I don't really understand this point, though it seems familiar to me (as in the inexplicability of the holocaust).
I can sympathise with the conventional (right wing, even) argument that it is wrong to try and explain away people's actions on sociological grounds. What individuals do, they are responsible for. I hold that to be true as much for the perpetrators of the WTC bombing as for junkies who kill people holding up shops. It isn't anybody else doing it, its you.
Personal responsibility does not negate sociological explanations, these simply operate at a different level of analysis.
What I find harder to understand is the manoeuvre that says that such and such an act is so bad (at which point 'evil' is often mentioned) that it is 'beyond understanding'. That just strikes me as a failure of imagination.
Nathan says that he can't explain Hitler or his inner circle. I don't know why. They seem pretty banal to me (having read Goebbels boring diaries a few years ago).
I remember ten years ago in the UK two boys killed a toddler and there was much talk of 'evil' then. People said that they did not know how the boys could do it. But that just seems like dishonesty to me. I can imagine how you could gravitate from cruelty to injury - even to murder. Being able to imagine it is a precondition for not doing it, I would say.
Equally, Nathan says that there is no continuum between a demonstration and the planning of mass murder. Well, OK there are always disjunctures, and the WTC bombing is not the same as a demonstration. But is Nathan really saying that he can't imagine how people could get into such a state of mind that they would contemplate such a thing? Why not? Are you a nun?
I don't have to imagine how people got themselves worked up into such a state that they cheered on the aerial bombardment of Iraq - I saw it. I didn't agree with the downing of the Iranian airbus, indeed I would say that it was barbaric. But it is not very hard to see how people initiated a course of action that led to its destruction.
In retrospect it was probably unwise for the CIA to instruct Osama bin Laden and others in urban terrorism, but I can well imagine how they thought that it was a good idea to stop the Soviets. I myself sold a left wing newspaper that opposed the fundamentalists in Afghanistan at the time, but I can imagine that a lot of people thought that they were heroes. Indeed I don't have to imagine, I saw it with my own eyes.
I don't believe that you can rise above something if you can't imagine it yourself. I hold to the nostrum (Herodotus?) 'nothing human is alien to me'. I found the WTC telethon pretty alienating, but if I try hard, I can imagine feeling like that. I can also imagine what it must be like to think that the bombing was a great revenge. I can well imagine what it must feel like yearning to bomb Afghanistan. All those responses are human, not other-worldly. But that does not make them right.
In message <034901c145f4$d1317260$0600a8c0 at mindspring.com>, Nathan
Newman <nathan at newman.org> writes
>While I find leftwing attempts to "explain" the causes of Sept 11 ridiculous
>and offensive, I find those "explanations" of the Right equally sad and
>offensive. A bit more security on our airlines - start with paying more
>than minimum wage to the security guards is a start - is a smart response
>but the global hysteria seeking explanation of THIS event is doomed.
>
>I don't believe in God but most religious thought is as easily understood as
>parables of grappling with the unknowable in life. "Evil"- or if you
>prefer statistically chaotic activity of a negative form - happens. The
>test is not explaining it or, to a certain extent, even stopping it
>(although its effects can be limited), but in how we ourselves confront it,
>whether matching it with our own irrational hatred or rising above and
>recognizing our better humanity.
>
>I think there is plenty of opportunity by the Left to encourge the latter,
>but harping on ultimately unexplainable causes is a dead end and far more
>likely to awaken the former.
>
>Nathan Newman
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-- James Heartfield