Percentages

A representative of the RAND corporation recently stood up before Congress to present the think tank's findings related to terrorism prevention. I didn't stick around to the end of the podcast to hear the whole talk, but where it began was troublingly familiar ground enough.

There is a sort of inverted pyramid of extremism, we are told. At the widest point are the many people exposed to extremist leaders and following radical, violence-endorsing ideologies. As the pyramid narrows, a subset of people will choose to act on those beliefs. And as we approach the pyramid's tip, we find the small but dangerous number of people who carry these extreme ideologies to the point of committing terrorist violence and hate crimes -- such as recently occurred in the massacres in Christchurch and El Paso.

What are we to infer from this image? I can't speak for certain as to where our RAND representative eventually intended to lead us, but the traditional logic of Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) programs has run as follows: given this pyramid-shaped progression toward violence, we can trust that among a number of people exposed to violence-espousing ideologies, some number (not all, but a significant enough minority to pose a threat, since all it really takes now is one person with an assault weapon) will eventually be converted to the point that they proceed to carry out terrorist acts.

If we could only reach people at the earlier stages of radicalization, therefore, we could succeed in preventing violent activity.

It's an idea with an understandable appeal, especially as we find ourselves in the midst of another hellish summer of horrific mass shootings. With a spate of these attacks seeming to come upon us now with each return of the season, we are also able to recognize all the familiar patterns of the country's grief-stricken response. First, people rightly ask why guns are so easily obtainable in our society - why we allow companies to profit from mass-producing military-grade arsenals as if they were ordinary consumer goods? Important and valid questions all.

But then, when we begin to confront the political difficulties of trying to roll back the power of the gun lobby, of regulating gun manufacturers or opening them up to potential liability, and all the rest of it, we grow desperate. We shift our focus away from the supply side of the gun question, and look instead to the demand. Maybe, we think, if we could just tell who was most likely to use a gun for violence, and prevent them from obtaining one. Maybe we could keep an eye on the people exposed to violent ideologies, and in some way intervene to put them back on the straight and narrow...

We then ask: how can we tell who the likely terrorists might be and try to stop them before they take action? How can we block the websites and information-sources that are feeding their violent fantasies? Or, as the title of the RAND briefing put it: "How can we prevent the next homegrown terrorist?"

There is only one great big gaping problem with this line of questioning: human volition.

We have no way of knowing what a person is going to choose to do. Contrary to our inverted pyramid hypothesis, espousing certain ideologies -- however abhorrent -- is not a proxy for criminal activity. The inverted pyramid breaks down because there is in fact no necessary connection between its tip and its base. Untold numbers of people embrace extreme ideologies without ever committing an act of violence. And many of the worst mass atrocities are done by people who have no coherent worldview, who intend to stand for nothing, whose motives are as mysterious, passing, and inscrutable as the mind of another always ultimately must be.

People have rightly been denouncing in recent weeks the obscene hypocrisy of Trump, our alt-right thug-in-chief, who rushes to attribute violence committed by avowed white supremacists to "mental illness," whereas he has called for the categorical exclusion of all Muslim people from the country on the basis of what he describes as "radical Islamic terrorism."

Perhaps what is needed, however, is a leveling up, rather than a leveling down. Maybe we need to rethink in all cases the straight line our pundits draw between certain speech, belief systems, ideologies, and expressive acts on the one hand -- and violence against other people on the other. Perhaps the rampant civil liberties violations perpetrated against Muslim Americans in the name of the War on Terror, in short, should not be visited on any person -- not even those who espouse white supremacist hate speech.

If there is really a necessary connection between espousing an ideology and breaking the law, after all, then the First Amendment can have little rationale. If speech acts of hate sit on the same spectrum as murder, with one simply a milder form of the other, then we ought to abandon Constitutional protections for expressive acts. It is only if we will reaffirm the validity of the distinction -- on the basis of the old insight that speech alone -- however detestable and hurtful -- cannot prevent another person from speaking, whereas violence has the power to prevent another person from exercising their own equivalent civil liberties for all time -- that we can preserve these core legal principles. But if we do so, our inverted CVE pyramid crumbles to dust.

"Why didn't someone stop him when they had the chance?" This is the question often on people's lips after a horrific massacre has taken place. And it is a fully understandable question. But it has only one answer: they could not have stopped him (and it is usually a "him" in mass shootings). Because he hadn't done anything yet. He has a legal right to post appalling, repugnant views on social media, or wherever else. In many cases, meanwhile, he has not done any such thing, or betrayed any signs of the so-called "radicalization" process. To surveil, harass, monitor, or arrest him on the basis of something he might do, but hasn't, is to violate the principle of due process.

Of course, precisely this principle has been violated time and again with respect to Muslim communities in the United States. Under the mantle of CVE, community organizations were encouraged to track and report on Muslim young people, monitoring them for the warning signs of "radicalization." Meanwhile, federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies have constructed databases filled with alleged "gang members," "terrorism suspects," people who ought to be denied the ability to fly on an airplane, etc. Have these individuals been tried and convicted of any crime? If they had, the database would be unnecessary. There is therefore no way to take oneself out of such a database. Having never been found guilty, how can they prove their innocence?

The due process flaws in these approaches are not incidental. They are baked into the logic of the inverted pyramid. If there is a single "radicalizing process" that leads from one stage to another (even if not everyone will take the entire journey), then it makes sense that a person at an earlier stage bears a kind of attenuated guilt for the crimes committed by those at the apex of the pyramid. They may not have been convicted of a crime, but they are on the same spectrum as those who have. Even if only a minority of them will go on to commit terrorist acts, so the logic goes, we know that a defined portion of them will. Therefore, the group as a whole can be treated as presumptively criminal, bearing fewer legal rights than others, and worthy of a greater degree of scrutiny and monitoring than others.

As Sherlock Holmes remarks at one point in The Sign of Four: "while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant." Here, surely, is a very RAND-ian view of the human condition. Our think tankers would blush for pride. If true, the Holmes view certainly absolves us of the need to go about the trouble of much of what we ordinarily think of as legal fact-finding. It vindicates the CVE approach: we can make assumptions about people in aggregate, and treat them in a certain way based on what we foresee a statistical subset of them is likely to do.

But here, I'm afraid the great detective's fabled powers of deduction may be failing him. Exactly how can it be that a collection of mysterious, inscrutable, and self-willed beings would -- in clusters -- behave in wholly predictable ways? We can certainly find patterns within a given sample. Can we then draw conclusions about all members of the sample?

Suppose we look at the total of all people who have been exposed to radical ideologies on the internet, and we discover that 5% of them commit violent acts. Could we not also have looked at all people who shop at Whole Foods, and discovered that a portion of them will at some point in their lives commit theft? Does this mean that Whole Foods shopping is the first step on the road to larceny? Could we not have surveyed the whole of humanity, and found that some of them, in a variety of walks of life, sometimes behave in cruel, odious, evil ways?

Of course, the connection between exposure to violence-espousing ideologies and the commission of violent acts will seem like a more intuitive one to most of us. How could it not?

Yet the principle of due process depends at every stage on the rejection of precisely such "intuitive" connections as this. It holds that people are responsible for what they do, not for what we assume about them on the basis of the views they hold, or the ways they behave, however confident we may feel in ourselves that we understand the nature of those views and behaviors, and what they lead to. Some ideas or life circumstances may be correlated with particular actions. But for every such pattern we can demonstrate, the individual exceptions will be legion.

There is a poem by Gottfried Benn that reminds us of the difficulties of making any such intuitive "connections" when our object of study is that ultimate mystery: human nature. The poem, "People Met," describes those individuals who have seemingly faced every disadvantage, harm, and obstacle in life, and yet have grown up to be "self-possessed as duchesses." Benn concludes: "I have often asked myself and never found an answer / whence kindness and gentleness come, / I don’t know it to this day, and now must go myself. (Hofman translation).

So too, when we ask whence violence and evil come, I suggest we can do no better than Benn. I have not found the answer to this question to this day, and neither has any researcher or statistician. Perhaps it is not possible to isolate sole causes of action in the heart of such a strange, ensouled animal as us.

We can ask why, when people choose to commit evil acts in our society, there is so much military-grade weaponry available to enable them to do so. But answering that question will force us to turn away from our favored scapegoats - the lone, lost, and troubled people adrift at the margins of our society - and shift toward those operating at the heart of it: lobbyists, weapons manufacturers, and the politicians with whom they deal.