One of These Things Does Not Cause The Other

I like Rachel Maddow. But this segment on last night's broadcast didn't show her at her best. Similarly, I've often linked to Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly. But this post doesn't impress me much, either. Sadly, they're not alone.

In the last few days, a disturbingly large number of my fellow liberals have muttered about "hate speech" and "incitements to violence" and "books read by shooters." Benen puts it this way, "After Jim David Adkisson started shooting people at a Unitarian church last fall, police found books from Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly at the killer's home. We don't usually hear about lunatic killers who have Paul Krugman or Bill Moyers best-sellers on their coffee tables."

Five words, people: post hoc, ergo propter hoc. After this, therefore because of this, otherwise known as the sequential fallacy. If X precedes Y, that does not mean X caused Y. James von Brunn did not believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States. That did not lead him to murder, Rachel, any more than it might lead the other people you rather freely associated with that killer to take up arms. As odious as the books of Michael Savage are, they do not necessarily lead to shootings at a Unitarian Church, Steve. Oh, both always toss in the obligatory caveat, as do the others. But the point they're making is pretty clear.

Moreover, there's also the guilt by association problem slithering through this discourse. Bill O'Reilly is an ass****. He is not a murderer nor is he responsible for murderers. George McGovern (not to mention Barack Obama) was not a Weatherman nor was he responsible for them nor were "liberals" responsible for Susan Smith's murder of her children, Newt. To paraphrase JFK, for while this week it may be a Sean Hannity against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other weeks it has been, and may someday be again, a Keith Olbermann.

Look, the oratorical animal believes words matter, but not in the cause-effect ways that are starting to pop up all over the liberal blogosphere. It's wrong to make these sorts of assertions. There is so much wrong with contemporary conservative arguments (Tax cuts create revenue! Spending cuts boost the economy! Gays and lesbians are by definition immoral!) that we don't need to run around making stuff up. Let's continue to be better than that, 'kay?

Comments

[bd]

Reminds me of the porn arguments in the 80s, when radical feminists and crazy conservatives briefly united around the argument that representations of violence against women caused violence against women. No. If only it WAS that simple. But violence against women is what we call an overdetermined phenomenon. Like hate crimes in general.

[Jim Aune]

I certainly agree, but it strikes me that broadcasting is a different animal entirely. If you compare the relative power and media access of O'Reilly and Beck to Dr. Tiller you end up with a profound inequity of the sort that traditional liberalism cannot cope with. Before the end of the Fairness Doctrine this sort of thing wouldn't have happened. Has the Internet made this sort of thing irrelevant? I'm not sure. At a more philosophical level, I'm still stuck on the issue of whether we can simultaneously argue that rhetoric matters and then deny the phenomenon of rhetorical incitement. The Brandeisian topos of "bad speech? more speech!" does not always work in a civic emergency, and the law does recognize things like the tortious infliction of emotional harm. Thinking out loud here.

[oratoricalanimal]

Obviously, I agree with Bonnie. And Jim. I was pretty careful NOT to include the Tiller murder in the original post. Seems to me we need to make some distinctions. I'm pretty dubious that a Michael Savage book or the birth controversy alone drove these people around the bend, as the two reports seem to suggest.

But a sustained movement, or what seems more like an underground organization, with a three decade long discursive imaginary of murder, material resources, ties to right wing militias with weapons--that's a different animal than Barack Obama's place of birth. The level of evidence for incitement and support (for that matter) seems much higher in the latter. Another lesson, it seems to me, that the specifics matter.

In some sense, when we lump that in with these other ginned up controversies, we lose the specific dangers posed by the violent wing of the anti-choice movement. And that's a shame. Because they ARE a threat. Liberalism does get the rule of law and would ask us to make some rational distinctions between these cases, I think.