What Made Him Do It?

Yesterday, United States Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan shot and killed 12 people and wounded 31 others at the Fort Hood Army base. He survived four shots and is now hospitalized.

Wild speculation began immediately. Fueling speculation are reports that Maj. Hasan is a Muslim and had made various statements reflecting opposition to U.S. military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. One interviewee even claimed that the major had said that Muslims should not be fighting Muslims.

Maj. Hasan is an Army psychiatrist who was about to be deployed to Afghanistan. There are reports that he was agitated about this.

The investigation into this horrific crime will be complicated. But today, one question has been pressed repeatedly in various media interviews and reports: “What caused Maj. Hasan to do this?”

The question is ludicrous. It presumes that his action was “caused,” as if it was some set of circumstances that ineluctably made him do it. But why think that?

Notice, I’m not asking, What makes anyone think that? That would be to commit the same mistake. I’m asking what reasons anyone would have for thinking that. Here are two possibilities.

First possibility. One might assume that nothing this horrific could be pre-meditated and morally culpable, but must be due to some psychological disorder or malfunction. “Nobody in his right mind would do such a thing.” That is, anyone who would do such a thing must be “out of his mind.” Such a one is more to be pitied than blamed. The tragedy extends not only to the victims and their families, but to the shooter himself who could not help himself, who was in some way driven to this behavior.

Second possibility. One might be concerned that Hasan’s action could have been motivated by a Jihadist ideology, and that this is socially and politically awkward. If Hasan was acting in full possession of his mental faculties, in premeditated fashion, under the inspiration of a Jihadist ideology, that spells real trouble on two levels.

First, it means that greater vigilance is needed at home to ensure that we have a trustworthy fighting force waging war with Jihadism overseas. Those who volunteer for service need to know that the men and women serving alongside them are on the same side. Americans need confidence that every means of terrorist insurgency in the United States is realistically assessed.

Second, any hint that terrorist strategists have infiltrated our military infrastructure could have serious social repercussions. I’ll leave it to readers to contemplate what those repercussions may be. But one way to begin would be to ask, what am I to think and how am I to go about my business, if even our home military bases are this vulnerable?

Looking for the “causes” of the man’s behavior is ridiculous. The most intelligent assumption, at the outset of investigation into this event, is that he made a calculated decision to perpetrate this crime. His motive needs to be investigated. Motive refers, not to causes, but to reasons. So, what did Hasan believe? What ideas and beliefs could he have had, consistent with all evidence, that could make sense to him of taking this kind of action?

The alternative is to suppose that no one acts with such horrific consequences in a morally accountable way. If that’s true, then what are we doing in Iraq and Afghanistan? Why, for that matter, is anyone ever locked up for an egregious crime? Everything is to be causally explained.

Let’s suppose that we could somehow persuade ourselves that human action is causally determined and that we must be sympathetic with agents who do such horrible things. We might still wish to contain the scope of their action and influence, to prevent opportunities for them to engage in such behavior—if only to spare the lives of innocents. On the assumption that behavior is caused, prevention would depend upon somehow mitigating the causes. Fine. But why shouldn’t ideology then be regarded as causal in its effect? Embracing a pernicious ideology may itself, on the assumption, be the effect of various psycho and social causes. If all commitment to Jihadist ideology is causally induced, which in turn leads causally to terrorist acts, then we still have an interest in isolating the ideological component in a person’s behavior, however “causal” the role of ideology may be. And once isolating that component, we should develop means to screen for its presence among individuals who have opportunity to act perniciously under its inducement.

Whatever role ideology did or did not actually play in Maj. Hasan’s action, I believe that we have to presume that his action is morally reprehensible and not just psychically tragic. And if ideology was a “factor,” then even a causal account of Hasan’s behavior must face that fact.

On September 11, 2001, Americans were stunned by the success of terrorist plotting that was years in the making and staging. On November 5, 2009, Americans were stunned by news of a massacre at Ford Hood. Are the events connected? At this point, who can say? But surely it is not paranoia to consider the possibility. Many of our leaders seem to be in denial. They carry on business as if terrorist reprisals are a thing of the past, or at worst effectively restricted to remote locations.

We need to understand the nature and power of ideology. Terrorists, for example, are pragmatists. They seek realistic means of achieving their goals. We do not accept their ideology; thus, we fail to understand their actions. We don’t understand their objectives; we simply can’t relate to them. And so we make all kinds of mistakes in judgment about their motives and methods. As pragmatists, however, Jihadists are creative and patient. Are they beyond  exploiting the freedoms of all Americans to live in relative obscurity, infiltrate whatever strategic centers of activity exist in our land, and pull the trigger at that moment when it best serves their purposes? Don’t kid yourself.

What made Maj. Hasan pull the trigger yesterday? That’s the wrong question. Better to ask: How could this have happened? There is an answer to this question. We may not like what we find out. But if all we consider is what makes a terrorist do what he does, we may not see the next one in our midst. I don’t know if Maj. Hasan is a Jihadist. I do believe he’s morally responsible for his action. And I fear the consequences if we refuse to investigate the possibility that Hasan, whether acting alone or not, was acting on behalf of an ideology.

Chris Matthews an Authority on Negative Campaigning and Wing-Nuts

Tonight, on MSNBC’s “Hardball” show, Chris Matthews says he “can’t stand” negative campaigning, from Republicans or Democrats. But earlier in the same segment he repeatedly calls right-wing conservatives “wing-nuts.” His Democrat strategist guest was more honorable. Even he couldn’t  call them wing-nuts, after being pressed to do so by Matthews.

Who’s the real wing-nut here?

Sixteen Works of Creative Nonfiction

Here are sixteen works classified as “creative nonfiction” and called “superlatively entertaining and artful” by Michael Dirda, in loose chronological order:

1. Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians
2. A. J. A. Symons, The Quest for Corvo
3. Robert Byron, The Road to Oxiana
4. Joseph Mitchell, Up in the Old Hotel
5. Isak Dineson, Out of Africa
6. M. F. K. Fisher, The Art of Eating
7. Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave
8. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism
9. Ivan Morris,  The World of the Shining Prince
10. S. Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives
11. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce
12. Alison Lurie, V. R. Lang: A Memoir
13. Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia
14. Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
15. Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination
16. The Paris Review “Writers at Work” collections (especially the first four)

What’s a reader to do when confronted with a list like this? Michael Dirda is a sure guide to what’s of value. But it doesn’t follow that decisions about what to read aren’t personal. What principles guide the winnowing of reading lists and the prioritization of reading plans? Rather than prescribe principles here, I illustrate with my own reaction to Dirda’s list.

A. Books already familiar to me: (1), by virtue of owning and reading it; (5), because I saw the film; (6) since I’ve come across this recommendation many times before and have long had an interest in taking a dip; (8) having read bits, at least, and possibly owning a copy; (14) though I have not read the book or seen the movie (1967) or TV mini-series (1996); (15), by name only, and this I’m not completely sure of; (16) in volumes I’ve sampled during stray hours at the bookstore, though I have no idea whether they were among the first four.

B. My future with those books already familiar to me, in the ways outlined in (A) above: (1), satisfied with my current familiarity, agree about its brilliance, but acknowledge that I would not have thought to include it on any list of top 16, except out of a compunction to appear well-read and properly aligned in tastes with the literati (which is not particularly tempting); (5) shouldn’t let my impressions of the film (which were not unfavorable, in any case) prevent me from trying the book, but would read other items before getting to this, and so might not ever get to it; (6) confirmed in my disposition to read this, and probably will track it down for that purpose soon; (8) will consult again (as I would have anyway), partly because of my work on film analysis and the nature of narrative, and not at all because it’s on Dirda’s list (though the reminder is appreciated); (14) more inclined to read this before (5), and definitely inclined to see the movie; (15) the title compels me to look this up, with the hope that it will agree with my imagination of what it’s about; and, (16), time to return to these conversations with authors.

C. What about the others? (2), is appealing because of its prospect for revealing how a life may be researched for writing a biography; (3), cannot make sense of the description that this book is “The Waste Land of travel writing (though I do, I’ll have you know, recognize the reference to T. S. Eliot); (4), may be worth a visit, if only to see how “street-corner preachers” are depicted; (7), nothing said in Dirda’s brief entry on this memoir draws me to it over others (but the description at Amazon does); (9), recently running into references to great English literature about Japan, and now this one, I sense an inevitability about exploring this unfamiliar territory; (10), would have been a welcome discovery when I was more interested in the question of Shakespeare’s identity, a curiosity that has passed for me; (11), it’s tempting because Joyce is an enigma to me and his reputation is justified, but I did read Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, and have read a few short stories, and this has seemed enough to me; (12), this one can wait, maybe for a nostalgic read next time I’m in the neighborhood of Harvard or Cambridge (though which Cambridge I’m not sure); (13), not particularly interested in Patagonia, but if this is “the most influential travel book of our time,” I’ll have to take a look, just to see what it could mean to call a travel book “influential” (though I have my own ideas about this).

D. Bottom line: Skip (1)-(5), (7)-(8), (10), and (12), for the time being. That leaves seven others. I surprise myself that (11) made the cut; but Dirda does call it “the finest literary biography of the twentieth century.” I’m skeptical about (13), but willing to learn more. I’m intrigued by (9), largely because of the coincidence of coming across several appealing references to literature related to Japan, a coincidence that I’ve learned to trust as a guide into the serendipitous; standing apart from the others, (14) is a “mood book,” in the sense that I’ll have to be in the right mood (whatever that is), and I’m not at the moment (and rarely am); (16) makes the list because of past experience and because these are collections of conversational pieces, with implicit guidelines for worthwhile interviewing and insight into the vicissitudes of the writing life; (6) and (15) are toss-ups for first place, and will probably be read in the order in which they next cross my radar.

So, here’s the order I’m most likely to follow with the seven I’m most inclined to read: (15), (6), (9), (14), (13) (11), (16).

For more from Amazon about each book, click on its title in the list above. With the exception of (12) by Alison Lurie, they all appear to be in print. And all are in the four- to five-star range at Amazon.

First Lines: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy

Laurence Sterne’s ironical work of fiction, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, was first published in 1759. It baffled and intrigued Sterne’s contemporaries. You may feel the same way after reading the opening sentence:

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions that were then uppermost;—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded that I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that in which the reader is likely to see me.

Come again?

You may wonder, “Does this start bode well for the rest of the book?” My copy runs to 526 pages. In 116 words, the loquacious Tristram says practically nothing. And yet, this sentence lies at the threshold of an acknowledged classic in literary fiction. What is of interest in this sentence is its vacuity, the very fact that it says nothing of interest.

Still not convinced? Well, then, did I mention that there’s also a film adaptation?

The description on the back cover reports that Laurence Sterne’s work is “impossible to categorize.” That may be so. But it is not alone in whatever general category it belongs. Another that I recommend is the Italian novel by Italo Svevo called Confessions of Zeno (1923).

Bearing Books from New England

A week ago I returned from a New England holiday with my family. We journeyed to Maine and New Hampshire in quest of respite from the cacophony of California. We found it. Harbor views, the Maine woods, marine vessels, lobsters, crisp air, and fall leaves.

And I found bookshops—with mountains of second-hand books—ranging from the maximally disheveled to the customary semi-organized to the immaculate (for example, The Old Professor’s Bookshop in Camden, ME).

Of course, I returned with an armload of books. Here they are, in no particular order, followed by an effort to say about what’s interesting about each selection:

• Donald E. Westlake, Thieves’ Den: The Dortmunder Stories (11 short fiction in the mystery category; 183 pages, 2004)
• Kate O’Brien, Farewell Spain (memoir and travel writing; 249 pages, 1937, 1985)
• Peter Geach and Max Black, eds., Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege (essays in philosophical analysis; 244 pages, 1952)
• John Stubbs, John Donne: The Reformed Soul (biography; 565 pages, 2006)
• Gale E. Christianson, In the Presence of the Creator: Isaac Newton and His Times (history and biography; 623 pages, 1984)
• Morton White, editor and commentator, The Age of Analysis: 20th Century Philosophers (history of philosophy, philosophical analysis; 253 pages, 1955)
• Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy: Volume 8—Modern Philosophy: Bentham to Russell, Part II, Idealism in America, The Pragmatist Movement, The Revolt Against Idealism (history of philosophy; 360, 1967)
• Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method (existentialism, philosophy; 181 pages, 1963)
• Henry D. Aiken, The Age of Ideology: 19th Century Philosophers (history of philosophy; 283, 1956)
• Robert Bretall, ed., A Kierkegaard Anthology (philosophy; 494 pages, 1946)
• George Santayana, The Life of Reason, or the Phases of Human Progress (philosophy; 320 pages, 1946)
• New England in a Nutshell: Quotations about the People, Places, & Particulars of Life in the Six New England States (quotations, geography, and culture; 179 pages, 2002)
• Ian T. Ramsey, Christian Discourse: Some Logical Explorations (published lectures, philosophy of religion, theology; 92 pages, 1965)
• Bliss Perry, ed., The Heart of Emerson’s Journals (essays, memoir, autobiography; 357 pages, 1938)
• Joseph Margolis, ed., Philosophy Looks at the Arts: Contemporary Readings in Aesthetics (anthology, aesthetics; 481 pages, 1978)
• J. M. Thompson, Robespierre and the French Revolution (history, biography; 159 pages, 1962)

These 16 books hail from three different bookshops, all of them vintage quaint. What explains my choices?

1. Westlake is a celebrated mystery novelist. Short stories appeal for their shortness. Quotation: “I don’t know how it is with anyone else, but I can never think about what I’m supposed to think about” (author’s Preface).
2. Farewell Spain recounts, in first person perspective by a noted essayist, much of what happened leading up to the Spanish Civil War—a remarkably recent event for a modern European country (the 1930s). The circumstances and outcomes fascinate me. Also, I often wonder at the attractions of Marxism for American and Western European intellectuals of the time. This book yields some answers.
3. Frege is probably the most surprising entry in this list. It was for me the most surprising discovery among the heaps of books to be perused. Here, in one volume, I have access to key essays on logic by this influential figure. Quotation: “It is even now not beyond all doubt what the word ‘function’ stands for in Analysis, although it has been in continual use for a long time” (first line from “What Is a Function?”—page 107). The sentiment expressed here has broad application in philosophical practice, I’m afraid.
4. John Donne was probably the greatest of the metaphysical poets. But I doubt that enough is known about his enigmatic life to cobble together a biography of nearly 600 pages. The first two chapters of Stubbs’s biography do betray a tendency to read far too much between the lines, and in such a manner that can be detected without any prior knowledge of the facts of Donne’s life. Quotations: Several lines in Donne’s elegy “The Perfume” demonstrate that Donne was not someone to “sit back and coast through life on inherited creeds” (p. xix). “Throughout his life, Donne  showed he was willing to take decisions that endangered everything he had; but at the end he was at peace with those decisions. His biography is worth studying not only because he was a splendid writer, but also because he was a brave and principled man” (p. xxv). That’s the sort of thing I look for in a biography. But I also require verisimilitude, and there’s reason to wonder if this book meets such a minimalist standard.
5. Was Isaac Newton “the greatest scientific thinker in modern times”? There’s ample reason to think so. But he was as absorbed with religious questions as he was with the scientific and the mathematical; in fact, he was interested in their mutual relations. Newton’s mature library included “416 titles on theology, which together with the patristic writings account for 27.5% percent of the Newton collection, about three times the number of volumes on any other subject” (p. 247). (Who cannot appreciate the exactness of the biographers calculations? I have no idea of the percentage of books on theology in my own collection.) Of Newton’s attitude about God, Christianson writes: “Try as he might, Newton could no more forge a bond with his Creator than he could with his fellow man. His future relationship with God was to be an intellectual rather than an emotional one, in which Christ, the loving and forgiving Redeemer, played a secondary role. It was Yahweh, the omnipotent Creator, harsh Taskmaster, and imperious Judge of the Old Testament, who commanded Newton’s lifelong attention and obedience. . . . Yet having found his God, he never once denied Him” (p. 248).
6. Copleston’s volume may be a redundancy in my library. For thirty years I’ve collected individual volumes of the complete set published by Image, Doubleday—on average for about $2.
7. The slight paperback books by Henry Aiken and Morton White are part of the old Mentor Philosophers Series. White dedicates his volume to G. E. Moore, and Aiken dedicates his to Ralph Barton Perry. These are two philosophers for whom I, too, have great respect, and whose work has influenced my outlook in philosophy. Written 50 years ago, these books will never be out of date. The expositions of views by past philosophers is reliable.
8. Who knew that Sarte sought to purify Marxism and believed that “existentialism is the pulsating heart of Marxism”? Anyone who has read Search for a Method. Quotation: “I do not like to talk about existentialism” (Jean-Paul Sartre, in the Preface to this book).
9. 

   Søren Kierkegaard

   My acquaintance with Søren Kierkegaard (b. 1813) is not as deep as I wish. This collection puts me in touch with bits of his work I would not otherwise know. Kierkegaard was a pithy philosopher, in the best sense. Wisdom poured from his pen. My first dip into this roundup of his jottings will be “The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage,” from Either/Or. Then it’s on to “When All are Christians, Christianity eo ipso Does Not Exist.” (I wonder what ‘eo ipso‘ looks like in Danish.) Quotation: “We will now see whether the age which demolished romantic love has succeeded in putting anything better in its place” (p. 82).

10. Who reads George Santayana these days? I do. Of special interest to me are chapters VIII, IX, and X, on “Prerational Morality,” “Rational Ethics,” and “Post-Rational Morality,” respectively. Quotation: “The condition . . . of making a beginning in good politics is to find a set of men with well-knit character and cogent traditions, so that there may be a firm soil to cultivate and that labour may not be wasted in ploughing the quicksands” (p. 254). What was true and lacking in 1933 is true and lacking in 2009.
11. I sought out a souvenir of this trip to New England and turned up two suitable books, the Nutshell book of quotations, and the memoirs of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Quotations: “There is nothing a New-Englander so nearly worships as an argument” (Henry Ward Beecher, quoted in New England in a Nutshell); sounds like my kind of place. “The most prodigious genius, a seraph’s eloquence, will shamefully defeat its own end, if it has not first won the heart of the defender to the cause he defends” (Emerson, p. 20).
12. As for the volume on aesthetics, I suppose I’ll start with essay 11, “The Ontological Peculiarity of Works of Art,” by Joseph Margolis (eight pages), proceed to essay 13, “On Drawing an Object,” by Richard Wollheim (twenty-four pages), and continue next to essay 22, “The Language of Fiction,” by Margaret Macdonald (fourteen pages). Quotations: “My own suggestion is that (token) works of art are embodied in physical objects, not identical with them” (Margolis p. 217). “. . . if an observer claims to see something or to see something in a certain way, then, if this could be so, that is if his judgment falls within the general specifications of what is possible, we may assume that it is so” (Wollheim, p. 250); Wollheim’s use of “we” in this passage intrigues. “A character, like all else in pure fiction, is confined to its rôle in a story. Not even the longest biography exhausts what could be told of any human person, but what Jane Austin tells of Emma Woodhouse [in the novel Emma] exhausts Emma Woodhouse” (Macdonald, 433). Hmm . . . . If Macdonald is right about fictional characters, what would it mean to say, “My life is a story?”
13. The copy of Ian T. Ramsey’s published Riddell Memorial Lectures of November 1963 is pleasingly musty, which makes reading it dangerously interesting for someone (like myself) with a mold allergy. Ramsey was at pains to rescue Christian talk about God from the tentacles of a residual positivism that reduced the scope of meaningful statements to what is empirically verifiable. Quotation: “What I would like to do now is, first, to show how phrases such as ‘up there’, ‘out there’, and ‘beyond’ come to be used at all in discourse about God” (p. 66).
14. Finally, Robespierre and the French Revolution. I believe that the French Revolution of the 18th century was the most wide-ranging transformative event in the shaping of modern history. The better it is understood, the greater will be our understanding our own times. I doubt that this little book presses such a claim. Its aim is to shine the light on a singular personality, Maximilien Robespierre, who supervised much of the Reign of Terror. He sent many to the guillotine, but, strangely, he managed to be guillotined himself; the interval between his last glorious act on behalf of the Revolution and his gnarly demise was all of six weeks. Quotation: “So Robespierre died” (first line in final chapter, p. 135).

My problem now is storage. This collection of books fit more easily in my suitcase than they will on my shelves.