Monday, December 16, 2024

Part I

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The Looming Danger of Young Man on the Internet: Details of the Arrest of Luigi Mangione Raises Big Issues of Young Men Negatively Influenced by Online Ideologies and Activism

The urgency of several worldview issues takes us back to two of the big stories of the last week. This has to do of course, number one with the arrest of Luigi Mangione, the lead suspect in the case of the murder of Brian Thompson, the insurance executive days before in the city of New York, a cold-blooded calculated killing that took place with full film and documentation.

The second issue has to do with Daniel Penny, who was arrested in charges that go back to an incident on a subway car in which he put a man who appeared to pose a threat into a choke hold. That man eventually died. He was charged with multiple crimes, but he was later found not guilty by a New York jury of one of the charges. The other charges had been dropped, but then came a spate of controversy and it is unfolding with some very big issues we need to consider.

First of all, let’s go back to the arrest of Luigi Mangione, and let’s go back to the response to the murder because all of a sudden there are some big, big issues on the table. Almost immediately there was a scandal of a sort that all of a sudden began to develop when announcements of the executive’s murder were actually greeted with thumbs up, smiley faces, and furthermore, even other more blatant signals of support for the murderer in this case, rather than sympathy for the murdered. You had headlines that appeared in the New York Times, “The Rage and Glee That Followed a C.E.O.’s Killing Should Ring All Alarms.” Even at the New Yorker, a headline, “A Man Was Murdered in Cold Blood and You’re Laughing?”

Well at first glance, it might appear that this is mostly just a phenomenon of social media because social media, especially with all the bots and the unnamed accounts, and frankly all the reckless and even worse than reckless things that happen just about every hour on social media, this appeared perhaps just to be one more of those manifestations. But clearly there’s something more threatening going on in this case. And I’ll tell you the proof positive of that is the fact that you’ve got people primarily on the Left coming out and saying, “Now this is going too far.” And so you have someone like Bernie Sanders, Vermont senator, Independent, but caucuses with the Democrats, the very symbol of the Left wing in the United States, particularly in the Senate. He goes on NBC and in other formats to say, “You know, it is categorically wrong to celebrate a murder or a murderer, period.”

But we do have to understand there is pent-up frustration when it comes to the healthcare industry and private insurance. And then he just leapt into his typical leftist argument against the private healthcare system. Basically, he is for socialized medicine, for an absolute government takeover of medicine.

And so I just want to that this is possible on the Left and on the Right. Conservatives can do this as well as liberals, but we need to call it out wherever it’s found. In this case, you had someone saying, “Well, you know that was a horrifying thing. We’re talking about the murder of a human being, but it does raise a very good point.”

But meanwhile, in the House of Representatives, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York and kind of symbolic of the Left wing in the House of Representatives, she came on and of course she denounced the murder and she did so in very clear terms. But then she went on to say that, health insurance as it is currently constituted in the United States, could be seen by some people who are struggling in the system as “an act of violence against them.” On X formerly known as Twitter, she posted a video that said this, “When we kind of talk about how systems are violent in this country, in this passive way, our privatized healthcare system is like that for a huge amount of Americans. I mean, I did not have health insurance until I got elected to Congress. When I first ran for Congress, I had to sit in a free clinic.”

The Congresswoman also told CBS, “All of that pain people have experienced is being concentrated on this event. It’s really important we take a step back. This is not to comment, and this is not to say that an act of violence is justified. But I think for anyone who’s confused or shocked or appalled, they need to understand that people interpret and feel and experience denied claims as an act of violence against them.” So now denied insurance claims are an act of violence, and so we have the juxtaposition here of two acts of violence. One went too far, that one in case you’re wondering was the murder.

Now, one of the issues we’re going to have to face directly is the question of socialized medicine, a question of government-run medicine. National healthcare is very much what you see in the NHS, for example in Great Britain, which is right now by the way, in crisis. And even as this was the centerpiece of the welfare state in Britain, to the pride of many Britons for a long time, it is really, really clear that the system has worn down and no one’s bragging about it now. 

And furthermore, when you look at insurance claims, let me just remind you that medical claims are going to be evaluated by someone, and an awful lot of them are going to be turned down by someone regardless of who that someone is. Right now that someone generally is someone who is related to a private healthcare company, but it could just as easily be someone who basically is a part of a government bureaucracy. And let me ask you the honest question, who would you rather have making these decisions? Someone who’s in a competitive industry or someone who is just a part of the administrative state? Anyone who thinks the system would be improved by socialized medicine is going to have to honestly account for the system that really comes down to socialized medicine.

As a matter of fact, it would probably be much, much worse if it were a government-run system precisely because there could be all kinds of political pressure on the system basically to follow all kinds of corrupt impulses. Right now we have an awkward system that is a combination of private health insurance and the large expansion of government into the healthcare industry in recent decades, most importantly in the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare. And again, there are all kinds of debates that we could confront on that question.

But the bottom line is this, when you look at the healthcare industry today, yes, it is largely concentrated in private firms, but those private firms have to compete with one another. But the private firms also have to understand that their main client is not you, it is the government, and that’s because the government has made it that way. And if you think that the thing’s going to become better, that the service is going to become easier and that the entire system’s going to become more benevolent if you put it entirely in the hands of the government. Well, again, I just ask you to look at what is entirely in the hands of the government and ask if that’s what you want when you need a doctor? Government has certain assigned functions and it needs to do those well. We do not need a private air force, but when it comes to healthcare, I think the issue needs to be debated very honestly.

But again, that’s a minor issue compared to the far larger issue of the morality that is now very much a part of the debate when it comes to the murder of Brian Thompson. And of course there are all kinds of things out there that are just absolutely horrifying, including the fact that there are some female admirers of Luigi Mangione who basically has started to sound like a fan club. Now, as you think about this, just let me remind you, this happened with mass murders and others before. It’s a phenomenon that should absolutely shock us, but should not surprise us. This is the kind of thing that in a social media age just happens more publicly and on a larger scale. It’s morally reprehensible. But you know what? It’s not entirely new. There have been criminals, indeed, bloody criminals in the United States that have been celebrated by those who are effectively are fans.

That was true back in the age of Bonnie and Clyde and others early in the 20th century is true now, no doubt it’s been true throughout history. Sometimes they get dressed up and turned into a cartoon like Robin Hood. One of the other things we need to confront in the Mangione case is the fact that we now know that he was influenced by Ted Kaczynski. Ted Kaczynski is better known as the Unabomber. And back in the period 1978 to 1995, Ted Kaczynski was unknown by name, but he was sought by the FBI and others, number one on the most wanted list because of his deadly attacks that appeared to be strategically directed towards people that he loathed for some specific reason, largely tied to the fact that he was very much opposed to certain forms of technology and for that matter, certain structures of civilization.

In that period from 1978 to 1995, he sent largely bombs through the mail, killing three people and injuring 23 before he was discovered. And by the way, he was eventually identified as Ted Kaczynski by a member of his own family who came to that conclusion by looking at the writing. He wrote a manifesto. That manifesto was clearly influential in Luigi Mangione’s thinking, and we know that because Mangione said so. He even emulated Ted Kaczynski to some extent in terms of writing a manifesto that was on his body when he was arrested there in Altoona, Pennsylvania days ago.

It is also clear that he has a biography. At least something like Ted Kaczynski, Mangione was the valedictorian of his elite boys high school. He was someone who went to an Ivy League institution earned two degrees at an Ivy League institution. Ted Kaczynski went as an undergraduate to Harvard, then got his MA and PhD degrees in University of Michigan, hired on the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley only to disappear and to reappear as the Unabomber, the enemy of modern civilization.

One of the most interesting parallels between Mangione and Ted Kaczynski is that Ted Kaczynski said, “These are not random acts of violence. This is war, and we are engaged in warfare.” Very similar terminology, evidently is found in the manifesto by Mangione. Mangione also left a positive comment on an internet-based form of Kaczynski’s manifesto.

Maxim Loskutoff writing in the New York Times comments, “Plenty of young people are alienated from both sides of the political spectrum and trying to create their own patchwork philosophies. They’ve seen little meaningful reform from either political party in their lifetime, get their information from a wide range of sources of varying reliability, and take pride in forming their own opinions.” As others have pointed out, there are an awful lot of young men who evidently are quite vulnerable to being exploited by and activated by the internet.

Part II

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The Murder of a Healthcare CEO is Not a Close Call in Morality: Murder is Never ‘Understandable But Unjustifiable’

But all right, before leaving this, I want to point to another New York Times article on this issue. It is by Travis N. Rieder, who’s a professor at Johns Hopkins University. He’s the author of a book entitled, Catastrophe Ethics: How to Choose Well in a World of Tough Choices. His article in the New York Times on this very question is entitled, Not Everything Understandable is Justifiable. Okay? I think we have to take a closer look at this.

So the headline says again, there’s a distinction between understandable and justifiable. Professor Rieder seems to imply that the actions and motivations of Luigi Mangione are understandable but they are not justifiable. That’s a very troubling argument. He starts by saying, “When Brian Thompson was shot to death, something strange and disturbing happened, the gunman was lauded. Why? Because his victim was the CEO of one of the largest health insurance companies in the country, and so the shooter, observers assumed, must be a victim of those companies.” He goes on to say, “That might be the case, not proved yet.”

But then he writes this, “The celebration of the gunman suggests that many people believe the killing was justified. Since I’m going to argue that this is deeply and importantly wrong, I expect that many readers will think, ‘It sounds like you’ve never lived with real pain or had to navigate the labyrinthine hell escape that is our healthcare and insurance system.'” He goes on to say, “I wish that were the case.” He then writes about his own troubles with the healthcare industry, very deep, very personal.

But he goes on to make the argument that the murder of the insurance CEO is morally wrong. He says, “I get the rage. The supposed motives assigned to the shooter may well be understandable, but not everything understandable is justifiable. This tragic situation should motivate us,” he writes, “to change the institutions and structures that have failed so many people, but not to give murder a pass, and especially not to glorify it.”

Now, my point in raising this article to our attention is the fact that I’m not surprised that he’s against murder. I’m just surprised that he appears so well, mildly against murder. I think the category of understandable but not justifiable is pretty troubling in itself. He then writes, “Let’s start with a claim that we don’t usually have to make explicit, but that seems to be under real scrutiny in this case. Murder is wrong indeed, murder is by definition wrongful killing. So if Brian Thompson was murdered, then the killer was wrong to do it because murder includes the concept of wrongness.” Okay, I was a little bit troubled before, now I’m very troubled. Now we are told, and this is a circular argument, that if murder is wrong, and if Brian Thompson was murdered, then the killer was wrong to do it.

Now, this is a very smart man writing the article. He is active in bioethics. Indeed, he heads a master’s program at Johns Hopkins University in bioethics. But what kind of morality leads to the end of a sentence? “Because murder includes the concept of wrongness.” You know the concept of wrongness just doesn’t appear to be established upon a very secure moral foundation. As a matter of fact, nowhere in this article in the New York Times does Dr. Rieder suggest why murder is wrong. He does emphatically say that murder is wrong. He just doesn’t say why it’s wrong. Later in the article he writes, “Ethics is hard and not always in a technical sense, the argument that Mr. Thompson’s killing was wrong is not logically sophisticated, nor does it take significant expertise to make. What’s difficult rather is to live in the messy middle of all our important moral conversations, not only about healthcare, but also about politics, climate change, the war in Gaza, abortion and a million other hot button issues.”

He then goes on to say this, this is his conclusion. “A killing can be simultaneously wrong and understandable. But by noting some sympathy or shared rage, one should not for a moment think that I have undermined the case for deep moral concern that a person was killed. Many things can be true at once and we must be capable of holding them all in our heads at the same time.” So I’ll admit, a part of the shock to me is that the editors of the New York Times in terms of the opinion section, actually ran an article in which someone said that one should not for a moment think that he’s undermined the case of deep moral concern that a person was killed. Deep moral concern? The problem here is that this argument appears to be rather underwhelming.

So looking at the argument, I decided I just have to press further why I have to wonder, address to this author, is murder wrong? I certainly agree with him that murder is wrong, but I don’t believe that it’s merely based in a deep moral concern. I think it’s based in something far more basic, say the 10 Commandments, as in, Thou shalt not murder. So I wanted to find out a little bit more about this argument, and again, he’s identified in the New York Times as a professor at Johns Hopkins and the author of this is the book, Catastrophe Ethics: How to Choose Well in a World of Tough Choices.

And something rang familiar. I had just not too long ago ordered that book based upon a mention of it in the press. And I was able to go to my staircase where it was in a stack and I found it. And boy did I find an argument. In this book, Catastrophe Ethics, Dr. Rieder is basically making the argument that much of the moral landscape we look at today is just too complex as compared to previous eras in which human beings had to live moral lives and make moral decisions.

He refers to this as the puzzle, and the puzzle comes down to the fact that even if you want to be an ethical person in this age of catastrophe, and let’s just take the climate catastrophe as the number one catastrophe he’s thinking about here. You can make all kinds of sacrifices. You can make all kinds of moral decisions, you can perform all kinds of moral acts, but the problem is so large, so immense and so complex that you’re not going to make any personal impact regardless of your personal moral actions, or at least it’s going to be negligible. And he points out that that is a very frustrating situation. It also presents a philosophical puzzle that is, how do we really decide what is right and wrong? How do we make major decisions of life, such as one of the ones he treats at length is whether or not to have a baby? And he raises the question, how are we going to know?

Now, here’s the thing. It’s really clear very early in the book that he rejects any kind of command ethic. He reveals any kind for that matter, ontology behind ethics. And in particular, it’s a very secular understanding of ethics. Ethics has to stand on its own secular feet, which is something I argue over and over again simply can’t be done. But it’s always interesting to watch. Now, a lot of the things he’s worried about are questions that have to do with diet. Do you eat meat? And he suggests all kinds of different things that are a part of the puzzle. And it’s a pretty sophisticated book. It’s a very intelligent book, and I think he understands that what he’s trying to do is to create some kind of ethics on the other side, a belief in God.

And I say that I’m pretty confident of that because one of the central chapters of his book is basically about why God is no longer a part of his moral landscape. In fact, Chapter 5 of his book is entitled, Trap #1: The Right Action Is The One Commanded by God. So he’s saying that is a trap, and he says that he grew up a Methodist in Indiana but he came to have some deeply problematic experiences with the church. “I absorbed patriarchal messages on the proper place of men and women, this from friends and acquaintances who presented themselves as deeply religious.” And he goes on to say, and I think this is the key paragraph, “I wasn’t sure there was anything like a personal God to be concerned about.” He was a teenager at this time, “And I was becoming more confident in my own judgments about the world than I was in those being taught by religious authority, especially when it came to ethics,” he writes.

“If Christianity really did condemn homosexuality than so much the worst for Christianity.” He says this, “I’m far more confident in my own judgment that there’s nothing morally wrong with homosexual sex than I am that there exists a personal God who has judged it immoral.” He goes on to say, “And on the flip side, I can admire the life of Jesus without believing that His example was important because He was the Son of God.”

Part III

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The Barrenness of Ethics Without God: Secularism is Not Sufficient For Carrying the Moral Load of Ethics

Now the great experiment, especially since the time of the Enlightenment has been for secular philosophers, secular moralists, to come up with some stable foundation for ethics after God. That is to say that if you’re trying to create a secular ethic, if you’re going to try to construct an ethic that is not only without theistic support, not only not based on belief in God, but frankly quite clearly based without God, then you’re going to have a hard time saying, “You shall and you shall not,” categorically to anything.

Now, again, I’m very thankful that this professor is making the argument that murder is wrong. I’m happy at least about that fact. But what makes me quite concerned is the fact that there is no ontology behind it. There is no absolute command behind it. There is no absolute right and wrong beyond it. Later in the chapter, he goes on to say that accepting atheism doesn’t necessarily imply the non-existence of moral facts. Well, I’ll simply have to ask then, where do moral facts come from? And it turns out that as you read the book, you understand he doesn’t believe in that many. Or apparently I should say, he doesn’t believe in that many moral facts. He believes in an awful lot of facts that create a very deep and complex ethical puzzle.

I have to say he’s very capable of some very troubling paragraphs. At one point, responding to another philosopher, he says this, “Although God seems like a good answer to moral motivation explaining why Hitler should have behaved better and why I must do the right thing, it isn’t. Because Hitler would still have been a monster if he had refrained from exterminating Jews and other minorities only because he was afraid of divine punishment. Sure, it would’ve been better if he didn’t do evil. But what he should have done is refrain from evil for the right reasons because other people have dignity, are worthy of consideration, their happiness matters or any number of other good reasons.”

I’ll be honest, it’s hard for me to understand, again, how an editor let that pass. Let’s just state that by any objective understanding. I think any rational understanding the world would’ve been immeasurably better off if Hitler had not committed genocide regardless of the motivations that led him not to do so. But I also have to say that even more foundational is the understanding that we only know that genocide is really categorically wrong because it’s metaphysically wrong, it’s ontologically wrong, and yes, it’s wrong because God has decreed it so, and by the way told us so.

But as a theologian, I also have to respond to a statement he offers later in the book. It’s in response to one of the arguments made by Socrates and Rieder responds, “If there is an all-good God, then doing the project well will mean we end up following God’s commands, but that’s because we’re both God and us mere mortals responding appropriately to ethical requirements and norms that exist independently.” Well, that’s the very point. I don’t think that any norm, I don’t think that anything exists independently of God and God’s creative action. And one of the primary foundations of Christian theology, and I understand this worldview is directly at odds with that of this ethics professor, but the Christian worldview is based upon the fact that we cannot hold God accountable to any morality external to him. And indeed the Christian worldview affirms that the only morality that exists, any true morality is one that is corresponding to God’s own righteousness and justice because he has revealed this in his law, and by the way, he’s also revealed it in creation. And thus it is the gift of God, it is not something imposed upon God.

There is no independent moral vantage point from which we can make any moral judgment of God. That is one of the most foundational principles of Christian theology. It’s probably something that Dr. Rieder will understand in his rejection of Christianity. There’s so much more to this book, and frankly, almost every page has some kind of interesting illustration or argument. And it’s really clear that Dr. Rieder is a very intelligent man. And if you’re going to try to create some kind of ethics on an entirely secular basis, this is the kind of argument you’re going to have to make. But I just want to point out that when you’re looking at something as the well-documented, cold-blooded planned murder of a man on the streets of New York, this kind of moral argument is just nowhere near up to carrying the load.

It’s really clear that thinking Christians are going to have to be very alert to the kinds of moral conversation going on around us because of, number one, this murder in New York and the arrest of the suspected murderer. The more we come to know about him, the more we come to know of his worldview, the more the moral issues are clarified. But the first moral issue has to start with the fact that this was a cold-blooded murder and it is wrong. And it’s wrong not just because of human moral judgment or even a moral judgment that exists outside human brains, but because it is a moral judgment that is based in the reality of God Himself. Without that reality, I simply do not believe there is any binding morality for long.

Somehow just making the argument that all people know that murder is wrong falls apart when people commit murder. And especially when others seem to make the argument, “Well, all murder is wrongish, but maybe this murder wasn’t really so wrong.”

We also need to watch this kind of argument, not just to say, “Okay, here’s the falsity of that argument. Here’s the inadequacy of that argument, and to make sure that elements of this kind of moral argument don’t show up in our own words.” There’s much more to be said about this book and about the argument. Again, the title of the book is Catastrophe Ethics, but my bigger concern is that the ethic which is argued for in this book is itself catastrophic.

Soon, I hope we’ll be able to look at some of the continuing issues and conversation from the Daniel Penny case as well.