Stardate 20020207.0950

(On Screen): Whenever someone commits a particularly inexplicable crime, there is always an effort to try to figure out why. We saw that happen after Columbine. It's excessive exposure to violent video games and movies. No, it's because they were socially isolated by the kids in their class. No, it was because of rock music. No, it was because they were Goths.

We're seeing it again now with John Walker Lindh. People are delving into his family life, examining how his parents behaved. They were insufficiently strict with him; they didn't give him any moral guidance. To fill the void he turned to Islam. He was a social maladroit. His father was gay. His mother was a flake.

Why analyze like this? I think it's because people feel helpless. We live our lives as if our situation is stable and understandable and predictable; it's scary when we read about someone just like little Henry next door or Victoria down the street who suddenly goes bonkers and becomes a mass murderer or a traitor or an embezzler. It's like an earthquake; the foundations beneath us shake and we suddenly cannot trust anything.

By explaining why Harris and Klebold went postal and started shooting anything that moved, we try to regain control. It gives us the illusion that if we understand what happened, that we will be able to prevent it from happening again.

But on a deeper level, it does something else, something far more harmful. It removes responsibility from the miscreant and distributes it to the society at large. If Harris and Klebold did what they did because of heavy metal rock music or by playing violent computer games, then we can prevent that from happening again by banning access to the music and games. If Lindh became a violent terrorist because his parents embraced an alternative lifestyle, then we need to get rid of alternative lifestyles. The end result is to view everyone in the society as ants, with no volition or moral responsibility, simply responding mechanically to the stimulus they are permitted. Taken to its extreme, you end up with a regimented society where people are only exposed to that which is good for them, and not permitted to see anything which could conceivably harm them.

In other words, you get the Taliban's Committee for the Preservation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.

Absent extreme mental illness, either we have to hold everyone responsible for their own actions, or else we hold no-one at all individually responsible for anything.

Why did Klebold and Harris shoot up Columbine high school? It's because they decided to do so. It's as simple as that. Who is responsible? They are. Since they're both dead, it's an unsatisfying answer. We want someone to blame, someone we can punish. But sometimes you can't get what you want.

Is it possible to prevent that kind of thing from happening again? Yes, but the price is too high. Klebold and Harris and John Walker Lindh are statistical outliers, and when a society is as big and varied as ours is, one in a million is damned well a long way from the center of the bell curve. The only way to prevent that kind of thing is by completely regimenting society in ways I could never accept. Millions of people play violent video games and then go about their lives as normal people; violent games do not make people violent. Millions of people listen to heavy rock music; there are many people whose parents break up or come out, or who adopt strange religions. Nearly everyone's parents screw up one way or another. Ultimately each of us has to play the hand that life deals us, and do the best we can with it. If we screw up, we have to accept responsibility for ourselves. And when others screw up, we have to let them, or force them, to take responsibility for themselves.