Can we make sense out of killing sprees?

Friday, July 29th, 2011

Over the course of the past century, “spree killings” committed by and directed toward civilians have become a regular part of our social world. It seems that we have developed a discrete category for them in our social imaginary.

In the years since the Columbine massacre of 1999, the dramatically increased frequency of these killings has had the effect of crystallizing this category in our collective consciousness.

When I heard about the massacres carried out this year in Tuscon and Norway, I was no less horrified than I was when I heard about Columbine, but now I feel I like can more readily name what happened. I feel like the conceptual “box” into which I place these kinds of events is more defined and accessible. And judging by the increased rapidity with which these killings have become political weapons, it would appear that the wider public is also getting better at “making sense” of this sort of violence.

Yet from a theological perspective, I wonder whether the attempt to make sense of these events is not misguided at some level.

Of course, we can and should make moral distinctions between certain types of killing, between murder and self-defence, for instance, or between terrorism and justified revolution.

Such distinctions, however, are presumably based upon the more fundamental distinction between good and evil, which in the Christian view is not a distinction between two categories of being, but rather one between being and its privation.

When it comes to killing, though, privation is always involved, insofar as killing names the act that deprives a living thing of its life.

When it comes to killing, then, we are not really distinguishing between “good” and “evil”, as much as drawing a line between “permissible” and “impermissible” – a line that marks the point where we become responsible for the loss of life that results from an act of killing, the point where that privation becomes attributable to us in a way that makes us sharers in it.

In other words, murder is murder because it represents privation in both the victim and the murderer. For Christians, death is never an unqualified good, and so killing can never be an act of perfect virtue; the real question is whether or not the evil involved in an act of killing overtakes the one who carries it out.

And to the extent that Christians also believe intelligbility to be equally controvertible with being and goodness, there is always going to be an element of the absurd lurking within any act of killing.

The violent loss of life involved in such acts always pulls them toward unintelligibility.

So it should be no surprise then that the more evil such an act is, the more unintelligible it becomes. The act of shooting unarmed civilians can dress up in a variety of justifications-written in a 1500-page manifesto, perhaps-but at its core we ultimately find no ratio, no basis in any real and positive good. What we find there is madness: a lack of any true intelligibility.

And yet as has so often been the case in our history, we seek to quantify that madness and orient it toward some political or social end.

Most recently, the madness of Anders Breivik has been used to associate conservative political views with “extremist violence.”

Given the references in Breivik’s writings to conservative thinkers, I can completely understand the tendency to make this connection, but what it misses in my view is the deep evil involved in this act, and the privation, absurdity and desperation that attends such evil.

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