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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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"Root causes" are excuses to do nothing

I've written before about the problems facing the TTC, Toronto's public transit system (examples from here: 1 and less directly 2). I'm a big transit advocate, think cities built around the automobile are awful, and car dependency is a big cause in western social malaise. Yada yada yada, you can fill in the rest. The problem I have is that my supposed brothers-in-arms on the transit crusade seem to think it's optional that transit actually be safe, clean, and enjoyable; this has been hashed and rehashed before so to put it simply my views are that if you want transit to work, you cannot tolerate anti-social behaviour on it.

Last week a 16 year-old boy was stabbed to death in a random, unprovoked attack. The assailant was a homeless man who was out on probation for multiple charges, including most recently a sexual assault two weeks prior, and had previously been issued weapons bans and ordered to take mental health counselling. You can imagine the response: various flavours of outraged, upset, sad, conciliatory, exhausted, in all their various permutations as they slithered through the filter of ideology.

The next day a mass shooting happened in the US, which has been picked over for its culture war nuggets already. But in the periods both before and after the killer's atypical identity was revealed, it reminded me very much of the reaction to the stabbing the day before. There is a certain type of person, who when confronted with an incident that they (consciously or not) are intelligent enough to realize might clash with their worldview, employs a kind of motte-and-bailey to defend it. They cannot outwardly exclaim that "This changes nothing!" in the aftermath of a tragedy, because it would appear cruel, heartless, or at the very least tonedeaf. Instead they insist that the real root of the problem is some vast, society-wide, rooted-in-the-depths issue that has to be tackled first. An obvious example is that (almost) every time there is a mass shooting in the US, 2nd amendment types all of a sudden become very concerned about the mental health of the nation, and proclaim it to be the fundamental cause of the problem that must be addressed before anything else changes. Now in general I'm actually very receptive to this line of argument; I think it is mostly a social/mental health problem. Again this has all been re-litigated a thousand times, but these kind of mass shootings are mainly a product of the last 25 years, and countries other than the US seem to have little issue mixing widespread gun ownership with low rates of gun crime.

But obviously this argument is an excuse to do nothing. These people care not one whit about mental health all the other days of the year, and if they were so serious about the problem in the first place maybe there would be a means to achieve some kind of reasonable restrictions on gun ownership that would, if not prevent mass shootings, at least stop them from being so damn easy.

Likewise, I've seen dozens of similar sentiments in the past week explaining the deep-seated causes of why a mentally ill homeless man randomly killed a teen: it's due to the federal government no longer funding social housing, it's due to a lack of compassion for the dehoused, it's about a lack of community, and of course We All Know it's really about capitalism itself. OK, great. But these all feel like excuses to do nothing. This kind of random violence on the subway wasn't an issue before COVID. Do we have to wait for ten years of elevated federal housing funds to act? Do we have to rebuild social trust first? Do we have to dismantle the corporations of the Laurentian Elite into worker co-ops before we do a goddamn thing? I like the sound of all these ideas, but I think there are more direct and immediate ways to prevent kids from getting murdered, so how about we do those first!

But of course the people voicing these sentiments don't actually want those actions taken. Or perhaps really, they perceive that those actions being taken might vaguely benefit the social and political capital of groups they don't like, and so construct an excuse to oppose them.

The bridge near me used to be suicide capital of Toronto. In North America it was second only to the Golden Gate Bridge as a venue for people to end their lives. So in 2006, the suicide nets went up, and there's only been one death since. I wonder whether if that solution was proposed today if we'd get the same kind of inane pushback: no, first we have to tackle the opioids, or too much screen time, or cyber-bullying, or whatever the root cause of the problem was. The nets are ugly: not only as a reflection of our society's problems, they also get in the way of a good view. But it would've been cowardly inaction to insist the root cause of the problem had to be solved first.

An obvious example is that (almost) every time there is a mass shooting in the US, 2nd amendment types all of a sudden become very concerned about the mental health of the nation, and proclaim it to be the fundamental cause of the problem that must be addressed before anything else changes.

"It's not the thing you are using as a scapegoat" inherently means blaming something else, but it's wrong to describe that as "suddenly concerned about".

If plagues were blamed on Jews poisoning the wells, and Jews said "wait a minute, bad sanitation by Christians is a better explanation", you wouldn't ask "why are Jews suddenly very concerned about Christian sanitation?"

The "suddenly very concerned" part comes from how 98% of the time American conservatives have somewhere between zero and negative interest in treating mental health as a public policy concern and bring it up only when taking a defensive position after a mass shooting (and generally without any actual policy proposals)

I imagine they aren’t too concerned because their solutions to mental health are largely outside the acceptable purview of policy. If enforcing people make culturally Christian choices to live a wholesome mentally stable life free of vice is intolerable to the secular Center left, to a conservative politician their hands are tied.

“Don’t make me pay for your sex drugs and rock and roll if you want them so bad” essentially.

That proposition is somewhat undermined by school shootings being more common in the more religious, more conservative South than elsewhere in the US. And virtually unheard of in vastly more secular Western Europe. And also that even in the US, advancing state-enforced Christianity as a remedy to mental health problems is an incredibly fringe position, even on the right.

I think a more likely explanation is that the intellectual paradigm of mainstream American conservatism simply isn't equipped to provide solutions to that kind of problem. It's like asking a progressive to come up with a scheme for regulatory reform.

Maybe that's because school shootings are aimed at devout Christians? No potetnial victims, no problem.

They're clearly not, though. If they were, we'd expect to see evidence that school shooters were actively targeting Christians. We'd also probably expect to see more shooting at churches and fewer at public schools.