Christchurch: A Collective Crime & A Call For Collective Action
A few years ago, I had the honor of attending a writer’s workshop led by Jane Unrue and Shahriar Mandanipour. Professor Unrue, director of Harvard’s Scholars-At-Risk program, and Mandanipour, perhaps the most accomplished Iranian writer of the 20th century, passed along many tips and lessons on the art of storytelling. In the wake of the Christchurch tragedy, after viewing an edited version of the Christchurch shooter’s live-stream video, all I could do was think back on what Shariar told me one day after the workshop:
There are some events that are so traumatic, so influential, that words seem meaningless and even disrespectful as an attempt to describe them or their impact. It is not until a writer reaches some amount of emotional distance from that event, that they can begin to understand and form words
Anyone who has witnessed the footage has felt the overpowering disbelief that washes over them like sea-sickness as the waves of horror crash upon their hearts with each second of what can only be described as the manifestation of true evil and hate. I remember when Call of Duty came out and my school held a conference talking about the potential effects of violent video games. I want to be clear I am not arguing that violent video games are responsible for the Christchurch shooting, but anyone who has watched the shooter’s video knows how unnervingly game-like it appears.
Perhaps this is the mind’s way of trying to comprehend: by viewing the live-stream as some sort of twisted shooter-video game we can avoid the true horror and implications of the evil we have witnessed. By putting this abhorrent evil off as some kind of “lone-wolf” crazed event, we can ignore the true nature of this crime and its meaning. With this ignorance comes false hope about the ability of humanity to recover and reconstruct after the event as if this terror never occurred.
The day after the Christchurch shooting, one of my favorite writers, Hanif Abdurraquib, spoke about the terror attack during an interview with AM2DM:
I find myself frustrated again that … the larger American dialogue — is reaching for the hollow idea of hope instead of honesty … And I get that hope can be comforting … but it often comes at the sacrifice of honesty
It is in our efforts to cling to this hollow hope that we ignore the honest horror and reality of these situations thereby shielding us from the accountability for these tragedies.
This year, my last of high school, I have to defend a twenty-minute thesis — a harrowing task that has begun to create “just a touch of gray” in my black hair. For this thesis, I have been researching heavily the conception of good and evil, specifically supernatural or spiritual good and evil. My research has reached from early Christian church fathers’ accounts of battling demons in the desert to the Freud and Jung’s attempts to rationalize group psychology of these “supernatural events.” It was in reading one of Jung’s essays in On Evil that I finally reached the emotional distance Shariar talked about to that enabled me to write about the tremendous evil that occurred in Christchurch.
In “After the Catastrophe”, Jung writes about the fallout of World War II, specifically how Europe could possibly continue, as ruin covers most of its cities and cultures.
Before the work of reconstruction can begin, there is a good deal of clearing up to be done, and this calls above all for reflection. Questions are being asked on all sides about the meaning of this whole tragedy
In the straight sprint to hollow hope, we ignore “the clearing up to be done” seeking to keep our hands clean of the mess which comes with true reflection — we sacrifice honesty for hermetically sealed comfort. But perhaps there is a reason behind this impulse to avoid. In writing this article, I noticed how difficult it is to reach anything remotely reflecting a moderate or relatively calm or settled point of view in the midst of one’s emotions. We should be clinical and distanced, but we are much more deeply involved in the recent events in Christchurch than we like to admit. One cannot afford to be only clinical — quite apart from the fact that they would find it impossible. Our interaction with the world involves us and all our emotional responses, otherwise, our relationship would be incomplete.
In writing this, I have discovered I didn’t realize how much of myself was affected. For some reason, I felt contrition for the evil that occurred in Christchurch, as if I were culpable in some manner. It is in this emotional response that I found solace in Jung’s words:
“This inner identity or participation with events in Germany has caused me to experience afresh how painfully wide is the scope of the psychological concept of collective guilt. So when I approach this problem in it is certainly…with an avowed sense of inferiority.”
This “collective guilt” doesn’t speak towards any legal or moral senses; psychologically, it refers to the irrational presence of a subjective conviction of guilt. While guilt can be restricted to the offender in a legal, moral, and intellectual point of view, collective guilt acts as a psychic phenomenon spreading itself over the whole community. If anyone has ever had the “unique” experience of attending school with a younger or older sibling, then you know this feeling well. Little Timmy or older Susie engages in some disgraceful behavior for which you cannot be held responsible, yet the atmosphere of guilt makes itself felt in many ways.
I remember when news of the Parkland shooting ravaged through America. In my school, what seemed to be a world away in Texas, we felt comfortably removed from the guilt and anguish of the people who knew about the shooter’s tendencies and did nothing to stop him. But all of that changed the moment a few of my schoolmates and I set foot in Europe on a class trip. What are we to say to European kids who ask us, “You’re always bragging about how great America is … would Parkland be an example of that greatness?” Would it have helped if I had hastened to assure these kids that this terrible thing did not take place in my community, but several hundred miles further east? Not in my city or state at all, but a city and state far away? The moment we, especially Americans, cross the frontiers of our own continent, we are made to feel something of the collective guilt that weighs upon us, despite our good conscience. We are quick to say, “you don’t really know America, so you can’t comment on it.” This simple evasive maneuver remains our primary method of perpetuating our own ignorance. Jung explains this better than I can:
“The European can no more convince the Indian that Germany is no concern of his, or that he knows nothing at all about that country than the German can rid himself of his collective guilt by protesting that he did not know. In that way, he merely compounds his collective guilt by the sin of unconsciousness.”
So then, why do we feel this collective guilt and why do we often rush towards the “sin of unconsciousness”? Some may object that the whole concept of psychological collective guilt is prejudicial and a sweepingly unfair condemnation. Of course, it is. That is exactly what constitutes the illogical nature of collective guilt: it cares nothing for the just and unjust, it is the dark cloud that rises up from the scene of an unexpiated crime. However, if we begin to penetrate the psychology of this phenomenon more deeply, we see that the problem of collective guilt is perhaps not as “collective” as it is “stratified”.
Since no man lives within his own psychic sphere like a snail in its shell, separated from everybody else, but is connected with his fellow-men by his unconscious humanity, no crime can ever be what it appears to our consciousness to be: an isolated psychic happening
Perhaps as a coping mechanism, humans divide themselves into groups within a hierarchy of connectedness. For instance, if your parent is diagnosed with cancer, this is different than if a friend at school or work is diagnosed and even more so if the sick person is someone you don’t personally know but nonetheless goes to your school or workplace. Each of these scenarios demonstrates the hierarchy of connectedness and guilt that comes from these implicit groups we subconsciously divide ourselves into. However, there are certain events that are so traumatic and influential that they shatter these groups and awaken the subconscious mind and the unconscious humanity within us all. Perhaps the best example comes from a somewhat related incident: 9/11. The terror attack that shook America to its core resulted in the same percentage of deaths out of the total American population as the Christchurch attack resulted in for New Zealand’s population.
One of the most memorable stories that emerged from the terror attack on 9/11 came not from New York City, but truly a world away. To the Masai who live in remote Kenya, skyscrapers are a foreign concept. This led to Kimeli Naiyomah finding only the vaguest understanding among his fellow Masia when he returned from his studies in America and tried to explain what had occurred a whole ocean away. While some had heard over the radio about the Twin Towers, none of the horrifying images reached this nomadic community of cattle raisers. It was only through the oral tradition that Naiyomah was able to explain the true measure of the tragedy. Through his stories, this tragedy became real to the Masai people. They felt sadness. Most amazingly, they wanted to do something. Soon after, they blessed 14 cattle and gave them to William Brancick, the deputy chief of mission of the United States Embassy in Nairobi, as a gift to the American people.
Even a remote village in Kenya, when relayed the traumatic events of September 11, felt the power of this collective unconsciousness and decided to give what they had to help. Jung, in typical psychoanalyst fashion, theorized about the root of this unconscious feeling in response to catastrophic events of evil:
Everybody joins in, feels the crime in his own being, tried to understand and explain it. Something is set aflame by that great fire of evil that flared up the crime. Was not Plato aware that the sight of ugliness produces something ugly in the soul? It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts. The murder has been suffered by everyone, and everyone has committed it; lured by the irresistible fascination of evil, we have all made this collective psychic murder possible; and the closer we were to it and the better we could see it, the greater our guilt
This unconscious collective plays are a great deal in humanity’s way of reacting to catastrophic evil. These crimes stir something primordial within us — they call us to feel, and most importantly, to act. Suffering is one of life’s few guaranteed experiences, but often times suffering is looked at in a one-sided manner. These terrible events give us a unique opportunity to collectively act, as the terror and shock affect us all at some level. Let us not waste this terrible tragedy by refusing to confront our emotions, the collective guilt, and call to action and thereby allowing another to happen on its footsteps. Without collective action, we cannot hope to truly recover from and prevent these acts of evil. But if we cannot access the amount of self-awareness necessary to tap into this collective unconscious and feel on account of the great evil in Christchurch, nothing will change. Perhaps what we need most is this radical phenomenon of collective responsibility that Dostoevsky attempted to portray in his famous novel The Brothers Karamazov with the monk Zosima:
“When he [man] realizes that he is not only worse than others, but that he is responsible to all men for all and everything, for all human sins, national and individual, only then the aim of our seclusion is attained. For know, dear ones, that every one of us is undoubtedly responsible for all men — and everything on earth, not merely through the general sinfulness of creation, but each one personally for all mankind and every individual man.”
