This week’s biggest news story happened at a Tucson shopping mall, where a disturbed young man went on a rampage with an automatic weapon that left six dead and fourteen injured. His primary target was Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who seems to be recovering miraculously from a bullet hole in her brain. Among the dead is nine-year-old Christina Taylor Green, who was attending the event to learn about how the democratic process works.
As a community, we have witnessed so many of these violent episodes that the range of responses has become predictable. The resulting public conversation, in fact, has focused largely on who is supposedly to blame for this catastrophe and others like it. Among political partisans and some quarters of mass media, the talk has often been polarized, defensive, and accusatory.
Part of the problem, I think, is that too many people, especially those with a political or religious ideology to defend and promote, assume that cause and effect in human affairs can be reduced to simple one-cause-fits-all solutions. We are told that the horror in Tucson could have been prevented by more civility in our political discourse, by stricter limits on guns that are only good for killing lots of people in a few seconds, by reducing the amount of violence in mass media and entertainment, or by better monitoring of people with mental-health problems.
Some even argue that the best solution is to make sure that even more people have guns at the ready for self-defense. That argument may seem useful and personally satisfying after the fact, but it is not a prescription for prevention.
The fact is that people never do anything significant for just one reason. Causation in human affairs is always a matter of multiple causes. In cases like this, communities are a lot like gardens. Just as a garden’s growth requires healthy seeds, receptive soil, ample sunshine and water, perhaps some appropriate fertilizer, and attentive weeding, healthy communities must pay attention to all the factors that contribute to ultimate causation. If any one factor is weak or missing, the garden will suffer or die; if all the factors are just little bit deficient, the garden will still suffer and might not survive.
There is plenty of valid and reliable evidence that nasty, toxic rhetoric contributes to the tendency among a small fraction of the population to act out violently. In fact, the very presence of violence in any culture at any level, whether in real life or in the imaginative life of entertainment media and computer games, tends to generate copycat behavior among the small fraction of the population that just might act out the violence their eyes and ears and brains have absorbed. The process of desensitization to violence has been documented over and over again in many experimental and real-life contexts.
And it’s sheer common sense to realize that the ready availability of high-tech handguns makes it more likely that disturbed people will occasionally use them for their intended purpose.
Thus there is very good reason to ask our political representatives and our entertainment moguls to tone down the violence and the polarized nastiness that have been polluting our culture for some time now. We know that Old Testament episodes and Shakespeare’s plays are violent in places, but we are supposed to think about the reasons for and the consequences of such violence in the Bible and in Shakespeare. And nobody spends hours every day reading the Old Testament or Shakespeare.
The violence we see on television, however, is pervasive, graphic, and spectacular. It happens for no reason other than cheap entertainment, and many people watch it for hours every day. The nasty, polarized rhetoric to which we are subjected in our political life is never really intended to solve any significant problem, but just to work people up to attack or defend an ideology. And ideologies are not based on empirical evidence but on faith in some tradition or some authority; thus, when ideologies clash, there can never be a rational conversation with a satisfying conclusion. There can only be more and more rounds of pointless clash.
There is also good reason to expect our elected officials to take seriously the impact of guns in our culture. This would mean facing up to the unwarranted power of the gun lobby and looking carefully at all the available evidence on all the issues involved, including evidence from other nations where gun violence is a non-issue.
So what to do? The basic principles of collaborative leadership on which the Collaborative Leadership Network is founded can be very helpful here. One important principle is to recognize that the truth is often complex, and in human affairs it is always very complex.
Thus we should try to be patient and track down all the causes for a given problem before we propose solutions or take action. This means recognizing that we can only reduce the incidence of mass killing by addressing all the significant causes at once – in this case, by supporting civility in public discourse, by sensible limits on the kinds of guns that are only useful for killing people, by acknowledging the dangers of violence in mass media, by more effective monitoring and treatment of people with certifiable violent tendencies, and by whatever other means seem appropriate.
We should also be patient about turning prescriptions into actual solutions. In our instant-gratification quick-fix culture, patience is an often-neglected virtue. Legislation is not always the answer to large-scale social problems, but sometimes it is. And getting legislation passed can be a long, tedious process. In any case, for it to succeed, it should also be a collaborative process.
The first principle of effective collaboration, in fact, is that collaboration starts with relationships. Collaborative leaders spend a lot of time and energy building bridges, knocking down walls, and generally developing relationships with others, including those who seriously disagree with them, before they even think about achieving any particular goals together. This can be time-consuming and draining, but it ultimately works better than the old worn-out power games that depend on hierarchy, authority, intimidation, and competition.
Those who promote collaboration and collaborative leadership are frequently ridiculed by others for being idealistic, naïve, weak, or simply out of touch with the supposed realities of human interaction. Over the last two millennia, however, we have learned that collaboration based on concern for others actually works better than competition in many situations. Our wisest and most respected leaders, philosophers, and moral prophets have all said so. Of course, many of them have been assassinated or crucified as dangerous revolutionaries. Apparently, living out the lessons they taught takes considerable courage.
It may sound idealistic and naïve to claim that our first challenge is simply to get along with each other, but our wisest and most profound observers have been delivering pretty much that very message since well before the Sermon on the Mount, and contemporary psychology echoes much of that message.
It’s time we mustered the courage and the wisdom to take that message seriously.
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