in passing

I thought that Brian Leiter at "Leiter Reports" had some pertinent things to say about the shootings in Arizona--as well as good links...

But for my own sake, I've been listening with one ear to "Democracy Now" and certainly haven't made a habit of reading what the NYT or others have to say.,..

Nonetheless, I have heard an invocation of one sort of secular religion: the American religion of happiness and it will be better and we're all basically good people.... and let's look at the bright side. (For me that sort of talk echoes badly: first with Depression era songs, and secondly with the lie about Vietnam that we could see the "light at the end of the tunnel"....)

I wouldn't want to trivialize real suffering, but there a sort of ideology here that I think isn't deserving of much beyond critical examination. Once this [happy! happy!/we're all in this together/look for the good, not the bad, in the bad.....]-machine gets rolling, any sort of analysis is crushed. Any real attempt to understand is drowned by a wash of emotions generated only, it seems, to avoid self-examination.

Further there is a problem about levels of explanation. As is always the case in the USA, explanations at the individual, not the social, level are preferred. It was only a mad man, not a society which is itself violent, and thereby increases the chances that a mad man will act out his violent fantasies.... (What does it mean for a society to be violent? Well, I suppose a responsible answer would involve comparing societies. Is the USA more violent than Europe, e.g.? Is the popularity of the death penalty in the USA relevant evidence?)

I believe that there's as well something to be said here about the popular psychotherapy developed by Ellis, which articulates a current in American culture. (An opinion based largely on reading Magai and Haviland-Jones's book, "The Hidden Genius of Emotion"...) It might be necessary for someone who has to survive a very tough situation to deny certain emotions, but there is a question about the price one thereby pays....

I apologize that I've not got the time do spell that out more here and now. (I wasn't trained to make that sort of remark without filling in the details, so please don't blame my teachers.)

And one final comment: the murderer in question is sometimes said to have not been political.
That, too, is a way of avoiding analysis, and blaming the event on the pathology of an individual.
Yet, the claim is patently false. If the man actually had an incoherent belief system, he also had a belief about the essential badness of government. The question of the role of government (or the need for government) is a basic and essential political question. It may not be "party political" as they say in the UK, but actually it does sound like an incoherent (inconsistent) Republican or Tea Party view... (incoherent because what's usually meant is that when government does something for poor people or people in general, that's bad.... what the government does to aid the ruling class or to fund the war machined is not counted as government activity--an inconsistency...)