It’s human to look for
connections. We do it when we hear that a friend has cancer. And we do it every
time an individual—or two brothers in Boston—go out and succeed in killing
total strangers. Raising concern for the
“root” causes of violence if you’re a Canadian Liberal, or the possibility of
bureaucratic negligence if you’re an American Republican, is unsurprising; it’s
human nature, it sounds constructive, and it is widely associated with analytical
and sophisticated thinking.
Nevertheless, liberal-minded
people as well as libertarians should actually be comforted by Barack Obama and
Stephen Harper’s focus on the crime of
terrorism and the resolve of their governments to punish those individuals found guilty of willfully taking their
politics out on the lives of others.
Harper’s complaint about
“practicing sociology” was partisan and, consequently, politically untimely. And
Obama’s reluctance to talk about “radical Islamists” is being exploited by his
opponents. Nevertheless, is it reasonable—and, more importantly, is it safe—to
imply that the bombings at the Boston Marathon on April 15 just might not have
happened: if our national governments paid greater attention to minority-group
individuals, their politics, and their grievances, or, on the other hand, if
they more aggressively monitored edgy individuals and damned extreme rhetoric
and radical movements?
Should our governments connect
what people think and how they express themselves peacefully—in a free society—with
acts of premeditated violence?
The implications of choosing "yes" are not any safer than lashing out emotionally.
Should we contemplate shifting
our alliances in the Middle East in the hope of mollifying potential domestic
terrorists? If America drives some individuals crazy, should Canada try to be
less American? Should all of us be less hostile toward the political and religious
points of view we despise in order to avoid terrorist violence?
In democracies, minorities—gays
and French Canadians, for instance—can persuade majorities to retreat from and
surrender old policies by persuading them that those old policies are unjust. Is terrorism simply politics on speed?
Senator Lindsey Graham wonders whether the US security behemoth “let its
guard down” in Boston because it did nothing about the Tsarnaev brothers even
though the older brother, Tamerlan, had already said hateful things on YouTube
about living in a nation of “Christian infidels.” Yesterday, the New York Times ran a profile of his younger brother, Dzhokhar. It found
hints of a “dark side”; a smart, promising, popular 19-year-old who’d, nevertheless,
“alluded to disaffection with his American life and the American mind-set.”
Keep digging. He may also be
hooked on Wire and Mad Men.
Should Obama and Harper hire
more sociologists, political psychologists, and computer engineers to daily monitor the private utterances and activities of a far higher percentage of
American radicals and landed immigrants? If radical Islamist thinking causes middle-class North Americans to commit murder, do we make radical political utterances
a crime too?
In a free country, a young man
needn’t mask his “dark side.” Our governments shouldn’t be told by us to
respect our privacy and, at the same, be expected to know what everyone is
thinking—if they don't happen to think like us.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky spent a lifetime
struggling to understand how individuals decide to commit cold-blooded murder. We shouldn’t ask our politicians, their
scientists, or their unbelievably powerful computers to try to figure us out
now.
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