That’s No Excuse: How Explaining Context Illuminates Responsibility
Why on earth would anyone choose to die by crashing planes into buildings? I wondered, as a small and awkward teenager living on Long Island in 2001, watching the cloud of smoke from the World Trade Center ominously grow across the sky above us. When my country began a retaliatory war, I continued to wonder, how could this attack possibly make sense to anyone? The smoke lasted days. The war lasted years.
Everyone knew someone impacted: a cousin that had to evacuate across the Brooklyn Bridge, an uncle who was a first responder tragically injured rescuing others, a parent who was killed while their children were in school, watching it unfold on classroom TV’s. The pain people were feeling and the damage we were seeing was immense.
It’s such a human thing, to wonder. We want to make meaning of things that don’t quite make sense. And when something terrible happens, so many of us especially want to understand why it happened, so that we can protect ourselves from experiencing it again. Given what I witnessed and experienced, of course I wondered.
Mainstream media and the government had an answer to my question: They hate our freedom. But even as a teenager this seemed a wholly unrealistic explanation. It was simple, and perhaps even comforting to believe it, especially if believing it helps make it easier to drop bombs on some seemingly nameless people somewhere. But no, there had to be more to this story. And maybe it’s because I grew up in Muslim communities of Queens and Long Island, but people in the Middle East didn’t seem quite so nameless to me, and no one I had ever met from there hated our freedom. And I could not imagine anyone, from any background, deciding to commit a massive murder-suicide for that reason alone.
So I learned more, and I discovered there were quite a lot of grievances to be had with my country. From what I was reading and hearing, we had apparently been galivanting around the globe taking what we wanted and meddling in other governments when it suited us. It was eye opening. And I told people, anyone who would listen in fact, that of course people were pissed at us. We’ve been intervening in their lives for decades, oppressing and exploiting their people for our own gain. I thought knowing this would be helpful. While it isn’t possible to fully control the actions of others, we could do our part to prevent future attacks by better tending to our international relationships, and using our power responsibly rather than exploitatively. What a relief actually, that there is some human explanation!
But my attempts at explaining what led to such a horrific act were frequently seen as excusing the action itself.
I now see that any explanation that humanizes someone who does harm can threaten the very armor we erect to protect ourselves from grappling with the tragic reality of what has occurred. It feels less horrific to see something as a result of evil, than as a tragic human act that somehow makes sense to the person doing it, from within their position in a complex web of histories, relationships, and impacts. When making sense includes separating ourselves from someone who did something violent or oppressive, it is easier than making human sense, because when the other person retains their humanity, we retain some, even if small, connection to them. By intellectually separating ourselves from people who take harmful actions, we can experience enough emotional distance from them to feel “safe”, regardless of whether we are any safer because of it.
And it’s true, there are often important differences between ourselves and others, including when those others do things that cause harm. Of course, we notice these differences. And noticing these differences can even help us understand what is important to us, such as values like respecting others’ dignity, and kindness toward strangers.
But even with the presence of differences, there is much that is still the same about us. We are actually all humans with the same human needs. We all need companionship, physical sustenance, joy, freedom, dignity, and many other important things to survive and thrive. When we fail to see how even horrific actions can come from the same humanness we all have, we are less likely to understand what led to those actions. And if we misunderstand what led to it, our strategies for attending to what happened and for protecting ourselves are less likely to work.
This has come up recently in conversations I’ve been part of or witnessed, either in person, on social media, or in media discourse. Mainly it has revolved around two things: interpersonal abuse and violence, and larger scale violence such as committed by the Israeli military and Hamas. In both cases, some people explain what is happening by looking at trauma and violence which was inflicted on the current perpetrator in the past, which they argue is why the person or group is violent today. Others claim that it can’t be trauma because not everyone who has been traumatized by violence becomes an oppressor. These same people also often express concern that explaining things by looking at the perpetrator’s past lets the perpetrator off the hook.
I have major concerns with conflating explanations with excuses, no matter which side does so. When people aim to excuse the perpetrators of violent actions by claiming they only did so due to previous trauma or historical oppression, that takes away responsibility and agency from the perpetrator. When people refuse to look at context or explanations for fear that it will be used to excuse the perpetrator, they take away responsibility and agency from all of those who created the conditions in which the perpetrator’s actions made human sense.
The truth is that responsibility is more complex than an individualist, blame-oriented perspective allows for. For example, an unfortunate reality is that many young boys have been raised in households where they saw their father physically abuse their mother. In fact, my father was one of those young boys. And my grandfather continued to abuse my grandmother until my father was old enough (and big enough) to let my grandfather know that if he ever laid a hand on my grandmother again, he would have my father to contend with. My father’s experience seeing his mother be abused led to him committing to never treating a woman that way. But sadly, the opposite is true for many young boys who grow up around such violence. Witnessing and experiencing abuse increases the chances that someone will abuse others down the road. Currently, the National Institute of Justice estimates that about 30% of people who grow up being abused go on to abuse others later in life.
It would be completely untrue to state that abusers who have been abused bear no responsibility for their actions; not only do they choose to act, but it is clearly possible to experience abuse and not go on to abuse others later in life. It would also be completely untrue to say that their trauma plays no role in their abuse. Instead of excusing violence, explaining the context in which it took place widens the circle of responsibility beyond the current perpetrator.
The same applies when people discuss the brutal Hamas attacks of October 7, and the extreme and violent Israeli response in Gaza. Not all oppressed people become oppressors once they have access to power. But many do. Not all oppressed people violently attack civilians. But many do. Not all traumatized peoples living in fear react to that fear by subjugating others, but many do.
And the fact that how people respond to violence and oppression isn’t guaranteed does not mean that their responses are unrelated. Trauma and violence in a person or group’s past are factors that influence an outcome, but they are not the only factors, and they do not guarantee a specific outcome.
When I was a teenager pondering 9/11, aiming to make human sense of one of the most significant events of my early life, I was not aiming to excuse anyone who chose to take such drastic and violent action. I wanted to understand how something like this could happen, so we could learn from it, and maybe prevent it from happening again. I wanted to take in whatever feedback was within this horrific event, to find something of value embedded within that massive tragedy.
Unfortunately, the inability to step outside the individualist paradigm of blame meant that my country never really contended with the parts of that feedback that were for us. Our fixation on a false narrative about “hating our freedom” resulted in reactive violence against our perceived enemies, most of whom had nothing to do with the attacks whatsoever. And interestingly, the brutal war we waged actually further entrenched many of the grievances people around the world have with the US that in part motivated the 9/11 attacks in the first place. Of course, most people with those grievances don’t choose to attend to them by violently attacking innocent Americans. But the fact that some have doesn’t negate our responsibility for our behavior internationally.
The conflation of excusing and explaining is more likely within a worldview that claims one person or group is always to blame. Untangling excusing and explaining requires widening our circle of responsibility enough to look clearly at whatever points of agency exist, and whatever histories and relationships are part of the context in which events are unfolding. Widening the circle of responsibility does not mean we take responsibility for someone else’s actions. Only they can do that. But widening the circle can illuminate any existing feedback about our own and other’s parts in what unfolded, and provide valuable insight about where we have agency to take action today.
