"Abomination"

"Cheng is not just a sophomore... but a student who has made us realize overnight that everyone at Tunghai is our family, no matter how downcast or happy they appear to be. We love them, but we don’t love them enough..."

That is a quotation from a letter to Tunghai University's faculty, staff and students appearing in today's Taipei Times house editorial. It is a remarkable passage in two ways. It is at once an implicit, and in my judgement, pretentious claim to collective guilt and also an attempt to soften the anticipated blow of public blame attribution to Tunghai University.

It is a pretentious claim to collective guilt because it pretends to know why Cheng Chieh (鄭捷) ended up committing his monstrous crimes, namely, insufficient "love", and in particular, insufficient love from faculty, staff and students. Yet how could the Principal possibly know that? It only takes a momentary reflection on the intractable uncertainties and explanatory deficiencies in the field of psychology to be appraised of just how malproportioned a claim that is.

And then there is the question of collective guilt - how can any degree of blame be attributed to staff, students and faculty throughout the University given that many of them will not even have known Cheng or had the slightest bit of contact with him? Even amongst those that did have contact with him - his classmates and lecturers - how can they be blamed unless one presumes that they ought to have known what Cheng would eventually do? Should they have taken the alleged fact that Cheng tended to keep to himself as evidence that he might kill people? Students in a science department are in the process of being trained both not to presume, and to take pains to recognize the limits of their knowledge and the uncertainties involved in prediction. The contradiction may escape the Principal of Tunghai University and the editor of the Taipei Times, but there is no good reason why it should, as it is not by any means a subtle one.

Finally, the Principal's quoted assertions seem to carry an implicit view of love somewhat redolent of discussions of financial income, i.e. as a "resource" to be distributed by all faculty, staff and students toward one another equally, or if not equally then at least without discrimination. Hence even anti-social types are to receive such "love". This strikes me as particularly warped for the simple reason that to love something or someone presupposes attraction which is necessarily particular and thus discriminatory. Love is a value that must emerge naturally between freely interacting individuals.

Further down in the same Taipei Times editorial...

"The words showed how the school has taken responsibility. It provides a stark contrast to other recent examples of statements put out by officials, politicians and media commentators which mercilessly condemn Cheng... They treat Cheng as if he was not a national of this nation."

It is typical of the editor of the Taipei Times to imply that mercy is owed to Cheng merely on account of him having been born in Taiwan - as if birthplace alone confers upon one a moral condition deserving of mercy.

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On the question of why Cheng Chieh (鄭捷) committed the crimes he did on Wednesday, I will offer a different sort of conjecture to the usual pointless run through the "nature-nurture" valley of piled-up "maybes".

My general take on this is not specific to Taiwan. It seems to me that a culture in which values are coerced into prescribed forms instead of finding their natural resolution in the lives of individuals is eventually going to corrode individual morality. If the values toward which an individual acts are forcibly removed from him, or forcibly thrust upon him, then it seems reasonable to conjecture that his sense of control will be undermined to a corresponding extent. At the furthest reach of this friction lies the emergence of psychotic nihilists among those already susceptible to the abyss by psychological profile.

Yet the source of the problem is the insidious scope of institutionalized coercion in all its manifestations, from taxation, prohibition, confiscation and military conscription all the way through to compulsory education and on to the downstream behavioural and psychological habits of evasion, dissonance and doublethink this coercion engenders. It is perhaps ironic that the Principal of Tunghai University sees fit to encourage students, staff and faculty to "love" one another irrespective of their own valuations, as this partially reflects the kind of mechanism I am talking about: the crude attempt to manipulate values into prescribed forms and to thereby engineer the souls of a subject population.

Let us now take two observations: first, Cheng reportedly told police officers that "one of" his objectives was to receive the death penalty for his crime, so it seems clear that his crime was not only premeditated but was conceived in instrumental terms, i.e. as a means to the ostensible end of being condemned to State execution. Cheng was still a reasoning agent, even if the premises of his reasoning were invalid.

The second point is that his crime occurred outside of the city (Taichung) where he lived and studied and was committed against apparent strangers, people who could not have personally harmed him since neither he nor they knew each other. It therefore seems unlikely that he was motivated by revenge against specific people. Perhaps his "target" was the more diffuse notion of "society" in general? If so choosing the Taipei MRT would have made a certain amount of sense had he regarded Taipei as the society's "nerve centre" and the place most likely to raise his crime to the highest salience possible.

And now a question...

"Cheng told police that he had been planning on doing something huge that would shock society ever since he was a junior high school student..."

That quote would appear to indicate the depth at which whatever caused Cheng's problem occurred: since at least as far back as he was a pre-teen. What was his history, if it was not a history of abominable abuses?