WORKS OF HATRED

When I heard the news of the massacre in Orlando, my first assumption was that the perpetrator was probably a poorly socialized, unanchored, Southern, culturally Christian male like the young man who committed the atrocity in Charleston some months ago. Odd to find that he was a poorly socialized, unanchored, Southern, culturally Moslem male. I made the opposite mistake twenty one years ago at the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

What strikes me is how much the two alternatives seem to be mirror images of each other. Change the religious badge (which is more often a cultural badge in these case than an expression of serious religious practice), and they are not very different. Both take up the same weapons—made so stupidly easy to acquire in our country—and turn the hollowness of their own existence outward into the devastation of the lives of others.

The Charleston killer and the Orlando killer alike could apparently find nothing of positive value to offer to their world. Did they even try to find it? They decided the only thing left was to purge their world of some of the people whom they felt polluted it. American whites have long treated blacks as pollutants. Many groups regard gay and lesbian people as pollutants. It was history that armed the killers as much as the NRA and its political minions.

But where does their hollowness come from? I think there are many sources of it. The chaos of work in our world is one problem. It’s difficult for people to shape an identity around work when it so often takes unreliable and demeaning forms. The lack of meaningful associations is another. Watching overpaid professional athletes on TV is not a substitute for exercise. Absorbing stray ideas from the internet is not a substitute for arguing them out with friends who might disagree with us. The loss of voluntary organizations and the redefinition of modern life as oriented toward individual acquisition can also produce people without meaningful interior lives.

And the rise of religious rant, which has almost eclipsed the great intellectual and spiritual traditions of the world religions and replaced them with hatred of those who are different has a part to play, too. The American white “Christianity” of the Charleston killer and the extremist “Islam” of his Orlando counterpart are not so far apart. Both turn their backs on the positive traditions of their faiths, which have created many of the great monuments of human civilization, and replaced them with incitements to hatred—hatred that empty souls embrace in the false hope of giving meaning to their own emptiness.

The only winner is Hell, the kingdom that lives and breathes hatred. Augustine said that evil has no true existence. In the great scheme of things, he may have been right. In the short run, its power to destroy seems very real indeed. It devours first the killer, then his victims. But the victims at least have mourners who do not let them go without tears.