Spirituality and School Shootings

Every revolution or social movement contains within it a spiritual component. How could it not? Such a great shift from a known way of doing things to an unknown and unproven one requires a great amount of faith, and faith is an integral component of spirituality.

Every great movement has within it a sense of unity, wherein people speak of equality and brotherhood. People within a movement often refer to others as “sisters” and “brothers. They see in the movement something that transcends personal interests and instead see communal interests that will in turn serve all. A sense of unity among all people and an idea of something larger than the individual is indeed a spiritual notion.

A social movement capable of making worthwhile change will embrace lofty ideals such as justice. Justice is not something to be held in the hands, not something that can be placed upon a scale and physically measured. It cannot be bought or sold. It is an abstract notion that must be brought into being by the performance of the required rites and an agreed-upon definition of what is essentially ethereal and formless. One merely feels that justice has been done or injustice perpetrated, it cannot be quantified.

A social movement calls upon the individual to make personal sacrifices for the greater good. Spirituality would be empty without a realization of self-sacrifice.

No one sacrifices and dedicates himself to the efforts needed for change without the vision of a better future, distant and unproven but shining nonetheless. How else can one let go of what is in order to reach towards what might be without an understanding that there is something beyond what is described by accepted wisdom. It is with a feeling deep within one’s heart and a conviction that a promised land is attainable that progress is made. Faith transcends fact, the spiritual becomes more real than the physical. All else is mere politics, the crude physical jostling for a slightly better position for you and yours, like animals at the trough.

We as a nation now ask ourselves after every school shooting why such a thing occurs. No, in fact we do not ask, we reach for simple solutions. Liberals say gun control is the obvious solution (and I’m not saying that is not part of the solution, but it is not a cure-all) while Republicans seem to think arming teachers is the answer. Or possibly a ban on violent video games. Or prayer in school.

The truth is more complicated. The truth is always more complicated than we would choose. The truth is there are many reasons why school shootings and other mass killings occur so much more often in the United States than any other country in the world.

When I first watched Michael Moore’s Bowling For Columbine, I was disappointed by it. I felt it left me hanging without any clear-cut answers. But years later I have come to appreciate the fact that it asked more questions than it answered, because I realize the problem is much more systemic and runs much deeper than I would like.

Martin Luther King Junior once warned that a nation that spent more on war than on societal uplift was one facing a spiritual death. Let me expand upon that idea a bit to suggest a society that sees competition as the only good—and violence is the most obvious form of competition—is approaching a spiritual death. A society that only thinks of the individual’s struggle for survival and the individual’s rights and liberties, is missing the single greatest component of the human psyche: love. And love, perhaps more than anything else, is at the root of spirituality. I am not talking about the purely physical longing for another, but the very real and necessary sense of connectedness to others, to the world, and to ourselves.

Karl Marx spoke of Emtremdung, the idea of being alienated from others and ourselves through lack of meaningful connection. When our work and our human interactions become too abstract and meaningless, we become distanced from any real sense of self. We have become an alienated society. We make up simplistic explanations for why society is the way it is and, like someone placing a too heavy jacket on too light a hook, place upon those simplistic notions too much weight for them to bear. We retreat from reality, and as we do, we retreat from our ability to actually improve that reality. Fearing and doubting our ability to make the world a better place, we invest our alienated need for power into institutions: governments, the media, the market, the military, religion. We give lip service to God, but it is a god devoid of spirituality. It is an idol we worship, and in it we invest the power we might ourselves harness if we invested in spiritual endeavors.

Such alienation effects all of us, affecting those most at the edge most profoundly. Those who feel detached from their fellow man are more likely to act in destructive ways. Those who feel powerless are more likely to feel that even extreme behavior does not really touch the lives of others. Even in their violent attempts at interacting with the world, they still believe themselves powerless.

But while Marx saw alienation as a lack of meaningful interaction with the world, there is still a greater detachment we need worry about. When bonds of love--which is to say meaningful activity rooted in our realization that we are the same as our fellow humans, that they feel goodwill towards us as we feel it towards them—are lacking, the most basic psychic need is unfulfilled. Detached from the world by a lack of any sort of spiritual connection, the individual becomes broken, inhuman, defective. That is the sort of person who is capable of going on a shooting spree.

We try to patch such people up with drugs, but that only makes them still more alienated. To believe that an external component is necessary to fix what is wrong on their insides gives the impression they are lacking something essential within. They feel broken because that is what society is telling them. We now have tens of millions of people walking around altered from the state millions of years of evolution have worked towards by a few decades worth of psychological theories and recent chemical inventions.

Until we are able to build a society in which even the least of us can find some degree of connectivity to the outside world (spirituality), we are doomed to relive the same scenario over and over. There is no gun law that will prevent guns falling into the hands of killers that will be as effective as creating a society that is less interested in manufacturing guns and more interested in creating connections with one another.

Perhaps this is the reason the United States so completely leads the world in gun violence: because its population is so alienated and lacking in ways to interact in meaningful and caring ways. Perhaps, for all we talk about personal rights and freedoms, the average individual feels powerless, afraid, and cut off from the world in which he lives. If this is the case, prayer in classrooms will do nothing to fix it: imposed prayer is merely the external trappings of spirituality. But creating school environments where constructive and loving interaction exists would go a long way towards fulfilling the spiritual needs humans have.

And perhaps we need to take an honest look at the sort of art and entertainment we are creating and allowing our children to consume. I’m not aware of any science to support my claim, but I can’t help thinking that music that espouses innocent love will have a more positive influence than music that espouses misogyny and the pursuit of mere physical satisfaction. It makes sense that movies and TV shows that show less random and senseless violence will lessen desensitization to violence. And I have to believe efforts could be made to turn video games into something more than orgies of shooting and killing. It just makes sense to me, makes sense to one who reflects on society through a spiritual lens.

The answer to mass shootings is a complex one that will require thoughtfulness and communication. This is impossible given the mindset we now have to point fingers and search for simple answers. The very fact that we have the problem and have not been able to solve the problem suggests the solutions are not simple ones. The most obvious and logical step is the restriction of the availability of guns, but obviously in a culture that is so accepting of violence, this has been unachievable. We must work at the root of the problem if we are ever to remove from our nation the dubious distinction of leading the world in gun violence. And there is no more fundamental place to start than at the spiritual level.