Art imitates life. But does
life imitate art? The superficial similarities between real-life neuroscience
Ph.D. student James Holmes, the shooter at the Aurora, Colorado massacre, and
the villain of Stephen Hunter’s not-too-well-written thriller Soft Target [1] are uncanny. The fictional
mastermind in Hunter’s book is a genius-level, upper-middle class white kid who
is bored with the world. He recruits some jihadis to attack a
mall (loosely modeled after the Mall of America) in a Mumbai-style attack to
provide him with a little stimulation. He wants to turn the mall into the
ultimate first-person multiplayer shoot-em-up game and commits the act not for
money, not even for power, but just to do something way cool.
Any good novelist captures his life and times, so it is no surprise that Hunter, a competent writer who sometimes rises to brilliance in the action genre, should also capture the political spirit of the age. When news of the attack spreadw in his story, Hunter describes the reactions of “the superintendent of state police … Colonel Douglas Obobo … the son of a Kenyan father and American mother … educated at Harvard Law.” Obobo immediately knows who the perp is, who it has got to be:
Some crazed white militia,
some NRA offshoot, some screwball Tea Party gone berserk. In his mind, one
never could tell about the right in this country, particularly deep in the
glowering Midwest, where men clung to guns and religion, cursed bitterly as
America changed, and still believed, fundamentally, in the old ways.
Unfortunately Obobo is wrong; and because the mall is a “gun-free zone,” the evil boy genius’ not very bright killers drive the crowds before them like sheep before wolves — until someone who didn’t get the word decides to fight back and kills the perps.
Hunter’s evil boy genius never
sees himself as evil at all. The concept is totally foreign to him. He lives in
a universe in which the concept of evil has no meaning. And when the hero
eventually guns him down, the genius mastermind’s only regret is that in the
game of real life there isn’t a restart button to do it all again. He dies
without regrets, without remorse.
Now maybe life is imitating art [2]. What are
regrets anyway? Is there any place I can download that?
According to the New
York Daily News he is being held under suicide watch in solitary
confinement in the Arapahoe Detention Center.
The newspaper was told Holmes
is still acting out his “Joker” persona.
“He hasn’t shown any remorse,”
a jail employee said. “He thinks he’s acting in a movie.”
One released inmate told the Daily
News Holmes had been spitting at guards and at his cell door. “Dude
was acting crazy,” the inmate said.
AJ Heil asked on his blog [3] what
a world without evil would be like. While most people would think it would be the
most wonderful place, he has other ideas. “I submit to you that it should not
be a world that we desire to live in. A world without evil, could quite
possibly be the worst world of all”:
Without evil, there would be
no point to doing anything at all. … By eliminating problems and hardships,
life would become a dreamlike existence — completely aimless in purpose. …
Without the ability to act wrongly, there would be no right. … A world without
evil would be the worst possible world.
Heil overstates the case, but
only just a little. As he points out, “a world without evil” would also be a
world without good; one in which the price for the inability to do wrong was
the impossibility of doing anything worthwhile. It would also be a world
without freedom, since for freedom to be real, choices have to be real. When
every Choice(i) == Choice(j) for all (i,j) then freedom is an undefined value.
This is the familiar critique of nihilism. “The term nihilism [4] is
sometimes used in association with anomie to explain the general mood of
despair at a perceived pointlessness of existence that one may develop upon
realizing there are no necessary norms, rules, or laws.”
The interesting thing is that
the hardened criminals in the Arapahoe Detention Center want to kill Holmes.
This will not come as a surprise to those familiar with the cultures of
criminal prison versus political prison. The difference is that in most
criminal jails the inmates know they are bad. In some political prisons the
very concept of evil often does not exist. Criminal prisons are full of bad
humanity. Political prisons are packed with people who have put themselves
above mere humanity.
This is a theme familiar to
political history and was explored quite effectively by Fyodor Dostoevsky at
the end of the 19th century. Ziaul Haque [5] describes
the seesaw battle between the possibilities of nihilism, as championed by
Marxism, and the alternative warning, as represented by Dostoevsky:
For the Marxists evil does not
really exist, since it is solely a matter of social evil which can be
eliminated by the revolution. But for Dostoevsky evil exists as an individual
fact, in each man’s heart and expresses itself precisely in the violent means
used by the revolution. With their historic and social justifications the Marxists
can wash clean even the blackest of consciences. Dostoevsky rejects this sort
of cleansing and affirms the ineradicable existence of evil.
…
Yet the last ninety years, we
have witnessed in Russia a kind of match between Dostoevsky and Marx. The first
round was won by Dostoevsky, since he had written a masterpiece; the second
round went to Marx, since his theories produced a revolution; yet the third
round seems to have been won by Dostoevsky.
Doubtless the nihilists will
get the upper hand again as in fact they presently do have it. Today both evil
and the devil have been relegated to the status of fairytales. Nobody believes
in them any more. The more enlightened the church, the less they believe in the
devil.
But if Haque is right,
Dostoevsky’s point of view will battle back until men regain the old pole stars
and reclaim freedom. And so it will be for a while. But no one should imagine
that such a victory will be everlasting. The idea that neither the devil nor
evil really exist is a persistent one, and it will be back. How did Dostoevsky
put it? “Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting
there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.”
Yet how can God and the Devil
fight when neither exists? In that case, maybe neither does man, but then how
would we know?
URLs in this post:
[1] Soft Target: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1451675348/wwwfallbackbe-20
[2] life is imitating art: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/world/batman-shooter-james-holmes-acting-crazy-spitting-on-guards-in-jail/story-fnd134gw-1226432347969
[3] AJ Heil asked on his blog: http://www.cranialcollision.com/2011/03/world-without-evil-my-worst-nightmare.html
[4] nihilism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism
[5] Ziaul Haque: http://www.articlesbase.com/philosophy-articles/the-battle-between-karl-marx-and-fyodor-dostoyevsky-5866520.html
[6] Belmont Commenters: http://groups.diigo.com/group/belmont-commenters
[7] How to Publish on
Amazon’s Kindle for $2.99: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B006VY2Q88/wwwfallbackbe-20
[8] The Three
Conjectures at Amazon Kindle for $1.99: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B006SOCAO6/wwwfallbackbe-20
[9] Storming the
Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B005MH19XI/wwwfallbackbe-20
[10] No Way In at
Amazon Kindle $8.95, print $9.99: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1453892818/wwwfallbackbe-20
[11] Tip Jar or
Subscribe for $5: http://wretchard.com/tipjar.html
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