CONCEPT TO SEE
CULTURAL HAZARDS:
CULTURALLY HAZARDOUS BEHAVIORS FEED CYCLES OF CULTURAL ORDER AND DISORDER
At 10:10 am on January 8, 2011, an eruption of rapid gunshots shook the still desert air in the foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains. U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head, at point-blank range, by a man with a semi-automatic pistol. She was given immediate support before being rushed to the University Medical Center in critical condition. She was holding a “Congress on Your Corner” constituent meeting in a Casas Adobes supermarket parking lot, in the Tucson, Arizona metropolitan area. Eighteen others were shot in the episode, and six people died, including a nine-year old girl, and the Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court for Arizona. After emergency surgery, and the use of an induced medical coma, her recovery began, requiring extensive rehabilitation. She returned to appear in Congress later the same year. One year after the assassination attempt she resigned from the House of Representatives in order to focus on her recovery, but promised to return to public life. She lost 50% of her vision in both eyes and continues to have language problems, and never was able to attempt a return to Congress.
Following this tragedy, severely injuring a member of Congress who is the wife of an astronaut, and causing the deaths of a distinguished federal judge, a child, and four other Americans, many felt that the rash of mass killings would subside as the American government and people, having been pushed too far by the assassination or maiming of senior government officials, would unite in efforts to find methods for understanding and preventing mass murder.
Subsequent years demonstrated the folly of these hopes, as mass murder visited every part of American life and geography. Another member of Congress, House Majority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana, was shot on June 14, 2017, during a practice for the annual Congressional Baseball Game for Charity, along with three others. Scalise and one other victim were rushed to the hospital in critical condition, where they eventually recovered after surgeries.
Mass murder continues to infect American life. Members of Congress and the judiciary are victims, yet answers in the form of substantive change do not appear. Understanding of the causes of mass shootings is limited and plans for prevention even more uncertain. The country struggles on.
Beset by repetitive tragedies, are Americans resilient or foolish? – resilient, as they continue their lives with courage, or foolish, because possible causes of the tragedies are neither studied in depth nor acted upon.
Recent decades of increasing violence, portrayed in the media and experienced in our lives, are an example of a phase of the repetitive cycles of cultural order and disorder. Cultural disorder commonly includes violence that begins when abandonment of “traditional” values and behavior yields social crises that cause uncertainty. The social disruption is followed by an eventual “calming down”, or a “clamping down” on the disruptive behaviors, followed by a return to “traditional” expectations and behavior.
The troubling vulnerability of a society to an emerging concatenation of cultural changes, represented most forcefully by a spewing of violence, can be painted by the brush of the artist; it is forceful and bracing, but it lacks the articulation of specific causal pathways. Such paintings through films are especially compelling, filled with detail and suggestion — yet, are dependent upon viewers to achieve the alchemy of turning the viewing experience into the knowledge required to forge practical solutions. This is a daunting task, especially as it competes with interpretations by viewers that might seed more violence-flooded art long on the excitement that attracts audiences, and short on the understanding that quiets violent tensions.
A TASTE OF LIFE
A Clockwork Orange
1971
Director: Stanley Kubrick
An inevitable problem fueling confusion is that any new approach to social problems can appear very risky to “traditionalists”, even those actions that prove to be sources of progress. “Disrupters”, of course, repeatedly point this out. The challenge is to distinguish between useful change and harmful change: to see or not to see. This is not an easy task.
Later, a rebirth of these (or other) culturally hazardous behaviors can occur, initiating a new cycle. This stalemate – a pattern of cyclical “traditional” and risk-laden destructive behaviors, bringing sequential order and disorder — is familiar to cultures through the ages, and periodically disrupts cultural progress. These cycles have complex roots, discouraging study. Yet, the sources of periodic cultural disorder and disintegration will only be countered through the application of practical actions flowing from new knowledge about the causes of cultural disorder.
If these thoughts seem to bring a whiff of pessimism, the commentaries to come convey optimism, offset only occasionally by warnings of lazy human self-satisfaction, struggling against the effort of thinking more broadly, inclusively, and precisely.
Any phenomenon that is as complex as recurrent periods of cultural deterioration and individual suffering will have multiple causes. Among them it is my intention to describe the pivotal role of meaning, and its distortion or destruction (altered meaning), as a source of personal suffering and cultural harm. For reasons to be considered in detail, meaning is a concept that has the characteristics necessary to make it an ideal candidate to be a primary source of those influences that can become detrimental to a culture. For example, if films, newspapers, the internet, books, and other media depict and decry everyday violence, why do most humans complaining about violence not see the meanings of the behaviors and avoid them? We are vulnerable to our abilities to see or not to see meanings.
VOICES
The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.
Luo Guanzhong (1522/1991/2013). Three Kingdoms: A Historical Novel (Moss Roberts, trans.). London: The Folio Society, p. 5.
The words of Qohelet son of David, king in Jerusalem.
Merest breath, said Qohelet, merest breath. All is mere breath.
What gain is there for man in all his toil that he toils under the sun.
A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth endures forever.
The sun rises and the sun sets, and to its place it glides, there it rises.
It goes to the south and swings round to the north, round and round goes the wind, and on its rounds the wind returns.
All the rivers go to the sea, and the sea is not full.
To the place that the rivers go, there they return to go.
All things are weary. A man cannot speak. The eye is not sated with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.
That which was is that which will be, and that which was done is that which will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.
There is a thing of which one would say, “See this, it is new.” It already has been in the eons that were before us. There is no remembrance of the first things nor of the last things that will be. They will have no remembrance with those who will be in the latter time.
I, Qohelet, have been king over Israel in Jerusalem. And I set my heart to inquire and seek through wisdom of all that is done under the sun – it is an evil business that God gave to the sons of man to busy themselves with.
I have seen all the deeds that are done under the sun, and, look, all is mere breath, and herding the wind. The crooked cannot turn straight nor can the lack be made good. I spoke to my heart, saying: As for me, look, I increased and added wisdom beyond all who were before me over Jerusalem, and my heart has seen much wisdom and knowledge. And I set my heart to know wisdom and to know revelry and folly, for this, too, is herding the wind. For in much wisdom is much worry, and he who adds wisdom adds pain.
Robert Alter (2010). From Qohelet (Ecclesiastes). In: The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes) (R. Alter, trans.). New York: W. W. Norton & Company, pp. 345 – 348.