Battling to the End

There is a dimension to the mass shootings in the United States, most recently the horror yesterday in Florida, that cannot be reduced simply to the lack of meaningful gun control.  It is certainly the case that, absent access to the guns, the destruction caused by incidents such as this would be dramatically reduced.  To be clear, this is absolutely reason enough to justify such moves--I am in favor of the complete ban and confiscation of all firearms in private hands in the United States, along the lines accomplished in Australia and the UK.  If accomplishing this goal is in conflict with the Second Amendment, then I am in favor of repealing the Second Amendment.  I am a gun control absolutist, and I believe that any and all efforts toward that end are good and salutary.  If such measures were in place yesterday, these kids would be alive today.

But.

There is something going on that causes all of these people to take advantage of the opportunity provided by the lack of gun control to engage in mayhem.  Based on the reporting, we have an alienated 19 year old who had been kicked out of school for violent behavior, and that alienated 19 year old decided to manifest his anger and rage on utterly innocent former classmates.  We can talk about all of the predictable ways that this rage and violence manifest themselves, especially in terms of partner-related violence.  But that is just another framing of the same basic underlying question--what is the source of this anger, this alienation?  Is it something new, or it is something that has always been there, if in perhaps a more controlled and subdued form?

I don't have good answers to this.  But I was thinking last night about Rene Girard's last major book, Battling to the End (originally in French Achever Clausewitz).  Battling to the End is in many ways a reaction to 9/11, and it was perceived as a very pessimistic book, and not without reason.  The basic thesis of Battling to the End is that we are approaching an apocalypse in the true Biblical sense of the word--a period of unrestrained chaos and unrestrained violence.  This apocalypse, for Girard, is the result of the gradual erosion of the Sacred--the pervasive structure that channels our collective violence into institutions that mask the violence at their heart.  This erosion, for Girard, is the result of the exposure of the lies that constitute the Sacred by and through the Judeo-Christian message.  Once the fictions inherent in the Sacred are exposed, the Sacred no longer works--once you see the man behind the curtain, you can't believe in the Great and Powerful Oz anymore.

This is usually presented as a good thing, and Girard would certainly say that at the end of the day it is.  But the process of wearing away the Sacred leaves you with a stark choice--you must either renounce the violence that once was channeled into the Sacred and live in a different way, or deal with the consequences of that violence in its raw, unmediated, chaotic, primal form.  It is for this reason and in this sense, Girard argues in Battling to the End, that Judaism and Christianity are essentially and necessarily apocalyptic religions.  Their very existence will eventually trigger the apocalyptic crisis, manifested in a binary choice between virtue and horror, because they take away the mediating structure that generates a stable equilibrium, an "acceptable" and "productive" level of violence.

I wonder if this is the lens through which we should think about the fact that so many of these massacres are somehow tied up in domestic and/or inter-partner violence.  In my last post, I talked a bit about "the Old Ways,"--the very rigid hierarchical relationship structure that defined all intimate relationships accorded to a fixed schema.  The Old Ways were a manifestation of the Sacred, in the sense that an attenuated (and sometimes not so attenuated) violence or coercion was used to lock people into a particular social place, with that violence being covered over with a comprehensive set of stories that justified why this wasn't really some externally imposed order, but instead Just the Way Things Are (I've talked about this a bit here and here).  The thing about the Sacred that must always be kept in mind is that the Sacred works--it is an effective means of channeling and containing the violence that pervades human life and human society.  Without in any way minimizing the ways in which the Old Ways were oppressive to folks who were not in a privileged position under this scheme, I think we need to recognize the way in which it accomplished the thing it was trying to do (without us being consciously aware of it)--channel our aggression and violence away from formal, public manifestations of that violence.

The Sexual Revolution, in its most fundamental form, represents a genuine "Intelligence of the Victim" as James Alison puts it, as it gives voice to those who had no voice and were scapegoated under the Old Ways--women and LGBT people (which is why I think the Sexual Revolution is ultimately wholly compatible with the essence of the Christian message).  It reveals the ways in which the Old Ways really functioned, not as some neutral, unchangeable reality, but as a conscious (or perhaps subconscious) decision to structure things in this manner.  But perhaps the mistake of the Sexual Revolution comes in believing that the coercion encoded in the Old Ways was and is a product of the Old Ways themselves, and thus if you just get rid of the Old Ways you get rid of the coercive and destructive component of romantic and sexual relationships and structures.  But maybe the coercion of the Old Ways is a product of, and a solution to, a much more primordial and fundamental destructive energy.

If this is true--if the Old Ways are a manifestation of the Sacred in a Girardian sense and the Sexual Revolution is a manifestation of the Intelligence of the Victim--then two things are true.  One, there is no going back, as once you see, you cannot unsee.  The Douthat/Dreher-style project of turning back the clock is ultimately futile.  But, second, we are all faced with an apocalyptic choice.  Either we must embrace a reciprocal, non-coercive model of relating to one another in the sexual and romantic space, or we have to face a pervasive, unconstrained violence coming from those who cannot or will not embrace this new model.  That might be what we are seeing in these pervasive outbursts of seemingly indiscriminate rage toward society as a whole.  It would also not be surprising that they are often predicated on some break-down in empathy in the romantic sphere--bluntly, in the Old Ways, these people would just be allowed to discharge their rage on intimate partners without any meaningful consequences.  It is only when that was not allowed--when the Sacred was removed--that the explosive violence occurs.

Again, it is still the case that the scope of this indiscriminate rage is far larger and more tragic than it would otherwise be without the sea of powerful guns.  It is equally still the case that the refusal to address this problem reflects a destructive pathology that is unique to the United States.  But even if we somehow fixed those problems, there is something that would still exist that must be addressed.  We both can't and shouldn't address it by winding back the clock and recreating the oppressive hierarchies of the past.  Instead, we need to go in the other direction, to dig deep and embrace a different way of relating to each other.

In an interview talking about Battling to the End, Girard said "history is a test; mankind is failing it."  The Sexual Revolution, something fundamentally good, brings with it a necessary test, and we, all of us, are failing it in a myriad of ways.  We need to learn to love one another, really love one another.  Because the alternative is that we will kill each other.