Rage, even if defensible, is not enough

Thinking about the shooting of United Healthcare exec Brian Thompson has sent me off down an intellectual rabbit hole which might (or might not) be interesting to someone besides me.

Let me start by admitting that my instinctive response to the murder was "Dude had it coming." For-profit health insurance is an abomination. No matter how nice these individuals may be to dogs and children, the people who run it have chosen cash over human decency. "Serious" opinionaters like Zeynep Tufekci or the Washington Post editorial board tried to cool such passions.

A good Facebook friend put my more considered sentiments well:

If you shoot a business executive because you don't like the way capitalism operates, that's an act of terrorism.

I totally understand the current schadenfreude. I have to talk myself out of it.

I understand that pacifism is unnatural and a truly depressing number of people scorn it.

Still, just because I say, "Every day without guillotines surprises me," doesn't mean I'm honing a blade.

Okay, my better angels know better and I inconsistently aspire to envision and build a nonviolent society and life. I have not personally been much victimized by the health insurance racket. But the sheer obscenity of killing sick people to make a buck while bloviating about mission and purpose hits me deep.

That said, I'm thrown back into thinking about another era when robber barons needed a lot of security to survive contact with the people they were grinding down and throwing away for their profits. In particular, this apparently ideologically-muddled Thompson murder made me think about Alexander Berkman, the anarchist who attempted to shoot and then knife the Carnegie Steel baron Henry Clay Frick in 1892. Labor historian Erik Loomis reminds about what Berkman had against Frick.

Let’s start with a basic fact: Henry Clay Frick deserved to be murdered.

This was a truly awful human being responsible for the deaths of a whole lot of people. First, there was his culpability in the Johnstown Flood, where the negligence of he and his friends led to over 2200 dead people.

Admittedly, he didn’t order their killings, but he also just didn’t care whether they lived or died.

Second, there was his actions at Homestead. To review this famous incident, Frick was the second in command to Andrew Carnegie at Carnegie Steel. Frick hated unions. I mean, all Gilded Age capitalists hated unions but Frick truly despised them.

He once personally evicted a worker from company housing by picking him up and throwing him in a creek. The world would have been better off without Henry Clay Frick in it. But that doesn’t excuse Berkman’s actions.

... [Berkman] didn’t know any Homestead workers and ... didn’t consult with any Homestead workers.

Berkman was an ideological anarchist of a late 19th century type, acting on a pseudo-political creed that celebrated violence as a prelude to revolution and a sort of eschaton. That creed, in its incoherence, was not so different from the manifestos of the Unabomber and apparently suspect Luigi Mangione.

Because Frick survived, Berkman also survived, convicted of the assault and imprisoned for 14 years in Western Penitentiary of Pennsylvania, in Pittsburgh. After his release, he published  Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist.  

This book is a sort of coming of age story, the record of Berkman's overcoming his highly theoretical idealism, yet finding a more mature identity and stance toward the injustice of Gilded Age capitalism.

He recounts the sheer dreariness and hardship of prison which almost drove him to suicide. 

He felt distain and disgust toward the other poor and broken men who were his fellow prisoners. They weren't the class heroes of his imagination. They too were victims of the system, but he couldn't identify with them.

"They are not of my world," he writes. "I would aid them", he says, being "duty bound to the victims of social injustice. But I cannot be friends with them ... they touch no chord in my heart." Quoted in Wikipedia

Growing up meant becoming able to appreciate and interact with these fellow flawed humans as something more than abstract victims of the class struggle. He had plenty of time to accomplish this before winning early release. He got out in time to be caught up in America's World War I panic about homefront immigrant subversives and being deported to the new Soviet Russia. He and his partner Emma Goldman didn't find anything liberatory about that experience either.

Berkman's memoir is a classic of political evolution. I highly recommend it.