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For those who are not aware, today is—besides International Weed Smoking Day and Hitler's Birthday—the 10th anniversary of the "incident" at Columbine High School. It's an odd trifecta of coinciding anniversaries and, added to the gloomy weather here, unhelpful in distilling any sort of positive vibes from the day. This particular Columbine anniversary also means that it's been ten years since I graduated high school, as I was also a senior when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold attempted to "out-mayhem" Tim McVeigh's demolition of Oklahoma City's Murrah Federal Building.
What? Did you just ask me to define "out-mayhem"? Why didn't I just call it a "school shooting" like so many people have done for the past ten years? Well, I'll leave the nuts and bolts of this to journalist Dave Cullen, whose new, exhaustively researched book, Columbine explains nearly everything you could possibly want to know about this seminal closing event of 20th century America. I say "nearly everything" because there are some things nobody will ever know about this, but Mr. Cullen seems to know all the rest.
Having come of age during a period of media-induced fear and hype over school shootings I'm sure I'm not alone in being a bit morbidly fascinated with them. Combine that with my sociology background and picking up this book was a no-brainer. I had done some minor researching into Columbine a year or so ago and it was Cullen's original stories for Slate that initially caught my attention (though I didn't make the connection when I first picked up the book) and had me thinking differently about the whole ordeal. Columbine wasn't a school shooting perpetrated by some disaffected loners; this was a botched massacre whose plan was hatched by one popular, intelligent—though psychopathic—kid with an intense hatred of mankind and his suicidally unstable friend.
The evidence for this is now overwhelming, but it wasn't easy unearthing it. Though Cullen was there from the beginning, he outlines how the county sheriff mangled the investigation and did a similarly poor job trying to cover up that fact. Many myths surrounding the shootings that are still taken as gospel are exposed to extreme scrutiny and none of them survive. The mass media—a few local papers excepted—did an incredibly poor job of separating facts from a good storyline and it was those early mistakes faulty judgment that spiraled chaotically into the school shooting narrative familiar today.
Cullen's book is valuable not only as a history of the actual event and a record of all the threads that became knotted this day ten years ago, but also as social reading of mass media and information dissemination. The narrative took on a life of its own that defied clearly contrary evidence and fed back into the ongoing tale of sterile, fearful suburbia. Utilizing the personal effects of the two killers, Cullen revealed the true nature of Eric and Dylan, the psychopath and the seeker who practically dared the folks around them to discover their heinous plot. The two who, because of the faulty profiling of the "school-shooter type", were able to plan their attack because, frankly, most people never suspected them as the loners ready to snap (one mother, whose warnings were ignored, excepted).
Columbine is one of the best non-fiction works I've read in a while and there's little doubt that Cullen poured all his energy into making it a work of art. His portraits of all the involved parties, from the parents to administrators to teachers to fellow students to law enforcement, are sympathetic and caustic in all the right proportion. And while there are clearly parties that are more at fault than others, Cullen never sinks to any immature blame games. The descriptions of psychopathy are engrossingly chilling and the pain of all the affected families and individuals bites the reader no matter how much you try and disengage. A commendable achievement in journalism and a noteworthy work of social history.
Yesterday, Jonah Lehrer (of Seed Magazine) posted a great find from The Boston Globe's "Ideas" section about brain functioning under different competitive scenarios. It appears that humans retain their competitive nature only up until a point and that when a group becomes too large to be competitive within, the brain essentially shuts itself down.
In one study researchers observed different sized groups taking test like the SATs and found that in small groups students performed much better than those in large rooms with many other test-takers. It appears that when in small groups, a participant is able to better size up their competition. Test-takers who were housed in a large room had lower scores, presumably because they were overwhelmed by the amount of competition they were up against.
An unrelated study looked at similar phenomena from a different angle. In a supermarket a display of jams was set up for customer taste-tests. When only 6 competing jams were used, sales increased among the products displayed. Then, when 30 different jams were displayed for the same purposes, people basically wanted nothing to do with them. There was such an array of choice that their brains short-circuited attempting to make any sort of decision. However, the study also found that when products were placed into categories—however arbitrary—people had a much easier time choosing a product or making a decision.
These findings seem completely plausible to me judging by my own behavior as well as what I've seen in my non-scientific daily observations. Give people small groups in which to operate and they find it much easier to orient themselves. I know in dealing with music, as seemingly arbitrary as "categorizing" bands and sounds can be, it is really helpful for our brains. Providing a label creates a foundation from which to analyze and associate; from that beginning one can make all sorts of further connections and establish their own web of knowledge. If you were to take a random assortment of bands and have someone start picking out the "best" (for lack of better example) bands in that pile, that person would have a panic attack. But if you had them organize that pile somehow and then pick out certain elements, they'd have a much easier time.
As far as competition goes, some commenters wondered how professional athletes (as one example) operated on such a high level in the face of this research. I contend that the best of the best don't even consider most other humans viable competition, and thus render them out of the picture. From a young age they've most likely—and clearly I'm assuming here—picked out a few other talented individuals against whom they could compete on a high level. At each stage (high school, college, pro, etc.) the categorizations of who matches their skill is refined. I think the same could be said of any endeavor, whether it's basketball, soccer, painting, poetry, furniture design, gardening, politics, etc. Folks who engage in these activities who have a desire to be good at them always find markers against which to measure their competition.
Back to the original point of the study, although this kind of competition in humans appears obvious, I think it's great that science has shown it to be an observable phenomenon and non just some folksy, anecdotal thing. Also, the fact that there are clear limits to the efficacy of competition amongst individuals is a great thing. Now, when some economists come along and make the claim that more and more actors in a market is good, we have this evidence to back up the counter-argument. Some competition is a marvelous thing, too much competition is a waste of everyone's time.
It's depressingly rainy outside and I can't decide if I want to have band practice tonight or watch the Celtics game. I hate choices. Speaking of!...
I got a new scanner for my birthday, so I'll be making good use of it with new segments like "Fromm of the Day" and whatever else I find around that makes good scanner fodder:
