More Death; Bullying Still Irrelevant

In light of the subject of my post yesterday, it’s truly remarkable that I happened to click onto this NY Daily News’ story about Monday’s shooting at a school in Chardon, OH. One paragraph below a picture of the shooter, T.J. Lane being ushered into the back of a vehicle in cuffs, the author writes, “Prosecutors on Tuesday described Lane, 17, as ‘someone who’s not well,’ and rejected claims the violence stemmed from him being bullied.” Since I’d practically just gotten through criticizing the irresponsible overuse of the term “bullying,” my first reaction to that line was, naturally, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

This is two egregious applications of the same media buzzword on two consecutive days, one extraneously denied as a factor in a young girl’s death, and the other extraneously denied as a factor in a teenage boy’s commission of murder. I really hope that my having read both of these stories is coincidence, and not a result of the media being so saturated with the bullying narrative that it’s this easy to find awful examples of its misapplication.

So the prosecutors in the Lane case rejected claims of bullying? I find it interesting that the author points that out but makes no note of from whom those claims came in the first place. Was it other students? Lane himself? His parents or his teachers? Was it a contingent of the public that has no connection to the case but has heard a lot from the media about the spectacular effects of some bullying epidemic? Or did the media itself float that assertion to prosecutors so they would have reason to print the denial?

Wherever the claim came from, it points to the fact that the media obsession with the concept of bullying has led at least some segment of society to readily jump upon bullying as the easiest explanation of virtually any problem among children or teens. The obsession didn’t seem quite so endemic yesterday, but when the same buzzword is presented as the most likely cause of both victimization and victimhood, there’s a good chance that the narrative has a really pervasive influence.

The farther the term reaches in absence of evidence for the appropriateness of its use, the less meaning that term retains. If bullying was initially seen as the probable cause for a girl being killed yesterday, but today it was seen as the initial probable cause for a boy killing his classmates, it’s hard to conclude anything other than that the explanatory use of the concept is arbitrary. If it can work in either direction, why didn’t UPI say yesterday that there was no evidence that Joanna Ramos was attacked because she was bullying the other girl? Why didn’t the Daily News ask defense attorneys whether Lane had targeted the three dead students because they were the victims of his bullying?

Unless the media can explain to me some nuanced justification that they’ve applied, I’m going to assume that in one case the story was already focused on Ramos and in the other case it was already focused on Lane, and the author of each piece had to leverage the bullying buzzword in somehow.

I understand the need that many people have to make sense of tragedy, and these narratives help people to do that more quickly and easily. But the same narratives compel people to make sense of tragedy inaccurately and incompletely. The media’s enablement of the impulse to grab the most uniform explanations and the let the stories lay does no one any good. In fact, the news media has a responsibility to discourage those impulses and to provide us with information that is thorough, accurate, and relevant, even if it complicates our understanding of the world.

I suppose I should give credit to each of these articles for actually dispelling the bullying claim, but the fact remains that there was no reason to raise it in the first place. Doing so just serves to tie these and other such stories together in a very tenuous way. That just muddles our collective understanding of these events as what they are – separate, distinct, but equivalently awful tragedies.

UPI Exploits Death Again - This Time it's a Little Girl

I’m quick to grow painfully tired of media buzzwords. Their overuse tends to strip them of all legitimate meaning. It takes a small-scale breaking point for the public to realize this in individual cases, but it will take a major breaking point for the media to recognize the counterproductive effects of their attention-seeking repetition.

I’ve noticed this recently with the word “bullying.” Frequently, when there are stories about children or teenagers who were victims of violence, harassment, or suicide, or who were subject to practically any interactions on the internet, the news media leverages in some sort of comment about bullying, seemingly in an effort to give unifying context to virtually every such story. That wouldn’t be objectionable, but it seems to me that “bullying” is a descriptive term that we apply to a situation only after we’ve identified it as such. If a child is being systematically harassed by a person or group of people, we say that he’s being bullied because that’s simply what the word means.

But that’s not the way the media uses it. Instead, they tend to talk about bullying like it is some kind of disease, which has a very specific set of symptoms and can be identified at any stage in its life cycle by a trained professional. Indeed, the disease corollary may be quite intentional, designed to make modern bullying seem less like an ordinary phenomenon and more like an epidemic, and thus something about which to feel a certain sense of panic. Applying it as a buzzword reframes bullying so that it’s no longer a term that concisely identifies a set of similar situations; instead it is the situation.

Never has the manipulative use of the term been clearer than in the UPI news brief about the death of ten year-old Joanna Ramos after a fight at a Southern California elementary school. The article summarizes the story in a few brief paragraphs, explaining that she and another girl had fought, that she suffered blunt force trauma that resulted in a blood clot in her brain, that her death has been ruled a homicide and that prosecutors have yet to determine whether charges will be filed. Then, after all the details of the actual case have been conclusively stated, UPI adds this as a concluding sentence: “There have been no allegations that Ramos was being bullied, KTLA reported Friday.”

If there have been no such allegations, then why on Earth is that relevant to the tragic story of a young girl being killed? Does her being or not being bullied affect the seriousness of the loss? Does it make her any more or less dead? Does it make the girl with whom she fought any more or less guilty of manslaughter? The only reason there ever could be for pointing out the absence of a particular charge or connection is if that piece of information would have been relevant. In this case, it just isn’t. It might have mattered, for the sake of complete coverage, if the girl was being bullied, but there’s no need to specifically dispel that possibility every time a child is killed. To do so is to suggest that bullying is typically a precursor to death among children and that the absence of bullying in this case is anomalous and therefore noteworthy.

Again, I’m sure that’s intentional. Actual relevance is the only legitimate reason for addressing the absence of allegations, but the media has reasons for that behavior that aren’t legitimate. If it’s a chance to leverage in a buzzword that they think their audience is expecting, that’s evidently good enough for them.

Bullying is a problem. It’s always been a problem. Using it as this catchall term in the media, though, cheapens that problem. It broadens awareness of the issue to the point of obfuscating recognition of actual instances of it. Isolated acts of violence constitute their own problem. And using a girl’s death from such an act in order to push your narrow media narrative is cheap, tactless and unethical. But considering that UPI is the same outlet that exploited Andrew Embiricos’ death back in December, cheap, tactless and unethical is evidently par for the course for them. They don’t set the overall media narratives, though. Everybody’s culpable for that.

Suicide and Deontological Ethics

This is interesting. I’ve hit a rare breaking point in my philosophical beliefs. Yesterday, Jack Marshall wrote about Don Cornelius’ recent suicide, and today he took it as an opportunity to recall a post from years ago regarding Hunter S. Thompson having killed himself in 2005. In the first place, Marshall was making the point that the social ethics regarding suicide may have to change as a deeply flawed health care system makes the last years of people’s lives burdensome to their families and communities. But Marshall reposted his comments about Hunter S. Thompson in order to make it perfectly clear that he has an unforgiving attitude towards suicide outside of the special cases of extreme old age and infirmity.

I appreciate the pointed focus on ethics of Jack Marshall’s blog, and I read it frequently, but I find that I am often at odds with his politics, as he is quite conservative, and I am sometimes at odds with his ethical theories, as he is unambiguously utilitarian. That latter fact explains why Marshall is able to conceptualize ethics as so flexible that suicide may be wrong in every case for one generation, but circumstance-dependent in another. I have never been comfortable with the idea that the rightness or wrongness of actions can change. I don’t believe that ethics are so flighty and inconsistent, so I have always subscribed to a deontological outlook, considering actions to be right or wrong entirely unto themselves.

Thus, I disagree with Marshall about the idea that the ethic of suicide may be different in the future than it was in the past. But as it happens, I also disagree with his aggressive assessment of the current ethic. I think the cultural revulsion at the idea of taking one’s own life is overblown and lacking in compassion. Despite using the term “victim of suicide,” we frequently tend to portray such people only as perpetrators, never as victims.

Most people, Jack Marshall certainly among them, describe suicide as the ultimate selfish act, but I consider that claim to be irrational. For something to be selfish, one must be able to expect that he will personally benefit from the act, but what personal benefit can there be if the end result of the act is that you cease to be, and thus cease to be capable of either benefitting from or being harmed by anything? I would say that in all probability, suicide is generally neutral with regard to self-interest, and indeed that the vast majority of suicide victims genuinely believe that other people will either not be affected by their deaths, or will be affected positively. Thus, I would ascribe the same motivations to most or all suicides that Jack Marshall ascribes to the theoretically defensible suicides among the elderly of the future.

As far as I can tell, I’ve always felt this way, though it recent years my forgiving stance on the issue has been helped by being on the other side of it. I have contemplated suicide extensively, and while I certainly would not encourage anyone to follow through where I have held back, I also would not pass judgment on anyone who did so. There are motivations, and mental states, and circumstances to consider, and the entirety of what drives a person to forfeit his own life cannot be adequately known. But I suppose that the essential reason to give a suicide victim the benefit of the doubt is an ethic of live and let live, live and let die. That is, there’s something to be said for the idea that one’s life is one’s own to either hold onto or cast off. And since I don’t believe in utilitarianism, the incidental, secondary consequences of suicide are not sufficient cause to judge it as unethical.

But my breaking point comes of realizing that it’s hard to make deontology mesh with attitude that says suicide might be okay. After all, my aversion to utilitarianism is clarified by any thought experiment in which murder is made okay by the promise that it will save other lives. Now, that’s the very thing that helps to convert others to utilitarianism, because it’s hard for people to imagine how a worse outcome can be associated with a better moral decision. But it is my strong intuition that we are morally culpable primarily just for our own actions, and if there are exceptions to the hierarchy of right and wrong, the entire system of morality falls apart.

I realize now that by allowing for the ethical rightness or neutrality of suicide, I am contradicting my belief that killing is wrong in its own right, rather than because of its outcomes. My natural inclination is to equate killing with murder – to think of it as an externally directed act. Yet suicide is barely different; it is an act of murder in which the same person is both victim and perpetrator. Unless I go to great lengths to explain why a self-contained act of murder is morally different from an externally directed one, it seems rationally incumbent on me to accept that suicide is wrong not only in general, but even in cases where it would end severe pain and suffering.

It’s not impossible to make that distinction. I could say that actions contain their own normative value only by virtue of their being externally directed. That’s tempting and I’ll give it some more thought, but it also seems like a manipulation of my own moral theories. To build such an exception into the concept of the intrinsic wrongness of a type of action is to approach dangerously close to utilitarianism and thus to be left with what I consider an incomprehensible moral code. And in fact, my willingness to consider circumstance in eschewing moral judgment of suicide could itself be easily labeled as utilitarian.

So it’s not easy for me to reconcile my intuitions toward suicide and self-harm with my belief in deontology. Now that the two ideas have been brought into conflict, I’m inclined to drop my existing attitude toward the specific case. The only other options are demolishing my ethical framework or twisting it to accept a contradiction, and either such action would be rationally unjustifiable. At least until I come up with a better solution, I feel compelled to declare that suicide is wrong no matter what. That extends even to the exceptions that Jack Marshall is willing to make for elderly people who feel they must take their own lives to avoid becoming a burden within the healthcare system.

However, I can see no intrinsic moral value in declining to preserve or prolong life, and that should adequately reconcile the deontological view of suicide with the utilitarian concern about becoming a societal burden. No moral imperative compels the elderly and infirm to pursue treatment, or even to actively keep themselves safe and healthy. And fortunately for my intuitions, the same goes for anyone who has motivations for suicide other than old age. It’s wrong to kill oneself, but it is not strictly wrong to accept one’s own death, to will it, or to actively pursue it.

This too is the sort of hypothetical which will drive some people fast away from deontology but that recommits me to it. It will strike others as inconsistent that euthanasia can be considered wrong while allowing yourself to die by other unnatural means is considered acceptable. But as far as I’m concerned, at a sufficiently deep level of analysis it is the only view that is consistent. And in fact it’s delightfully consistent because it appears to reconcile not only contrary intuitions but also deontological and utilitarian theories. Not only that, but it satisfies both my rationality and my romanticism. The idea that courting death can be right even as forcing it is wrong gives moral weight to the way that I hope to one day die. It means that Hunter S. Thompson, who left a suicide note lamenting the end of football season and shot himself at 67 while on the phone with his wife, is subject to ethical judgments, but that I should admire Ambrose Bierce even more than I already do for getting involved in the Mexican revolution at age seventy-one and disappearing after leaving behind a final letter that said in part:

Good-by -- if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico -- ah, that is euthanasia!