Tenons Avec De Nice

Burt Likko in reply to Mike Schilling says:

I notice that earlier, we were talking before about the difference between a Daesh-inspired attack and a Daesh-directed attack in terms of whether the difference between the two matters with respect to Daesh’s power as an enemy. This is a question of political significance. But now, we appear to be discussing assignment of moral blame and the significance of, inter alia, other causes of violent behavior such as mental health.

I thought we had the debate narrowed down nicely several rounds ago when we reached the issue of causation. Did Daesh somehow cause the violence in Nice? If it directed the attack in advance, this is a projection of its political power. If it merely claimed credit for it afterwards, it’s hard for me to assign Daesh’s claim of political credit all that much significance, any more than I would assign political significance to the myriad other acts of apolitical violence referenced before.

For some reason, I’ve been asked to confront an older question regarding whether a cleric in Florida caused violence in Afghanistan by making a spectacle of himself burning a Koran. I’ve not looked up the earlier argument, but that’s what it really came down to. IIRC, I took the position then that primary moral blame rested with the rioters themselves, but the American cleric who did something he believed would incite violence and intended to incite that very violence, was in fact morally blameworthy when the thing he intended to happen did happen. @jaybird or some other archivist can look it up and advise if that’s an incorrect restatement of my position on that event.

So maybe the argument here is that Daesh deserves moral blame for Nice. That isn’t the discussion I thought we were having about Nice. I don’t think I assigned political significance to the Florida cleric’s burning of a Koran; he did not attempt to project his political will to Afghanistan by his act. (I’m pretty sure I did not advocate any kind of criminal activity; the burning of a Koran in the United States, just like the burning of a Bible or the flag, would almost certainly by protected by the First Amendment.)

But as relevant to the discussion here, the American cleric wasn’t trying to change the Afghan government or influence something the Afghan government. Rather, he wanted to see if he could get Muslims to riot somewhere by making a spectacle of himself burning a Koran. He arrogated to himself the ability to set in motion a chain of events that he suspected and intended would lead to the loss of human life based on offending the religious sensibilities of people he gave every impression of despising. Politically, I can’t see that he any particular objective, certainly not one that mattered to Afghans. Morally, he did something calculated to cause violence and intended to cause violence, and violence actually happened, apparently as direct result. I remember arguing then that was blameworthy, and it certainly seems blameworthy now.

The issue, then, has become twofold. First, I’m asked whether I see a causal connection between Daesh’s call for violence, and what happened in Nice. Second, I’m asked to assign some kind of significance to that connection — and now I am uncertain whether that significance is moral or political.

I’m still far from certain that the causation is particularly strong in this case, given the man’s significant personal history of violence before anyone claims he became “radicalized,” and continuing hints about a complex history of mental illness, particularly depression, atop a milieu of little economic opportunity and social isolation.

Interestingly, the article in that second link suggests that a mostly irreligious life followed by a sudden burst of intense religiosity before committing a violent act while invoking that religion is a recurring pattern for people who do their violence in the name of something religious. The fervor of the recently-converted, I suppose, but this was not something I’d known and frankly it scares me all the more given my earlier remarks that peoples’ mental states are subject to significant change without notice.

Now, if there is evidence that Daesh somehow pre-directed this fellow to attack Nice, then that’s a political act by Daesh. That’s Daesh exercising political power, and it gets political significance as well as moral opprobrium. I really don’t see evidence of this at all — and I don’t think that’s the claim under debate here. The claim as I understand it is that inspiring him to do this is somehow equivalent to directing him to do it. And now I see that equivalence is supposed to be a moral equivalence, based on the reference to a different issue in the moral realm.

So if, as seems most likely right now, this is a guy who was already violent anyway, and who decided right before he went out, “Hey, look at Daesh, they’re awesome! I’m going to do something violent in their name,” then I’m still unimpressed with this as a purported reflection of Daesh’s political power. In such a circumstance, you could persuade me to say, “Daesh gets moral blame for inspiring him.” Frankly, Daesh’s moral scorecard is so abysmally bad at this point, it hardly seems to make a difference.

I’m even less willing to link Daesh to this act if, as seems still within the realm of possibility, the guy was merely “Daesh-curious.” In that case, I’d say Daesh are bad guys, and this guy was a bad guy, but there really wasn’t any connection of significance between them.

But, to quote then-Secretary Hillary Clinton, “What difference does it really make?” Are we going to hate Daesh more than we did before? Are they going to hate us back more than they did before? Are we going to try to destroy them more than we’re doing now? Allow me to posit that we hate them already and they hate us already and we’re already trying to destroy them. Are we going to fear them more than we do now? What good does that do? Or is the whole point of this simply that every one of us should all experience a greater sense of fear than we currently do?Report