Last year at this time I was moved to write a column concerning a school shooting. The same horror has been repeated again this year. And yet again each of us is left trying to make some sense of such an evil. We are left asking how teenagers can murder fellow teenagers, how the human heart can become so callous as to laugh at the sight of fellow humans being mowed down. I, too, am left horrified and confused. But I wonder if the shootings of recent years should really surprise us that much. A provocative but I think important question is whether these shootings are not in actuality the logical manifestation of a nihilistic culture which denies all meaning and truth -- except to affirm the ultimate right to self-autonomy.
These shootings inevitably raise questions about the banning of guns. I won't dive into that fight except to say that limiting access to guns seems to miss the deeper problems of our culture; it seems to confuse the tools of evil with the evil.
And the Littleton tragedy was evil -- evil in its vilest and purest form. But it is an evil which begins to make better sense when viewed in the context of our culture. For what is the ultimate call or common denominator of our culture; it seems to be that each of us is autonomous, that if we can will it, we can do it. Meaning is created and formed and is what each of us desires it to be. The strange paradox this raises is that within this context we still find a way to make moral judgments. Each of us agrees that Littleton is a great tragedy, that evil was at work. But how do we claim this? If the will creates truth, if each "I" declares what my personal "truth" is, then how can we commonly declare Littleton wrong? It might have been wrong within your system; it might have been wrong within mine. But how can we declare that it was wrong with our system if we cannot agree that we even have a system. In a sick and twisted way the shootings at Littleton make sense; they make sens
e within the shooters' system of "truth."
It has been said before but it bears saying again: our culture is in some very dire straits. Littleton is just one of the daily manifestations of it. Connect a line from Hitler through Stalin to Littleton. They all are the face of evil; each is a manifestation of the truth that evil does exist; we shrink away from that statement but in that shrinking away we surrender ourselves to the evil. Ronald Knox once wrote "It is so stupid of modern civilization to have given up believing in the Devil ... he is the only explanation of it." The denial of evil, the denial of the Devil, is characteristic of our nihilistic culture. But in denying evil we also deny the good. Presented with the deep and difficult questions of life and society -- why do I exist; how should we order our lives together; what is good and what is evil -- we have decided that we would rather do our own thing, define our own 'truth', become separate atoms who bounce around against each other than to engage in the urg
ent project of searching for the Truth. Declaring that we cannot agree on these questions is simply an excuse not to. Engaging in argument about the foundational truths of human existence is a much more difficult path to follow but a much more needed and urgent endeavor. This surrender to complacency is a sort of cowardice but it is also a very lonely proposition. How lonely to say that each of us is the final arbitrator; absolute autonomy has its drawbacks.
"Ideas have consequences," Richard Weaver once said. We can wish that it were not true. We can attempt to escape that fact. We can even get along for awhile denying it. But Littleton and our scarred history call us back to reality -- a reality which speaks in blood and death and horror. Nothingness, nihilism -- the idea which our culture is currently premised -- is just another word for cowardice.
