Something Monstrous

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 14 November 2015.

Martin Luther King

It's awful, yes.

Whenever you have something as indiscriminate as last night, it's hard to derive many messages from it. Unlike Al-Queda, who at least tries to avoid areas where innocent Muslim women and children might be, ISIS just loads up and lets the bullets fly. We're in for an effed-up several decades, if not The End of the World.

ISIS's approach makes it difficult to sort through the carnage and wreckage from an ideological perspective. Perhaps they have a clear passage in the Quran they reference as justification, but to me it seems like nihilism. I hate to say it, but some would say religion is nihilism, in that it denies or at least devalues the present life. So "mortifying the flesh" and "going on a killing spree" are two sides of the same coin. It's interesting how this form of religion has become the most galvanizing. You would think it would create an uptick in attendance at your local ultra-liberal Protestant church, but it doesn't. Those places are dying out. People are angry, but they don't go flocking to their own, less fundamentalist places of worship.

With all due respect to the people of Paris, I don't think that the targets have been representative of the "best parts of Western Culture." Charlie Hebdo and Screamin' Jay Hawkins mocking various ethnicities seems like free speech run amuck. I agree that free speech is important, but I don't think freedom of speech—or even just freedom—is as salient or galvanizing as what we're up against. Anyone who checks in on Miley Cyrus's annual "scandalizing" performance at the VMAs knows that what we are defending is often profane, sexist, racist, consumeristic—not to mention downright boring.

None of this, of course, means anyone deserved to die.

What we are discovering as we are confronted by this clear ideological force is that we no longer know what our own principles are. We tweet #JeSuisCharlie, but I hazard to say we don't even know exactly what that means. What this onslaught exposes is the unsuitability of freedom as a principle, and by that I mean as a first or foundational principle (redundant because that's what "principle" means). Freedom is vouchsafed by values that are higher on the hierarchy of values, like the inviolable dignity of the human person. Martin Luther King Jr. and the past generation of Civil Rights leaders understood this, but since then there's been a steady decline in this critical understanding of freedom's source and foundation.

Here's what I'm terrified of: in the absence of principles, we will seek and find not the bedrock principles I'm alluding to, but our own pre-Christian psychic substratum. We've kept our noses relatively clean for a several decades now, not regularly murdering millions of noncombatants (uh...never mind, that's not true), but Europe—and America by extension—has the most murderous subconscious the world has ever seen (possibly with the exception of the Chinese/Mongolian subconscious). I don't know what exactly happened in the Schwarzwald of Germany, but it forged something monstrous.

At some point, our civilized mask will crack and this monster will be unleashed on the world. ISIS will be summarily wiped out, their wives and children rounded up, tortured, killed, or stuffed in ovens. In short, I fully believe that our subconscious can go toe-to-toe with any in the world. But that's not the ideal endgame.

So what is the ideal? It definitely involves Christ, who saved, uplifted, and purified paganism.