The New Yorker Radio Hour - Malcolm Gladwell on the Sociology of School Shooters

Episode Date: May 29, 2018

Malcolm Gladwell spoke with The New Yorker’s Dorothy Wickenden in 2015 about the social dynamics of school shootings. Studying the literature of sociology, Gladwell compares shootings to a riot, in which each person’s act of violence makes the next act slightly more likely. And David Remnick speaks with the Columbia professor Mark Lilla, whose book “The Once and Future Liberal” argues provocatively that identity politics and support for marginalized groups are costing the Democrats election after election. “We cannot do anything for these groups we care about if we do not hold power—it is just talk,” Lilla says. “An election is not about self-expression—it’s a contest.”   New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. After this month's shooting at Santa Fe High School in Texas, like the shooting before that and the one before that, tragedy after tragedy, we're left yet again to continue a conversation about our society and our culture and what it is that causes this epidemic of violence. regardless of your views about the Second Amendment, how does a teenager, a kid, show up at a school determined to kill as many of his own classmates and teachers as he can? One answer to that question, by no means definitive, comes to us from staff writer Malcolm Gladwell,

who looked for insights in the literature of sociology. In 2015, we published his article called Thresholds of Violence, and he spoke about what he'd learned with the New Yorker's executive editor, Dorothy Wicenden. Malcolm started off by talking about a shooting that didn't happen, a potential tragedy that was caught just in time. There was this case of a kid named John Ladoo in a little town about an hour south of Minneapolis,

who is caught by police, by surest chance. The police happened upon him in his rented storage locker where they find all of the ingredients for explosives. and they take him in to the police station, and he confesses that he was planning to essentially blow up his high school to create the biggest school massacre ever. And he's not mentally ill. He's not abused, wasn't abused or traumatized or bullied.

He is an honor roll student. He's on the spectrum. He's a kid with what we used to call Asperger's. But he's in no way, like this sort of speaks volumes. His parents are incredibly alarmed because he's in police custody and they don't realize that, and the cops haven't called them. And the reason they're alarmed is it's past 9 o'clock, and he's never out past 9 o'clock. You know, he's that kind of dutiful a child.

And they had no idea he was compiling weapons and bomb-making materials? They knew that he made bombs, but then- And that didn't cause alarms? But wait a minute. That's not normal behavior? It's totally normal behavior. It is normal behavior. had been making little bombs. He made little bombs, not big bombs. Kids have been playing

with chemistry sets and making bombs for as long as there have been chemistry sets. I can name you editors of the New Yorker, and you can probably guess who they are. Who made bombs as kids? This is a normal thing for adolescents to do, to experiment with explosives. You know, there's, especially adolescent boys. So his parents really thought he was completely normal. There was no problem. He thought he was a science geek, which is what he is. He was, in fact, in what comes clear in his confessions. is that his interest in killing other people is minimal. He has barely even thought about that. So what motivates him?

And he also, by the way, did differentiate himself very clearly from Adam Lanza. He said, I am not Adam Lanza. Yeah, no, no, no. Well, he wasn't, to my mind, it's unclear whether he even would have gone through with it had he not been caught. he got obsessed with the technical question of what it would take to blow up a school successfully. And he was particularly obsessed with Columbine. And as he points out, Columbine is a failure. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold intended to blow up their school in Littleton, Colorado, and Columbine High School and failed.

And that's why they started shooting everyone, right? So in this purely kind of narrow, obsessive way, he's just trying to solve the technical problem that has bedeviled his predecessors. Could you talk a little bit about this sociologist you wrote about who studied riot behavior as a form of social contagion? And you apply his theories to the evolution of school shootings. What do they have in common? You know, a riot builds among a number of people in one time and place. These are the acts almost always of solitary geeks, as you say, who are working through their own obsessions. How do you compare those two phenomena?

Yeah. Mark Granovetter is the name of one of the great, if not the greatest American sociologists of the last 50 years. And he had a theory about riots, which is the mistake when you look at a riot is to assume that every rider has the same set of motivations and that every rider is identical. Imagine we've got one person who's a bit of a radical, and he's really upset about something, and he throws a rock through a window. He doesn't need anyone else around to do that first. He's willing to act on his own as the first guy. He has, what Grand Re would say, a threshold of zero. He requires no other person to go before him to do a radical act.

Someone else might watch this and say, oh, I'm going to join in. That person would never have acted if they were the first, but they'll act if someone else goes first. They have a threshold of one. Then there's someone else who's a little more conservative. They would never be the first in. They would never even be the second in. But they would be the third in, threshold of three. And he goes all the way up, if you have a ride of 100 people,

you could hypothetically have a group of 100 people, each of whom had a different threshold, ranging from zero to 99. The 99th person in is my mother, right? She's the person. My mother would not be the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, But if absolutely every one of her cronies from church were rioting, she might riot. Have you told her that? I don't think she'd be happy to hear that at all.

No. Well, actually, my mother would probably say she was in the 70s. But that's a really very different way of understanding a riot. So what I, when I read that, I thought, oh, this is really interesting because we see the same thing with school shootings. How so? That's what I wanted to pin you down. Like, take one of these school shooters. Where do they fit? it in this paradigm. So John Ladue, when we compare John Ladue, the kid I was writing about last year, to the kids who were doing school shootings in the early 90s, it's night and day. The first, if you take a look at the list of the first six major school shootings in this country, or the one's

leading up to Columbine, what you see are kids with profound psychosis, kids who had the most brutal childhoods imaginable. I mean, you just cannot imagine, you know, how bad they're, or kids who fit the clinical definition of psychopaths. Eric Harris is a textbook psychopaths. I mean, there is nothing normal about that kid. So in the beginning, you see these kind of florid indices of pathology. But as, but it's how we get to John LaD. do. So he's like number three who would be joining the riot? It's not a perfect, you know, you can't do the perfect sequence like Veneveter has, but I think you can observe in a very general way over time the fact that the longer this phenomenon persists, the more likely it is

for someone who is relatively normal to participate. How big a problem is the availability of guns? This is such a huge part of our political debate. Well, you know, those who say that you can solve this problem with gun control are engaging in a fantasy. Can you prevent some cases of this by locking up all the guns? Sure. Is that politically possible in the near term in the United States? No. So my problem with the gun control argument is that it so grossly simplifies what's going on here that this is, you know, we had tons and tons of guns in this country and no school shootings for a long time. So school shootings are not a necessary or inevitable consequence of having lots of guns. What we're looking at here is a powerful, contagious adolescent cultural pathology

that has used the availability of guns to extend its reach. Now, let me say one crucial thing here. This should in no way undermine the importance of gun control. There. That's what I'm ready to say. This is a gun control can solve the much bigger problem of the kind of unpremeditated shootings done in the heat of passion or drunkenness or drug use that claim the lives of tens of thousands of Americans every year. That's the reason to ban guns.

School shootings are a wholly separate and more complex phenomenon. Let's not muddy the waters by trying to extend an incredibly powerful and important social initiative to this specific difficult issue of social issues. So what do you say then to mothers and fathers of teenage boys who might be interested in building little bombs or who have an obsession with guns? That too is a very common phenomenon. Is there nothing to do to alleviate the contagion to bring it down, bring it back? Well, I do think that we should explore ways of making experimentation with bombs and guns socially safe. So instead of stopping it, you should do the opposite. In other words, there is, you reacted with alarm when I talked about how adolescent boys like to make bombs.

I have two girls. Yes, that's right. But our response should be the opposite. it should be like, this is a phase that many adolescents and boys go through. They're genuinely and legitimately fascinating with these. And by the way, the people who built, played with their chemistry sets and blew things up as children, many of them went on to be... Great chemists.

Great chemists. They, you know, they contributed to some of the greatest scientific successes of the 20th century. So, you know, this impulse can be channeled in very positive directions. Let's do that, as opposed to denying that it exists. I will also say that, you know, if you were a 17-year-old in the United States, anywhere from, you know, the First World War through to the end of the draft in the early 70s, your desire to play with guns as an adolescent was satisfied when you got drafted. And that ended. And I'm not, I wonder whether this isn't a kind of unintended consequence of the end of compulsory military service. Interesting.

Thank you so much, Malcolm. Thank you. That was staff writer Malcolm Gladwell. You can find his article Thresholds of Violence at New Yorker.com and its most recent book is David and Goliath. He spoke with the New Yorker's Dorothy Wickenden. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick. As we head into the primary season, the Democratic Party is expressing a lot of optimism. But to be sure, there are many unresolved issues in play having to do with impeachment, the election of 2016, and much, much more. As Mark Lilla sees it, the Democrats' troubles predate the 2016 election. In fact, they go back decades. Lila is a self-described liberal and a Columbia professor of the humanities. In his book, The Once in Future Liberal, he argues that identity politics on the left

have been responsible for sidelining the Democratic Party in elections. Now, this is an argument that infuriates a lot of liberals, which I think was deliberate on his part because the once-in-future liberal aims to change, how Democrats think. I talk with Mark Lila after the book came out in August of 2017. There is a quote recently that Steve Bannon, of all people, deliver it. The Democrats, the longer they talk about identity politics, I've got them. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats. And you have said it works for

them, it being identity politics, it doesn't work for us. And there seems to be some link, not that I'm saying your politics by any chance are the same as Steve Bannon's, but you're saying a similar thing, aren't you? I just think it's an objective fact. I mean, he has no reason to lie about this. And the past two generations of our politics, I think demonstrates exactly that that works for their side, and it doesn't work for our side for all kinds of reasons. Now, that is not to say that we don't talk about identity. To understand any social problem in this country, you have to understand identity. And we're more aware of that than ever, and that's been a very good thing.

But to address those problems with politics, we have to abandon the rhetoric of difference in order to appeal to what we share so that people who don't. share this identity, somehow can have a stake and feel something that other people are experiencing. To give you an example, I'm not a black motorist. I will never be a black motorist. I don't know what it's like to look in the rearview mirror of a car and see the lights flashing and feel my stomach churn, right? But I am a citizen and that person is a fellow citizen. And if we can make the case that citizens in this country, that there are citizens in this country who can't just go for a drive without being worried about this and they won't be

equally protected by the law, I think I can make the case to people who aren't black that that's a terrible thing, right? And so I want to frame the issue in terms of basic values and principles that we share in order to establish sympathy and empathy. and identification with someone else. Mark, what are you asking African-Americans to do? Be a little less specific, a little more polite somehow? You're asking them to be less aggressive in their demand for justice, whether it's on the road or on the street?

I'm not quite... This is where I understand the overall yearning for a more generalized rhetoric of us, of liberal values, of civil rights, I'm not sure why you have the disdain you do, the suspicion that you do for a group like Black Lives Matter, that you're saying that they are going about it in all the wrong way, or unless I'm misunderstanding. Well, I mean, to read the full passage of what I said about Black Lives Matter, I said Black Lives Matter is a textbook example of how not to build solidarity. There's no denying that by publicizing and protesting police mistreatment of African Americans,

the movement mobilized supporters and delivered a wake-up call to every American with a conscience. I'm totally on board with that, right? So what did Black Lives Matter do that you're, at best, ambivalent about and very critical, really? Right, and then I say, but there's no denying that the movement's decision to use as a treatment to build a general indictment of American society

in its law enforcement institutions and to use Mao-Mao tactics to put down dissent and demand a confession of sins in public penitents, Played into the hands of the Republican mark. Mau Mau Mau tactics. Are you familiar? Are you? Of course I remember.

What was, you know, what was that confrontation they had with Hillary Clinton, if not that, right? They were shouting down people at various venues. No, those are Mao tactics, sure. You're comfortable with that phrase? Sure. I mean, you know, Ma' Mao tactics. I'm also thinking of. No, I remember the opening of Tom Wolf piece.

Tom Wolf, right? Some of the criticism that's aimed at your book has less to do with the generalized demand for more common politics and a desire to win than it is for a certain tonal thing. There's a tone to the book that you have been offended by politics on campus in a way that seems outsized. Can you address that? What's been your experience on campus of identity politics that offends you? Well, to begin with, what leads to my frustration and my tone is that I'm sick of noble defeats. I'm tired of losing. I'm sickened by the fact that Donald Trump is in power right now, and not just that, but that Republicans control two-thirds of our state legislatures, two-thirds of our governorships, 24 states outright.

They win two more. They can call a constitutional convention. To my mind, that is the biggest threat to every... Every group that Democrats care about, that's the most important threat. And it's impossible to have both at once. You can't have a winning strategy without maintaining some semblance of a concentration on identity. Well, when it comes to the distinction I'm trying to make between analyzing a social problem and developing a political program in order to win power.

You know, people who are in movement politics fail to see the distinction, I think, because identity politics is maximizing. That's how you succeed. You see this as the only issue, right? There's a difference between speaking truth to power and seizing power to defend the truth. And those require very different things, right? Unless I misread your book, you seem to say that in the interest of winning, and politics is about, power, ultimately, that the Democratic side ought to think about abandoning certain issues, certain kinds of rhetoric in order to win.

But abandoning certain things like full-throated opposition to bathroom bills will mean that certain people, transgender people, some of the most vulnerable people in our society, will get hurt. How does a party go about sacrificing people on the altar of the general good? Well, my main point is this, and I want to get this across, we can. cannot do anything for these groups we care about if we do not hold power. It is just talk. Therefore, our rhetoric in campaigning must be focused on winning so then we can help these people. An election is not about self-expression. It's not a time to display everything we believe about

everything. It's a contest. And once you hold power, then you can do the things you want to do. So your rhetoric has to be mobilizing, and it's got to mobilize... But you can imagine how outraged a transgender person would feel about such a... Of course, of course, and the situation of transgender people can be

very, very difficult, especially young people who feel trapped in a body and suicide rates are terrible, and homeless rates are terrible. But let's be concrete about this. Transgender people make up less than one half of one percent of the country. There's no

electoral group that we're trying to mobilize. That's not to say that we don't want to help them and focus on that when we analyze our problems and when we get into power. But that is not how you seize power in this country, especially in the states we need to win. Look, we have the two coasts. We need to go to the middle of the country. It's a question of vision. And, you know, what was extraordinary about Reagan is that up in terms of,

Until 1980, the Republican Party had all these warring factions and they didn't have one message. And once Reagan offered this vision of the very simple vision of the country, all of those groups, the differences between those groups became much less important because they all saw themselves in this vision. And that's what has to happen to us, that we need to be able to put forward a vision so that African Americans look at and say, those are the principles I stand for. And white working class people look at it too, and they are thinking so much about their differences. Mark, you mentioned Joe Biden as somebody who gets it. Joe Biden was probably the clearest and foremost voice for gay marriage in the Obama administration.

Oh, of course, yeah. But how do we get gay marriage? It was not just that there was a fiat from above, on the contrary, is that this change happened socially. It happened in families. It happened at dinner tables when children came out to their parents. Sometimes parents came out to their kids, right? But it also happened because you had people in the streets shouting, we're here, we're queer, which is something in the book that you say, we'll only get you a pat on the head. Didn't that help get power to?

Didn't Stonewall help get power? Civil rights movement helped get power? That's, again, just to focus on one particular issue and one particular group. And if each group is just thinking about itself, it's not thinking like a party. Party politics right now has to come first because we cannot help any of these people if we don't get elected. And as long as we think of ourselves as groups and think now as the Democratic Party is, which has me worried, that now they have to just add another group or shift to another group, which is the white working class, we're not going to get anywhere. Mark, you've described a kind of scheme in our recent politics of two, you call them dispensations, the Roosevelt dispensation and the Reagan dispensation.

Is it your hope somehow to return to the Roosevelt dispensation, the idea that government exists to solve problems? No, that can't be done, because our situation is very different. To begin with, we've learned that the government can only do so much and that certain programs don't work, and we understand that better. The economic situation is completely different. We have a globalized economy. It's no longer possible to organize labor and the way we used to. Women are part of the workforce.

All kinds of things have changed. But our basic principles, I think, haven't changed. And that is that we stick together. Citizens are not roadkill. We take care of each other. And secondly, that we stand for the equal protection under the law. And if we can only articulate what those two principles might mean in the present, I think we would be able to move on from our obsession with or a self-limitation to identity

in order to reach out to people we haven't been able to reach out to. Mark Lila, thank you very much. Okay, that was fun. Thanks. Mark Lila is the author of The Once and Future Liberal and a professor of humanities at Columbia University. I spoke with him in August 2017. I'm David Remnick. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and that's it for now. I hope you enjoy the show. I hope you join us next week.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Cario, Rianne Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Filman, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, Sarah Nix, Mithelie Rowe, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Sharon Chetty, Michelle Moses, Emily Mann, and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Turina Endowment Fund.