Is Society to Blame?

I just finished reading A World of Curiosities by Louise Penny. If you haven’t yet read it, don’t worry, there are no spoilers in this article. I am a big fan of Louise Penny’s writing. I love the fictional village of Three Pines located in the Eastern Townships of Ontario, Canada, and the characters she has living there. If you enjoy intelligently written murder mysteries, I highly recommend Louise Penny’s work.

In A World of Curiosities, she weaves an actual historical event into the fictional storyline. In 1989 a gunman murdered 14 female engineering students and wounded 10 more along with four of their male colleagues at École Polytechnique in Montreal. The gunman said he was “fighting feminism.” He entered a classroom, separated the female students from the males, shot all nine women in that room before moving down the hallway shooting others as he went.

Some Background

Americans are all too familiar with these types of tragedies. Columbine, Parkland, Uvalde and Virginia Tech are just a few of the school shootings. The Las Vegas concert and Pulse nightclub shootings were even deadlier. The Gun Violence Archive identified 635 mass shootings in the U.S. in 2022. The majority of those shootings were domestic in nature, followed by gang/drug violence. Only a few are overtly political or public policy motivated.

When the shooting has an obvious political link, like the 1989 shooting in Montreal or the attempted assassination of Republican members of congress in 2017, members of the opposite side of the political aisle start showing videos of people whom the shooter supposedly supported spouting aggressive political rhetoric. The obvious goal is to link the violence to the opposition’s belief system and their defense of it.

This is where Louise Penny comes in. In the Acknowledgments section of A World of Curiosities, Penny writes (referring to her time as a journalist covering the Montreal shooting), To my shame I initially believed, and gave airtime to, the politicians (all men) who insisted that this was the work of one lunatic, and not an indictment of society. There was no need to look at institutionalized misogyny. To examine equal rights, or lack of them. To have stronger gun control.

This got me thinking about societal change, the role of public rhetoric and the responsibilities we have when we take to a public platform, and the responsibility individuals must take for their own decisions.

A Model to Help Us Understand

Kurt Lewin, often called the “founder of social psychology,” published his famous change model in 1947. His model basically says that in order for an organization (or society) to change, it must unfreeze the current state, move to the desired state, and refreeze at the desired state. He also notes that no matter what change is occurring, there will always be individuals who benefit from the status quo and will resist that change. How we handle the resistors is often the key to the successful migration.

Let’s look at an example of social change through the lens of Lewin’s model along with the basic More Spock presupposition that humans are motivated by self-interest, and in groups, predatory self-interest. Women’s suffrage movements are a good example. The men who resisted weren’t bad people, they simply accepted a construct that had been around for tens of thousands of years – that men have defined roles in the family, the tribe and the community and women have their own roles to fulfill. They couldn’t yet see that the construct would not work or was no longer needed in a developing, industrialized world.

Today, you would be hard-pressed to find any male in the U.S., Canada or Europe who still believes that women aren’t sophisticated enough to vote (or do most anything). Over a period of time, the social construct that women are capable of contributing in every facet of society won out over the old construct that women were both mentally and physically inferior to males and should know their place in society. The resistors to the inevitable change eventually faded away in western society. However, in places like Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, the resistors are still very much in control.

Witches!

Another storyline in A World of Curiosities pertains to the fate of women accused of being witches in Montreal in the 1600s. Americans remember the Salem Witch Trials from high school history class. Some 20 people, mostly women were killed in Massachusetts in the 1690s. Many may not realize that the same hysteria had previously swept across Europe. History.com estimates that some 80,000 people, mostly women, were killed in Europe between 1500 and 1660 after being tried and convicted of witchcraft.

Witches were blamed for just about everything and the prevailing construct accepted by most was that witchcraft was a real thing. Witchcraft’s negative effects were felt throughout society and most agreed that the practice must be eradicated. A book entitled Malleus Maleficarum or Hammer of the Witches was published by German Jesuits in 1486 and described the best practices for identifying and motivating confessions from witches. This book, among others, contributed to a mass acceptance of a construct that to save society, leaders must identify and purge society from witchcraft.

Locus of Control

Bob and John are golf buddies. Whenever John misses a putt, he immediately blames the grass, the condition of the green, the wind, etc. Whenever Bob misses a putt, he generally says, I pushed it, I pulled it, or I misjudged the speed. Behavioral scientists would say that Bob is demonstrating an internal locus of control – meaning his own actions ultimately determine whether he makes or misses putts. John is demonstrating an external locus of control – meaning the missed putts are out of his control and determined by outside influences.

While locus of control is generally discussed at the individual level, it seems that societies experience a pendulum where, at times, a society celebrates a collective internal locus of control and at other times, we embrace constructs that lead us to a more external locus of control culture.

The witch trials in Europe and North America were periods where more people (or at least leaders) demonstrated an external locus of control bias. Our diseases are caused by witches, our crops have a bad yield because of witchcraft, the devil is driving our youth to make bad decisions, etc.

In late 20th and 21st century North America, we seem to be in a similar pattern. We’ve invented and accepted constructs based on observable individual behaviors that must be linked to some greater thing. Instead of witchcraft, it’s systemic racism, white supremacy, or as Penny mentions, institutional misogyny that is the source of our problems. There is no question that there are self-professed white supremacists among us, as well as misogynists who, for various reasons disdain women. Serial killers who prey on prostitutes, for example are often found to have a profound hatred of women that goes back to childhood experiences.

We can also find examples of systemic barriers in our society, many of which have been corrected, but some can still be found. Women weren’t allowed to own property – now they can. Women weren’t allowed to vote – now they can. Women could be fired from their jobs for becoming pregnant – now they can’t. As society continues to identify these types of systemic issues, I’m confident that we’ll keep moving forward.

However, Penny and many on the left have elevated these constructs into witchcraft territory. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion sessions now focus on how white people must confess to their white privilege and recognize how their very presence negatively influences the lives of people of color (external locus of control) even if their observable behaviors have never demonstrated any animus toward people of color.

And perhaps more importantly, there is a continuing push from left to silence voices who express concern about these constructs.

The Benefit of Public Debate

Rachel Levine, Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services, recently made headlines when a video emerged in which she urged social media companies like Twitter to censor “misinformation” about “gender-affirming care” for children. Transgenderism is a relatively new phenomenon. The earliest case I am aware of was Dr. Renee Richards in the mid-1970’s. She transitioned from male to female and sued to participate in the 1977 U.S. Women’s Open tennis tournament. Caitlyn Jenner really brought the issue back to the public eye in 2015, and there has been a stampede of individuals seeking gender reassignment surgery since – over 9,000 per year according to Modern Urology.

While surgeons are rushing to learn the skills for these procedures that they perceive to have great market potential (their best interest), many in the U.S. are still wrestling with this entire concept. Are nearly 1% of the population really born with chromosomes that don’t align with their perception of their gender? A hundred years from now will we look back on this entire thing as a fad that came and went? Or will it be like the journey that homosexuals experienced – from being defined as a having mental disease and/or participating in a grave sin, to being fully accepted by the majority of the population. Even with a minority of resistors still around, acceptance of another’s gay lifestyle is now pretty much the societal norm in the west.

More and more we’re seeing supporters of social change pushing to limit access to opposing viewpoints. One way they do that is by calling dissenting views, misinformation or hate speech. In an earlier blog I recalled an exchange between Sen. Josh Hawley and Khiara Bridges (law professor at Berkley) at a congressional hearing. Hawley asked Bridges if men could have babies. Bridges shut down the debate by stating, So I want to recognize that your line of questioning is transphobic and it opens up trans people to violence. While Hawley’s question was political theater, it is a legitimate question that society is asking, along with how young a person can be allowed to decide which gender they prefer to be. Labeling those who ask questions about issues like these as well as studies conducted by scholars whose results don’t align with those of the people in power as misinformation or hate speech is problematic.

So, back to the original question. To what degree does language like Sen. Hawley used in the hearing, or language used by those who were resistant to the movement of women in Canada into traditional male roles like engineering drive people to violence?

In More Spock’s opinion, a call to violence is just that. When groups like Antifa or the Proud Boys communicate to their supporters that they are going to a location to protest or counterprotest, and they encourage supporters to bring weapons and damage property, this is a call to to violence. When a white male, like Al Campanis, questions whether blacks “have the necessities” to be in management roles as he did in the famous 1987 Nightline interview, that was not a call to violence. That was the opinion of a man who had grown up believing in that construct. It was ultimately good for society that he said that on live TV. It escalated a debate that resulted in increased opportunities for black managers in baseball, other sports and in business. Imagine if censors at the time believed as Campanis did regarding the ability of blacks to lead and had denied Ted Koppel the right to ask that question because it might result in misinformation? It might have taken society longer to accept blacks into key leadership roles. Campanis being wrong was ultimately good for society.

Louise Penny’s claim that the 1989 Montreal shooting was enabled by the misogyny of the time period simply isn’t fair. Society was in between unfreezing and refreezing. There were no men I’m aware of suggesting that the appropriate reaction to these societal changes in Canada was to slaughter women who presumed to attend a university and study STEM topics. Acts of violence like this in Afghanistan, for example, are encouraged by Taliban leaders and the perpetrators of these terrible acts against the women of Afghanistan are directly linked to the rhetoric of politicians and religious leaders. The shooter in Montreal and the Washington D.C. baseball shooter are not the result of political rhetoric. If they were, there would have been a lot more shooters like them.

Summary

We must be careful about censoring dissenting views as they pertain to important societal topics such as climate change, the government response to the pandemic, data related to gun violence, and studies and opinions related to transgenderism. Even if we disagree, it is our burden to prove the other side wrong. Censoring those opinions in the name of protecting people from misinformation or labeling it hate speech (when there is no call to violence) will make us more like the Taliban than a 21st century democratic republic. People have a right to be wrong. It’s much healthier for society to allow resistors peaceful avenues to put their thoughts out there. It may take longer to achieve the end goal of a change initiative (like Women’s Suffrage), but if resistors don’t have a way to express their concerns, the violence will likely be much worse.