In chapter 5 certain narratives are shown to foster a mood of satisfaction, which presents as indifference to harms perpetrated by others. We are moved to accept the status quo or some set of arrangements carried out in our names. Here I analyze an influential criminological narrative, the so-called general theory of crime by Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990), which relates how individuals become criminals through negligent parenting. The narrative allows us to construct everlastingly good selves in contrast to irresponsible and inconsequential others and charts a path to our control, over self and others, in this lifetime. Whether dramatic or subdued, stories that fuel mass harm draw contrasts that reassure audiences of their morally right positions. I am in that audience, a fact that chapter 5 highlights. I am a sociological criminologist who is accustomed to pondering rather dispassionately the harms heaped upon criminalized persons, their families, and their communities. I am concerned about these harms, but I am also regularly able to set aside my concern. My affect when I think about penal harm is usually subdued, and my record of activism is, sadly, spotty. By theorizing the emotional impacts of the story of antisociality, I am in effect investigating my own comfort level.
Chapter 6 summarizes the aesthetic nature of destructive narrative influence, draws out theoretical implications, and identifies points of potential intervention based on the analysis—resisting certain stories and telling new ones that encourage “life-enhancing illusions” (Becker 1973, p. 158) rather than illusions that degrade and destroy.
CHAPTER TWO
The Cultural Grounds
of Mass Harm
Large-scale projects that cause suffering, degrade, and destroy—war, massacre, state torture, slavery, lynching, pogroms, human trafficking, terrorism, counterterrorism, prostitution, criminal punishment, economic exploitation, political repression, environmental degradation, industrialized agriculture, meat eating, and so on—are commonly explained in terms of quests to win or maximize resources and power. These projects and the struggles and objectives they pursue are also always coded symbolically. That is to say, mass harm is enculturated. It is naturalized, normalized, trivialized, excused, justified, commended, and/or obfuscated. These and other processes of enculturation are discursive.1 They are bound to language, to the way people talk about them. To build a case for the discursive grounds of mass harm in this chapter, I first reflect on the nature of mass harm and address why mass harm in particular warrants a cultural analysis. Then I examine scholarship linking mass harm to cognition and processes that manipulate (1) cognitive processes, as well as discursive forms, which I distinguish as (2) wording or (3) narratives. This review leads me to suggest that narratives are uniquely effective vehicles for moral and thus emotional messaging. Yet, research on mass harm, highlighting narrative or anything else, has clarified processes of legitimation to the virtual neglect of emotional inspiration.
CONCEPTUALIZING MASS HARM
The special concern of this book is mass harm. It is crucial that we comprehend how devastation actually mounts up—against criminology’s traditional preoccupation with individual action in violation of some law. I define harm as trouble caused by another. Intent to harm is not essential to this definition, though actors “must have had some notion that their (in)action might result in harm” (Presser 2013, p. 7).
My definition depends on some agent naming some experience as “trouble.” Questions of who that agent should be and which alleged troubles necessitate concern are admittedly problematic, as demonstrated by competing claims of victimhood in the context of sexual misconduct (i.e., pointing to damaged souls and careers). Yet, as scores of critical criminologists have maintained, “crime” is no less problematic a concept. A focus on crime privileges the perspective of lawmakers and law enforcement agents, while “harm” takes seriously the felt consequences of action.2
What is mass harm, then? Its parameters are not transparent. Mass incarceration means large numbers of people incarcerated, mass murder means large numbers murdered, and so on. Logically, then, mass harm should mean masses harmed, and it does. I propose, furthermore, that mass harm entails mass involvement. If many are victimized, many are implicated. Mass harm requires multiple agents who may bear widely differing levels of responsibility, but nonetheless bear responsibility. Conceivably, one person could fly a drone that launches a missile or dump the toxins that annihilate an ocean’s marine life. However, the motivated agent needs others to manufacture and supply the tools to harm and to escape detection. Harms under fascism seem to emanate from a single leader, but the fascist ruler needs henchmen. Besides, today’s mass surveillance, instant communication, and global capital both check and facilitate our actions. Then there is the motivation to harm in the first place. If recent “lone wolf” terrorist attacks tell us anything, it is that the inspiration to do mass harm is usually communally sourced (Berntzen and Sandberg 2014). Of genocide Savelsberg (2010) observes: “Grave human rights violations can only be understood as the outcome of collective or organizational, especially state, action” (p. 51). Individual aggressors are heavily in debt to their social milieu (see also Bandura 1999).
To conceptualize mass harm as mass involvement in harm is to make a controversial move. Elites and the rest of us, it seems, would like to deflect and concentrate responsibility. A case in point is present-day denials of institutional complicity in sexual harassment and rape. Stewards of churches, schools, businesses, fraternities, the military, and other spaces from which survivors have come forward regularly reject the notion that their cultures are enabling, despite disproportionately high rates of victimization in those spaces. Such denials are no doubt meant to preserve power. But I believe they also stem from a failure to grasp the expansiveness of the enculturation of social life.
The commonplace harms just mentioned as well as the atrocities of the twentieth century make it painfully clear that mass harm requires “standing by” as much as it does actively inflicting the harm. Hence the lucidity of the statement attributed to Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Perpetration receives the lion’s share of attention, however, both in popular culture and, less defensibly, in the field of criminology (Manji, Presser, and Dickey 2014). A cultural approach to mass harm is able to account for both perpetration (from administration to manual involvement) and failure of intervention: cultural processes—ideas, figurative expressions (e.g., metaphors), and stories—are aimed at and influence both direct agents and bystanders. Complicity may be self-serving, in either survival or fiscal terms; still the enterprise in which one is complicit “goes down” a certain way. Enabling bystanders include persons who suffer from harmful structures, consistent with insights from Marx on false consciousness and ideology, and Bourdieu on symbolic violence. The fact that victims themselves often accept conditions of poverty, inequality, oppression and other injuries as natural and/or acceptable underscores the role of cultural signification in mass harm perhaps most vividly of all.
IDEAS OF HARM
It is axiomatic that our actions are guided by ideas, including all-encompassing worldviews, values, principles, norms, and codes. Our harmful actions are guided by ideas that concern who harm victims and agents are and what the nature of harmful practices is. Ideas about who and what is “trouble” guide school discipline, policing, criminal justice policy, and government generally. The impact of profiling or stereotyping on the lives and prospects of individuals and communities is well documented. An ethos of neoliberalism underpins various harm enterprises—overly stringent conditions on public assistance, austerity measures, and limits on global debt relief—to a large extent by assigning responsibility for suffering to victims. The logics of colonialism and gentrification render existing residents of a place invisible and occupation inevitable. The view of a natural moral hierarchy where humans have dominion over nature constructs ecological devastation as consistent with the right order of things.
Criminologists of various stripes explain offending behavior in terms of values and norms, though the behavior in question is
