By Now, You Should’ve Somehow Realized What You’ve Got to Do*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42E2fAWM6rA
The following post is about the perception of our generation as being apathetic. My belief that our generation is perceived as apathetic is almost entirely anecdotal, and if the reader disagrees with my starting assumption then the following note is likely irrelevant; I choose not to endeavor to empirically prove the aforesaid perception, rather I merely state that I observe the perception when talking with adults older than me, viewing popular media sources, and so on.
I agree that large groups within my generation are socially and politically apathetic; I have often argued that the opulence realized by the United States during the 1990’s resulting from the information technology revolution has rendered many of the decade’s recipients of spoils wholly apathetic toward social and political issues. To be sure, I maintain my position that far too many individuals in my generation have abused the advantages provided by them to sulk in laziness, self-gratification, materialism, and vanity. It is, after all, difficult to expect highly-privileged, overfed, and unchallenged citizens to discuss a war in the Middle East or impending economic crises when such issues do not affect their daily lives.
But I disagree with the use of generation as a monolithic descriptor; generations are never comprised of people who share the same or even similar conditions. We live in a diverse society in which a rural manufacturer knows little of what faces an urban service worker. Needless to say, no single adjective describes all the people in my generation. And in this instance, in which apathy is the accusation, we can find a myriad of counter-examples that, when recognized, give my generation reasons to be proud and give older and younger generations reasons to be thankful.
My generation, most importantly, motivated the exponential growth in philanthropic participation we have witnessed in the past decade. Wendy Kopp founded Teach-for-America, but my generation made it an elite organization with thousands of active members. Bill Clinton initiated Americorps, but my generation’s overzealous participation has required continued expansions to the program. My generation travels oversees for the Peace Corps in record numbers; donates more time to national charity organizations than any previous generation; and starts effective social movements like the red campaign and ONE. My generation has people who have resisted the temptation toward apathy and have instead harnessed the power and potential of the information technology we inherited during the 90’s to make many philanthropic movements more effective than ever before.
My generation includes people who are savvy, intelligent, and socially minded. My generation may not participate in the political activism of prior generations, but its commitment to broad-based and grassroots social change should not be overlooked. Many of us are doing what our parents told us they wish they had done but never did: we are devoting our livest to causes larger than our local communities in the hopes of effecting real and long-lasting improvements to the world.
*The title, as you have probably realized, comes from Wonderall. Pete Vernon predicts that the song will be remembered as our generation’s song. That’s a debate for another note.
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A Pedantic Critique of the VA Tech Massacre
The media is always sensationalized and people always oversimplify events they prefer not to comprehend; both of these proposed axioms are the product of self interest acting in a complex social environment in which diversity is prolific and emotional turmoil is rife. The consequence is the marginalization of analysis of tragedies like the recent Virginia Tech massacre; we hear from self-appointed experts on media outlets that the killer of over thirty innocent students was “a loser”, “pure evil”, “a hater”, “a murdering monster”, and “a coward.” I want to predicate the following by ensuring that I neither condone the actions of nor sympathize with the killer. I am, however, very weary of polarizing and simplifying descriptions of someone who no one actually knows anything about; he was, as admitted, a loner who no one knew and who no one understood. What is worse and more disturbing is that the killer is being paraded on all media as the enemy, the wrong, the other, etc. In this way, “innocent” people watching, reading, or listening, can feel more confident in their personal abstraction from evil. For example, the stock responses are often given: “I can’t even imagine what goes on in such a mind,” or “how could someone ever do something so evil and wrong?” Suddenly the nation achieves commonality in righteousness, as everyone can agree that they are vastly different than the abominable monster on the screen. Though talking heads often make unfounded macro claims concerning solutions to the problem, every individual ignores responsibility and becomes more secure in his or her own sense of moral correctness and social acceptance. Humanity effectively ostracizes the unknown killer (not unknown in name, but rather in identity and personality) and produces two problematic results: 1) People become more content with their own moralities and 2) People isolate themselves from the killer, relieving their own kind as responsible. When the killer is rendered subhuman and different, then no one is similar and consequently no one is responsible (I am using responsible loosely in this context, which will be made more clear later.) The thesis is the following: Given that the killer is human and given that we are human, we should be very hesitant to distance ourselves from the actions of the killer. We should instead view the extreme and tragic actions as signals of our potential for wrong and our need to be more self critical and self aware.
I am going to introduce a metaphysical framework that will be applied to the rest of the argument. If the framework is disagreeable, then the entire argument falls on face. The framework, however, should be carefully considered, especially when cross analyzing similar situations in the future. The framework proposes that there are only two ways to understand the killer: 1) as a member of a predetermined evil class of individuals, which necessarily and implicitly establishes a contrasting class of inherently good individuals, or 2) as a member of a homogeneous set that is differentiated by involuntary effects, discretely those of nature and nurture. The framework then a priori discredits the former possibility on a tautology: If people are members of predetermined classes, then they lack free will in a pure sense and thus cannot be held accountable for their actions. Thus, the implications of the latter are all that will be considered: If we our originally homogeneous, then any person anywhere at any time could have been the person who killed the victims at Virginia Tech. That is to say, all that distinguishes me (or anybody else) from the killer is a natural set of mental and physical conditions and capacities, and the unique combination of environmental and nurturing effects that have impressed a personality and a decision-making structure upon me. The argument may seem frustrating because it suggests that I did not (nor did anybody) choose to be who they are in the static present. To argue otherwise is to presuppose an arbitrary and abstract consciousness that would necessarily be predetermined (as mentioned above). Thus, if my “consciousness” had been replaced with the killer’s (with the exact same natural and nurtured conditions), then I would have done the exact same thing as the killer did, only it would have been me watching life occur in that permutation. The counter-argument is always that many people face many of the same tangible conditions as the killer and none of them kill over thirty innocent people. The response, of course, is to point out the ignorance of confounding conditions; that is to say, NO one has EXACTLY the same conditions, so NO one is a good control to compare the killer to. Given the EXACT conditions, there is no metaphysical reason to believe that the duplicate would not act in EXACTLY the same way. The argument concludes as wholly definitional: if you were the killer, then you would be the killer. The reason for elucidating the definition is to acknowledge that the only component that makes us not the killer is luck or chance. As members of humanity, we were lucky to be given our lives with our consciousnesses such that our perspectives and ethical codes (or simply decision-making structures) prohibit us from killing innocent people. I contend, however, that we have done nothing to earn those fortunate attributes; they have simply been given to us through natural and nurtured causes and conditions.
The effects of dehumanizing the killer are two fold: First, by making ourselves more content with our own moralities, the collective media and the society as a whole are nurturing us to be less morally conscious. As long as we can point to “pure evil”, then the petty immoralities of our lives appear less problematic. We can thus relax and be less critical and less concerned about improvement. The second effect is that we place blame incorrectly. The logical extension of the framework above is somewhat radical: it suggests that we are implicitly responsible for the actions of all humans, since all humans are acting in ways we would have acted if we were those humans. Thus, we should not isolate ourselves from humans who we would prefer to render as others. We should acknowledge them as indicative of humanity’s weaknesses and as the potential reflections of ourselves. Humanity is ubiquitously responsible for humanity’s most ignoble behavior. And though it seems logically impossible to extirpate the foundations of the weaknesses, we should view the problem such that we attempt to cure its symptoms. When we are presented with iniquity like that displayed in Virginia Tech recently, our response should not be to ostracize the killer such that we become more comfortable with the status quo. Rather, we should become more critical and more weary of ourselves as potential sources of similar actions, regardless of the scale. The killer exposes what humanity is capable of, each one of us, which should cause us to be more introspective and aware, not more confident in our own moralities.
