>Don't agree with every
>>word of Hitch but the basic point is sound -- to the extent that any action
>>issued from the Taliban-based world of oppression, the discussions of US
>>crimes "causing" the mass murder of Sept 11 is ridiculous. Hitch clearly
>>notes the tragedy of blowback from the US's own crimes in supportin the
>>Taliban in the first place, but to give any moral status or even link of
>>mass murder as connected to legitimate struggles against injustice is an
>>obscenity.
>
>The two sentences are not connected, unless you confuse a purported causal
>explanation with an attempt to justify the unjustifiable. Surely, Nathan,
>you (a sociologist!) are not taking the position that to attempt to
>explain these terrible crimes is wrong because that would amount to a
>whitewash of them?
Was it agreeing with or justifying McVeigh when we people tried to understand why McVeigh did what he did? Certainly not! Is it justifying domestic violence and legitimating that behavior when we try to understand the structural dynamics that give rise to such abuse?
i have a friend who was abused by the deacon in her church when she was 5-7. for years she went to therapy. for years she fought the idea that it was her fault. for years she seemed to choose the "wrong man". for years she bought (mildly) into the idea that abused women seek an abuser for a partner.
then she took a sociology class. she learned about gender roles, about gender oppression, about sexism, etc. she learned to stop beating herself up over seemingly "attracting the wrong kind of men". she also learned to understand how men are caught up in a system of gender oppression. in no way does she feel that a sociological imagination is useless in understanding what happened, why he did it, and what _she_ can still do to live a rewarding life, despite her recognition that, to paraphrase, "we make our lives, but not just in any old way we please". she can still judge the deacon's behavior as wrong, too. a sociological understanding of gender relations in no way detracts from her ability to make that judgement.
We have a family friend who is married to someone who is emotionally abusive. We love them both. We know that one of the reasons he engages in such abuse is because he's "acting out": he's a professional who can't find a job in his field because he's in his late 40s and lives in the wrong part of the country and feels he can't relocate. When he comes back from an interview and things don't go well, the abuse starts. Sometimes he feels he's overweight; he projects this onto his spouse and tells her she's overweight, even though she's clearly not.
Understanding the dynamics of capitalism and how it shapes such personal relations is not justifying this man's behavior. But it certainly helps this woman understand that it's not her fault and it's not because he's irredeemably evil or bad.
What is interesting is this. Back when she first turned to others for help, I did what I always do: research. I pointed her to some stuff on family systems therapy. FST suggests that one way for his wife to deal with the situation is to recognize that their relationship comprises a "system" and, while she's certainly not responsible for the abuse, her behavior--her response to the abuse--can sometimes ratchet it up. So, the advice from a family systems therapist is to help her stop responding in the ways that she's conventionally responded. If she normally responds to his ridicule by arguing with him by pointing out that she's not overweight, then she should do something different -- not argue with him, for example. Since there are a variety of possible alternative responses to chose from, one of the things FST counselors suggest is to try to understand the social factors that give rise to her husband's abuse. This does not excuse him. She is not instructed to shrug her shoulders, turn the other cheek and accept it. Instead, she's instructed to respond differently to his abuse so it will jar him out of his "normal" set of behaviors and one of the ways she seeks to do this is to try to figure out some of the experiences he has that make life painful for him and why, in turn, he wants to make her life painful.
this is not exactly what is going on re: the ME. nonetheless it is an example of how one can view this at a psycho-sociological level without resorting to some mystification about how his behavior is mysterious