Disinterested Judges and Uninterested Accomplices: The Naïve, the Ignorant, the Insane, the Evil by NORMAN SIMMS
When I listened to the three young male students (who were arrested for colluding with the two Boston Marathon Bombers by throwing away the fireworks and backpack of their schoolmate) saying they didn’t want their friend “to get into trouble,” all I could hear for a moment-putting aside the later thoughts of complicity in terrorism, admission of treason, and insidious deceitfulness among those who hate the West, especially the United States, Israel, and Christendom-were spoiled brats reducing the enormity of crimes committed to mere late adolescent pranks. That is, these college buddies could not see beyond their own petty little world of cynical and nihilistic tricks against any and all persons, institutions and ideas constituting authority, and this deserving of respect. When they recognized their friends from the video images posted by the police, they seemed to have taken it on their own to protect the bombers, to intervene on their behalf and to lie to the investigating officers.
This is a whole other order of madness of malapropism and solecisms than to which I usually refer-for instance, the case of a reporter on a major news network who stated more than once that the person just found guilty of a horrendous murder showed no emotions and was “disinterested” throughout the trial. You would think she would have caught herself-if not at once, then soon afterwards and would have re-shot her little speech, so that she could say “uninterested,” since it is only the judge in the courtroom who should have been “disinterested” as he or she presided. These kids-if we dare use such a colloquialism that grants them a degree of cuteness and therefore of sympathy-have at once lifted themselves up into the context of serious responsibilities they have at the same time disingenuously exposed themselves to the charge of being associates after the fact. They may be tried for attempting to obstruct the course of justice, a place where ignorance of the law is no excuse for seeking to destroy vital evidence in the case. I also suspect that their ignorance and youthful naiveté may be a sham and consequently they may be liable to charges of deeper complicity.
Similar comments may be made about the two brothers’ mother, the older young man’s converted wife, and perhaps about other associates of theirs, related by family or not, in the United States or the Russian Republics.
If there is to be a proper analysis of their written and spoken words, whether on the retrieved computers, in more public blogs and social media sites, or in letters, recorded phone conversations and recollected statements by various witnesses, then one of the key factors to be taken into account will have to be the weak and defective language current among the youth, university students and graduates. Poor language skills due to incomplete mastery of English in all its nuances of tone, texture and degrees of formality by immigrants are one thing. Vague and jargon-ridden terms prevalent among the half-educated and overly-immersed denizens of pop culture form another, not to mention electronic-gaming terms, fundamentalist religious in-words and computer-speak.
But what are the choices open for categorizing the moral responsibility-I have to put side criminal decisions to legal procedures-these suspected terrorists and their accomplices? They are either naïve, ignorant, insane or evil. Granted that there can be various permutations and combinations, along with cross-overs and other blending, let us set forth the options.
The Naïve
This would mean one or all of the accused are too young and inexperienced to really grasp what has been done, what it means to the society around them, and how it affects their own lives. Despite their actual ages, all being over eighteen years of age, which put them into the camp of the adult and the responsible among citizens, they look, speak and act like children. They may not know the difference between licit and illicit acts, between good and bad, or even between what is serious and prankish-or, as I used to discover among too many of my university students over the last few years of my teaching, they did not know that such standards and qualities existed. They lived in a world of almost pure egotism.
The Ignorant
Not only may they be too silly and foolish to understand what they have done in terms of law or morality, but they may now even know-because no one has taught them, provided role models, or themselves been able to frame in clear terms what the meaning and implications of their actions are. They may be so confused by the rhetorical ploys and suggestivity of the propaganda all around them that they cannot figure out what everyone else is so upset about, like children who find it hard to distinguish between playing games and real social behavior. Though this takes us back to the category of the naïve, we are looking at a combination of failure in the schools and the media to inculcate in young people what the acceptable standards of civil society are and how to negotiate their own individualities through the norms of the world they live in. They have some mastery of technology, be able to work their way through multiple choice questions and true/false quizzes, or write out their own opinions and emotional preferences on relatively trivial and supposedly objective topics, but they have no real experience in critical thinking, self-analysis or logical argumentation.
The Insane
On the face of it, any adult who could fit into the category of the naïve or any university student who was still operating at the level of adolescent absolutes would surely have to be considered mentally unbalanced to one degree or another. Those kind of people are so divorced from common sense and moral deportment that they cannot be expected to take part in civil society. Such persons were treated by specialists who were known as “alienists” in the nineteenth century before the whole of diagnosis and therapy was turned into a medical science, just as the term morality was reduced to a behavioral tic instead of covering a whole range of qualities from emotional and mental health through intellectual achievement and on to social responsibility.
The Evil
This is a category I want to use without any theological or mythical qualities. Therefore the concept is related to forms of madness and delusionary enthusiasm. Evil people seem to be those who have no meaning or pleasure in life than hurting others, causing them grievous pains, humiliations and excruciating death. It is not even that they are numb to the hut they cause in others, since such a lack of empathy or sympathy would be a symptom of emotional illness; because they enjoy watching and hearing others suffer. They seem also to relieve their own inner demonic pains by projecting them actively outwards on to their victims and gain the power they otherwise fear they have never had or lost in themselves. Moreover, such wicked persons are able to rationalize what they have done and create elaborate systems of self-justification, either by inventing new ideologies, manipulating existing belief-structures, or interpreting the religion or political beliefs of their enemies in such a way as to make it just and right to destroy its upholders. But can all those sweet, innocent-looking faces belong to purveyors of evil in the extreme?
So, maybe we need to add a few more possible categories:
The Self-Deluded
Mature, experienced and even well-educated people may temporarily delude themselves into thinking they understand very complex issues in a simple way and then take decisions which, while consciously going against received opinions and public attitudes, not to mention the law of the land, because they believe it is the right thing to do, the moral and the just way to behave for long-term and general good. This may come about when such persons have had a sudden and a traumatic, or at least a dramatic, private experience, which they then generalize into a universal law; and so when overcome by previous guilt or excited into present outrage at a manifest instance of apparent injustice, they are galvanized-I use this old-fashioned word in the sense of electrified or stimulated as though by unconscious power-into action: they take matters into their own hands while all around them the community seems indifferent, torpid and stupid. This enthusiasm-another old-fashioned word-was well-known to the philosophers of the Enlightenment, such as Locke and Hume, and who saw the danger in well-intentioned efforts by those guided by an inner light of reason or revelation, taking off half-cocked, as it were, without giving themselves a chance to reflect on the full picture or discussing the problems with disinterested colleagues or friends in a dispassionate way.
The Entranced
When the sense of individuality is suppressed, the mob mentality, the instincts of the crowd, the force of public opinion, or the charisma of leaders, all these may lead to individuals and communities picking up suggestions, as though they had been hypnotized or put into a group trance. To explain this process, once again I find myself retrieving archaic words or senses of common words that have fallen into desuetude. There is then a contagious feeling, sometimes as anarchic and chaotic as a panic-a stampede of wild animals goaded on by the gadflies of confusion-or an exaltation or exuberance of passionate desire to greet, overwhelm and become absorbed into some seemingly larger reality-as in celebrity concerts, evangelical assemblies or the rush to welcome a messianic figure. In such occasions, normal rules of conduct, restraints on public displays of emotion, and consideration of consequences and implications do not come into effect; and the surge of collective energy races towards its goal, the devil take the hindmost.
We are dealing with a situation-persons, actions, consequences-which lies outside the vagaries of new-speak and computer jargon. It is time therefore to become literate again, just as it is time to become rational and aware of history: because we are engaged passionately with the cause of justice and truth, because it is in our interest to protect the moral values we wish to live by.
Norman Simms is the author of Alfred Dreyfus: Man, Milieu, Mentality and Midrash (Academic Studies Press, 2011). The second volume in the series, Alfred Dreyfus: In the Context of His Times: Alfred Dreyfus as Lover, Intellectual, Poet and Jew should be out towards the end of this year; and a third volume tentatively entitled Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus: Illusions, Delusions and Allusions is being prepared for 2013.
Read more: Family Security Matters http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/disinterested-judges-and-uninterested-accomplices-the-nave-the-ignorant-the-insane-the-evil#ixzz2SVdPR65Y
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