Now that the dust has settled, I can slake the still thirsty among you who want more juice on the Orlando nightclub shooting.
My contention is that I already wrote about it.
Here’s the profile on the killer.
Here’s the discussion on guns.
The articles could use some clean-up and tweaking, as any product seen through the eyes of the content-producer. But I’ll stand by the essence of their contents. No substantial changes. But apparently people want more OC. I am a sucker for Matthew 7:7….
This was a terrifying tragedy, and like all tragedies, people want explanations. Well, people want a sense of control; explanations are a mean to that end. As I wrote in my gun control opus, we seek some sort of system of explanation in loco dei. We need a something to blame, something to fight against. Something evil. We and the forces of good can unite against that and eventually triumph over it. That’s how the stories go. Terrorism. Islam. Immigrantion. Homophobia. Masculinity. Once we have an idea to fight against, we can draw up a counter-attack. I made a rough sketch of the approaches:
A friend of a friend found one such explainable struck a chord with her: moderate religion as a culprit. Here’s the article she posted. It’s wrong, but it’s an interesting read.
“But when I reached the age at which young people feel a drive to do something significant with their lives, I still turned to…”
“And that was what led me to think, I am…. It was a sentiment not of solidarity, but terror — terror”
“I saw … a young man who was desperate to accomplish something of … significance with his life”
“Most frightening of all, I saw… I might have become…” -author
“Where am I? Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this world mean? Who is it that has lured me into the world? Why was I not consulted, why not made acquainted with its manners and customs instead of throwing me into the ranks, as if I had been bought by a kidnapper, a dealer in souls? How did I obtain an interest in this big enterprise they call reality? Why should I have an interest in it? Is it not a voluntary concern? And if I am to be compelled to take part in it, where is the director? I should like to make a remark to him. Is there no director? Whither shall I turn with my complaint?” –Søren Kierkegaard in Repetition
The author’s subconscious is doing the arguing. This is a man still looking for answers. Religion hasn’t worked yet, but he knows enough to appreciate that religion has power. I would literally bet money he is one of those people who says “I’m not religious, I’m spiritual”. But he is religious. He’s also agnostic. God doesn’t have enough power to answer his questions, but religion does. “Religion encouraged him do it”. Religion, in loco dei, means there’s still a higher power behind the chaos in the world.
No, the shooter did it for himself and religion didn’t stop him. The shooter didn’t know who he was or how to matter, like our author, like many of us. His father appears to be some flavor of delusional man, possibly with Islamo-fascist sympathies. The shooter had to grow up in America though, and those views aren’t tolerated. So he couldn’t adopt them outright. He couldn’t inherit the meaning in his life; he had to make it. Moderate religion, if he ever tried it, didn’t work. He wasn’t looking for deeper meaning that religion attempts to offer. He saw his reflection in the pool and concluded that that was enough. Islam didn’t matter; he mattered. Religion just became a pretty cloak to wrap himself in.
What the religious folks of today don’t want to confront is that our religions are getting on in years and don’t have the spring in their step that they used to. People need something bigger than themselves to turn to. Something constructive, ideally. If the old way isn’t cutting it anymore, we’ve got to renovate. The shooter had no foundation on which to prop up his psyche other than his own ego. and how did his ego handle the weight? Rage. Religion didn’t fuel him, it merely failed to convert him.
The violence in the religious texts are a pretext, not a cause. If they were causative, religious violence would be everywhere, and it’s not. The overwhelming majority of Americans are exposed to these violent texts and do nothing to act on it because there are a million other feedback loops telling them not to. Moderate religion does not, when you add up all its vectors, incite people to violence. Even fundamentalism in America very rarely tends to incite violence either. Bigotry, sure, but not abject violence. But the shooter didn’t want anything to do with those other components of society and religion that told him not to be violent. He wanted to be violent; he didn’t want to not be violent. So he cherry picked the small portion of religion that allowed his ego to justify his shittiness and ignored the rest. He was going to get that justification from somewhere. Islam happened to be the lowest hanging fruit for him. Moderate religion didn’t egg him on, it at worst just failed to ingrain nonviolent tendencies in him. But ultimately, he made that decision himself.
So I’ll grant moderate religion isn’t the angle most of you are taking. Terrorism is a sensible accusation. It did cause terror. But terrorism as a poli-sci term requires there to be a purpose to the terror. Effecting terror for the sake of terror isn’t terrorism–unless some day militant nihilists want to violently proselytize, but I doubt we’ll end up seeing that. As of this writing, terrorism doesn’t seem to be a plausible explanation. “But he fucking called 911 and pledged allegiance to ISIS before the attack”. But he wasn’t working with them–as far as information that is publicly available indicates. He wasn’t with an organization trying to effect a political or religious goal. You don’t pledge actual allegiance to ISIS to a Floridian 911 dispatcher. That was all theater. For the news, for himself. He was trying to tell us he was a part of something. He wasn’t. It’s all talk.
He wasn’t an immigrant either. His dad was, and even people on the liberal end of the spectrum have a decent case to ask “uh, why is a dude who’s trying to run for president of Afghanistan up for citizenship?” But the shooter himself was raised in America. Outside of complete politically unfeasible “seal the boarders in perpetuity” route, immigration laws aren’t going to have any power to fix this. But his citizenship an interesting point. A number of these high profile incidents involve people raised in Western countries: the Boston bombers*, the San Bernardino shooters, the Belgium bombers, the Isla Vista shooter, the Charlie Hebdo shooters, the Virginia Tech shooter*. And that’s just the recent ones I can think of off the top of my head. *(denotes immigrants, not second gen.) It’s not fresh-off-the-boat adult immigrants doing these types of things (although I’m sure some have, or they will in the future, just as a statistical probability). It’s people who have been through a process of acculturation.
I can’t speak to the process myself, but immigration is a weird deal. Moving across cultures comes with baggage, not just to you, but for your kids. Imparting cultural traditions, and helping kids get a sense of identity and their place in the world is a massively important part of psychological development. Crossing cultures throws a wrench in that; you have to pick and choose what you’re bringing with you from the old traditions and what you’re assimilating. Failure to juggle that balance appropriately can mess kids up. Most of them don’t turn out to be mass murderers obviously, but pick a mental health issue. The sense of self, the sense of our purpose in the universe is not a thing to be taken lightly.
So our shooter was a homophobe, right? I mean, I think the word is insipid. Prejudice and bigotry shouldn’t be synonymous with psychological fears… but nonetheless that’s our word for “anti-gay”. The dude clearly targeted gays. There has been speculation that the guy was a closet-case. That’s one of those deals where it sounds really speculative and it fits a popular narrative super easily, so until I see an article to the effect of some guy coming out and being like “yeah, we’ve been having an affair for the last year. Here are the naked pics he’s sent me on his phone”, I’m not going to latch onto it as a conclusive component of the guy’s profile. Not every anti-gay act of violence is perpetrated by closet cases. It’s an Occam’s razor thing to me. He could have just been scouting the place and people are jumping to conclusions. Regardless, it doesn’t change anything else in my perspective. Just throw in sexuality to the list of things he’s uncertain about in life. The ship was already sinking anyway.
He did target gays, that seems pretty incontrovertible though. The why becomes tantalizing. An interesting line has been drawn around whether not his religion (Islam in this case) bears any culpability. The political correctness/multiculturalism/virtue signaling segment of the left tends to downplay the effect of religion, while the secular-humanist left and right wing (in an unexpected alliance) tend to highlight the import of religion in this motivation. Religion is certainly a contributor to the motivation. Homosexuality has worked its way into the cultural limelight, and religion tends to stand in opposition to it. Anti-homosexual tendencies aren’t unique to Islam, but that ubiquity also doesn’t exculpate the religion either. A secular-humanist probably wouldn’t have harbored any anti-homosexual proclivities–at least not to that extent. But the idea that in the absence of religion this guy wouldn’t have shot anyone is also probably incorrect (we can’t say for sure, of course). No major religion as practiced in the West advocates shooting up a room full of gays. Religion didn’t put that idea in his head, he did. This asshole was already going to shoot up a room full of people; religion just told him what kind of people to shoot. If he had a secular upbringing, he’d be shooting up a school. There but for the grace of God….
When you whittle things down to an ultimate cause, Orlando happened because a rage-fueled narcissist took his impotence out on other people. There wasn’t a goddamn thing you could do about it. You can’t stop the next one, either, and there is going to be another one.
Try not to let it get to you.