A reaction and response to your essay:

-- By CarlJohnson - 23 Mar 2012

First of all, I think this essay is very well written. Your word choice is careful and describes your ideas with admirable precision, and your tone is sophisticated, but not overly academic. I also like the overall topic of the essay, asking us to move beyond Holmes’s bad man and contemplate the really bad man, for it is an inquiry that leads to the solid points you go on to make, but also can serve as a jumping off point for other ideas.

Stylistically, despite your overall clarity of writing, I think the following passage from the second paragraph could use some revision:

"What influence can a legal system have when the harshest available punishment holds no sway? Any attempt to further describe this state of mind is unlikely to be right, and any ex post facto analysis of such a person will always suffer from the uncertainty of speculation. What can be said is that it most often emerges from something like extreme desperation, even mental illness."

The rhetorical question is nicely stated and introduces a major point that you elaborate later, but the phrase “any attempt to further describe…” confuses me because preceding it you don’t offer any description of the state of mind. The word “further” seems odd. Also, I think you can find a more descriptive word than “right” later in that sentence--perhaps “illuminating” or “comprehensive.” As for the final clause of that sentence, wouldn’t any analysis of such a person always suffer from the uncertainty of speculation? I don’t think that uncertainty is unique to ex post facto analysis, unless you’re suggesting that ex ante the really bad man would actually tell us about his state of mind, or that we could otherwise learn of it with certainty. I think the last sentence of this passage is a point worth making, but you might want to rephrase it after you revise the previous sentence for better flow.

Moving on to substance, I think you’ve made two somewhat contradictory statements about really bad men being mentally ill, but, oddly enough, I actually agree with both of them. The first is, “Behavior so far outside a universal human norm is, by itself, mental illness…” The second is, “To say that they are mentally ill is to rationalize the apparent inability to deal with the really bad man.” Setting aside the brainwashing and heavy narcotics forced upon, say, child-soldiers in parts of Africa, I think it is true that to slaughter innocent people as did the gunman at Virginia Tech, one’s mind must be fundamentally very different than most humans; it must lack a certain moral faculty that most of us have. I think the lack of a pervasive mental faculty without which one cannot be fully functional in society is a reasonable definition of mental illness. For example, it works just fine for cognitive impairments and disorders concerning mood regulation. On the other hand, I also agree that for society to say that an extreme deviant, the really bad man, is mentally ill is to artificially label him as “other,” so that the rest of us can maintain our comfortable definition of “us.” It’s a way for us to reject the reality that the really bad man is one of us, that he is a fellow human, that he is a member of our society.

I think that that labeling of the really bad man as “other,” as mentally ill, is what does the work of, as you say, relieving the pressure on the rest of society, but you argue that it is the blaming of policemen and school administrators that does this work. You say that pointing the finger at people besides the gunman allows us to ignore “more fundamental problems,” like the inability of our legal system to have any effect on the really bad man. I guess that’s true, but even if we admit to that fundamental problem, so what? There’s nothing we can do to fix it. The really bad man, by his very nature, exceeds the reach of the system and is subversive to it. No amount of systemic reform can change that. I think the more interesting insight stemming from our finger pointing lies in the urgent need for us to finger point. I think that urgent need reflects the fact that we are pathologically unable to accept that there is no tangible solution to a problem. Faced with an atrocity such as the massacre at Virginia Tech, we think there must be someone somewhere who dropped the ball and allowed this to happen, there must be a way to prevent this in the future. The sobering reality, though, is that no matter how much we want these atrocities to be explainable and preventable, they simply are not. We cannot rationally explain why the really bad man is as bad as he is, and we cannot prevent him from carrying out these attacks. The most we can do is hope that we don’t cross paths with him at the wrong time.

--Carl