How much does someone’s physical beauty influence the way we think about them? An unfolding storyline related to 19-year-old alleged Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev offers an interesting—not to mention disturbing—case study.
There’s a mountain of evidence implicating Tsarnaev as one of the two bombers whose improvised explosives killed 3 and wounded nearly 300 during last month’s Boston Marathon. From Tsarnaev’s own confession to numerous surveillance videos placing the Russian immigrant (and his older brother, Tamerlan) at the scene, it would seemingly take a Herculean suspension of one’s cognitive faculties to believe the teen wasn’t involved.
Then again, maybe not.
A growing number of online supporters for Tsarnaev—who goes by the nickname Jahar—are voicing their support of him and even calling for his release from custody. The reason? As one teenage girl online put it, he’s “too beautiful to be a terrorist.”
You might think such a viewpoint would be an isolated one. But Twitter reports that the so-called #FreeJahar movement has enough supporters that it’s actually been a trending term on the site since the April 15 attack. Fans (many of whom are teenage girls) have tweeted their support with messages such as this one from OMG Free Jahar!: “Yes i like Justin Bieber and i like Jahar but that has nothing to do with why i support him. I know hes innocent, he is far too beautiful.” And Selam. tweeted, “i don’t care if jahar is a terrorist he’s cute and i don’t won’t him to die.”
I’m not sure which of those statements is more problematic: the belief that someone couldn’t have committed a crime because he’s attractive, or the belief that because a person is attractive, he doesn’t need to be held accountable for a crime. Arguably even more chilling are messages from admirers such as this one on Facebook, which mingles infatuation with a casual reference to the massacre: “I love you, you bomb my heart.”
What I do know is that sentiments like these (and others like them from the 6,500 people who’ve joined a Facebook group dubbed Dzhokar Tsarnaev Free Jahar Movement) illustrate a couple of significant trends in our culture.
First, for some folks, physical beauty is all that matters. Admittedly, people voicing sentiments like the ones above are likely young and highly impressionable. They’re easy to dismiss because their viewpoint is so ridiculously at odds with the reality that the rest of us live in.
And yet …
In a culture in which physical beauty is ubiquitously enshrined as the ideal—on billboards, at magazine checkout stands, on television, indeed in almost every form of news and entertainment—it’s naïve to assume those societal values haven’t affected us in more subtle ways as well.
Perhaps that influence shows up when we feel bad about ourselves or judge ourselves harshly in comparison to such images. Perhaps it’s giving preferential treatment, even in small ways, to those who are more attractive. We may not be willing to let terrorists off the hook because they are so “beautiful.” But in other, less dramatic ways, what someone looks like may very much influence the way that we relate to them (or to ourselves).
Second, I believe this story is a startling illustration of postmodern influence at work.
Postmodernism isn’t interested in objective, verifiable truth. Instead, what matters is subjective, individual “truth,” truth that’s often undergirded by intense emotions and personal experiences.
If I don’t “feel” that someone who’s attractive could have committed such a heinous crime, well, then, in my mind he didn’t. It doesn’t matter what the evidence suggests. What matters is the intensity of my feeling and the reality I’m creating and living in myself.
Again, this particular example is an extreme one. It’s easily dismissed by anyone who’s even remotely reasonable. Despite postmodernism’s cultural ascendency, most of us do still submit to some baseline of reality, of right and wrong.
And yet …
Postmodernism’s emphasis on experience, on emotion, on individual “truth” and the inviolable sovereignty of what I think and believe is at work all around us, all the time. Apart from extreme stories such as this one, our society’s understanding of right and wrong, of good and bad, of healthy and unhealthy is increasingly squishy, increasingly dependent upon each individual’s subjective viewpoint.
What matters, we’re told constantly, is what we feel and believe in our hearts to be true, not what anyone else thinks. In the end, however, that mindset is an ingredient in the recipe for a dangerous and deluding brand of narcissism—a narcissism that seems normal because everyone else is busy indulging it too.
Hopefully, we haven’t been as deluded as some of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s fans would seem to be. But we’d be wise to recognize that the same cultural forces that have led some to idolize a violent terrorist may very well at work in our lives, too, shaping the way we see the world and what we perceive to be real and true.
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