Last week Pope Benedict XVI brought delightful news for the Jews. In his new book the pope personally exonerated Jews for being responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, denying that Jews shared collective guilt for the death of Their Lord. In this, he reiterated the repudiation of collective guilt by the Vatican, nearly fifty years ago, in 1965. On this matter, at least, there is to be no retreat.

Those of us who can remember the earlier repudiation will also remember the brilliant conniptions of Lenny Bruce. As Bruce admitted, “Alright, I’ll clear the air once and for all, and confess. Yes, we did it. I did it, my family. I found a note in my basement. It said: “We killed him, signed, Morty.” Tonight Morty can rest serenely.

The debate over Jewish complicity in the death of Christ, in contrast to the complicity of certain Jews, is a matter of no small significance, even if, as Bruce slyly commented the statute of limitations should be running out. Ultimately the issue is not about Jews and Jesus, but about the assignment of blame for creating a climate of violence.

When I teach freshmen, I begin my seminar on Scandal and Reputation by explaining to these students that sociology is the most dangerous of disciplines. We are the academic subject that through its very birthright trades in stereotypes. Our lineage demands that we discuss race, class, and gender. We do not – or do not only – talk about one black barber, a wealthy stockbroker, a woman of ill-repute, or some malevolent rebbe. Our call is to talk about people, and not persons. Social psychologists push the discipline to gather data from persons, but we analyze what we gathered as if it came from people.

This means that when Jared Lee Loughner went on a shooting rampage, we asked how he got that way. And when Jesus was nailed, we ask who is responsible for a climate of crucifixion. As a sociologist, I believe that our task is noble. It might have been Lenny’s Uncle Morty who was responsible, but the broader question is which social forces contributed to the climate in which the crucifixion was conducted, just as we asked about the shooting in Tucson.

Let me be clear, these questions should not lead to a drama of rebuke, punishment, and attack. But surely it is fair to consider how we should understand responsibility. Let us leave Jerusalem for the streets of Memphis. Forty-three years ago next month an assassin, James Earl Ray (surely admired with grim satisfaction by too many) murdered the Reverend Martin Luther King on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. If the Jews are washed of responsibility for Jesus, are white Southerners as well? Do they, too, receive a pass? Did the climate of racism and hatred in the former Confederacy contribute to the assassination of Dr. King or does the blame adhere to James Earl alone? Is there any responsibility to be shared for creating a climate in which violence occurs?

Collective guilt is a strange concept. It can’t be passed along like some genetic mutation. Surely no guilt adheres to unborn generations, but should a climate of hostility be forgotten or forgiven? Collective guilt is not the right term, but the beliefs and attitudes in Memphis 43 years ago deserve our consideration.

This week a committee of the House of Representative is considering the radicalization of Muslims in the United States. Not all, but some. The attacks on the World Trade Center are not the responsibility of Muslims in the United States and abroad, but we can ask whether the beliefs within radical Islam permitted these men to operate within a community, even while, like James Earl Ray, keeping their plans to themselves.

Individuals must be held responsible for their freely chosen behaviors, but they operate within communities that hold beliefs and provide the infrastructure for action. The man who pulls the trigger or who hammers the nail deserves blame. And no community deserves blame for the act itself. However, when we realize that acts depend on social climate, assigning responsibility to groups is both necessary and proper.

As Pope Benedict asserts, the “temple aristocracy” – a small coterie of elite Jews – was at fault for Jesus’ torment. But if we focus too tightly on any small coterie, we ignore those who listened with rapt attention and whose consent gave these elites their moral authority. Jerusalem, Memphis, Jiddah, Tucson: communities shape the action of individuals in ways that they may not even recognize. If we focus on the deed of the man, too often we miss the voice of the crowd.

Half a century ago, Tom Lehrer, our iconic musical satirist, paid ironic tribute to National Brotherhood Week. In introducing his cracked paean to tolerance, Lehrer asserted that ‘I know that there are people who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that.’ His grievance is all too common. We have resided for some time in an age that frets about hate speech, but when does distaste become hatred? And is sharp and personal talk bad for the polity? The shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords temporarily invigorated the debate over civility, but such moments have a way of not lasting. That was so January. Biting discourse draws attention and motivates both supporters and opponents.

In the immediate aftermath of the Tucson killings, some on the left focused their attention on those in the Tea Party who expressed vivid – and yes, offensive – animus for President Obama. There surely are those whose colorful language hides an absence of mindfulness. But, as conservatives knew well, their time for grievance would come soon. After all, we have a United States senator who titled his literary effort, Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot. And there was the backbench Democrat from Memphis who compared Republican tactics to Nazi propaganda. Hitler would have George Soros’ wealth if he could receive a tiny royalty for each use of his name or image.

Even more dramatic is the boisterous crowd of teachers on the mall in Madison, Wisconsin. Protesters are fighting for collective bargaining rights, and in the process compare their newly elected governor, Scott Walker, to Hosni Mubarak and worse. Others will judge the justice of the Badgers’ cause, but who has taught these demonstrators about the villains of history? By the way, as an Illinois resident, I welcome the fleeing Democratic state senators and urge them to pay our newly increased income tax, part of which will go to teachers’ pay.

The question is how concerned should we be with Governor Walker’s and President Obama’s detractors? What is hate speech? Is it just lusty talk? Is it something to reject and to fear? Or, is it the cornerstone of our rough-and-tumble republic, a democracy that our founders would recognize? When discussed by scholars, such as Jeffrey Goldfarb in Civility and Subversion, civility in the public sphere is often linked to the responsibilities of mainstream intellectuals (Walter Lippmann or John Dewey), but it can equally be extended to C. Wright Mills, Thomas Sowell, or Frances Fox Piven. These thinkers and writers have responsibilities to both lasting discourse as well as to immediate change. But issues of civility and incivility apply also to those who stand outside ivied gates – the Keith Olbermanns, Glenn Becks, Frank Riches, and Bill Kristols of this world.

In fact, there is very little evidence that impassioned rhetoric leads to violence. Admittedly not none, as the assassination of Lincoln, the beating of Senator Seward, or the murder of Yitzhak Rabin reminds us. But objections often seem more aesthetic than criminological. The transposition of scorn and dislike into hatred by those who object to hot talk is misleading, even when we are talking about what has been termed ‘group libel.’ A person who finds African-Americans witless, Jews mercenary, or bankers heartless denigrates the group, but perhaps the heated emotion of hatred does not apply. Maybe they don’t hate, but just scorn, which is different from hate.

As Tom Lehrer breezily suggested, objections to hate speech, when it comes to characterizing a group, can themselves be labeled hate speech. When examining objections to individuals the problem grows thornier still. Someone can object deeply to the president, any president, accusing him of leading the nation into an inescapable quagmire, a world of fascist or communist sympathies. Surely these claims reveal real dislike. As Emily Eisenberg and I once pointed out in comparing reactions to Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton (Tricky Dick and Slick Willie, in their sexualized identities), some leaders raise ire, often less for what they have done, than for who they are.

But it is hard to pin down hatred. A syllogism suggests that I judge critically, you dislike, and they hate. Still, even if one can find such hatred, perhaps we should see the commitment to discourse as opposed to violent action, as within the boundaries of civil society. The allegiance to debate reflects the principles of the Founders, it doesn’t deny them. Being engaged in left or right disruption – talk or action – can be handled by a confident society. Yes, legislators, justices, and government officials must find grounds for reaching agreement, but they can do this – and over centuries have done this – within a welter of voices. The more some say that things have changed, the more that we can say that they have remained the same.

So I am not dismayed about the absence of a congenial debate – even while I wish that those with whom I disagree would sit down and shut up. Throughout our history, tough talk has been common as Jefferson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Bush pere and fils can attest. Fiery talk doesn’t lead to fire, it leads to commitment and, sometimes, to social change. As sociologist William Gamson has pointed out, militant social movements tend to be more effective than mousy ones. Get up on the soapbox and shout, as long as there are those who are more pragmatic to do the hard lifting of compromise. Hosni Mubarak is just like . . . fill in the blank.

In these past few days, I have read and heard many responses to President Obama’s speech at the memorial service at the University of Arizona, including that of Jeff Goldfarb here at Deliberately Considered. While I agree with many of the encomiums to that speech – praise for its sincerity, civility, appeal to democracy, appreciation for individual lives – I am in a distinct minority in feeling that it was not altogether successful as a moment of high and consequential political rhetoric.

It was not the Gettysburg Address. Of course, it may seem unkind to compare Obama’s speech to that one of the ages by Lincoln, but I believe the tasks of that speech were similar to those of Lincoln and that it fell short of the mark. Public ceremonies of this type have unique challenges – memorialize the victims of violence, appeal to the better angels of the nation, re-establish the authority of the state, indicate a way forward.

The main issues involve choices of genre and structure. For me, Obama’s speech oscillated without adequate accounting or warning between the genres of private lamentation, religious homily, and political oration. Without an overarching structure that linked these genres together, their coming and going unsettled me as a listener. Was so much reference to scripture appropriate in a civil ceremony? Was so much detail about individual personalities befitting a national oration by a head of state?

The speech caused me to reflect on prior moments of national traumas that challenged leaders to make sense through collective reckoning. Traumas like wars and assassinations that resonate upwards, from individuals through families and communities, to the larger social and political collectivity call forth formal responses by heads of state. And these responses transform the traumas into history. Hegel linked history itself to the state: “It is the State [he wrote] which first presents a subject-matter that is not only adapted to the prose of History, but involves the production of such History in the very progress of its own being.”   The state thus views itself as the central character of history, with an agency and a political body of its own, capable of being wounded.  The lives of individuals, whether caught up as soldiers in war, or as workers in a ruptured economy, or as victims of terrorist attacks, find themselves and their individual points of view eclipsed by that of the state itself. And this is true regardless of how central to the state’s very progress these individuals are.

The speech by President Obama last Wednesday night made me reflect specifically on Lincoln’s magnificent “Remarks” at the ceremonies dedicating the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.  In his brilliant analysis of The Gettysburg Address, Garry Wills writes of Abraham Lincoln’s adaptation of the Greek Epitaphios or Funeral Oration to the task of dedicating a military cemetery on the site of the former American Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg.  Of this classical template, Wills writes that it provided a “prose form of the Greek orations that was meant to be bracing after the sung lament (threnos) of the burial rite…The prose form is itself a return to political life, a transition from family mourning to the larger community’s sense of purpose.”  Lincoln built his speech up from a series of oppositions – life and death, word and deed, nature and society – and managed to extol the individual soldiers and their deeds without naming or describing them. And he ends with the transcendent frame of “the government of the people shall not perish from the earth.”

From sung lamentation to prosodic oratory, the State claims its transcendent purview. The State thus has its genres and can, at moments like that at Gettysburg, deploy them effectively. But we need to assess other historical moments of crisis, like that of the last weeks after the shootings in Tucson, in which the line between the purview and prerogatives of the state and those of individuals and families is not so clear cut, when the “right” genre for representing historical events does not so easily present itself, and when the confusion is largely a function of discord over the meaning of an event in real time.

The task then becomes doubly difficult – to fashion a language of interpretation that moves to that collective level of history but that also takes seriously the work of threnos (lamentation).  Greek tragedy, another genre, found that middle way, largely because the families whose actions were performed were literally the families heading the state. And tragedies like Antigone were especially tuned to this combining, focusing on the conflicting demands of family and state. But the language of “family” can be expansive or restrictive as given society chooses to interpret it.  Bifurcating the prerogatives of the private sphere and those of the public sphere can ultimately entail a loss of sympathy and collegiality in the most expansive meaning of the terms, that is in terms Hannah Arendt would put forward. Rather, it is possible to highlight the trajectory from threnos (lamentations of the family) to epitaphios (funerary oration) that carries forward the apprehension of the singularity of the one who is missing or mourned even in a genre that expresses the needs of the collectivity. I believe that this was Obama’s aim, and why he spent considerable time reflecting on the details of the lives of the individuals killed in Tucson. For many listeners, Obama’s speech hit the mark, moving them emotionally and drawing them together collectively. With the Gettysburg Address in the back of my mind, I found myself wanting more.

Laura Pacifici is a senior at Brown University concentrating in Political Science. A contributor to an international publication, Voices, she is particularly interested in domestic policy issues and has a forthcoming article on the criminal justice system. After graduating in May 2011, Laura plans on a career in law and politics. Jeff

Almost as quickly as the news media insinuated that vitriolic political rhetoric contributed to Jared Loughner’s killing spree in Tucson, these same reporters and commentators were sharply criticized for having pointed to political explanations. While David Brooks and others such as Charles Blow in their most recent columns were disturbed by these developments, I am not surprised that the news media all but ignored –as Brooks pointed out– psychological explanations in its quest to understand Loughner’s act. This, I believe, is a result of the fact that increasingly we are turning to political commentators such as Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly and away from Diane Sawyer and Brian Williams to deliver our news.

In relying more on “news commentators” and less on traditional “news broadcasters”, we have contributed to the merging of “news” and “commentary.” Commentators on the left and the right know what their niche and partisan viewers expect of them; their task is to fulfill these expectations. This leads to a creative, if unfortunate interaction:  Major events come with a prepackaged political bent. It is no surprise that, burdened by the demands of the 24-hour news cycle, these commentators would respond to an event like the massacre in Tucson using politically based explanations.

The news media is not immune from our polarized political climate. Nor is it immune from the increasingly inflammatory rhetoric used by today’s partisans to smear their opponents. Jeff Goldfarb in his recent post discussed the nature of this rhetoric. He pointed to the relentless use of the term “Obamacare” as a modern-day example of what Orwell in his canonical 1984 called “newspeak”, which Goldfarb describes as a language that conceals and manipulates rather than reveals.

By tuning in night after night to the Keiths and the Bills, to the MSNBCs and the FOXs, our own demands have forced the news media to utilize such discourse. Viewers and readers are now trained to expect narratives with heroes and villains and causality that have political elements rather than a strict recounting of the facts of the case.

When disaster strikes, especially involving our nation’s politicians, media commentators and journalists are forced to respond to our need to place blame and attribute causality. President Obama in his speech in Tucson touched on this problem, explaining that “it is part of our nature to demand explanations – to try to impose some order on the chaos.” Obama also recognized another tendency that today feels just as natural: “we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do.” The news media and their viewers together succumb to this tendency, which places us in a perpetual Catch-22: we’re increasingly becoming frustrated by accusatory and politicized news reporting, but we are not willing to abandon our political commentators.

Although we will probably never know what motivated Jared Loughner to carry out his killing spree –and whether, for example, Brooks is right that psychological explanations more appropriately account for Loughner’s act– what we can be sure of is that we, along with the commentators we love and love to hate, have helped to ensure that the news media interprets major events through combative partisan lenses. We pay a price for our own reliance on political commentators: our news is politicized, shaped, and framed before it is delivered.

Barack Obama is the foremost orator in my life time. During the Presidential campaign, I thought that this may be the case. The first two years of his Presidency raised some doubts. I knew the talent was there, but would the talent be used effectively to enable him to be the great President that I thought he could and hoped he would be? But after his speech at the Memorial Service for the Victims of the Shooting in Tucson, Arizona, I have no doubt. No other public figure could have accomplished what I think President Obama accomplished last night.

He spoke as the head of state, not as a partisan candidate or leader, and a deeply divided country became, at least momentarily, united in response to his beautifully crafted and delivered address. He enabled us to grieve together, helped us try to make sense together, and challenged us to respectfully act together, despite our differences.

The power of the speech was revealed by the reaction to it. Even Glenn Beck recognized Obama’s accomplishment, and publicly thanked the President for giving the best speech of his career.   And the instant analysis of the panel at Fox News praised the excellence and effectiveness of the President’s inspirational address.   Charles Krauthammer concluded the discussion, recognizing that the President appeared and spoke as the head of state, not as an ideological politician, and maintained that it may have a significant effect on Obama’s fortunes. “I am not sure it’s going to have a trivial effect on the way he is perceived.” This from one of Obama’s major critics.

Of course Obama’s supporters, including most of the people attending the service in Tucson at the vast McKale Memorial Center at the University of Arizona, were deeply moved. My friends and I at the Theodore Young Community Center were especially pleased that our guy did so well.

And the commentators of the major newspapers and blogs were almost universally in agreement of the speeches inventiveness and excellence. Dionne, Robinson, Thiessen , Gerson at the Washington Post , Collins and the Times editorial voice at The New York Times , John Dickerson at Slate , John Guardiano at FrumForum, and, in a most interesting acknowledgement of the rarity of Obama’s achievement, Rick Brookhiser at the National Review.

Obama is probably the only major politician who became a national figure because of one speech, his 2004 keynote address to the Democratic National Convention.

When his campaign for the Presidency was most severely challenged by the politics of race surrounding his relationship with his minister Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr., he gave the most important speech on the problem of race given by a candidate for the Presidency, as I analyzed in a previous post.

Now he has given a remarkable speech that marked a solemn occasion, by remembering with specificity those who died, those who survived and those who acted heroically. And then he addressed the political divisions in the country, most recently concerning whether the heated hateful rhetoric (much of it directed at the policies and person of Obama) has contributed to the tragedy . He did this in a way that made his most principled point for civility, uniting his divided audience:

“But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized -– at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who happen to think differently than we do -– it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we’re talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds. (Applause.)…

For the truth is none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack. None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped these shots from being fired, or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man’s mind. Yes, we have to examine all the facts behind this tragedy. We cannot and will not be passive in the face of such violence. We should be willing to challenge old assumptions in order to lessen the prospects of such violence in the future. (Applause.) But what we cannot do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on each other. (Applause.) That we cannot do. (Applause.) That we cannot do.”(link)

In the days immediately following the Tucson Massacre, the divide was between those who argued that the violence of political rhetoric, specifically of the right, was somehow related to the Tucson massacre, and those who argued that this was unfounded and divisive at best, a blood libel, as Sarah Palin unfortunately put it.  The response to a national tragedy was an even more divided nation. Obama turned the table.

He agreed with Palin, et.al., that we will likely never know what motivated Jared Lee Loughner and that the nature of our political discourse was not likely an immediate cause, but he disagreed with the Palin (who repeatedly reminded her audience during the Presidential campaign that Barack Hussein Obama palled around with terrorists) about what the proper nature of political discourse should be. He struck a blow in favor of civility.  His speech  makes incivility more than unpleasant.  It is less likely now to yield practical results. He marked a standard for future action that all Americans applauded, and this will have consequences. I agree with Charles Krauthammer: it’s not going to have a trivial effect.

Now it will be interesting to see how the Republicans advance the ‘‘Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act.’’ Perhaps they will have the decency to at least change the name of this meaningless gesture.