No Virtue in a Rush to Judgment

I was a bit taken aback by the conclusion to David Brooks' column this morning in the NYT. With respect to new reports suggesting Major Hasan's Fort Hood massacre was the product of religiously inspired violence, Brooks writes that:

A shroud of political correctness settled over the conversation. Hasan was portrayed as a victim of society, a poor soul who was pushed over the edge by prejudice and unhappiness.  There was a national rush to therapy. Hasan was a loner who had trouble finding a wife and socializing with his neighbors. This response was understandable. It’s important to tamp down vengeful hatreds in moments of passion. But it was also patronizing. Public commentators assumed the air of kindergarten teachers who had to protect their children from thinking certain impermissible and intolerant thoughts. If public commentary wasn’t carefully policed, the assumption seemed to be, then the great mass of unwashed yahoos in Middle America would go off on a racist rampage.  

Worse, it absolved Hasan — before the real evidence was in — of his responsibility. He didn’t have the choice to be lonely or unhappy. But he did have a choice over what story to build out of those circumstances. And evidence is now mounting to suggest he chose the extremist War on Islam narrative that so often leads to murderous results. The conversation in the first few days after the massacre was well intentioned, but it suggested a willful flight from reality. It ignored the fact that the war narrative of the struggle against Islam is the central feature of American foreign policy. It ignored the fact that this narrative can be embraced by a self-radicalizing individual in the U.S. as much as by groups in Tehran, Gaza or Kandahar. It denied, before the evidence was in, the possibility of evil. It sought to reduce a heinous act to social maladjustment. It wasn’t the reaction of a morally or politically serious nation. 

On the contrary! There is no virtue in a rush to embrace "the possibility of evil."  Whenever harms happen to innocent people, they are to be regretted, but we'd be mistaken to call every harm a wrong (let alone an *evil* wrong) in the absence of some evidence suggesting that the harms were not products of accident or insanity. This initial reluctance (prior to evidence rolling in)  to link Hasan to radical Islam seems especially appropriate when a) there's the possibility of nasty spillover effects to innocent Muslims in the armed forces here and in the civilian population, and b) a mistaken linkage would jeopardize our foreign policy objectives with and in Muslim countries.

Normally, I find Brooks to be a breath of fresh air, at least as columnists go. Not 100% right, but at least usefully provocative. Not so with today's o'er-cooked pronouncements.