Over the last few days, it's been tough to get the Kauhajoki shooting out of my mind. I tried to get some of my thoughts in order today, so here goes.
I'm very surprised that this spate of school shootings and seemingly random killings in Finland is making me reconsider my opinion on violent video games and movies. I say this with two very important caveats:
- I'm a libertarian. I don't support banning anything.
- I don't, for one moment, believe that a video game or a movie, any more than a book, website, traffic sign or cherry tree can somehow make an otherwise normal person start flipping out and killing people.
Having said that, I think it's important that we think about the Kauhajoki killings in context. Exactly like after Jokela, I'm seeing newspaper articles and columns, public statements, blog posts and Facebook status updates in which people moralize about killing. That's why it seems worthwhile to ask the question: what kind of attitudes can we expect people who grow up in our society to have about killing? How do we, as a culture, think about the ethics of killing?
I want to start off by looking at three news items from this past week. For the sake of convenience, they're from Helsingin Sanomat, Finland's biggest daily paper.
The first news item was Jukka Tarkka's review of a doctoral thesis on how
the Finnish secret police deported people to Nazi concentration camps in the Second World War. Of course, this isn't really news to most historians. What is news is that there's evidence the Finnish secret police knew exactly how the Gestapo ran things in Germany.
This is unlikely to raise many eyebrows, however. In Finland the entire population is educated to believe that Finland's part in the Second World War was only the glorious and heroic defense of our independence from the evil Bolsheviks, and there can be nothing ethically reproachable about it. Historically Finland can do no wrong. This logic stretches as far as it needs to. Because the Finnish defense of its independence in the "Winter War" was heroic, it follows that Finland's invasion of the Soviet Union is 1941 was also heroic and morally unimpeachable. Similarly, occupying Soviet territory and shutting Russians into concentration camps to starve or be deported to Germany must also be heroic and correct, because to question one aspect of the war is to imply that the war in general might have had questionable moral aspects. This is unacceptable, therefore deporting people to the Gestapo must be morally correct.
As it happens, I've already heard the doctoral thesis lambasted as some stupid girl who doesn't understand anything about history, trying to tarnish Finland's glorious image with her horrible stories of how we were supposedly friends with the Nazis. I have no doubt someone will be inspired to mount a defense of Finnish heroism in the Second World War because of this despicable attack on our nation's moral integrity.
When Finnish people have killed in uniform, we consider it glorious, heroic and worthy of emulation. Some years ago, RAY (the Finnish state gambling organization) ran a series of ads showing public figures from the 2000's in 1940s army uniform, asking: Could we do what they did? Obviously, they were implying that we should ask whether we would be capable of heroically defending our country. At the same time, in practice, they're asking: could we kill people like they did? And this is presented as a good thing, something to strive for. Both the Jokela and Kauhajoki shooters must have seen those ads.
It's a well-known thing in the Finnish Internet world that no-one in their right mind should ever read the reader comments appended to Helsingin Sanomat articles online. There's an article on the Kauhajoki shooter washing out from his military training,
Matti Saari ei pärjännyt armeijassa. The discussion, as can be expected, drifted toward military service in Finland. Here are some choice comments:
adam | 24.9.2008 14:29
Ei, ei armeijassa opeteta tappamista, vaan hengissä selviämistä.
Henkka | 25.9.2008 12:18
Armeijassa ei opeteta tappamaan vaan puolustaman itseään ja maatamme! En kokenut kertaakaan, että olisin tappanut ketään ampumalla tauluun...
Realisti | 25.9.2008 12:28
Tarvitsee muistaa, että armeijassa ei opeta tappamaan ihmistä vaan vihollista. Siinä on iso ero. Näin minulle opetettiin armeijassa.
Quite simple! In the army, you're not taught to kill, you're taught to
defend yourself. You do this by killing. The first poster would have it that killing is, in fact, not killing but surviving. The last commentator says that you're not killing people, you're killing the enemy. How wonderful! If the aliens invade Earth, apparently the Finnish army is prepared. Or maybe they mean that whoever counts as an "enemy" doesn't count as a person. By that logic, the Jokela and Kauhajoki shooters didn't kill any people either. I'm sure that given their avowed misanthropy, they considered their victims their enemies.
To sum up, killing is considered a heroic, glorious thing. The killers are exalted and their victims are dehumanized into a faceless, non-human "enemy". Does that sound familiar? It's exactly the ideology that both the Jokela and Kauhajoki shooters professed, and one that resonates with almost every school shooting in the world. We condemn this ideology and call it murder in connection with school shootings, but we exalt and teach it and call it virtuous when the killers wear a uniform. Clearly in this sense our culture does not condemn killing. Instead it teaches an ambivalent attitude to killing, where the ethics are relative.
Another newspaper item from this week:
HS: Teemu Mäki professoriksi Taideteolliseen korkeakouluun. In other words, Finnish "artist"
Teemu Mäki has been appointed to a
professorship at the Helsinki University of Industrial Art and Design, or whatever TaiK is called these days.
This is the guy whose claim to fame is that he made a video in which he
kills a cat and masturbates on its decapitated body. I can't make this stuff up. Apparently, according to Mäki, he adopted a cat from the Helsinki animal shelter, but then decided he doesn't want a pet after all, and killed the cat with an axe. He videotaped the killing, and when he was done, he masturbated onto the dead cat. And now he's being made a professor at Finland's state-run university of art.
As an aside, in 2004 Finnish historian and Green party parliamentary candidate
Jukka Relander defended him in Metro. If there was ever any doubt Relander is an idiot, let there now be none.
But where's our principled moral stand on killing? Where's the outrage? Indeed, the Helsingin Sanomat news item on the topic doesn't even mention the infamous video, which did cause a big outcry at the time. But now we've apparently just forgotten. Hesari's "NYT-liite" interviewed him briefly this week, and that interview is the newspaper item in question. NYT mentioned he's the guy who killed the cat, but basically just asked him some normal questions. In an aside, he flippantly remarked he doesn't really care about animal rights. I'm sure he doesn't.
His appointment has excited practically no comment. A moral stand on killing? I don't see one. In Mäki's case, and incidentally Relander's defense of it, killing is an ethically neutral thing. The same attitude is widespread in Finland on the topic of animal rights; the "fox girl" (
kettutyttö) argument that killing animals in a painful way, practically torturing them, is wrong, is simply dismissed. The viability of the fur trade is judged by economic criteria. Killing is simply accepted.
At this point I'd like to digress briefly on the topic of violent movies and computer games. As I've said, I don't believe they cause or in any way contribute to violent crime. What they do, in my opinion what they must, contribute to is the cultural values we attach to violence. In one part of our culture, killing in condemned and wrong. In another, it's glorious and heroic. In yet a third, it's ethically neutral. In the world of movies and video games, violence is interesting, arousing and "cool". That may not make anyone go out and kill people, but it does contribute to the general ambivalence and even acceptance of violence. That's worth thinking about.
The third news item of the week is, of course, the Kauhajoki shooting itself. Here, we have a principled stand on killing. It's wrong and horrible that Matti Saari killed all those people. I don't disagree at all. It's just that over the course of this week simply following Helsingin Sanomat is enough to see that our attitude to killing is not very principled. In some cases we condemn it, in others we exalt it. Is it any wonder that some people can take our moral codes, apply them differently, and come to the conclusion that it is morally acceptable, if not even virtuous, for them to go to school and start killing people?
In fact, I claim I know where these school shooters get their ideology from, lock, stock and barrel: nationalism. Their "misanthropy" is in fact nothing more than a sort of individual nationalism; they consider themselves a nation of one. We teach their ideology in our schools and our compulsory military service. Killing is either acceptable or not, depending on who you're killing and on whose orders. If you're killing the enemy, it's not murdering people, it's defending yourself against the enemy; depending on how you define who you're killing, it's either heroic or criminal.
The school shooters share our code of ethics. They use the same morality as our culture at large to justify what they do. I think there's something wrong with those ethics.
