Making sense of Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation for Gaza: Can suicide be a moral act?

Suicide has long been a topic of sociological, philosophical and of course, psychological literature. Yet, as you watch the video of a young man from Texas going against the direction of the political conversation promoted by the powers that be, in solidarity with strangers, they fall short.

Not always about mental health

The most tempting kind of reductionism with political acts of suicide is to pathologise them. Suicide, in this imagination, is a result of a diseased mind, of either untreated or incompletely treated mental-health issues — in essence a result of diminished capacity.

To be fair, there is more often than not a psychological basis for suicide. Yet, as reports that hint at Bushnell having mental health issues emerge in the largely pro-Israel media in the West, there seems to be something wrong with treating all acts of self-sacrifice as somehow lacking agency.

All acts of suicide cannot be explained away through the prism of disease. Captain Mahendra Nath Mulla (Maha Veer Chakra), for instance, is among the most celebrated officers of the Indian armed forces. He chose to go down with his ship, the INS Khukri, during the 1971 India-Pakistan war and save the lives of many of his crew in the process. His death was an act of will, of honouring a moral code even at the expense of his life.

Durkheim, social facts and suicide

For Emile Durkheim — a founding father of Sociology – suicide also needs to be studied as a “social fact” — external forces that emanate from society and act on the individual. These facts, though not visible in the same way as physical phenomenon, need to be examined empirically through the “sociological method” – observed, classified, defined and measured. While suicide is an individual act, a visible manifestation of the deepest melancholy, it is also the result of social forces. But Bushnell’s act does not fit neatly into even Durkheim’s broad categories.

The self-immolation was not, in the strictest sense, Egoistic Suicide. Such acts are the result of excessive individualism, of feeling depressed and untethered. While it can be argued that the dominant discourse in the US has ignored the suffering of Palestinians, Bushnell’s last words were not about his own loneliness. They were about the suffering of others, a continent away, whom he did not know.

The US military man’s death was also not a case of Fatalistic Suicide, at least not completely. Such deaths are the result of a society where people have no agency, where rules are so constraining that life seems hopeless. Reportedly a trained software engineer, a White Collar career was certainly a plausible choice for Bushnell. He could have, like so many of us do, lulled himself into a consumerist coma.

Anomic Suicide is the morally unmoored individual’s response to social and economic upheavals. Bushnell, from all that we know, did not suffer any such upheaval.

Altruistic Suicide comes the closest to defining Bushnell’s act. It occurs when an individual’s identification with and solidarity to a group’s goals and ethos is so great that they sacrifice their lives for it. Military personnel and religious martyrs, for example, fall under this category.

But does Bushnell? In a sense, yes. His act of protest was not, prima facie, about the self but others. Yet, it was not about the group he was socialised into, there is little celebration of his act in the society he comes from. To the contrary, US mainstream media has downplayed it.

A moral act?

The immorality and, in many jurisdictions, illegality attached to suicide emanates from a notion of sanctity of life. If life is sacred, logically, suicide is abhorrent. Philosopher David Hume, though, points out why this is not the case. One, given that human beings, as a fundamental part of their existence, often end life – animal, human, plant – and alter nature in various ways, an act of will towards one’s own existence is not against the natural order. Second, since a person makes no demands of society once they have passed, they do not “owe” it an explanation or ethical debt in return. Finally, since the natural impulse of all living beings is to survive, going against that instinct towards what Freud called thanatos (drive towards death) must be a result of rare suffering.

What, then, was Bushnell suffering from? Two things come to mind.

First, Bushnell saw. He saw the suffering of children and women, men and boys in Gaza. He saw what so many of us did, and he saw through the false equivalences that many of us don’t. Second, he did not forget. His act, in a sense, was the ultimate form of non-cooperation. Of saying that “I will not be a part of a culture that supports mass killing”.

No, Bushnell’s is not an example for others to follow. What it should do, though, is make all of us who have been lobotomised by “content” open our eyes. From a lynching to a casual act of bigotry, from war and its crimes to politics and its depredations, we must stop looking away.

In the ultimate analysis, his death is a tragedy, a loss that will never be worth it. Nor does his death do anything to obviate the suffering of Palestinians. But it does hold out the hope that the rest of us can change, even if a little.

aakash.joshi@expressindia.com