> From: Gar Lipow <the.typo.boy at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] German school gunman 'kills 16'
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Thursday, March 12, 2009, 10:53 PM
> One type of killing, school killings are actually lower
> today than
> they were in the 60's. (Of course the 60's and
> early 70's had
> especially higher levels of internal U.S. violence than the
> present -
> at least the present through 2007. Don't know figures
> for 2008, or the
> past few months, yet.) So I'd want to see statistics
> before I was
> convinced that this kind of "spree" killing is
> higher today than at
> other times in recent history.
>
[WS:] I do not think we should apply one-size-fits-all statistical approach here. I think there is a difference between central tendencies in a population and individual cases that, while being "outliers" in the statistical sense, are nonetheless highly indicative. For example, to study religion in some remote village, you may take a "statistical" approach and interview a number of villagers and then tally their responses to compose a picture of the religion in question. Or you may interview the village priest, and get a very different picture that way. What is more, the latter may be a more accurate picture even though it is based on a sample of one (an anathema in statistical inference.)
So bringing this to the discussion of school violence, we need to distinguish between propensity toward violence in general population, and seemingly isolated "high profile" cases, such as shooting sprees.
I have little doubt that incidence of broadly defined violence (any physical aggression, not just killing) in general population (including schools) is lower today than it was, say, a hundred years ago. This is particularly true of the US, where acts of physical violence among strangers in public spheres are rather rare (domestic violence is a different animal, but I am its incidence is lower as well.)
But as the incidence of actual violence has been reduced, the incidence of symbolic violence is way up. The UCSC criminologist Dane Archer did a comparative study of US and British high school students, asking the subject to supply an ending to a story involving different kinds of interpersonal conflicts. His data showed that the Brits tended to provide some kind of verbal conflict resolution (arguing, shouting, negotiating, etc.) The US-ers, by contrast, tended to provide graphic descriptions of extremely violent resolutions (shooting or physical violence between the parties.)
What is really interesting, the incidence of actual violence among strangers seems to be higher in the UK than in the US (cf. football hooliganism or bar brawls, which are not that common in the US.) So it seems that as the level of actual violence in everyday life goes down, the appetite for virtual (or stylized) violence goes up.
I can only speculate that this must have something to do with male socialization - we (as society) tend to brainwash males with notions of "toughness" "defending honor" and similar idiocies, which creates male propensity toward violence to "prove oneself." At the same time, we tend to reduce acceptance of- opportunities for actual violence in everyday life. Consequently the poor male schmucks have to escape to the virtual world (images, games, etc.) to establish their male ego through violence.
Of course, capitalist marketers cater to this male craving for virtual violence and provide ample supply of cultural material to meet that demand, for a profit of course. The ubiquity of the violent script in pop culture legitimizes the use of violence in general population (as Dane Archer would argue.)
The point is, however, that most people tend not to cross the boundaries between virtuality and reality in everyday life. They may have wet dreams about committing violent acts, or even perform them on a computer screen, but they do not act them out for obvious reasons. Therefore, ordinary statistical methods are not very useful for detecting the impact of this virtual violence on social behavior.
However, "high profile" individual cases may provide a better insight, just as interviewing a single priest may offer a better insight into religion than polling a bunch of villagers. These high profile cases represent unstable individuals who do cross over the boundary between virtuality and reality, thus providing an insight into their system of beliefs and desires.
But that system of beliefs is socially constructed, and capitalist pop culture has a big role in it. The German shooter, the news reports tell us, was a son of an "successful businessman" (code word for an egoistic asshole) who introduced his son into the gun culture (i.e. showed him how to use lethal force against others.) A number of explicitly violent films were found on his computer, which point to the role of pop-culture scripts. Finally, he was treated for "depression" (a code word for delinquent behavior in bourgeois individuals), which suggests that he was unstable, and thus prone to acting out his macho fantasies.
So seemingly isolated individual cases may tell us quite a bit about changing role of violence in a capitalist society, which statistical studies of general trends could not reveal. As I said before, this is highly speculative, and may not fit all "high profile" cases, but at least it offers an interesting angle to look at things that seem to defy rational explanation.
Wojtek