Two tragedies rocked the world last weekend. Differing in kind and scale, they nevertheless raised similar questions around the nature of personal responsibility.
After the initial shock of hearing about the killings in Norway and the death of Amy Winehouse had worn off, the instinctive response of the media, and the population as a whole, was to ask ‘why?’ When confronted with tragedy, it is human nature to seek an explanation. We want to know who was at fault, and what could have been done to prevent it.
Within hours of his arrest, the possible explanations started – was Anders Breivik a fundamentalist Christian? Was he insane? If the former, all of a sudden we have a people-group and a philosophy to blame; someone can be held accountable. If the latter, we’re not so sure; if he is mad that means his mind is not really responsible for the actions of his body. A plea on the grounds of insanity would leave the relatives of his victims feeling cheated of justice.
But what if he’s neither insane nor ‘radicalised’? If he is in full control of his thoughts and actions, what is the explanation then?
The Today programme this morning asked “Is Anders Breivik evil?” and although Robert Piggott, presenting the piece, allowed some respondents to consider instead whether Breivik’s actions were evil, the core question is an important one, for it again seeks to put Breivik in a category somehow different from ‘the rest of us’. If he is by nature evil, he is in some sense less responsible for the evil actions he perpetrates: he can’t help doing evil things, it’s just who he is.
A similar mindset seems to be at work in the reporting of the life of Amy Winehouse. While there is no suggestion the she was evil, the ‘why’ questions have almost universally sought to excuse her from any wrongdoing: Amy was a talented, troubled ‘Angel’. The worst people have found to say of her was that she was ‘headstrong’ since childhood. Yet even this is said in a tone of fond amusement, as though she were an Enid Blyton schoolgirl ‘always getting into scrapes’.
In part, the motivation for this is an admirable sensitivity to the grief of her family and friends. In part, it is our enduring reluctance to speak ill of the dead. But it leaves us far from a solution.
Amy was extremely gifted, but was afflicted with the linked diseases of alcoholism and drug addiction. Although commentators are willing to admit she made some ‘bad choices’, for the most part the impulse has been to absolve her of any responsibility for her actions. She is portrayed as a victim of some malevolent force outside her control.
In the Radio 4 piece this morning, Professor Solaiman Gamal, of the Muslim College of London, said, “What distinguishes us from other [creatures] is our free will, it’s our mind, it’s our appreciation of what is good and what is bad.” Unless we are willing to accept that Anders Breivik may just be an ordinary man who chose, rationally, to commit a terrible evil, and that Amy Winehouse was an ordinary girl who chose, rationally, to act in a headstrong (which after all is only a euphemism for ‘rebellious’ or ‘disobedient’) manner, we do not have any reason to consider ourselves different from animals. And more importantly, we are forced to conclude that nothing can be done. If no-one chooses his actions, everyone is subject to the whims of the external forces. There is no point asking why, or asking what could have been done to prevent these two tragedies, if we are bent on finding that the answer is ‘nothing’. Jennie Pollock is the former Executive Administrator of Theos.
