Tuesday, December 14, 2004

Ignore this, i don't have a floppy disc here at school so i needa save my shit somehow.

Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris murdered their classmates at Columbine high school and immediately blame was scattered. Fingers were pointed at Marilyn Manson for his macabre lyrics and image, the video game Doom was blamed for its surreal violence, accusations were thrown at the teenager’s parents for negligence, but not once was it explicitly said that these two kids murdered on the self-chosen accord of their own free will. Yet when assigning responsibility it is assumed that despite any influences, one acts freely in this given sense. Is it possible, however, that these teenagers were not as free as we’d like to believe?
Society very much likes to have things explained, especially when it comes to what makes us tick. We like to know how our bodies work, what causes mental illness, what determines sexual preference, what causes depression, addiction, intelligence, obesity, etc. It is understood that schizophrenics are the way they are because of a malfunctioning of the brain, and many times the mentally ill are referred to as being “not right in the head”. In essence, the effects of biology and environment on the individual are being scrutinized from every angle, classified and written in textbooks, and we tend to hail such understandings of our nature as being a triumph of the scientific world.
Yet when it comes to explaining what made the kids at Columbine commit their crime, the blame ultimately falls on their self-chosen accord despite their influences. Is this an explanation? It’s impossible to know every biological impetus that influenced the kids at Columbine, or every environmental factor that caused them to plot their crime, but if these factors were entirely understood they would render the children’s sense of morality as being superfluous. To map out every biological urge and how it was felt, or to identify every environmental influence and how it was interpreted would be to understand precisely what didn’t cause the children to do as they should have done. In this regard, it is no wonder why Stephen Pinker of M.I.T once concluded that, "Science and morality are separate spheres of reasoning. Only by recognizing them as separate can we have them both...".