothing new to me. I have over the past few years--the past several months in particular--had occasion to consider the violence in inner city America, the disquieting lack of empathy in the communities that have been left, for all intents and purposes, behind. And without meaning to excuse their actions--agency and responsibility being two ropes in human society one ought not fray with too much abandon--I have never been able to wholly begrudge these ghetto thugs their behavior. Their schools are far, far--far--cries from what is generally accepted as acceptable in the rest of America, staffed by teachers who may or may not care, but there is only so much one can do when there is a textbook for every 2 or 7 children, when the heat won't last through the winter, when there may or may not be cess gurgling from the playground, when the number of viable rooms in the school building forces two, three grades per classroom. When so many of these children go home to parents who are either not there, or else, if there, do more harm by their presence than their absence. When they walk through neighborhoods with 10%, 20% unemployment, and when those who are employed are paid $5 and 15 or 20 cents an hour, unable to live on that in America even if they're careful because who could, people could barely live off that when Congress passed that in 1994. When they see the government's response to a devastated poor and black city, a response that--well, we won't even begin to compare it to other recent instances of mass and immediate ruination. When the only stores in the neighborhood sell lottery tickets and liquor, and the nearest grocery store offers moldy and dying produce, and a cornucopia of Frito-Lay products. When the table of media culture is replete with offerings that laud the gangbanger, vilify the snitch. When speaking correct English is 'talking white,' getting uppity.
Now again--mind you--I do not seek here to eradicate responsibility, to say that the effective underwriting of the Frito-Lay Corp. is not the community's fault, that the bad parenting is not the community's fault, that the racist prohibition on speaking correct grammar--indeed, on valuing education at all--is not the community's fault. But--and I ask you to consider this with sincerity--how much can an 8-year-old be blamed for taking part in these actions? How much can a 9-year-old be blamed? And what about a 10-year-old? And an 11-year-old? And if perhaps you are inclined to aver that at, say, 12 people should begin to think for themselves--or maybe you draw that line at 13, 14, or 15--then how is this young man or young woman supposed to suddenly, apropos of so very little in their immediate environment and contrary to all they've taught and learned and whom so many of their elders have sought for them to become...become something different? If you don't blame the 8- or 9- or 10-year-old, why is all of a sudden the 11-year-old worthy of blame for not being a certain way? When for the other 10 years of his or her life you found it perfectly normal to expect something different....
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In the Times Magazine this Sunday in case you missed it was the story of Herbert Weinstein. Aged 65 and an ad executive living in Manhattan at the time, nary an instance, legal or otherwise, of violence in all of his life, he strangled his wife and then, in order to make it look like a suicide, threw her out the window of their 12th-floor apartment on the Upper East Side (making it look thoroughly
worse). Odd, and like a John Cheever story gone way, way awry. Maybe he had been under so much stress for so long, yadda yadda yadda, went postal. Maybe she was nagging him about upkeep on the house in Connecticut and finally--at long last--he showed her. Maybe it was actually that they were into kink, and still, to this, day, he can't admit it. Or maybe the cyst that was growing in his brain near his amygdalae had been pushing in the right place, finally had bored close enough onto the very neurons in his brain responsible for sending and receiving those pulses of electricity that cause us to conceive of other people as human, needing of our care. Murder lost its meaning, or no--he lost, physically, his ability to understand what it meant.
In any event, she died, he went to prison, and since this early-90's trial there has been a slow but inexorable movement in American jurisprudence to incorporate the latest lessons from neuroscience into our courts of law. Lie detector tests that focus on which areas of the brain light up with electrical activity when we say something we know is true, as opposed to when we say something we know is false. Interrogations undertaken with the aid of electrodes, at the interrogator's side a map of the brain showing which areas light up when we remember something seen as opposed to those areas that jump alive when we recall an act we ourselves performed. Courtrooms and attorneys' offices and police precincts all suffused with the latest research on which areas of our brain are related to anger, which to regret, which to retribution, which to fear. Ways we could then start picking jurors because of all this. Methods to mitigate--perhaps with surgical or very specific rehabilitative caveats--the punishment meted out by the state.
All very complicated and murky issues--and this being the tip of the proverbial sharp and craggy floating ice--but ones which nonetheless all hinge on just how [philosophically] materialist we want to be in our collective social and legal metaphysics. That is, do we cause our actions, or do our brains? And is there a difference? And if there is, then I can go ahead and pinpoint where the brain is, but can you please tell me where the "we" is? Because I can't seem to find it at the moment. It's kind of eluding me. And law, as we all know--some of us here more intimately than others--is a real stickler for details.
Here--let's try a thought experiment. See how you react to each of the following two quotes (the first by Joshua Greene, assistant professor of psychology at Harvard; the second by Stephen Morse, professor of law and psychiatry at UPenn):
"To a neuroscientist, you are your brain; nothing causes your behavior other than the operations of your brain."
"brains do not commit crimes; people commit crimes..."So? Which side are you on? If you agree with one, you're more of a Materialist than what I'm going to go ahead and call a Noumenonist--one who believes there are things we can't see/touch/smell/hear, but that exist anyway. [For my etymological reasoning for the derivation of this term, Kant's wiki entry is a good place to start, though if you want to skip right to the chase then just go here.] If you're the former, you're more likely to be an agnostic/atheist, and if you find yourself in the latter group you probably have some answering to do if you don't explicitly believe in god (or a kind of god). In any event, the point still remains: either you believe that we as individuals--as persons, as selves, as unique and singular individuals--are responsible for our actions, or you believe that we are all just products of our brains, our brains which can be altered, altered sometimes by our own actions, sometimes by our environments, sometimes by cysts growing inside them, pushing up against the wrong regions....
I, for one, am in the former group, and I certainly agree with the former quotation, though this could be almost exclusively because the latter is inherently flawed (i.e., there is no way to define "people" without at some point, and probably ultimately, getting to "brain" [or at least the less materialist nomenclature "mind"]). Not that I want to exculpate all criminals and all crimes; to the contrary, I'm opting instead not to stop looking for answers, I'm opting to dig deeper, to find the point which is as close to the first cause as possible. I am not, like some Noumenonists out there and like so many Religionists in this country, interested only in dividing matters and societies into two halves, the good and the bad, the rightfully acting (insofar as we know, at any rate), and those whose actions are not rightful. The world is more complicated than that, and it seems that every time we find something new we are forced to say, It is only now that we have begun looking.
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