Explaining Violence in Sociology

In light of class discussion and current events, it seems only pertinent to examine the massacre at Virginia Teach in the realm of philosophical analysis. After reading Sharon Begley’s “Anatomy of Violence,” from Newsweek, April 20, 2007, Garfinkel’s elaborate description of explanatory frames and the questions and answers they permit in the complex construction of phenomena were clarified.
Interestingly enough, Begley examines the reasons why a mass killer acts, and in accordance with Garfinkel, she gives multidimensional reasoning for such action. Instead of stating that a gunman would act based on a gene which induces aggression, she stated that such genes only are definitive in character development if they interact with other influences.

Societal standards, family, friendships, pop culture, governmental laws, and other broad influences are labeled as the root of Begley’s characterization of a killer. She states, “Scientists who study criminal violence—that committed outside of wars and civil conflicts—now believe that its roots are equally planted in biology of an individual, the psychology that reflects the interaction of innate traits and experiences, and the larger culture. No single cause is sufficient, none is deterministic.”

It becomes clear that the question Begley asked was not, “Why do mass murderers shoot people?”—this could be answered substantially based on place and time circumstances, including the weapons used, etc. The question Begley asked to arrive at that answer—the question she asked being derived from the explanatory frame in which the question was possible—must have been, “Why of all people, do these people become mass murderers?”

The answer to this question lies in the structural conditions, which Begley certainly depicts. These structural conditions are liberating, too, in that they limit the possible answers to a question based on the explanatory framework of the structure. Garfinkel states, “These presuppositions radically affect the success and failure of potential explanations and the interrelation of various explanations. Call this explanatory relativity,” (48).

Garfinkel’s plainest example of explanatory relativity in Forms of Explanation is that of student achievement, explaining, “why Mary got an A,” (42). For Garfinkel, this is the wrong question. The right question, much like the question Begley must have asked to have arrived at her conclusion, would have been, “Why of these students did Mary get an A?” Based on the structural conditions of the class, the bell curve, a distribution of grades, etc., Mary attains her grade. Similarly, the mass murderer is created—through the presuppositions and structural conditions of specific life experience based upon biology, psychology, and culture.

WRITTEN IN REFERENCE TO:
“The Anatomy of Violence”
Sharon Begley
Newsweek
Monday, April 30, 2007

Forms of Explanation: Rethinking the Questions in Social Theory
Alan Garfinkel
Yale University Press
New Haven, Connecticut and London, England
1981