Ranthropologist

Tag: violence

  • Us/Not Us

    Us/Not Us

    As I write this, over 100 people have been reported killed in Paris in multiple terrorist attacks. The news is jamming my social media feed and my RSS feed. It’s on every major television station. It’s being continuously updated on news websites. It’s a terrible tragedy. I’m not writing this to minimize it. I am upset and dismayed and disheartened and grieved by it – but I have a few observations to make.

    Who noticed the story from yesterday, November 12, about the suicide attacks that killed 41 and injured over 200 in Beirut, Lebanon? Did any of you change your profile picture on Facebook to a Lebanese flag, or post a photo of a Beirut landmark in tribute to the victims? Did you know that on October 27 in Syria, 115 people were killed? On October 25, it was 161 people. On September 18, it was 255. These are typical days for Syria. The death toll in the Syrian civil war so far is over 250,000. Anyone posting those status updates in their feed? And how about the rash of stabbings in Israel? On October 13, three people were killed and over 20 were wounded. Other attacks have occurred since then. So, where are the Israeli flags on social media?

    I’m not stupid. I know there’s a war in Syria and daily casualties are to be expected. I know that Lebanon experiences frequent unrest, and bombings and attacks there are sadly common. I know that the Palestinians and the Israelis are acting out generations’ worth of struggle and conflict, and attacks and violence are frequent there, too. I’m not trying to say that because bad things happen everywhere, every day, that we should just shrug our shoulders at what has happened today in France. Not at all. But I do want to observe that when it happens to people who we regard as being more like us – well, then we sit up and take notice. When political violence happens in places we don’t expect it to – places we think of as safe – then we react with shock. When terror happens in western or northern Europe (not so much in eastern Europe, though) we feel more connected to it. I’ve done it too – I made a drawing in tribute after the Charlie Hebdo attack last January. I posted it to Twitter and Facebook. I felt connected to France in their shock and grief because I felt an empathy that stretched back to September 11, 2001. So why don’t we react in the same way to the daily stream of violence in other places?

    I have some tentative answers. We become accustomed to violence happening to the Other. We don’t empathize, generally, with people whose countries and cultures – and, let’s face it, oftentimes colors – don’t match our own. It doesn’t mean we don’t sympathize, but we’ve become inured to violence and unrest in the non-Western world. We think of it as happening to “those people” – again, not in an unkind or dismissive way, but in a way that speaks to the differences we perceive between us. It’s a classic, unconscious us/not us mentality – an artifact of Western, and particularly US, hegemony.

    Is it any different when we shrug or tsk at reports of a drive-by shooting of a young person of color in a gang-heavy neighborhood, yet hold candlelight vigils for a white victim of violence? Is it any different when a sex worker or a homeless person is found dead in an alley and gets a few lines, if that, in the local paper, vs. when a person with a job and family is murdered and gets front page headlines? Is it any different when a working class mom reports her daughter missing and is told she’s probably a runaway, vs. an upper class family’s missing child who gets immediate media coverage and police attention?

    It is hard for us to feel empathy for the so-called Other, but the Others are human, too. We’d be exhausted by grief and shock if we reacted to every act of violence the way we react to what happens to people like us – the way we are reacting to the attacks in France now. But we have to remember to feel something. We have to remember that the suffering of the outcast, the minority, the underprivileged, the uneducated, the tossed away – is of equal import to the suffering of the powerful, the privileged, the lucky, the elite, and everyone in between. And the suffering and death and terror experienced by the Other – the people not like us – is no different than the suffering and the terror experienced by those like us. I grieve for France. I grieve for Lebanon. I grieve for Syria. I grieve for Israel and Palestine. I grieve for us all.

  • Daily Reads: Race, Riots, and Context

    Daily Reads: Race, Riots, and Context

    In light of the riots in Baltimore in response to the death of Freddie Gray at the hands of Baltimore police, I offer this article by Conor Friedersdorf. Writing in The Atlantic, Friedersdorf condemns the violence while urging that the state-sanctioned violence perpetrated by police against Baltimore residents – particularly those of color – be addressed with the same urgency, indignation, and self-righteousness. Sadly, our attention is easily diverted from the underlying causes of the violence by context-free sound bites and video feeds, or by the actions of a single mother dragging her son away from the scene. Friedersdorf includes quotes from Martin Luther King that, to me, say it all, with this as the kicker: ” I’m absolutely convinced that a riot merely intensifies the fears of the white community while relieving the guilt.” Friedersdorf reflects King by concluding “that riots are to be condemned; that they are inextricably bound up with injustices perpetrated by the state; and that it is a moral imperative for us to condemn both sorts of violence.”

    Two States of Emergency in Baltimore

  • Logical Fallacies: No True Scotsman

    Logical Fallacies: No True Scotsman

    I had planned to post a Daily Read tonight, but then I heard the news that three young Muslims had been shot to death in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, by a man who has apparently referred to himself on Facebook as an “anti-theist.” This is a radical form of atheism in which the person goes beyond just not believing in god/gods/religion; instead, anti-theism is explicitly opposed to religions of any kind. According to the several articles I have read about this, the shooting is being linked to a parking dispute between the shooter and the victims, two of whom lived in the same apartment complex as the shooter. Yet, because of the shooter’s outspoken anti-theism and various remarks on his Facebook page in which he expresses extreme antipathy towards religion, and towards fundamentalist Christians and Muslims in particular, the Chapel Hill police department is investigating these murders as a possible hate crime.

    I am an atheist. My first reaction when I read that the shooter is an anti-theist was one of dismay. Atheists love to point out that no one has ever been killed in the name of atheism, while millions of people have died in the name of various religions. Already, prominent atheists such as Richard Dawkins are publicly expressing their shock over the shootings and repudiating the notion that it is acceptable to kill someone because of their religious beliefs; at the same time, Dawkins is also tweeting about the parking dispute motive and blaming that instead. And parking may well be the proximate motive for these murders, but I really don’t think it’s smart to remove the shooter’s anti-theism from the equation. Instead, we should acknowledge it. If we don’t, then I fear we fall into the no true Scotsman fallacy. This fallacy occurs when someone makes a proposition such as “No atheist would ever kill a Muslim simply because they are Muslim.” The rejoinder would be “The shooter in Chapel Hill is an atheist who killed Muslims.” The fallacy comes with the response that “No true atheist would kill a Muslim for being Muslim.” In other words, the person attempts to preserve their original argument by saying that this person cannot be defined as an actual atheist. In the case of these murders, atheists can also make the argument that while the shooter may be an anti-theist he is also clearly mentally ill, and that is the real reason for this tragedy. It’s not quite the no true Scotsman fallacy, but it’s the same idea; that is, it proposes that anti-theism can’t truly be the shooter’s motive.

    No true Scotsman is often used in a religious context. “No true Christian would murder an abortion doctor”; “No true Muslim would blow people up in the name of Islam”; etc. But whether we want to believe it or not, some people who identify themselves as Christian do commit violence that they attempt to justify with their version of Christianity, and some people who identify themselves as Muslim do commit acts of terror in the name of their version of Islam. They are Christian. They are Muslim. Just as atheists shouldn’t fall for the no true Scotsman fallacy in the case of this anti-theist murderer, so should Christians and Muslims not fall for it when confronted with the bad things that people will do in the name of these religions. And let’s also not get bogged down in bean-counting which religion is worse – horrible things have been done in the name of many religions throughout history and in the present, whether by individuals or entire groups.

    I think the problem is that other Christians and Muslims end up getting tarred with the same broad brush when tragedies like this happen – and now the same thing is going to happen to atheists. But just as there are Christians, Muslims, and now, apparently, atheists who commit violence in the name of their beliefs, it is equally true that not every Christian, Muslim, or atheist will commit violence in the name of their beliefs – or even that they support violence by others in the name of their beliefs. We call these people extremists for a reason – because their ideologies are extreme and, by definition, they exist on the far fringes of the overall belief systems they claim to be a part of. People tend to tack from the no true Scotsman fallacy on the one hand when the violence is done in the name of their particular religion, to the equally fallacious conclusion that if one Muslim/Christian/atheist is violent they must all be violent on the other hand.

    Personally, I think this shooter very likely is mentally ill. I also think he probably was motivated by a parking dispute – but it’s arguable that the dispute itself may not have existed had his neighbors not been clearly identifiable as Muslim based on the attire of the female victims. I also think it’s likely that mental illness is the culprit for lots of other allegedly religious-motivated crimes, particularly when they are perpetrated by individuals acting alone (and for the record, I don’t think mental illness is involved in the case of organized religious violence a la ISIS or the Lord’s Resistance Army). But let’s not dismiss the man’s anti-theism as irrelevant. If the shooter was motivated by his beliefs then it’s better to acknowledge it than to look silly by trying to deny it. Just as Muslim community leaders speak out to condemn violence perpetrated in the name of Islam, it’s smart for atheists to condemn this shooting, even if mental illness and/or a parking dispute is truly the culprit. No true atheist should do otherwise.