Moral Aggression: cultural fantasies that made a comedy of errors fatal

(This is a reprint of an essay I did for Psychology Today, originally published July 20, 2013. I was writing In response to Trayvon Martin’s murder by George Zimmerman. The argument Is relevant to Donald Trump’s full-page newspaper ad calling for the execution of five Black teenagers later exonerated; and Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed two protesters against police violence in Kenosha, Wisc. on Aug. 25, 2020,)

Were it not for the bullet in his heart, Trayvon Martin’s encounter with George Zimmerman would be a comedy of errors. As a stranger in street clothes packing a concealed weapon, Zimmerman had no business shadowing and challenging Martin—in fact a police dispatcher had just warned him to cool it. Zimmerman was literally looking for trouble, yet he misjudged the danger because Florida had put a pistol and the sinister “Stand-your-ground” law into his hands. Ironically, teen culture had put old-fashioned fists in Martin’s hands.

The problem is that both men were drawing on dangerous cultural fantasies. Emulating the heroic vigilante in American movies and lore, Zimmerman tried to live out a fatally unrealistic story. Instead of saving “his” neighborhood, he became a clownish bigshot getting a bloody nose and killing one of the neighbors he was supposed to be protecting—and an unarmed boy to boot. Whether he struck first or not, Martin too was acting out a cultural fantasy: the heroic black male fighting to survive racist mean streets. He had no idea he was suicidally confronting the sort of sinister concealed weapon that makes Florida an unsafe place to be.

Martin had as much reason to feel threatened as Zimmerman did, as he said in his phonecall to Rachel Jeantel. In legal terms, as Alafair Burke observed, if the court had pointed out that Martin was punching Zimmerman in self-defense, then the verdict could have been different. In fact it would reveal the dangerous absurdity of the neighborhood vigilante scenario. 

The incident escalated to hair-trigger fatality because each man was drawing on a cultural story that left out curiosity, inquiry, and negotiation. The fantasies excluded the imaginative sympathy–the “Hello, how are you?”—that is the basis of civility. In part they reflect the reliance on violence to stimulate thrills and chills and profits in entertainment. As media researcher George Gerbner found, one consequence is that heavy TV viewing will lead you to overestimate how dangerous your own neighborhood is.

The moralistic law-enforcement student who wanted to be a judge like his father seems to have imagined that law means enforcement, not talking through problems with strangers. The culture of young black males similarly prepares them to mistrust and fear a shadowy figure like Zimmerman, whether he was a cop or a potential mugger.  

So this is a story about a failure of civility—and the law—to control paranoia, hair-trigger reflexes, and fantasies of heroic force. What motivates the story and made it tragic is the combination of moral aggression and the allure of abandon.

Moral aggression ranges from petty hypocrisy and bullying to the systematic use of righteousness as a weapon to intimidate and kill. History quakes with murderous eruptions such as the Christian crusades, witchhunts, lynching, and all wars. But righteous malice can also be sly, as when politicians sanctimoniously punish the poor by cutting food stamps. 

Moral aggression is crucially entangled with self-esteem. In a sense it’s at the core of personality, as Karen Horney recognizes when she sees culture encoding demands or “shoulds” that from infancy start molding—and often warping—personalities. After all, mum and dad (culture) stuff you with a sense of “what is right” long before you’re know who are or can sort out your values. And people use “shoulds” against each other, which is one reason we fear dictators. When you put down someone who’s “wrong,” you feel “better,” pumping up your self-esteem. If you use moral aggression to exterminate “bad” others, as in Auschwitz or the Old Testament, you can even feel godlike.

The fantasy is most atrocious when it runs amok, as in witchhunts or ethnic cleansing. If you’re seething, the urge to throw off all inhibitions leads to rampage killing or “going postal.” But in American culture these days abandon is pervasive in movies, news, sports, and military ambitions. Shedding inhibitions is a style. Hence the copycat quality in many rampage killings. Our choices are always conditioned by culture. If you fly into a rage, you still have to choose how to act it out. Consciously or not, you need models. If everyone is fascinated by radical gun violence and you join the mayhem, your bigshot infamy commands the world’s attention.

But here’s the hook. Abandon is cruelly ambiguous. If losing control unleashes rage, it’s deplorable. Yet abandon can be seductive too. All sorts of cultural voices, from sports and warfare to advertising promise that if you could just throw off your inhibitions, you could tap some amazing resources in yourself: become a daring millionaire, an Olympic athlete, or an invincible gangster. In slang we say “Go for it!” Superman models this fantasy when he throws off his dorky Clark Kent duds and shows his superhero cape and jockstrap. This is the romance of abandon. Pro wrestling fakes it. Rampage killers live it.

The second ambiguity is that abandon has no obvious limit. How much is enough? Abandon is terrifyingly lethal when the twitch of a finger can trigger maximum violence and kill a child or the city of Hiroshima. George Zimmerman’s pistol supported fantasies of abandon. With a gun he had no reason to be cautious about the hoodied stranger he spotted. He didn’t realize that Trayvon Martin was also into abandon until his fist smashed Zimmerman’s nose. 

flirtation with berserk abandon is one marker of “bad boy” fantasies in pop culture, as the many extravagant and dead rappers illustrate. Trayvon Martin flirted with the bad boy role, suspended from school several times, and once challenged by cops over some ladies’ jewelry found in his backpack. In one cellphone snapshot he posed with a potted marijuana plant, and in another gave the camera the finger with both hands. He had no police record, and these details are harmless, yet they suggest the ambiguities of outlaw self-reliance and streetwise toughness modeled in male adolescent culture—and the corresponding readiness of officialdom to profile minority males.

Ironically, Zimmerman was more of a “bad boy” than Martin. In 2005, he was in trouble for assaulting a cop, and his ex-fiancee took out a restraining order against him. In his new moral watchdog identity, in a recording of a call to police, he growls about “fucking punks” and “these assholes, they always get away.” This is not the wise voice of the law. You might conclude that Zimmerman uses moral aggression to keep himself better under control. 

Let’s not forget the larger cultural picture. Zimmerman echoes the nation’s ambition to be a self-appointed “global policeman.” In American mythology. the neighborhood watch vigilante is akin to “the minute man.” Today, the watch is also an expression of the national security state that spies on its citizens as possible terrorists and mounts a manhunt against any whistle-blowing Snowdens who refuse to cooperate. 

Overreaction to threat has official support in the “Bush doctrine” that at any sign of threat, the US is justified in “shooting first and asking questions afterward.” The Bush/Cheney mentality recalls the Cold War and Mutually Assured Destruction, the policy of launching a counterstrike the second you spot a missile inbound. The invasion of Iraq cynically employed this mentality, striking with “shock and awe” to counter an imminent attack: a sickening lie that strirred up insurgent anarchy and killed over 100 thousand civilians before the global policeman was forced to withdraw.. Li

Like the “Bush doctrine,” Florida’s “Stand-your-ground” law assumes that any threat to your security warrants total violence. You can see this bizarre idea sanitized in the use of unaccountable drones to assassinate suspects today. No trial, no evidence, no appeal. Given human bungling, drones are as dangerous as Zimmerman’s gun, without which this would be a story about a bloody nose. 

Among those miscalculations is the death of innocents. Only in recent years have we had to face incontrovertible DNA evidence of wrongful imprisonment and judicial murder. But faced with DNA evidence, some prosecutors have repeatedly refused to reopen such cases, presumably because to avoid feeling crushed by guilt. After all, what could be more abominable than the suffering of innocent people condemned to terror and death? Moral aggression put Todd Cameron Willingham to death in Texas despite scientific testimony ignored on appeal. Governor Perry (later head of the energy department in the Trump administration), openly sabotaged the resulting investigation.

Conventional wisdom often behaves as if morality and abandon are self-evidently “natural.” In fact they can used like any other cultural tool or weapon.  Hours after the politically skewed Supreme Court voted to gut the voting rights act Governor Perry’s Texas leapt to pass a discriminatory voter ID law disguised as a means of foiling fraud—for which no evidence exists.

Texas police recently jailed18 year old Justin Carter on $500,000 bail because a Canadian woman vigilante tipped them that in a bantering Facebook discussion two months after the Newtown massacre, Carter had made a sarcastic joke about murdering schoolkids, parenthetically signaling (lol) and (j/k) = just kidding. The Canadian snoop discovered that Justin had apparently lived near an elementary school as a kid (!) The First Amendment is supposed to protect us from witch hunters. Did racism exacerbate the ignorance and callousness of the police and judges?

 In Justin Carter’s case, prosecutor Jennifer Tharp seems to be using moral aggression to look tough to nervous voters. In a culture that is scaring itself silly and looking for easy scapegoats, the temptation to cheap heroism is addictive. Yes, there are vicious criminals around us, on Wall Street and in uniforms as well as in dark alleys. But the Zimmerman fiasco, and the vigilante culture that contributed to that fiasco, aren’t punishing treacherous wealth and crooked power. Rather, they use bogus morality to pick on defenseless nobodies. Like all cultures in all eras, the US is greedy for heroes, and we manufacture them the way Guangdong province turns out shoes. In a dizzyingly ironic way Trayvon Martin has lost his life opening a window on the hallucinations of heroism in the new century.

 Again, keep in mind that abandon and moral aggression go together. And so Florida’s berserk “stand-your-ground” law goes hand in hand with a harsh minimum sentencing law. George Zimmerman the killer is innocent, whereas Marissa Alexander, a black woman who fired a harmless warning shot through the ceiling to hold off an abusive husband, goes to prison for twenty years. To cut off the doctrine of self-defense from its cultural context is asking for trouble—not to mention, unjust. If two armed Floridians felt threatened, stood their ground, and shot each other to death, would the solution be to start firing whenever you first spot a stranger? Would lawmakers support that paranoia?

 Disney World is not the only magic kingdom in Florida that thrives on illusions.

Resources mentioned in this essay:

Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil

Alafair Burke, “What you may not know about the Zimmerman Verdict: the Evolution of a Jury Instruction,” Huffington Post, July 15, 2013. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/users/becomeFan.php?of=hp_blogger_Alafair Burkehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=alafair-burkehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/users/login/

 Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth

Kirby Farrell, Berserk Style in American Culture

Kirby Farrell, The Psychology of Abandon

David Grann, “Trial by Fire: Did Texas Execute an Innocent Man?” New Yorker, Sept. 7, 2009.   <<http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann

Michael J. Moore, “The Legacy” (documentary film about California’s Three Strikes law)

William Boardman, “Criminalizing Free Speech”

<< http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/18322-focus-criminalizing…

The Woman Who Met God

Back when the Soviet Union had just come unglued, in 1993, I was doing some workshops for the Peace Corps in Kazakhstan.  In Taldy-Korgan, just across the Tien Shan mountains from the Uighurs in China, I met with a group of local grammar school teachers. They were hard-workers: Instructors, mothers to their own families as well as to their students,

I asked them to write about a problem they faced.  Finally the fortyish, motherly blonde Tatiana obliged by volunteering that she had met “the Christ” in a dream.  Her problem, she said wryly, was that when she told her husband, he thought she was crazy. 

Her dream messiah was a handsome Russian-looking young man who assured her he was the real thing.  Tatiana had grown up in Tatarstan in a nominally Islamic family.  Like many others in the group whose families the paranoid Stalin had  exiled to Kazakhstan, she was now  anxious, because the post-Soviet Kazakh government was pressuring non-ethnic Kazakhs to emigrate and appropriating their jobs.

I pointed out that a messiah rescues people.  What, I asked, might Tatiana need to be rescued from? In no time we were discussing a  new law that threatened non-Kazakh- speakers with the loss of job and deportation.  (Since only 40% of Kazakhs spoke the language, the law was eventually ignored.) We talked about emigration and the threats it posed, especially at a time when Yugoslavia was breaking up in  murderous ethnic cleansing.

In this context Tatiana’s Russian-looking messiah seemed to be trying out her “Russian” identity, grounding her in a deeper frame than the politically unstable local scene.  To put it another way, if the cultural crash uprooted her, Tatiana was facing social death as threatening as real death. She was envisioning a new Russian Christian identity that would welcome and console her.                                                                          

The Kazakh women began reassuring or even mothering one another. But when the idea of exile–social death–surfaced, a few of the Kazakh women testily denied that there was any threat at all.  They may have felt guilty that a national policy which benefitted their own group would injure their colleagues and neighbors.  Yet they were also threatened by economic insecurity in the new post-Soviet environment, so they no doubt had their own anxiety to contend with. 

What struck me was the Kazakh teachers’ desire to resolve their ambivalence about hurting the openly anxious non-Kazakh women.  Their self-esteem was pumped up, and yet that made them feel guilty.  In turn, they dispelled guilt by defensively—aggressively—attacking their non-Kazakh colleagues. After all,  sending colleagues into exile was symbolically killing them.

Some of the non-Kazakh teachers saw us off to the airport. One said the workshop had been the only time in decades working together that they had ever really talked to one another.  Although I’d  had the group shake hands and re-introduce themselves to one another, nothing was resolved. Yet some of them at least were grateful that the many years of polite professional silence have been broken.  The teachers’  professional culture had  ordered the workplace for many years, but it wasn’t enough.

In the parting hugs one of the women thanked me again, and her eyes shimmered with tears.

Diversity vs. “Me First”

A friend just sent me this tidbit about Penguin’s new strategy for coping with the pressures on publishers:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/06/when-diversity-means-uniformity/

You’ll notice that Penguin, which is now the corporate imprint empire of Emperor Penguins, wants to market to every pigeonhole that people might use for an identity. This is partly a reflection of marketing machinery, which slots us into lists and databases.

But one assumption is that Penguin wants to find love by whispering what each customer wants to hear.  The assumption is that reading is all about Me, and selling to Me.  So why expect readers to be  curious about others.

If you don’t have a product for a target audience, or if you oppose the idea of target audiences, you’re a writer in trouble on the Penguin’s ice flow.

Since gratification sells, editors are always trying to peep at, and name, what gratifies people.  You’d think one risk is that such voyeuristic strategies would flatten out personality.  After all, online marketing strategy is always spying on you in order to target you with “appropriate” ads “relevant to you.”  Or relevant to the target you’re supposed to be.

Maybe this is why individuals are willing to be herded into pigeonholes (?) While social media brags about enhancing you, it may be a sign that you feel more threatened by anomie: more in need of a social media mic to amplify your voice. Maybe the theories don’t fit the lives they want to explain.

Think of the Parisian editors who had to read MSS submissions without computer printouts helping them decide who’s loitering in the book stalls wondering what to read.

I just read that Proust had to pay to have Swann’s Way published, and another payment (about $900 = cheap) for a glowing front-page review in (I think it was) Le Monde.

We hear all the time about box office records; they can more important than what’s in the box.  Everybody knows this, yet there’s almost always a gap. To connect, you’d to ask about behavior.  That’s not the slippery shadow the Penguin’s fishing for.