Gangs and the Malleability of Human Ethics

13 Responses to Gangs and the Malleability of Human Ethics

1. Paul says:

   December 4, 2007 at 00:53

   How about a “Buddhist” explanation: Because the perpetrators and victims believe they are making decisions that have a better chance of leading to their own happiness, yet those decisions lead to the same sorts of problems we have witnessed throughout “civilized” history. Most of us are locked in a worldview dominated by a sense of lack, a sense of separateness, greater concern for past and future than attention to the present moment. We are unable to move beyond our conditioned thought patterns, so we constantly reproduce the harmful relationships that cause our suffering. Even those of us who are among the “lucky” few are daily reproducing those relationships: our global commerce, our support of our national governments, corporations, media, educational systems, etc., our use of “resources”, continually sets standards such as the price of labor in markets around the world, the value of military force to “keep peace” and police force to “keep safe”, and the value of consumer “goods” to promote happiness–which affect everyone around the world. Can’t be too surprised by gangs in Africa (and in the US) within a civilization built on self-aggrandizement, competition, and the use of power to gain advantage. “Human nature” has produced all of this, and we have been trying for over 2500 years to get unstuck. Perhaps some of our modern experiments in living (including idealistic intentional communities) might show us the way.
2. Janene says:

   December 4, 2007 at 09:13

   Hey Dave –I have yet another answer, somewhat similar to Paul’s… but this would be the biologist’s answer. Populations in overshoot behave in unpredictable, violent, and self destructive ways. That’s why the *most* extreme, population-wide behaviors we see are in Africa… If it were not for the support of the rest of the world, these countries would have collapsed and been done with it all, but in our modern peer-polity system, that cannot happen. So instead we have populations living right on the verge of collapse for years on end. Civilization breeds psychotic behaviors… so what happens when people live int he worst possible version of civilization with no end in sight?About a year and a helf back, the NYT published an article about elephants, population stress and erratice behavior…http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/magazine/08elephant.html?ex=1317960000&en=555795c586596ed3&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rssIf you did not read it then, I would highly recommend it… its long, but very insightful. Perticularly as a vehicle for an objective look at human psychotic behaviors…Cheers!Janene
3. Dave Pollard says:

   December 4, 2007 at 09:40

   Thanks Paul. Janene: I hoped someone would bring up overpopulation as the root problem, so thank you. The question then becomes what kind of pyschosis does it manifest — ‘evil’ behaviour, ‘because i can’ behaviour, or more gradually and chronicallty ‘because this is the only way i know to behave’ learned behaviour.I this I actually wrote about the elephants when the story occurred — blamed on excessive pressure on their ecosystem and shrinking habitat. Perhaps we could argue that natural human habitat is also shrinking.Thanks,
4. Dale Asberry says:

   December 4, 2007 at 10:07

   How about a Malthusian explanation? All animals, in competition for food and sexual resources, resort to killing off or dying off to bring the population back into balance. The Lakoffian (or other humanistic) perspectives don’t apply because the problems are pre-human — they only rationalize after the fact.
5. Daimon Sweeney says:

   December 4, 2007 at 11:07

   Adding some neurological punch to the “Best they know how to do” reason are the effects of trauma. Those committing atrocities are, in addition to everything else, acting from trauma (in my liberal frame). Witnessing horrific events can be enough to induce trauma (perhaps as a child seeing ones family and village slaughtered, being kidnapped by those who did it, and with one’s own survival dependent on pleasing them). To commit such acts must do the same. One way we respond to trauma as humans is an almost ritual repetition of the original experience in new versions, perhaps in an attempt to process it and release the fixation trauma induces. Our built in ways are not very effective, unfortunately. In fact, we tend to recreate the original situation over and over again, which if done in the outer world propagates the trauma to others (I have recently thought that trauma ought to be treated as a communicable disease). Perhaps some part of us is hoping we will find a new way out with each repetition. With certain therapeutic approaches (which can include mindfulness in the re-experiencing, to acknowledge the Buddhist perspective above) we can indeed resolve traumatic experiences, but I doubt they are available in most of Africa. They are neglected enough in the US, where we certainly need them as we continue to manufacture trauma in wars, for ourselves and in the countries we invade. On another level, thinking of evolutionary psychology, to all these reasons I would also add that we humans seem to have various proclivities programmed in as survival enhancers, part of our inheritance from evolution, such as wanting to belong to the group for safety and inclusiveness, community and connection. This deep desire or need brings with it the willingness to adapt our beliefs and behaviors to the group norms. Appalling as it may be to think of this, the people committing these acts undoubtedly have a sense of community and connection with each other. They are probablykind to each other and take care of each other. I would not be surprised to find they have very strong bonds, though based on shared horror, perhaps. Witness the bonds formed by comrades in war. The very extremity forges strong bonds. If we think of the acts which bring a new person into such a community, they might be seen as an extreme form of hazing or as an initiation, the traditional sharing of extreme experiences which dissolve to some degree the preexisting sense of self and require it (for personal survival, to maintain a sense of self) to reform around the new model presented by the group, which represents safety, inclusiveness, belonging, etc. We have our programmed tendencies to adapt to the reality of the group, and initiation is a mechanism to amplify this effect. Already traumatized, treated kindly (perhaps) by the killers, with survival depending on being part of the group (reinforced no doubt with totally credible death threats – or worse – in case of escape attempts), driven to process the trauma with reenactment as one way this happens, it is not surprising that recruits absorb this behavior as their reality. It is their way of life. Finally, from a neuroplasticity point of view, the maxim is that neurons which “fire together wire together.” Including rape (orgasm, from the perpetrator’s point of view) with violence (activating circuits and parts of the brain dealing with physical survival) wires those together and no doubt produces an extremely potent and intoxicating neurochemical cocktail. The rest of life may seem a little dull by comparison. Add trauma re-creation (I almost wrote trauma recreation, which may be uncomfortably close to the truth) and community bonding, and we have normal human beings whose neurobiology has been hijacked into a horrific and self-propagating configuration. This is a hard nut to crack.
6. Doug Alder says:

   December 4, 2007 at 13:11

   There was a recent study done that showed fairly conclusively that the brains of pedophiles are structurally different from non-pedophiles”Pedophiles have considerably less brain white matter than people not sexually attracted to children, says the research released Wednesday from the Toronto-based Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.”If similar structural differences exist in the brains of mass murderers etc then you have at least a partial answer to your question Dave – they simply can’t help it because it is impossible for them to “know better”.I see no evidence for humans being born with a sense of morality built in – altruism yes as there is much evidence to show that exists in chimps and apes as well, and indeed from that altruism a moral code can arise, but no “thou shalt not kill” is built in.
7. Kaunda says:

   December 4, 2007 at 16:15

   I’m not very satisfied with these explanations. I don’t know much about Buddhism, but Paul’s response comes closest to my own inchoate one.My brother was murdered in a grizzly way along with a young pregnant girl who was living in the same house with my brother along with her boyfriend. The murders were at the hands of some local youths. I wanted so much to know what had happened and why. That exploration brought me up against taboo. I could create in my mind a re-creation of the events, even killing my brother with five shots in the back. But all I could do in mind after that was to run. I could not go back later as the boys did to kill the girl.I’m bookish so went reading. The whole sort of “evil spawn” point of view just wasn’t something I could believe. The idea of the “culture of violence” in the American South rang truer, although I had some qualms about the methodology of the studies. Seeing the boys in court, I got the feeling even they didn’t know the reasons why. Of course court is intended as a place for proving a case, not for bringing out what actually happened.Reading your post reminded me of William Saroyan’s “Seventy Thousand Assyrians.” If you’ve never read it, it’s short and worthwhile. http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7EMA01/White/anthology/saroyan.html Here’s the line I recalled:”I am positive, that one man at a time is incapable of the monstrosities performed by mobs. My objection is to mobs only.”But Saroyan’s reasons for being positive, I guess might go to language, and really something like what Paul says:I do not believe in races. I do not believe in governments. I see life as one life at one time, so many millions simultaneously, all over the earth. Babies who have not yet been taught to speak any language are the only race of the earth, the race of man: all the rest is pretense, what we call civilization, hatred, fear, desire for strength . . . . But a baby is a baby. And the way they cry, there you have the brotherhood of man, babies crying. We grow up and we learn the words of a language and we see the universe through the language we know, we do not see it through all languages or through no language at all, through silence, for example, and we isolate ourselves in the language we know. Over here we isolate ourselves in English, or American as Mencken calls it. All the eternal things, in our words. If I want to do anything, I want to speak a more universal language. The heart of man, the unwritten part of man, that which is eternal and common to all races.One last personal story. When my mother was dying there was a period of several days of lucidity and not so lucid thinking. I guess sort of along the lines of “seeing her life passing before her eyes” she said to me: “When I look at you now it is quiet uncanny. I see you as a baby suckling at my breast, and as a toddler, as a little boy, a handsome teenager. I see you, see you at all those times all at once.” I can look at a photograph at me as a child and know it’s me. What she said to me was just so moving because yes she knew me as an integral person; a baby, a child, a boy and a man all at once.Saroyan the writer in struggling to write about brotherhood found words antithetic to the task. “My objection is to mobs.” Well, a knotty problem that. And I think Saroyan in pointing to the way babies cry as the source of brotherhood is onto something quite essential.
8. Janene says:

   December 4, 2007 at 18:12

   Hey Dave –I’m not at all surprised you read and wrote about the elephants… in fact, I was betting you did, but wanted to be sure… :DI think the problem I am having with your questions there… in my mind, these are all excuses for our behavior, rather than reasons. We actually DO these things because animals under stress engage in progressively more violent and cruel behaviors until they either die, or the stress ceases. So the answer would be, IMO, whatever any given *individual* believes of himself. One of my favorite Jason Godesky lines: Man is less a *rational* creature and more a *rationalizing* creature. :-)A couple other points made here are really good, however… mass psychosis, sure to play a huge part. Community dynamics and ‘belonging’ — more important than ever in times of scarcity and trauma. Re-enacting experienced trauma. Yep. The bit re: “neurons that fire together, wire together” — absolutely! all of these pieces of a very rational, systemic response to the facts of modern civilized life in each given variation…Janene
9. Pearl says:

   December 5, 2007 at 11:15

   I don’t think its genes or brain nor exclusively mob mentality which is a sort of excusal of individual culpability but each figures in as a part. It is a snap one individual in one moment at a time, a lack of stopping self. A moment of hardness from the patterns seen. An element of moral imperative can back it. Survival instinct twisted with injury, a further justification that others in the same experience of threat are doing the same pattern. Revenge building on revenge building a context for more defense, more offense. I agree also with the impact of binding together a community and the addictive nature.
10. David Creelman says:

    December 5, 2007 at 16:43

    Moving from reasons to solutions. I think the key to controlling group violence is stable governance structures that do an adequate job of taking care of people. It’s when the governance is inadequate that group start to fight. We have lots of examples of adequately good governance: Europe, Japan, Canada, probably China. But it’s hard to keep adequate governance in the face of shocks like economic collapse or outside interference.
11. Jon Husband says:

    December 6, 2007 at 06:19

    Isn’t good governance ordinary people who have been elected as representatives of all the others in a society to “take care” of those in that society ? Something that seems to be ever-so-gradually slipping from the core tasks of governments .. yes, including Canada’s … as the purpose of life in the first world becomes more and more defined by getting and keeping money and property ? Hi, David Creelman .. trust you are well. Funny that we meet again here on Dave P’s blog.
12. Melinda says:

    December 7, 2007 at 12:52

    My affinities lie with Kaunda on this one. All the explanations offered above are pieces of the puzzle, to be sure – but none of them truly answers the question: Why? Why shoot someone in the back? Why go back afterwards to kill a pregnant girl? As Kaunda said: they probably don’t know themselves.In accounts of cruelty, one element stands out for me: the recurrence of ritualized torture. Most often in sexual form. The whole point of the deed seems to be the killing of “soul”. (I use the word “soul” because everyone intuitively know what I mean when I use it.) Simple extermination is not enough. All arguments about resources seems to fall flat in the face of this.In the Congo: why else gang-rape, maim, and leave to starve a six-year old girl? After wiping out her whole village? The area was too isolated for her to act as “message bearer”. The perpetrators knew she would die of starvation, or be caught by a wild animal. Why did they not kill her? Extermination does not seem to be the point.The explanation of re-enactment of original trauma also falls flat in the face of the perpetrators’ increasing “creativity”, “invention” and “novelty” in the techniques of torture used each time a new victim is found. See this link: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040308/goodwinThe explanations above are factors, yes. They can converge on the life of one individual in complex ways, yes. But there is still an ugly mystery here. It probably lives inside each of us. And we have to find a way to understand it.
13. Melinda says:

    December 7, 2007 at 14:18

    Thanks for listening Dave. It provides encouragement. First for saying out loud the thing that weighs most heavily on one’s heart, and then for reflecting and saying: now what? Here’s my “Now What?” I think it covers each element mentioned so far and I suspect most of your readers are probably involved in one or more of these anyway:1. Bring to mass public consciousness the truth that – on a small planet – it is suicidal (on many levels) to ignore the welfare of others. Buddhism is great for this but does not work for the majority of people who won’t actually buy into Buddhism. More ways are needed for spreading this meme – which is, of course, a fact.2. Prevent & ameliorate trauma – through our attitudes (understand), our deeds (do the right thing), and our institutions. (The job of an institution is to be a place, or a process, or a tradition, that makes it a joy to do the right thing.)3. Be vigilant about the instiution of government. The very least one can do is cry foul when needed. Just don’t do nothing.4. Be equally vigilant about corporate institutions. Many of them are larger and more powerful than nation-states.5. Know this: There is not enough time – not – to love. (Whith apologies to a Californian poet whose name escapes me.)Melinda

Comments are closed.