WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD is proud to present this essay by Kenneth W. Bickford, Looisiana developer and Director at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington. Ken is also a personal friend of the Editor, who has importunately harassed him for copy ever since they attended a Cajun tailgate before the LSU football game at the Georgia Dome last September.
+++++
No guest is more unwelcome in the modern mind than fathomless evil.
On the occasions when the effects around us cannot be immediately linked to a cause—as in, for instance, when we see a magic trick, or when we discover an unexpected genus or phylum of plant, or, when we contemplate what came before the big bang—our mind accommodates those effects by classifying them as, in this case, entertainment, scientific or metaphysical puzzles.
To the ancient or primitive mind, mystery was a natural part of human existence—one with which one could comfortably coexist. To the modern mind, puzzles are nothing more than embarrassing speed bumps which give the temporary appearance of effect without a cause—even when that cause stands, transcendently, outside of our space and time dimensions.
For practitioners of the modern faith, then, every pit must have a bottom.
Which makes the hole left by the handsome, intelligent Anders Breivik, so discomfiting, for the pit he dug is bottomless and there isn’t enough memory, reason or imagination in the world to fill it with an explanation.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn knew a thing or two about bottomless pits—for he spent nearly one-sixth of his adult life in Stalin’s gulags. His reflections on the causes of fathomless evil in The Gulag Archipelago are worth recalling today:
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
The risk in explaining Breivik’s fell act is also the risk of excusing it.
Of equal risk, however, is failing to question whether or not society had unwittingly provided a favorable setting for evil—indeed, whether evil had in fact found a comfortable home in which it was free to stretch itself, make itself comfortable and gambol about on a whim.
In this, the actual home life of Anders Breivik has proven instructive.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, former British prison psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple plumbs Breivik’s depthless evil as well as anyone:
The human impulse to explain the inexplicably horrific is revealing, according to Dr. Dalrymple, in two respects—one personal, one political. First, it says something about us that we feel compelled to explain evil in a way that we don't feel about people's good actions. The discrepancy arises, he says, "because [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau has triumphed," by which he means that "we believe ourselves to be good, and that evil, or bad, is the deviation from what is natural."For most of human history, the prevailing view was different. Our intrinsic nature was something to be overcome, restrained and civilized. But Rousseau's view, famously, was that society corrupted man's pristine nature. This is not only wrong, Dr. Dalrymple argues, but it has had profound and baleful effects on society and our attitude toward crime and punishment. For one thing, it has alienated us from responsibility for our own actions. For another, it has reduced our willingness to hold others responsible for theirs.
"Most people," Dr. Dalrymple says, "now have a belief in the inner core of themselves as being good. So that whatever they've done, they'll say, 'That's not the real me.'"
Nearly a century ago Chesterton produced his own marvelous rendering of essentially the same thought:
Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin—a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or no man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing. But certain religious leaders in London, not mere materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water, but to deny the indisputable dirt. Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved. Some followers of the Reverend R.J. Campbell, in their almost too fastidious spirituality, admit divine sinlessness, which they cannot see even in their dreams. But they essentially deny human sin, which they can see in the street.
In a story that appeared on NPR, Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg grimly vowed "But I hope and I believe that the Norway we'll see after will be a more open, more tolerant society than the one we had before."
It is difficult to imagine how such a thing could be accomplished.
My own take—armchair psychologist as I am—is that tolerance is the wrong virtue upon which to build a society. If I am correct, then the expansion of tolerance in Norwegian society will only serve to exacerbate the further isolation of individuals like Breivik. And it wouldn’t be the first time that social ills have been treated with medicines that inflame, rather than cure, the problem.
Nor is it likely to be the last.
I find it fascinating, but hardly surprising, that the modern political class tends to engage in theories of cause and effect which reflect egoistic preferences rather than what is known to actually succeed. An old prescription for sore throat in Ireland consisted of putting the head of a live gander into the invalid’s throat and persuading it to quack. The persistence of the sore throat didn’t shake the confidence of a country doctor anymore than the persistence of sociopathic murderers seems to shake the confidence of a Norwegian.
In a perspicacious essay entitled “Hospitality as the Gift Greater than Tolerance,” Ralph Wood, professor of literature and theology at Baylor University, posits that the true virtue for a society is not tolerance but hospitality. Consider the following three paragraphs:
That the religiously indifferent Chesterton first became a devout Anglican and then a Catholic convert indicates his early discernment that the liberal project would not suffice unto itself. It had a canker at its core, and the worm eating at its heart was called “tolerance.” For while liberalism could offer protections against common evils, it would have an increasing difficulty defining common goods. Chesterton was among the first to recognize that his own inherited liberalism would issue in an unprecedented secularism, rapidly displacing religion from the center of human life. The movement that began with the aim of setting people free would threaten, in fact, to empty the public sphere of those virtues that alone might prevent a return to the brute and slavish state of nature that Thomas Hobbes envisioned: the “war of all against all.”
It was concluded that into this vacuum where common goods were once held in common by people of faith, the tolerant state alone must now establish a true commonwealth.
From such sentiments there emerges the modern individualism that values untrammeled liberty above all else—whether negatively defined as doing no harm to others, or else positively interpreted as constructing one’s own life without let or hindrance. No longer is freedom understood as obedience to a telos radically transcending ourselves and thus wondrously delivering us from bondage to mere self-interest. Rather does liberty come to mean a life lived according to one’s own individual construal of reality. At its extreme, such individualism holds that we can make up our identity entirely out of whole cloth, that we can strip away all bothersome particularities that locate us within concrete narrative traditions, and thus that we can be free only as we rid ourselves of the troublesome commitments and obligations that we have not chosen entirely for ourselves. In sum, we may and must become autonomous selves immunized from all moral and social obligations except those that we have independently elected.(Emphasis added.)
Is there any doubt that the “moral and social obligations” of Anders Breivik were of his own particular election? Is there a superior avatar for the Hobbesian “war of all against all” than Anders Breivik?
How, then, are those who hold to radically opposing construals of reality to deal with each other, if not by a polite tolerance that obscures the power arrangements underwriting it? Chesterton’s The Ball and the Cross suggests that hospitality is a more excellent way. Hospitality of a Christian kind does not entail a smiling kind of niceness, a prim-and-proper etiquette, nor even a gracious capacity for party giving. The word derives from hostis, a locution originally meaning not only “host” (as in “welcoming and providing for”) but also “stranger” and even “enemy.” Hospitality thus becomes a Christian practice and discipline, a fundamental responsibility regarding those who are alien and perhaps even antagonistic toward us. It requires, among other things, the willingness to welcome the gift that others represent—not the gift that we expect or desire from them, but their often surprising and troubling gift, especially when others have convictions that are fundamentally hostile to ours. The word “tolerance,” by contrast, originally meant “to endure pain or hardship,” and it eventually came to signify “putting up with the opinions and practices of others.” There is a decisive difference. Tolerance somewhat condescendingly declares that we will “put up with” others, even when their views and habits are noxious to us. Hospitality, by contrast, offers to “put them up” in the old-fashioned sense: we will make even our enemies our guests and thus our potential friends. Hospitality thus becomes an earthly analogy to the Gospel itself. Just as we were once strangers and enemies whom God has patiently taken into his household (Rom. 5:10), so must we be willing to offer hospitality to those who are alien and hostile to us.
Standing alone, Hospitality won’t mean much out of context with the other virtues. As Chesterton pointed out: “The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.”
This is why individual virtues are only fully at home in a larger family of virtues—something which is only known to occur within the ecology of family and its larger cousin community. Community, however, is an increasingly rare thing.
Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam discovered the (for him) disquieting fact that there was an inverse relation between cultural diversity and social capital in a 2006 paper which, coincidentally, was published by the Nordic Political Science Association. The abstract states:
Ethnic diversity is increasing in most advanced countries, driven mostly by sharp increases in immigration. In the long run immigration and diversity are likely to have important cultural, economic, fiscal, and developmental benefits. In the short run, however, immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighborhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down’. Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer. In the long run, however, successful immigrant societies have overcome such fragmentation by creating new, cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities. Illustrations of becoming comfortable with diversity are drawn from the US military, religious institutions, and earlier waves of American immigration.
What is perhaps missing from Putnam’s “long run” hopes is the fact that—unlike today—early examples of “successful immigrant societies” to the U.S. consisted of peoples drawn from the same Western Civilization, or who shared a common religious or military telos.
For my own part, I am convinced now more than ever that another aspect of the debilitating isolation felt by the Breiviks of this world is the loss of subsidiarity. Burke’s famous passage regarding the “little platoons” neatly captures what’s missing in the average city in Europe and America. Those little platoons served as spandrels between the lone individual and the apparatus of the state.
A nation comprised of political units which scaled upward from the individual to the family, from the family to the community, and so on up to the level of the state allowed a coherence and cogency to the conversations had within each political unit. The spandrels between these political units gave the Breiviks of this world a humanly scaled conversation space—a means of talking with someone other than themselves. (It is characteristic of both the evil and the insane that they should favor conversations with themselves over and above conversations with others.)
Such conversations can give both positive and negative feedback to the larger units in society. In our multicultural world conversations tend to be restricted to inoffensive, pretty platitudes. Taken to its argumentum ad absurdum, multiculturalism silences the expression of dissatisfaction. Where conversation—even prejudicial conversation—is allowed, the subsidiarity knows the mind of its membership in a way that allows engagement with the good and the bad.
In the absence of such conversation, the sociopath makes plans and society remains oblivious to the fact.
A recent story in the Daily Mail regarded the young man who murdered his girlfriend on a bet and who made numerous online boasts about his intentions. For some reason, though, internet statements about murder plans are almost never taken seriously. As a father of three girls, I am already contending with the unreality of internet conversations by little boys who send requests for racy photos. So far the girls have put them in their proper place, each in their own unique way.
To their amusement, I’ve told the girls that in my day if I had actually dared to ask a girl for a racy photo, I would have had to approach her and politely say “Look, if you don’t mind, would you please take this Polaroid camera home with you tonight, and then, in the privacy of your bedroom—again, if you don’t mind—would you please remove your top and take a few photographs of yourself. Then—and this is very important—bring me the photographs tomorrow morning when you come to school.”
My inability to do such a thing was based, in part, on the fact that none of the girls in my high school were anonymous persons. They were not easily treated as instruments to satisfy my base desires. Conversations with real persons were—and to some extent, still are—subject to real consequences.
How curious it is that crude viewpoints should be silenced in the public realm and amplified in the private.
It does, however, explain the thinking of a congressman.
This is so, I contend, because the public realm has become too large and the private realm too small. The nastiness of our private thoughts and the banality of our public pronouncements are of one piece.
A psychological distance seems to be the sine qua non for both. In the one, the boy is free to lust without being called to account, whereas in the other, the subsidiary is not free to express its fear of outsiders—a fear that is as real as a boy’s lust and which, like the boy’s lust, is never required (perhaps the better word is “allowed”) to account for itself.
Theodore Dalrymple’s recent observations about England’s garbage-strewn highways evidence a sympathy with this view:
The virtual world has become more real and all-encompassing to us than what used to be called the real world. Those who toss rubbish from cars are in a bubble, and in a trance; separated physically from the world, bathed in music, usually trance-inducing, they glide past everything around them like ghosts in haunted houses.I have noticed that much of the malignancy in modern life arises because of man’s spatial dislocation in the world, by which I mean to say his unfortunate faith in technology’s promise to enlarge both his reach and his grasp have inspired him to use space in a way that is physically and socially unsustainable. It can even lead to the belief that fathers can adequately fulfill their roles as fathers from a distance—from a foreign country even.
Hospitality is a virtue best practiced by a socially cohesive community—a condition which is incompatible on its deepest level with shared multiple understandings. A stark choice must be made: You may have multiculturalism, tolerance and openness, or you may have community and hospitality. You may not have both. In neither case will you eliminate evil, but there is a reason for preferring a community, for it is community which fruitfully engages evil with persuasion.
Neither the lusty boy nor the lecherous public man are persuasively engaged—the one because he will only talk with himself and the other because he is only allowed to converse with those unlike himself. In either case, dialogue and persuasion become a gossamer vapor—to the extent they exist at all.
Modern man tends to cover a geographic space that spreads him thin, waters down the power and magnitude of the local institutions which support him, and which then necessitates the replacement of such institutions either by transferring their functions to corporate interests or to government itself. A spatial commitment to a particular place and the persons inhabiting it is a beginning step in solving such problems.
A commitment to place could lead to a home that is less than tolerant of evil—an intolerance that is based on the love one has for one’s own place and the logical refusal to see that love damaged by evil. It is the sort of commitment observed by Wendell Berry when he wrote: “I began to see, however dimly, that one of my ambitions, perhaps my governing ambition, was to belong fully to this place, to belong as the thrushes and the herons and the muskrats belonged, to be altogether at home here.”
Man’s problem is not only dislocation, nor can it be the case that men who properly locate themselves in relation to kin and kith will eliminate the possibility of evil. But they could limit it because men who are tied by culture and by space would have in their favor checks and balances against their sinful tendencies that modern spatial usage eliminates. Community accomplishes this by minimizing the anonymity upon which the radical individual depends, and simultaneously maximizing contact with others of a like heart.
In a debate with Amitai Etzioni in the City Journal from 1997, philosopher Roger Scruton saw a historic turning point:
The effect of the liberal agenda has been to corrode the social order that makes it possible to be a liberal. At a certain point an equilibrium was reached—the equilibrium that you can perceive in the early novels of Henry James, say. Then, the cement of community held firm, while the liberal freedoms, grafted upon society by urban life and held in place by the Constitution, created a unique and widespread habit of toleration.
I note in passing that, contemporaneous with Henry James’ novel Portrait of a Lady, the solitary serial killer first made his appearance on the world scene. Jack the Ripper, as well as America’s first serial killer, H.H. Holmes, both appeared during this time, and a large part of their success is attributable to evil’s enlarged home—a climate in which it was possible for murder victims to go unmissed. To go unmissed, a person must be able to live in a place without being of it. Both London and Chicago were experiencing a sociological first: Droves of young women with no social ties to those cities had suddenly appeared among them.
It is a sine qua non that getting away with murder requires that the missing should be unmissed—spatial dislocation, then, is noticeable at the very beginnings of modern social corrosion.
The efficiency of the modern murderer is possible not simply because of an improvement in killing methods, but also because evil’s natural home—a disconnected and solipsistic society—has been enlarged.
Which means that restoration must consider the actual substratum required by culture for its very existence: Shared physical space.
Josef Pieper claimed that leisure was the basis of culture, and he was right. But leisure had antecedents in the commonalities of climate, economic possibility, language, religion, history, shared dangers and so on. And none of these could have created a common way without man’s occupation of space with fellow man. When we no longer live together, nothing else really matters. In fact, when we no longer live together, there is no longer a “we.”
What an odd circumstance our modern times are when we can live within a dozen feet of the same person for decades and never meet them.
We do not know when it was, exactly, that some ancient forebear came up with the idea for a word with the meaning of “first person plural,” but one thing is dead certain, he had to be referring to folks who were sharing the same cave.
An ancient common way has been rent by modernity’s credulity in cultural elasticity. We have unrealistically required that our common way stretch over the space of an entire continent, to cover all the untold millions with whom we share a tectonic plate—and believe that we have succeeded. Into such a fell place, the wonder is not the existence of a Breivik in Norway, but rather the (thus far) non-existence of a “state of nature.”
Scruton’s observation in a City Journal article from 1996 that “No communitarian has yet come to terms with the fact that the strongest communities in the modern world, and those that give the most reliable moral and material support to their members, are also closed communities” speaks to a sense of self which is primal and humanly scaled. To believe that human culture is, in the words of historian Wilfred McClay, “infinitely extensible” is to believe in something that is simply untrue.
And there is always a price for ignoring reality.
Functional subsidiarity won’t fully eliminate the sociopaths in our midst. We shall always have sociopaths among us. Historically—Attila the Hun comes to mind—their murder sprees have occasionally overwhelmed functional community.
Still, I can’t help but think that Breivik was lacking a properly scaled home—most particularly the corporeal presence of a father, but also the proximity of closely knit kin and kith—that was at one time an ordinary part of human existence. It was the sort of context that brought judgment to a boy’s natural aggression, directing it to bring harm to enemies and protection to loved ones.
The walls of modernity’s home are expansive and roomy, tolerant even. But they fail to direct or shape.
Breivik’s aggression was never shaped or directed. In the end, he had no way to discriminate between good and evil—all he was really good at was killing.
— KENNETH W. BICKFORD
NEW ORLEANS
AUGUST 4TH, 2011
Comments (25)
Completely off base from start to finish. Brevik killed Norwegian liberal teenagers because he hated their parents for destroying the Norwegian community by letting in lots of the Muslims whose viler "community" he experienced at a young age. (Unlike most other liberal kids, he saw the reality of multiculturalism on the streets BEFORE he was moved to the gated community. Letting your kids get beaten up by underclass minorities is a big no-no if you want them to grow up properly liberal-what did you think the secluded island was for, anyway?)
"all he was really good at was killing."
A man who makes his first million before his 20s are out has other talents he can leverage. A man who can successfully lead high-level World of Warcraft raids (which requires a LOT of interpersonal communication before, during, and after, an equitable division of the loot therein among lots and lots of egos, and a huge time investment in maintaining the guild community. No wonder he presented as the nicest Norwegian you've ever met!) is not a man who kills because he has no other choice.
The platitudes of the past will not explain the acts of the present. You want to understand Brevik, go watch Batman Begins. SPOILER: He's Ras' Al Ghul. Even has the same goatee style and everything.
Posted by Epoetker | August 5, 2011 9:31 AM
Outstanding.
What did Burke say about there being little merit in toleration of another's opinion when all opinions were held in no regard?
Posted by Nice Marmot | August 5, 2011 9:55 AM
I'm sure it was his daddy issues, rather than seeing the reality of Muslim immigrant behavior, which caused him to change his views.
The best you could say about him is that he had had a more solid family life, his approach to fighting for an end to multiculturalism would have been civil instead of violent.
Posted by Mike T | August 5, 2011 10:36 AM
Excellent post, Kenneth, and thanks, Paul.
Some parts reminded me greatly of an excerpt from a work by David Walsh, posted on the Voegelin View website.
He notes that liberalism is in crisis, and that:
"This disappearance of a shared social and political world means ultimately the disappearance of the liberal ethos itself. That is the first leg of the crisis. The common self-understanding constitutive of liberal democracy is itself in danger of extinction to the extent that a multiplicity of private viewpoints overshadows it. A profound crisis of confidence, the equal of any that it has historically faced, is now shaking liberal order to its foundations. Unsure of what it believes and uncertain of the grounds for what it holds, liberal democracy is vulnerable to the centrifugal forces that it has for so long held within itself. Without a liberal center "things fall apart and mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."
and further that:
"The collapse of the liberal center has been the work of liberal principles themselves. That is the crucial second leg of the crisis. Not only is there a hollowness at the heart of the public order, but it is a vacuum that has been largely self-created. The ethos of neutrality so studiously cultivated by liberal theory and liberal practice is what has evacuated the soul of its politics. By extending the principle of neutrality far enough, liberal conviction has finally been unable to resist the last step. It has become neutral regarding itself. There can be no dogma that all must accept, because that would be an illiberal imposition contrary to the freedom of choice that the liberal construction is intended to promote. The only foundation to liberal political order must be the aggregation of the private valuations of the individuals who compose it. There can be nothing approaching a shared worldview, because being liberal means precisely that we do not have to share a worldview."
Posted by Jonathan | August 5, 2011 10:45 AM
Mr. Bickford,
A remarkable essay. Beautiful and haunting. I will be posting some more detailed thoughts later today over at my blog.
In the meantime, Epoetker, let's be very clear -- assume for a minute you are correct and ABB "killed Norwegian liberal teenagers because he hated their parents for destroying the Norwegian community by letting in lots of the Muslims whose viler "community" he experienced at a young age." That doesn't change the essential point of Mr. Bickford's essay one whit -- in fact it just re-enforces the idea that "he had no way to discriminate between good and evil—all he was really good at was killing." Why? Because even if those liberal parents were in fact "destroying" the Norwegian community you don't fix the problem by going off and killing a bunch of liberal kids. Period, end of story. This is Christian ethics 101.
Posted by Jeff Singer | August 5, 2011 10:58 AM
And lest we conservatives get too smug, remember that "classical liberalism" cannot escape indictment here. Laissez-faire capitalism is not magically less "liberal" just because the adjective "classical" has been affixed to it.
Posted by Nice Marmot | August 5, 2011 10:59 AM
"A man who makes his first million before his 20s..."
Not true. He made his first million (according to himself) at 24. In 1997, at the age of 19, he lost 2 million kr. ($369,556) in the stock market.
Posted by Monkey Boy | August 5, 2011 1:54 PM
But Brevik isn't a Christian, so why are you judging him by Christian ethics? His only moral upbringing was found either from his liberal parents, the street gangs he hung out with as a kid, and whatever he gleaned from the tactics of his enemies. Insofar as he had any religion, it could be called Success. This is Relativism 101, or Alinskyism 101, or Sun Tzu's "All Warfare is Deception" put into practice.
To him, (and to his liberal and Islamic enemies, naturally) tactics do not matter, only progress toward goals. Killing all those revolutionary teenagers was a gamble toward his version of The Greater Good. This is neither narcissistic nor selfish, though it may indeed be somewhat fantastical, and ill-advised by certain parties. So too may the 9/11 terrorists be seen by their own compatriots. But let's have no foolish talk of his PERSONAL immorality. He sees himself as a soldier in a war against Islam and liberalism and we here, apparently, do not.
We have been remiss, gentlemen. We have dragged out the other-than-war against Islam and liberalism too long, favoring tactics that are too blatantly ineffectual, and the worldviews of our enemies have seeped into the intellectual cracks of those who experience the enemy on the front lines. (And rest assured that Norway is front-line enemy territory.) We did not excommunicate them from our churches, we did not deport them from our countries, we did not forbid them to practice even the worst aspects of their religion, and we favored cheap citizenship and cheap grace, riding out the blessings of our forefathers' prosperity rather than attempting to understand how they were granted.
The only Christian response to seeing a talented man, whose gifts were wasted by his society, killing a bunch of brainwashed teenagers, in the midst of a pro-terrorist demonstration, in the middle of an almost completely pagan country, is the one given in Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address:
"The Judgments of the Lord are True and Righteous Altogether."
Posted by Epoetker | August 5, 2011 2:23 PM
No. Individuals are responsible for their "personal morality" even if they believe evil things. It is knowable by the natural light that systematically gunning down people for their political opinions is wrong. Period. Full stop. Even people who grow up in Norway are responsible to the law written on the heart. "Christian ethics" doesn't mean "ethics that applies only to Christians."
And Mr. E., here we go again: Bag it with the comments insinuating that this evil massacre was a "righteous judgment." It seems that I have to give you a warning on repeated threads. Actually, I don't. But I will. The next comment along those lines will be deleted.
Posted by Lydia | August 5, 2011 2:32 PM
One of the surest hallmarks of insanity is an inability to understand or accurately predict how the majority of people will react to your actions; another is the inability to properly assess cost-benefit ratios and predict the likely effectiveness of your actions. It was for this reason that many people called the 9/11 hijackers and operation planners "insane", because the actual effect of their actions, in terms of the destructive response they provoked from the West, seemed so counterproductive to any material or spiritual goal comprehensible to a Christian or post-Christian mind.
The notion that the deaths and destruction were the goal for their own sake, as a transcendental triumph of spiritual commitment over material existence, is still hard to grasp for many. By their own standards of value and benefit, based on their beliefs about the nature of the Universe, the hijackers were not insane.
If Breivik was genuinely so deluded/deranged as to believe (a) that his actions would accomplish his stated goals of inspiring Norwegian cultural reinvigoration and non-Norwegian exclusion, and (b) that they were the only possible means to that end, such that the cost in life would ultimately be deemed worth it, he might be considered insane, as the level of magical/paranoid thinking required to believe that indicates. But like most "lone crusader" killers of his type, Breivik betrayed a fatal self-protective sanity in his choice of target and method; by selecting the most defenseless targets possible and refusing to martyr himself, he revealed that hand in hand with his supposed greater good there marches a personal narcissism and cowardice which can only be called evil.
Everybody has mixed motives for doing everything, but the gap between what we say our motives are and what we know them to be, as well as how well we know what they are, can make a fatal difference between good and evil.
Posted by Stephen J. | August 5, 2011 4:08 PM
Epoetker, you need to scale back the rhetoric if you want to stay here. It could be construed as pro-terrorist to support a Palestinian state, but they are not inherently the same thing. One can legitimately support a future with a Palestinian state that has given up terrorism, for example, and NOT support terrorism. The AUF demonstration cannot be said to have been designed as a formal support of terrorism (unlike youth camps actually run by Hamas in Palestine, of course). Make your case with facts, not with exaggerations and distortions of facts.
Second correction: when God permits evil to be done to someone, a true Christian does not draw the conclusion "they had it coming to them". Christ established this quite clearly, when asked about the men whom a tower fell on: he declared it was NEITHER for their own sin or that of their parents. Likewise, Christians generally accept that the holy ones among us may suffer on behalf of others, so their suffering evil is not to be attributed "on account of their sins". Therefore, while it is indeed true that God's judgments are true and just, it is inappropriate to decide that His permitting the kids' suffering evil is a judgment on them.
Finally, even when God permits an evil man to perpetrate an evil crime on a sinner, we are not to suppose that the evil man should be treated as merely an instrument of God's just wrath: he is a moral agent in the perpetration of the crime, so the evil man's own evil will condemns him, even while his crime accomplishes God's will to punish the sinner. We rightly denounce the evil man's crime, even when it accomplishes punishment of sinners.
Posted by Tony | August 5, 2011 8:00 PM
Well, the fastest way to make a regime overplay its hand is to make war on it for the very things it espouses. No one can seriously deny that the 9/11 hijackers accomplished their goal of radically undermining individual freedom in the US. Likewise, you assume Brevik can only be considered successful if a large minority of Norwegians change and rise up. To the contrary, he is more likely to cause the government to double down on everything he despised, oppress the Right and through the misery that will cause end up changing things.
Posted by Mike T | August 5, 2011 9:44 PM
Everything that happens is not a judgment of God. Accidents happen, natural disasters happen, people suffer from incurable and painful diseases etc. Victims of common criminals, and especially the victims of maniacs like Breivik, don't somehow 'deserve' their fate.
God certainly permits such things to happen, and it's within his power to prevent them. But that does not mean the suffering of humanity is a divine punishment which is relentless and vindictive.
Posted by Alex | August 6, 2011 2:41 AM
I'm not sure I would agree with that, to be honest. Yes, there are more practical restrictions and inconveniences and profile-based injustices than there were pre-9/11, as any air traveller knows; but can we really say individual freedom, on a sweeping and common basis, has been "radically undermined"? The fundamental rights and laws and ideals of Western culture remain in place; no Amendment nor article of the Bill of Rights has been repealed; and insofar as some recent judicial decisions have weakened them in practice (I'm thinking of a recent Indiana court decision seriously undermining the Fourth Amendment, in claiming that police no longer need a demonstrable 'probable cause' to enter a house without a warrant and use force upon the inhabitants), those have mostly come from internal leftist and statist judges rather than anything done specifically as part of the War on Terror.
Remember that the jihadists don't just want to undermine individual freedom, they want to replace it with a very specific and fundamentally different legal and social code -- and they are no closer to that goal than they ever were, nor is it likely that violent methodologies will get them closer. It has been asserted by writers both Muslim and non-Muslim that the most effective form of jihad in practice will simply be to exploit the laws and cultural weaknesses of the Dar al-Harb by immigration, demographic infusion, and eventual overturn of non-shari'a laws through votes rather than force. If that is true (and a disturbing preponderance of the evidence suggests it may be) then the continuing immigration of non-violent Muslims into non-Muslim populations is likelier to accomplish Islam's secular and political goals than any campaign or individual act of terrorism. The fact that jihadists continue to resort to violence despite this, and despite its self-evident counterproductiveness, suggests that jihadism seeks goals other than the purely secular and political.
So it's not his actions themselves, but the government and social response to his actions, which you think Breivik expects to provoke the actual response he claims to want, i.e. the backlash against multiculturalism and the re-ascendance of Norwegian nationalism? That's possible, but I have to admit I don't generally think this kind of "Xanatos Gambit" (as they call it on TVTropes.org) is consciously attempted much in real life, especially via acts of violence like Breivik's. People with the megalomania necessary to believe they personally have to kill large numbers of people, and the vindictiveness needed to make that gratifying, don't generally have the self-sacrificial bent of mind and dispassionate foresight necessary to set themselves up as a genuine and effective political martyr, unless they've committed to a transcendental belief system (like Islam) that integrates and justifies both.
Breivik strikes me as someone who's cloaking his desire to prove his power and his need for self-aggrandization in the trappings of "crusader" and "martyr" imagery; I really find it hard to believe he cares more about his ostensible political goals than about the personal gratification of the acts themselves, and I find it doubly hard to believe his choice of targets didn't include his awareness of how much pain, grief and horror he'd be causing.
Posted by Stephen J. | August 6, 2011 10:56 AM
Functionally, yes, I would say that the Fourth Amendment has been repealed by the TSA. It's utterly outrageous.
I tend to agree with Auster's first law of majority/minority relations: The worse a particular group behaves, the more concessions are made to that group. (I'm paraphrasing.) Of course, that law applies only to designated victim groups, not to groups the left already hates. But let's put it this way: Would a giant mosque be under planning for the previous location of the World Trade Center had 9/11 not happened?
A combination of sheer cowardice and a kind of suicidal desire to bend over backwards to prove that one makes *no connection* to Islam from Muslim terrorism does mean that acts of Muslim terrorism have been successful in garnering far more concessions to and expressions of respect for Islam than ever before. Astonishingly, one was more likely to hear the phrase "Muslim terrorists" from the media before 9/11 than in the years following. The response by our cultural leaders, the insistence on the "religion of peace" meme, has been utterly irrational and yet, once one has seen it happen a few times, it becomes utterly predictable.
Evil acts of terrorism by those who are not members of such groups will not, however, be "successful" in this same way. Not that they would be justified even if they were--that should go without saying.
Posted by Lydia | August 6, 2011 1:20 PM
If Breivik is right that the political establishment is enabling the thugs of the immigrant communities to band together on racial lines and abuse Norwegians while undermining any attempt by Norwegian youth to even notice this let alone retaliate and protect themselves in their own neighborhood, the political establishment is in fact part of the underworld. If we accept this criticism, then this was just one thug from a broken home on a long term mission to attack an opponent.
Posted by Timon | August 6, 2011 3:16 PM
Except the "opponent" was a bunch of unarmed people who weren't attacking him. Sorry, no dice.
Posted by Lydia | August 6, 2011 3:53 PM
My apologies. I assumed you would read the entire article first. Ahem:
From the Palestinians:
"Fatah Youth has participated for almost 15 years in the same summer camp and our youth has benefited by learning and sharing experiences on democracy and advocacy for peace and justice."
Oh, you mean they had actual future terrorists there, giving extra pointers, too?
From the victims:
"Some of my friends tried to stop [the gunman] by talking to him. Many people thought that it was a test ... comparing it to how it is to live in Gaza. So many people went to him and tried to talk to him, but they were shot immediately."
Ironically, the victims were already living in a virtual reality far less real than that of Brevik's World of Warcraft, which at least assumed that seperate factions would fight for their own interests. As the guy in the article I just linked said:
"These people were victims of a horrendous terrorist attack. But if people cheer and help terrorist groups (even if they don't understand that they are terrorist, perhaps because their media and leaders haven't told them so or even told them the exact opposite) they make terrorism more successful and thus attractive as a strategy. "
So the camp was, in fact, a pro-terrorist camp.
Wishful thinking:
"The camp, run by Norway’s left-wing party, was lobbying for breaking the blockade of the terrorist Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip and for immediate recognition of a Palestinian state without that entity needing do anything that would prevent it from being a terrorist base against Israel."
So we have actual terrorists from Palestine flown out to the camp to help propagandize in order support goals that directly help the most violent of Palestinian terrorists RIGHT NOW, not later. Your positions seem to be more and more the types concocted by those too far from the action to make proper judgments. Is this a war, or isn't it? The refusal to define a position will only lead to more chaotic bloodletting "all against all" war in support of no clear goals. Does the Bible or the church support that? Did Augustinian Just War theory ever have a place for it, or did it simply assume as a matter of course that people would naturally fight for their own race, country, or religion's interests? Did it cover "soft" invasions and irregular warfare or was it mainly concerned with conflict between states?
There is no hiding from these issues. They are far further along than anyone assumed at the beginning. Our inaction, and further, our willing marginalization of 'extremists' who never had any intention of doing what Brevik did, has seen to that. It is in this spirit that I reserve final judgment until all the facts are out. It's the right thing to do-in a time of war.
Posted by Epoetker | August 6, 2011 3:58 PM
"Until all the facts are out" -- good point, Epoetker
Posted by Michael Bauman | August 6, 2011 7:24 PM
Our inaction, and further, our willing marginalization of 'extremists' who never had any intention of doing what Brevik did, has seen to that.
So everyone has to take your word for it that they don't have such intentions. Playing the "blame the victim" card while promoting Breivik's insane hero complex is not inspiring confidence that you are adequate for the task.
It is in this spirit that I reserve final judgment until all the facts are out.
If this is what reserving final judgment looks like, I imagine an open approval would violate every paragraph of the Geneva Conventions.
Related to the original post:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/08/01/a_murderers_manifesto_and_me?page=full
Posted by Step2 | August 6, 2011 7:47 PM
Michael Bauman, since you are a long-time commentator here, I sincerely hope you are being facetious.
Posted by Lydia | August 6, 2011 7:50 PM
Lydia,
No. I don't mean to imply that waiting for all the facts to come in is a joke. It was just something that Epoetker said with which I agree. To date, there hasn't been much. Indeed, there hasn't been much on the entire site, what with folks writing in defense of burning human beings for their theological views, revolutionary conservatives who don't want us to talk about revolution, and Thomists who don't recognize the enormous gap between their worldview and that of, say, Jesus, Paul, or Jeremiah. I'm just happy to find the odd good sentence, and said so.
Posted by Michael Bauman | August 6, 2011 11:31 PM
This concerned "all the facts" about the evil murderer's evil murders in Norway. Normally Step2 and I have little in common, but he put the response to that well.
Posted by Lydia | August 7, 2011 4:38 AM
Lydia, Yes, I know. Getting all the facts is a requirement for Epoetker as well.
Posted by Michael Bauman | August 7, 2011 8:15 AM
Well for one, the USA PATRIOT Act applies to all investigations, not just criminal investigations. The federal government also asserted the prerogative, no matter how rarely used in practice, to detain American civilians for military trials (see Jose Padilla). Furthermore, the behavior of TSA is a radical departure from pre-9/11 air travel and TSA is working day and night to expand its authority well beyond air travel to any form of mass transit.
There is also the fact that they have been pushing for giving the ATF the power to deny gun ownership rights to anyone on the no fly list, despite the fact that the no fly list is such a piece of garbage that a typical college intern CS or SWE major could write a better application.
This only makes my point that the jihadists most certainly accomplished "step 1" of their plan of radically transforming us (or softening us if you prefer).
There are two flaws in your argument:
1. Brevik knew that under Norwegian law he could only be sentenced up to around 21 years. He is clearly a very smart and manipulative man (only 1 person in the village thought he was even the slightest bit suspicious) therefore it stands to reason that he could likewise fake a "come to Jesus moment" and convince the state that he was reformed as his 21 years came up.
2. It doesn't take a self-sacrificial person to do what he did. In fact, to the contrary, he very well may have planned on sacrificing a lot of his fellow travelers to state oppression thus making martyrs of them. By getting the government to engage in collective judgment, he could get it on a path of self-destruction.
I think his choice of targets was intended precisely to cause incredible suffering. That's part of the point. By slaughtering prominent left-wing youth, he could engage the wrath of the left against the hard right which would be a historically effective way of galvanizing a movement. Nothing breeds conviction and unity like conflict strife.
Posted by Mike T | August 8, 2011 8:02 AM