II — The Critical Juncture: An Indifference to Spiritual Interiority
Indifference or reconciliation. The choice is ours to make.
Yet, such choices are often perplexing, ranging as they do through the murky depths of the human psyche. They easily befuddle the most astute observer and tend to dishearten those inclined to reconcile.
But apart from presenting confusion and discouragement, what makes an understanding of this choice so difficult is the use of the term indifference. To most, indifference implies a moral deficiency relative to another person, such as a want of concern or caring for them.
Not surprisingly, most parents would deny any such assertion. Few would admit they are indifferent toward their children. Most parents have strong feelings of love for them and this love is a powerful testimony against any allegation of indifference. Given this, it would seem that the disjunctive proposition — indifference or reconciliation — holds little, or no, promise for deepening our understanding of the causal dynamics of youth violence.
But before dismissing the term indifference altogether, it is well to remember that it has a logical meaning which transcends the moral sensibility and commitment to caring.
As noted already, Columbine has unmasked in the lives of youth a dark and seemingly impenetrable landscape dotted with signs of danger. A few years back, TIME magazine alluded to this predicament in a cover story entitled the “secret lives of youth.” As most have since come to know, this secret life involves a volatility in the lives of some youth and the unpredictability they present summons forth in us a nagging, even free-floating, fear of what they might do. To alleviate this fear by preventing youth violence is the challenge.
But to remain content with a national prevention strategy that merely observes these material conditions and circumstances, then calculates the assorted risk factors correlated to them, and lastly makes public the primary warning signs of violent behavior has not proven to be very helpful. The reason for this is clear: it is only a first step of knowing. It does not even begin the hard work of understanding. What remains to be explained beyond the accumulation of scientific correlations is why these behavioral dynamics exist in the first place. What efficiency or root cause brings about violent behavior?
It is with this question, “why violent behavior?”, that we arrive at the critical juncture in our inquiry. It is here where the failure to understand youth violence has its origins. For rather than engaging the underlying truth of the evidence perceived, we assume a posture of intellectual indifference and detachment toward it. We refuse to go beyond a mere description of the active display of our perceptions. We fail to see manifested through them a causal origin situated within the intrinsic dynamics of the human person.
It is as though the brute facts of perception are self-explanatory, that no spiritual accounting of experience is necessary. It is as though the material conditions and circumstances we perceive are not indicative of an interior life situated within the person. It is as though perceptions are mere atomistic units and their interactions are of a purely mechanical nature.
It is this mechanistic presumption – a presumption born of an indifference to the causal relevance of spiritual interiority — that shapes and colors our understanding of youth violence.
How odd it is that very little is commonly accepted about youth violence beyond the false assumption that it is equated with violent behavior. But make no mistake about it. There exists here no tautology. Youth violence embodies a more profound reality than that contained in an objective display of violent behavior.
To equate youth violence with violent behavior is to deny violent acts an intrinsic origin in the structures and dynamics of the human person. It is to be disengaged, distant from the inner life of youth. It is to say that youth violence has no formal structure, that it has no causal dimension, that it has no intrinsic dynamic, that it reflects no intrinsic purpose. It is to say that behavior is just an unmixed activity, something strangely sterile and cold, distant from its origins, existentially destitute, devoid of spiritual content and freedom, and thoroughly depersonalized. It is to say that youth violence is simply bad behavior, that it should not be tolerated, and that it should be severely punished. It is to say: that’s the end of it! There is no more to be known … or said … or done.
All this should cause concern. But there is more. The reduction of youth violence to violent behavior posits a practical assumption about the intrinsic nature of the person. In any mechanistic scheme, the person is reduced to a kind of empty vessel whose sole function is to serve as a methodologically determined locus for the interaction of discrete social and economic forces.
The practical implication of this slight of hand is that the observed associations of material forces are judged to be the actual causes of human behavior. The spiritual dynamics that are intrinsic to, and flow from, the person are assumed to have no impact whatsoever on the life of violent youth, or any other human behavior for that matter. Indeed, the existence of these spiritual dynamics is not even acknowledged.
This logical indifference constitutes a radical form of methodological reductionism, pure and simple. It denies that human behavior flows from matters concerning personal dignity, freedom, and transcendent purpose. It fails to grant that behavior has any relevance whatsoever to quality relations, including those of love, compassion, understanding, and mercy. Instead, human behavior has been reduced to a barren reality, a reality akin to the interaction of balls on a billiard table. In such a scheme, personal behavior is nothing more than a function of matter in motion.
Given this methodological context, there is no possibility for creating a national prevention strategy that can alleviate the incidence of youth violence.
Tomorrow: Part III
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