 The Writing on the Screen: A General Semantics Reading of Cho Seung-Hui’s Breakdown
A Meditation on the Meaning of the Virginia Tech Shooting Spree
On April 16th, 2007, the now infamous Cho Seung-Hui went on a shooting spree at Virginia Tech University killing 27 students and 5 teachers and wounding 15 others before shooting himself (Kleinfield). Immediately the chatter began that Cho may have played video games. The self-made video he mailed to NBC featuring himself dressed up as his avatar Ax Ismael, brandishing multiple weapons, and posturing to the camera like a violent 3D-game hero in a first-person shooter game certainly suggested a correlation. By the end of the week the suspicions were confirmed. The New York Times reported that his parents had hoped when he was accepted to Virginia Tech that he would no longer retreat to playing video games alone the way he did at home (Kleinfield). Now let’s be clear about the meaning of the signs we are interpreting here. Many people play violent shooter video games and do not go on a shooting spree in real life, firing 175 rounds in 10-15 minutes and killing 30 people as Cho did. They may shoot digital avatars on a screen, but not real people in real life. The main issue that concerns us from a semantic perspective is that Cho reversed the order; he played out violent game-like imaginings in reality.
Three days after Cho’s murderous rampage, one of my students at California State University Channel Islands posted on her Facebook webpage a statement that said she was “going on a … school shooting spree! Watch out kiddies, better hide under that desk!” By afternoon, she was arrested on campus and taken to the county jail where she was charged with making a criminal threat (Abdollah). In the case of Cho’s shooting spree in which he identifies with his violent avatar Ax Ismail, and in the case of my student’s reckless speech act on her webpage in which she verbally identifies with Cho’s shooting spree, we see a breakdown of semantics that, when somaticized in the four-dimensional world, has devastating effects.
Three days after Cho’s murderous rampage, one of my students at California State University Channel Islands posted on her Facebook webpage a statement that said she was “going on a … school shooting spree! Watch out kiddies, better hide under that desk!” By afternoon, she was arrested on campus and taken to the county jail where she was charged with making a criminal threat (Abdollah). In the case of Cho’s shooting spree in which he identifies with his violent avatar Ax Ismail, and in the case of my student’s reckless speech act on her webpage in which she verbally identifies with Cho’s shooting spree, we see a breakdown of semantics that, when somaticized in the four-dimensional world, has devastating effects.
In these two examples, we recognize what Alfred Korzybski, the founder of General Semantics, called “undesirable human semantic afflictions” (184). One of these afflictions is characterized by higher-order cognitions that are not grounded in coherent lower-order emotions. The body, mind and emotions cannot be separated, and the natural sequence is to build a coherent emotional-somatic semantics on which to ground higher-level cognitive abstractions. Another kind of affliction is characterized by the inability to effectively evaluate the values of asymmetrical semantic relations, which characterize the majority of relations in the natural world. Mistaking asymmetrical relations for symmetrical ones creates a false identification between two values from two different orders of abstraction that should be kept separate.
An asymmetrical semantic relation is demonstrated in the following example given by Korzybski: “If a leaf appears green to me, I certainly do not ‘appear green’ to the leaf!” Such a statement shows what is at stake in equating values of signs that are not on the same order of abstraction or whose relation is not symmetrical. If we do so, we quickly find ourselves in a dimension of semantics that is false to facts; i.e., illogical, and potentially delusional. Consider, for example, the illogical analogy: If I kill digital avatars on a computer screen I ‘win’; if I kill people in a classroom I ‘win’. The potential damage of illogical or delusional semantic evaluations to the adaptive evolution of our species is so great that we all need to be extremely conscious about what kind of logic we are teaching to children and young people, and what the sequencing is in their semantic/somatic development. Emotional development comes first in the natural order. Therefore when analyzing what kind of logic we are teaching, we have to take into consideration specifically the semantic aspects traditionally ignored by science–affective and somatic aspects, including somatic patterning, limbic resonance and the emotions. On a biophysical level, order, sequence and relation signify as much as content. For children before the age of fourteen, perhaps even more than content. In fact, the structure is the content. On this level, gaming can mean, beyond whatever content fills its surface screen, that the player is sitting alone for long periods of time without human emotional contact, developing a high threshold for visual stimulation and perhaps, depending on the kinds of games played, a high threshold for violent images, along with a compulsive repetition attachment. Let’s face it, repetition is how we learn. It’s part of our biophysiology. Sharon Begley, co-author with Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz of The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force, describes the biophysical imprint of somatic repetition on the bodymind this way:
The brain is dynamic, and the life we lead leaves its mark in the complex circuitry of the brain: footprints of the experiences we have had, the thoughts we have thought, the actions we have taken. The brain allocates neural real estate depending on what we use most: the thumb of a video game addict, the index finger of a Braille reader, the analytic ability of a chess player, the language skills of a linguist.
This knowledge bears immense implications for age-appropriate use of computer technologies, because all software applications are, by definition, high order abstractions quite distinctly different from, for example, swimming with a sea otter off the California coast. And video games by definition encourage repetition. Parents should monitor children for appropriate use of games, and game designers should be aware of the somatic and emotional semantics their games could encourage in players with undeveloped or dysfunctional emotions. The situation in regard to electronic games can be summed up in this way: violent video games do not necessarily cause players to be violent; however, the industry may well be creating games for which we should, if we were totally responsible, require psychiatric evaluations before allowing people to play. Likewise, universities do not necessarily cause students to be alienated; however, they may create social environments that fail to provide students adequate safety nets much less coherent programs to help them integrate abstract cognitive skills with emotional intelligence in the body.
The hard truth is that emotional and somatic development must always precede more abstract cognitions. Why? Because “for better or worse, we happen to live in a four-dimensional world, where ‘space’ and ‘time’ cannot be divided” (184). And we live in that world as whole organisms, whole beings, with nervous systems that process ordered chains of signs and meanings produced by the impulses of external and internal stimuli with a spatial and temporal order. In other words, order and relation and repetition are fundamental to actual experience and function in the world. For this reason, old three-dimensional analogies and elementalist thinking that break the whole being into elements defies the facts of actual function in the natural world. Consider the old Cartesian logic embedded in this absurd question: Was it Cho’s body or his mind that became a criminal on the day he longed to be a hero? The question is itself insane. Why do we even bother to ask then, if the university’s responsibility is to the embodied emotions or minds of its students? Parents, educators and electronic game designers need to look at the whole picture, and the whole person, to evaluate what is appropriate use of computer technologies and what is an appropriate educational response to a student’s speech, writing, and behavior.
If game designers and parents should consider the bigger picture, so educators should finally see the writing on the screen and take action, before there’s more blood on our playgrounds and in our classrooms. It’s not enough to educate a mind, even digital technologies need a body, heart and soul to make them make sense. A mind without a heart is a danger to our own evolution. Scientists know this now. The new field of neurocardiology recognizes that 60-70% of the cells in our hearts are neurons, meaning our heart is a part of our brain (Pearce). The emotions are part of our intelligence. Educators should make somatic-emotional development, or bodymind integration courses, a requirement for all entering freshman at every university campus in the U.S., as well as for children in every elementary school across the country. Cho Seung-Hui needed those courses. All of us do.
Camilla Griggers
Works Cited:
Begley, Sharon. (2002). “Survival of the Busiest.” Wall Street Journal. Science Journal.
Kleinfield, N. R. (2007) “Before Deadly Rage, a Lifetime Consumed by a Troubling Silence.” The New York Times. April 22, 2007. VOL. CLVI. No. 53,922. A1, A22.
Korzybski, Alfred. (2005). Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. 5th edition, 3rd printing. Ft. Worth, Texas: Institute of General Semantics.
Pearce, Joseph Chilton. (2002). The Biology of Transcendence. Rochester: Park Street Press.
Schwartz, Jeffrey M.D. and Sharon Begley. (2002). The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force. New York: Regan Books.
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