While I have familiarized myself with the rules of this board, I must apologize in advance for any errors or faux pas I may make in this post-I am new to the Straight Dope. I do not believe this is a redundant topic, but I acknowledge I may be wrong.
Following a tragedy, the media and the public as a whole tend to try and place blame on a group or institution.
Goths, Muslims, Autistics (I avoid person-first deliberately, as most autistics cannot abide it), Video Gamers, the Mentally Ill, etc. have all been outright or de facto blamed as a group on at least one occasion for a horrific crime or attack.
Are we talking simply of blame as in legally liable or does this group tend to support something that requires action and have been hiding behind the “don’t blame all of us” mantra as a way to deflect blame?
I suspect there may be at least a little of this instinct built into us, by evolution or whatever. People survived by drawing conclusions like “Thag ate a red berry and died—red berries are bad.” “Ooga got bit by a snake and his leg swelled up and turned purple—snakes are bad.”
Blaming an organisation is acceptable if that organisation condones or supports the actions of one - like blaming the Catholic Church for actively protecting the child-rapists in their ranks. Blaming a group is also acceptable if the group is defined by a common, relevant flaw - like blaming drunk drivers for drunk driving deaths.
In the case of the Klan, you might be able to blame the organization for being racist, because its stated goal is promoting WASPs above inferior negroes, papists, Jews and Muslims. But in that case, really, you’re just blaming the individuals who joined for the very action of joining.
But you can’t blame the organization for lynchings, because I don’t believe that is an inherent part of the Klan. There probably were, and maybe even still are, klansmen who are against lynching and just want to “protect their heritage” or some such ignorance fueled bullshit. Blame them for that, not lynchings they never played a part in.
There were probably plenty of decent, goodhearted Nazis too. We shouldn’t let their fear of the Fuhrer and ignorance of the Holocaust equate them in our minds with the horrible people who actually murdered millions. By all means, blame individual Nazis for joining a racist organization and refusing to take a stand against the evil power that ruled their country. But you can’t blame someone for the Holocaust unless they actually participated in the atrocities.
Drunk drivers, by virtue of definition, can be blamed for driving drunk. They cannot, however, be blamed for drunk driving deaths unless they actually killed someone while driving drunk. (And even then, I’m sure there are plenty of “drunk driving deaths” where it didn’t matter either way if the driver was sober or not. Even cases where it was the dead sober driver’s fault.)
Judge people by their actions. Sometimes, the action of joining a stupid or malevolent organization is a blameable offense. But that still doesn’t impugn them for every terrible thing the organization does. Blame the people who actually carried out those actions.
I think you let far too many people off the hook with that position, DrCube, unless I misunderstand you.
If you knowingly belong to a group that perpetrates evil, particularly if you support the group materially, you have moral culpability for the actions of the group. Perhaps not the first time (say you didn’t know the KKK was going to lynch anybody) but certainly after it becomes public or if it is the stated policy/goal of the group.
It’s the difference between saying that Al Qaeda membership hold moral responsibility for 9/11 (they do, IMO) and saying all Muslims do (obviously they don’t).
Yes, generalizing is something our brains do very easily. It’s designed for self-preservation but it’s an instinct that is easily misled.
Of course they are. That’s one of the most preposterous things I’ve ever read. The original 19th-century Klan murdered thousands of people to suppress the black vote and resist Reconstruction. That was their reason for existing. Newer incarnations have been less deadly, but the gist of it was always the same: they wanted to preserve a position of power for whites based on violence and the threat of violence against nonwhites (or immigrants or non-Christians). Everything about the KKK has always been designed to frighten people with the threat of anonymous violence by vigilantes.
There was a lot of pressure to join the Nazi party in Germany and in some contexts I think it was compulsory. There are varying degrees of responsibility and the lack of choice is a major factor, but let’s not go too far in saying “Hey, don’t blame all the Nazis because they weren’t all SS guards.”
What if they deliberately looked the other way or refused to admit what was happening? What if they could have done something but didn’t lift a finger? What if they did little or nothing to oppose the bigoted laws of the 1930s? These things are all connected. Are these people “goodhearted” if they weren’t responsible for exterminating people but also did nothing about the Nuremberg laws and the rounding up of Jews into ghettos before the Holocaust itself?
What if their actions support or encourage or enable violence or crimes by other people? What if being part of a group enables people who wouldn’t act alone? I can’t necessarily answer these questions, but I think you’re treating this a bit too simply. You may not be a murderer if you don’t pull the trigger, but even if someone else bears more responsibility than you do, you can certainly contribute to the circumstances in which a murder occurs. Otherwise this wouldn’t be a debate. So I think some ideas are emerging here: one is that membership has to be voluntary, it has to be relevant to the purpose of the group, and (on a related note) to blame a large group I think there has to be a solid reason to believe group members knew or should have known about the misdeed, and that their support/lack of resistance/wilful ignorance is partly responsible for the wrongdoing.
Great point-I think you and other posters are right in that it’s built into our psychology. I suspect it’s something one will have to consciously suppress if one wants to be fair.
I think the misunderstanding is that I’m not letting anyone off the hook, just apportioning blame accurately.
Okay, I’ll grant you that. I’m not the most knowledgeable person about the Klan, but you recognize that there were different “Klans” at different times. The Reconstruction Klan was not the 1920s Klan, was not your grandpappy’s Klan in the 50s, was not the skinhead hillbilly Klan of today. So to say that somebody who joined the Klan in 1990 necessarily supports or participates in the same actions that the Klan perpetrated in the 1870s is wrong. People join organizations for all sorts of reasons. Agreeing 100% with their platform is probably very low on the list for most people.
I doubt it was a very frequent occurrence, but I’m sure there were at least a few ignorant Klansmen over the years, duped into thinking it was all about mom and apple pie, who might have believed blacks had an offensive culture that needed fending off, but wouldn’t dream of terrorizing people or lynching them. Those people should be blamed for their ignorance, racism and gullibility, but not for murder.
Then blame them for those actions. Blame them for looking the other way. Blame them for contributing to or encouraging murder. Blame them for joining the racist group. Blame them for their ignorance. Blame them for the beliefs they actually hold, not beliefs people in higher positions in the group hold.
There are plenty of things individual Klansmen or Nazis deserve blame for. But if they didn’t kill anyone, don’t blame them for killing people.
Groups are not people. I doubt there is a single person in any group who accepts that organization’s entire ideology. Even Hitler took issue with some planks in the Nazi platform, until he became the Fuhrer and his word became their platform. Most people don’t join a group because they believe in everything the group says or does.
For example: I was in the Army. I did it for college money, electronics training and a decent paycheck. I didn’t support a single thing the Army did while I was a soldier, even the Iraq debacle I spent two years of my life participating in.
Blame me for honoring the contract I signed even when it meant supporting a war I didn’t believe in. Blame me for fixing missile launchers which later destroyed property and perhaps even killed innocent Iraqis. Blame me for not risking jail time in order to avoid all that. I took the easier road at that time and got a free ride to college and a good job out of the deal. I deserve blame for all that.
But I don’t deserve blame for invading Iraq. I don’t deserve blame for killing anyone directly, because I didn’t. I was part of a huge complicated machine that killed people and I do deserve some blame for that. But I was not a murderer.
Does anyone here think those who voted for Bush in 2000 or 2004 deserve blame for all the murder and destruction that man perpetrated? Does every last American, regardless of how they voted? No. They deserve blame for their own actions, not the actions of other people, no matter how terrible the ultimate consequences might have been.
To blame a group there’d need to be some degree of homogeneity that relates to the act. It would also help if the group doesn’t condem the acts of the individual.
It is that last one that gives the NRA some wiggle room on Sandy Hook. It is the first that let’s autistics off the hook for Sandy Hook.
A formal hierarchy would tend to shift the blame upwards. An individual Nazi with no direct action has less responsibility than party leaders.
That’s a historical fact. The organization went away or dissolved or faded in and out of existence a couple of different times.
Someone who joined in 2012 isn’t responsible for what happened in the 1870s, but they’re certainly joining with a general idea of what the Klan did historically (otherwise they wouldn’t join) and we can draw some informed conclusions on that basis.
But they have to agree substantially with something or they wouldn’t join. And if you join a group, you’re responsible for finding out what the group is about, are you not?
I’m wondering why we need to put that much energy into this thought experiment. The Klan’s image has always been based on terrorizing people. That’s why they wear hoods, attack people at night, and (later) why they burned crosses on the houses of people who were not wanted. It seems to me that if you’re granting that these dupes were a rare exception, that says all we need to know about the rank and file members. (In fact if you have a secret organization like this, you make an effort to only recruit people once you’re sure they support the same agenda you do.) If people wanted to say they joined the Klan unawares and were mere racist nationalists who would never dream of supporting lynching - who just never got invited to the lynching or something - the burden of proof would be on them. I am not sure how that’s even possible, but there you go.
I do. But you’ve completely dodged the question here. What about the entire idea of enabling these people by supporting them? What about the fact that even if they didn’t agree with 100 percent of the platform, they continued to support it - didn’t care enough to quit, and gave enough support that in some small way they helped it achieve its ends or do what it wanted?
Given that you weren’t in a decision making position, I’ll agree.
Now we’re comparing voting (or giving money) to joining a group, which is not quite the same. I think the question here is how much blame they deserve and what that blame means in practical terms. They may not have supported every bit of his agenda, but they gave him the support they were able to give him. Doesn’t that count for something, or do we need to jump through hoops to try to identify every conceivable exception?
After a certain point, doesn’t this become extremely naive?
I don’t think I dodged the question, Marley. I think we’re looking at this from two different perspectives.
To take a real example, Werner Heisenberg stayed in Germany during WWII, and in fact participated in Germany’s equivalent of the Manhattan Project. I’ve read his autobiography, where he claims that staying allowed him to subtly sabotage the project and ensure Hitler never got a nuclear bomb.
But suppose we ignore that, and assume it was just how it looked. Aryan scientist supports the Nazi party, and works to maintain the glory of German science even as evil Jew physicists like Einstein flee.
He deserves blame for staying and supporting the Nazis. He deserves blame for working on a nuclear bomb, even if it isn’t ever successful. He deserves blame for simply hanging around and condoning, in his own small way, the Wehrmacht and the Holocaust it supported. But he didn’t kill any Jews.
He deserves whatever blame every other “patriotic” German citizen did at that time, the blame of allowing the evil regime to exist. He also deserves blame for publicly supporting the Nazis even among the scientific community. But he doesn’t deserve the same amount of blame as the Nazis who marched Jews into the gas chambers, or the guys who opened the Zyklon B canisters.
Gassing Jews is bad. Publicly saying “Third Reich forever!” is also bad. But they are not equivalent. In the interests of fighting ignorance, we all deserve to have those distinctions made. Both because supporting your country through an evil regime, while bad, isn’t as terrible as directly killing innocent prisoners, but also because killing innocent prisoners is much much worse than waving a Nazi flag. Equating them lets the evil people off the hook as much as it overly punishes the merely bad. And truth is worth wading through the nuances.
Yes, in the hypothetical he merely helps create weapons that would have allowed Nazi Germany to kill even more people, and perhaps he wasn’t successful through no fault of his own. But he wasn’t an Auschwitz camp guard, so, um…
I think everyone here agrees that different people have different degrees of responsibility. But if you’re trying to argue that people who designed weapons for the Nazis deserve some lesser measure because they “didn’t kill any Jews” (they probably only killed Allied soldiers and allowed the war to go on, which meant more Jews and others died in the interim), I’d have to ask what you’re trying to prove again.
There is a limit to how much breath I’m willing to waste defending people who didn’t actually design or run death camps and “merely” contributed to the war effort some other way - particularly when these people generally did not make greater or lesser contributions based on choice or morality; they did it based on their ability and what other people around them told them to do. The guy who ran a concentration camp didn’t design rockets because he didn’t know how and did a job he was considered suitable for. The guy who designed rockets didn’t guard a camp because he didn’t know how and did a job he was considered suitable for. They were part of the same war effort and both their abilities were “used.”
Statistics prove that driving drunk isn’t a good idea. Do you want to encourage or discourage driving drunk? There is only one way to discourage it: blame all of them.
Most people join groups, or even are members of groups that they inherited, because they need to belong somewhere. Stating afterwards that you weren’t responsible for the evil acts of a group is:
mostly valid,
yet always an escape. Not wanting to be responsible requires leaving the group in time.