Class v. Identity

The class v. identity debate (Jacobin Magazine) has two aspects: factual and narrative. The factual aspect is the reality of disadvantage and discrimination that women and certain ethnic groups face - which is a fact. The narrative aspect is the manner in which this fact is conveyed in public discourse.

The factual aspect of this debate can hardly be contested, as discrimination in employment opportunities, access to housing, or due process is indeed difficult to deny. The narrative aspect forms a spectrum ranging from mostly descriptive to mostly emotive. An example of mostly descriptive narrative is a labor market study that uses quantitative methods to identify the effect of sex or ethnicity on wage disparity. An example of mostly emotive narrative is the talk about "patriarchy" "white supremacy" or "white privilege".

The actual bone of contention in the class v. identity debate is the narrative aspect, although there is a wide spread misconception that the debate is about facts. I sincerely doubt that anyone who bona fide engages in this debate disputes the facts, which as I said are difficult to deny. As I see it, the actual debate centers on the mostly emotive narratives, which the "identity people" love and "class people" hate.

Stated differently, the debate is mostly about cultural tastes not the facts, and as the old saying goes de gustibus non est disputandum. I can certainly understand the emotional appeal of narratives that fly in the face of the official ideology of democracy, equal opportunity, and meritocracy. Crying "the emperor has no clothes" can have a profoundly cathartic effect on those who do the crying.

There is, however, one aspect of these cultural tastes and preferences that can be debated - their effect on political struggle to diminish, if not altogether eliminate discrimination from economy and society. As a matter of fact, the discrimination persists mostly because it is very useful for the oligarchy as it enables the few to control through the divide and conquer tactics. Therefore, the success of the struggle against discrimination critically depends on forming a broad coalition of various social groups against well organized and financed corporate and political oligarchies.

The narratives of discrimination can be judged by the effects they have on that divide and conquer tactic. It is easy to see that the talk about "patriarchy" "white supremacy" or "white privilege" plays right into the hands of the oligarchy because it amplifies divisions among groups that should be united. That talk may sound like music to ivory tower academics who love to wallow in guilt, but ads insult to injury to those who are chronically unemployed or underemployed, work shitty jobs at the whim of their bosses, cannot afford health care, experience the effects of substance abuse and also happened to be white or male.

The talk about "patriarchy" "white supremacy" or "white privilege" is very unlikely to win any supporters from the white working or lower middle classes. In fact, it is likely to alienate them from the left-leaning politics and further push them toward those who, like Trump, appear to "call things as they are." If the left is to win those people it needs to come with its own "call things as they are" narrative of discrimination and injustice, a narrative that may not be as appealing as wallowing in guilt to the cultural studies academics but that is appealing to the proles whose support is indispensable in the political struggle for a better society.

Latter days magic

Magic thinking is not limited to prehistoric or medieval societies. It is alive and well in the modern supposedly "rational" societies. The main difference between prehistoric and modern magic is the kind of magical objects involved, which in turn is affected by the state of knowledge and technology. In the prehistoric times there were witches,demons, flying objects, an the like, today there are foreign agents or conspiracies. What all of them have in common is that they are outside of the realm of rational knowledge and by that virtue - they "expand" the rational knowledge by going where rational knowledge cannot.

Looking for explanations is the quintessence of human cognition. If the rational knowledge cannot supply a satisfactory explanation, people will turn to magic, especially in situations that cause them anxiety or fear. In this respect, people have not changed since the prehistoric times. What has changed is the type of magic and magic objects involved in these "explanations".

Witches and supernatural flying objects could do the trick when the then existing state of knowledge could not convincingly disprove their supposed 'effects' on human affairs. However, when knowledge progressed to the point that it could decisively show that witchcraft and sorcery do not exist, new magical objects immune to rational refutation had to be found. As a result we have two kind of magic phenomena today. One is the conspiracy theories of various kinds that live in the folklore and on the internet. The other one is institutional rites and believes - from "risk management" programs to the corporate organization itself.

The belief in 'Russia meddling in the US "democracy"" is a magic ritual that combines the elements of both forms of magical thinking - nutjob conspiracism with pseudo-rational corporate ritualism. It is widely accepted because it serves a useful function - it provides a convenient and comforting explanation of a discomforting reality that is messy and difficult to explain, at least in simplistic terms. That messy reality is the sorry state of the US 'democracy'. People find it it discomforting to find out that what they learned in civic lessons does not apply to the political reality they see - so they need a convenient explanation.

Invariably in such situations outsiders and foreigners are the first to blame for the "corruption" of the political order at home. In the Soviet Russia and the Maoist China - imperialist agents were to blame. In North Korea and the Islamic world - it is America, the Great Satan. In America, by contrast it is Russia. Blaming Russia has an advantage for the politically correct liberals, because allows them to maintain the pretense that they are not "racist" and do not blame people of different skin color or ethnicity. That pretty much explains the popularity of the Russia meddling in the US affairs myth.

Mass killing as a theatrical event

In a predictable like bowel movement fashion, the corporate media will offer two partisan explanations of the recent Las Vegas mass shooting - Stephen Paddock was deranged (R) or Stephen Paddock had easy access to deadly weapons (D). Both may be technically true, yet neither explains much. There are many people who are deranged and millions who have weapons, yet a great majority of them do not commit mass murder.

An alternative view, that in my view provides a better explanation, is that such events are in fact theatrical performances staged by people who commit them. Their purpose is to communicate a message to the public in manner that the author finds aesthetically appealing. The main difference between these massacres and, say, Hollywood "action" or "horror" movies is that the extras in Hollywood movies leave the scene alive after the shooting - both literal and figurative - is done.

This explanation of criminal acts has been proposed by Jack Katz in his 1989 book "Seductions of Crime." Katz assembles impressive secondary empirical material to demonstrate that what motivates many perps not material rewards but the sensual experience of the crime itself. "The adolescent shoplifter, for example, savors not the trinket she steals but the challenge of sneaking it past the clerk, the thrill of having outsmarted the system. With stickup men, as with members of adolescent street gangs, it is the transcendent joy of dominating an adversary. With the impassioned killer, it is to vent the rage triggered by humiliation or by a threat to some cherished moral value."

Aesthetic and rules of the drama play and important role in Katz's explanation. They induce, so to speak, the perp to the logic of action suggested by the dramatic rules of the genre, the choice of scenery, the choice of props, and the course of action. Different types of drama may appeal to different cultures and different types of individuals. The drama of bringing down an airliner full of infidels from the sky may appeal to people from cultures infused with stories of eternal battles between the believers and the infidels. Machine gunning people attending a concert is more aesthetically appealing in a culture infused with images of a single individual, a rock star or a business executive, controlling the masses from a high stage, or Hollywood images of a super-hero shooting down villains by the dozen to the applause of the audience.

The main point here is that the dramas of "martyrdom", "super-star" or "super-hero" are not only culture specific, but have wide aesthetic appeal to many people from a particular culture. Many people in those culture vicariously re-enact such dramas, eithei in their day dreams, in theaters, or in staged re-enactment events. Few, however, go a step or two further and take the step alluded to by Franz Kafka in the short story "The Penal Colony" - an execution by writing the sentence into the flesh of the condemned.

My guess is that people who take that extra step and actually arrange for mass killing are those who have what is considered "leadership qualities" in a particular culture. These individuals imagine themselves as leaders or even creators and are not satisfied by mere consumption of popular narratives in their cultures. They aspire to creating ones of their own, ones that would leave others in awe. Many such leaders and creators eventually end up in mental institutions, some succeed as super-stars of business (the Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs) or entertainment, but the few become mass murderers like Mr. Paddock.

This explains why an individual who has no rational reason to kill strangers in great numbers does so. His behavior is no different from that he reads about in religious texts of his culture about martyrs, businessmen, and other super-stars. What separates him from millions of others consuming the same stories is gumption and leadership, the willingness and determination to implement the dream.

What still needs an explanation is the incidence of mass shootings, that is, why they are occurring with greater frequency in certain times and places than others.  Here, it is useful to consider the insights of the  sociologist Mark Granonovetter who focused on the social context in which individual decisions are made.  In this line of thought, individual decisions are affected, to a significant degree, by social precedent.  If one person sees other people engage in a particular behavior, they are more likely to engage in that behavior than if nobody around that person engaged in it.  This creates a positive feedback loop, also known as path dependence in institutional economics. in which subsequent repetitions of a particular type of behavior makes it more likely for that behavior to occur in the future.

Based on this reasoning, Malcolm Gladwell offered a compelling explanation of the increased incidence of mass school shootings in the US.  In this explanation, each incidence of schools shooting lowers the threshold of resistance to such actions, and thus making it more likely for another person to commit a similar act.  That is, as the mass shooting start occurring the influence more people to commit such acts, but who would not commit them in the absence of prior acts of this nature.  This explains why such acts are more frequent in the US after the Columbine school  shooting than in other countries, or for that matter in the US in an earlier time.

To sum it up, social context increases the incidence of mass killing sin two ways.  First, it provides cultural narratives that sanction and legitimate mass killings as the means of redressing real or imaginary grievances.  These narratives appeal to a wide range of individuals, but most of those individuals would not decide to act on those narratives on their own.  There are powerful social norms that prohibit killing of fellow humans, especially on the mass scale, and these norms effectively prevent most people from acting on even most appealing killing fantasies.  But of norms are being eroded, they stop acting as a deterrent, which increases the likelihood that someone  will act out these violent fantasies.  What causes this gradual norm erosion is a positive feedback loop, known as path dependence, in which an initial occurrence of social behavior makes subsequent occurrences more likely, and as the incidence of that behavior increases, so does the likelihood that it will be further repeated. 

This is an uneasy diagnosis of a serious social disease, because it recognizes the root cause of a problem that cannot be easily solved, at least in a democratic society.  Breaking the positive feedback loop that creates mass violence requires state interventions that would make civil libertarians cringe, while the prospect of these measures' success is far from being certain.Facing a serious problem that does not have an easy solution  is not what people can typically cope with, cognitively or emotionally.  That is why most people prefer alternative diagnoses, one that offer a prospect of a solution, even if illusory.  Such as better gun control, or a better mental health care system.