On Violence, Evil, and Suffering

I have a terrible memory.  As a general rule I don't remember much of my past.  Yet, something that I remember vividly is sitting in a high school Spanish class watching the television immediately after the mass shootings at Columbine High School in 1999.  At the time I didn't realize the full gravity of the situation, but as the story began to unfold I began to feel differently than I ever had before.  There is no name for the feeling that I had, but it was a combination of disbelief, pain, anger, and fear among other things.  Not 15 miles from where I was sitting something inexplicable had just happened.  This was the first time I remember coming face to face with the ineffable.

There have, tragically, been numerous times since then that "my world" has experienced other horrific and tragic examples of senseless violence (which it seems is a silly term since I can't find a way to think of sensible violence).  Just in the past month the news has been filled with stories of the horrible massacre at the movie theatre in Aurora, and just recently the murders at the Sikh temple in WI.  These events were absolutely terrible, and they are tragic evidence that we live in a world in which meaningless violence is inflicted on people every single day.  Every day people are killed, tortured, abused.  Perhaps worst of all is that the pervasiveness of violence is ultimately incomprehensible to us.  I can no more understand why James Holmes' acted as he did than I can understand a rock.  There are certainly physical and chemical realities underlying both, but neither physics nor chemistry can ultimately explain motivation, belief, or intention.  Speaking with someone not long after the movie theatre shootings my conversation partner and I said, nearly simultaneously, "I hope he's crazy."  The truth is, for us, it is much easier to live in a world in which such unconscionable behaviour can be blamed on mental illness.  If he's not crazy, then what?  If there's not a physiological blame then where can we go from there?  

Many people would have no problem saying that somebody like James Holmes is either crazy or evil.  Unfortunately I can't buy into this simple distinction.  While I am a firm believer in the reality of mental illness, I simply cannot accept that the alternative is that a person IS evil.  From the beginning of time we have often taken the label of 'evil' and applied it to that which we don't understand, and even more dangerously, to those who are simply different than us.  We (potentially) call somebody like James Holmes 'evil' in order to turn him into an Other.  If he is not crazy or evil, than what is to say that we too could not perform similar tragic acts?  We want him to be evil, in order to make ourselves feel better about the world in which we live.  Yet, for many of us, the world in which we live is a world in which we gladly accept what Walter Wink calls 'the Myth of Redemptive Violence'.  We distinguish between the violence which we understand and the violence which we don't by labeling one 'just' and the other 'evil'.  I will be the first to say that the actions of James Holmes were evil.  But does that make him evil?  What does it mean to so freely categorize a human being?  It would seem, at face value, that an 'evil' person is beyond hope, beyond peace, beyond redemption.  Indeed, it would seem that an 'evil' person has simply ceased to be human.  I cannot accept this to be true of any person. Nobody is beyond the hope of redemption.

While it would certainly make me feel better about the world to classify certain individuals as evil, I'm afraid it is merely an easy way out.  The real difficulty for me, in the face of the ineffable, is to recognize such actions as a genuine part of the world in which we live.  The world in which we live is filled with tragedy.  The world in which we live is broken, violent, and full of hate and pain.  In the 3rd book of the Hunger Games trilogy, Mockingjay, the main character, Katniss, comes to a realization about the violence of her world. Quite movingly she says, "I no longer feel any allegiance to these monsters called human beings, despite being one myself.  Because something is significantly wrong with a creature that sacrifices its children's lives to make a point.  You can spin it any way you like."  While this may well be a critique on a general culture of warfare, it also seems to be exactly the sort of 'easy-way-out' to which I have already pointed.  Yet, I think this quote also points to an important fact.  Perhaps it is precisely the 'monstrosity' of humanity that we have difficulty accepting.  We label an individual 'evil' in order to reject the monstrosity which inherent in our humanity.  This monstrosity is that which transcends our understanding.  It is coming face to face with the ineffable within ourselves.  We come face to face with evil not via the Other, but in ourselves.  I can say with approaching-perfect certitude that I will never commit an act of violence so egregious and despicable as those described, yet, I fully abide in a world in which children die from treatable ailments (not the least of which is malnutrition).  I cannot give up my allegiance to humanity, but must face the monstrosity that inhabits it.  A professor who I think quite highly of recently offered the most meaningful advice that I have heard in the face of such monstrosity, "Let us silently sit with the pain," for sometimes that is all we can do.