Our callous society makes us accessories to killings of all sorts
On July 14, Norway remembered the killing of 77 people, mostly young, at a summer camp on the island of Utoya, victims of lone gunman, Anders Breivik. While the circumstances and scale of both atrocities are different, they equally show the horrific depths to which humanity can descend.
In her book, One of Us, Norwegian writer Asne Seierstad traces Anders Breivik’s life and finds, as her title suggests, that there was no inevitability to his actions. Until he committed his crimes, there was nothing to distinguish Breivik from many other young men.
He was addicted to computer war games and was a virtual recluse, but that did not make him unique, perhaps not even unusual, as people live more and more in the parallel world of the internet.
Horror movies and books give us a misleading image of evil-doers. People who perpetrate acts of unspeakable evil are most often ordinary and only take on sinister qualities in hindsight.
What happened in Srebrenica is the leitmotif in history. Because of the large number of perpetrators, no one would suggest that they were other than normal in all other aspects of their personal and social lives. It would be difficult to argue that, taken individually, each of them was not ‘one of us’.
However, our collective reaction to atrocities is to identify with the victims, not with the perpetrators. ‘We are all Charlie’ was the public response of solidarity after the Charlie Hebdo killings.
Yet, as Seierstad observes, both victims and perpetrators usually come from the same society and are moulded by the same cultural influences.
Expressing fellowship with victims of random acts of violence should not blind us to the fact that it is from within our safe, social order that such violence emerges and will continue to emerge. Norway was devastated by disbelief, as well as by horror, after the events in Utoya in July, 2011, because atrocities like that don’t happen in their peaceful, secure, affluent country.
Looking at the roots of social and environmental breakdown in his encyclical, ‘Laudato si’, Pope Francis identifies our failure to see in every human being a brother or sister who shares this planet, “our common home”, as the root of our inhumanity to one another.
He writes about the “harmful sense of isolation” of internet communication, where “contrived emotion” that has more to do with “displays and devices” becomes a substitute for a real relationship. In this virtual world, we can “choose or eliminate relationships on whim”.
For young people in particular, who are learning to form mature bonds with others, it is easy to see how overuse of internet communication can lead to “breakdown in social cohesion”.
For Breivik, other people were reduced to targets in a war game that moved from his computer screen to real life.
For combatants, regular or irregular, the process is not that different. The humanity of the enemy must be eclipsed, so it is not a human being like ourselves whom we are aiming to kill, but ‘a target’, ‘a mark’. This is why face masks are often used in target practice, to psychologically prepare combatants for killing.
For Seierstad, a killer must first extinguish the humanity of the other person, before he can extinguish his own and become a person capable of killing in cold blood. When you no longer see others as fully human, with personal lives and loves like yourself, it is as easy to destroy them as to eliminate an image on a computer screen.
For Pope Francis, every act of cruelty or indifference arises from a fundamental failure to recognise the dignity and value of every life, starting with “the poor person, the human embryo, a person with disabilities. Respect for life forms cannot be selective”. Francis sees “laws without underlying principles” as “arbitrary impositions”. For a value to be authentic, it must be coherent and consistent. Along this continuum of respect for the human person, no life is excluded, however small or weak.
In secretly filmed footage, released last week, Dr Deborah Nucatola, senior director of Medical Services with Planned Parenthood, graphically describes how she harvests body parts, such as livers and lungs, during the abortion process. The most horrific thing about the video was her utter sense that she was doing nothing remotely questionable.
For her, the life she was destroying was not a human being, even though she kept referring to its body parts. It was “gestational tissue”, or “a seventeen-weeker”.
The cultivated blindness allowed her to talk about carefully protecting lungs or livers as she “crushed” the rest of the body. As she talked, she ate lunch, drank wine, and made occasional small talk.
For her, this was a normal, everyday business discussion. From her cultural perspective, the unborn human is the object of another’s rights, rather than a subject with rights of his or her own. The violence is not less because the unborn are silent and helpless.
The words of Isabella, in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, come to mind. “And the poor beetle that we tread upon, in corporal sufferance, finds a pang as great as when a giant dies.”
Speaking about abortion in the US Senate, Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma said: “The only difference between an adult and an embryo is time.”
However, the majority of the US media and political establishment appear to disagree. For them, the moral issue at stake is the manipulation and misrepresentation in this undercover film and the fact that the material gained in the process was carefully selected to serve the pro-life agenda.
Again, the chilling ordinariness, matter-of-factness and banality of those who feel they can snuff out human life because they have reduced it to an identity that denies its intrinsic dignity and value. However, the violence that chills and revolts us does not begin and end with the perpetrators. It is not possible to understand it without reference to the societies where it originates and that potentially means all of us.
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