As of the time of this writing, just hours after the shooting rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, 27 people are dead.<\/p>\n
Courtesy of mass murderer Adam Lanza, twenty children between the ages of five and ten are forever gone from this world.\u00a0<\/p>\n
For the victims and their loved ones, we are helpless to do anything but pray.\u00a0 But while our hearts break, we should see to it to prevent our heads from doing the same.<\/p>\n
Thus far, we are not off to a good start.\u00a0 Well, at least some of us aren\u2019t.<\/p>\n
As is typically the case, the ever perceptive writer Ilana Mercer is an exception to this rule. The legions of commentators who haven\u2019t wasted a moment to grace the country\u2019s airwaves with their sage analyses of the Newtown rampage Ilana refers to as a bunch of \u201cself-serving tele-experts, twits of psychology and psychiatry\u201d whose obsession with \u201cdiagnosing\u201d the purveyors of evil in our midst results, and can only result, in the denial of evil itself.<\/p>\n
Ilana\u2019s verdict is blunt and decisive: \u201cAdam Lanza,\u201d she declares, is \u201cevil, not ill.\u201d<\/p>\n
And she is right.<\/p>\n
Clarity precludes confusion, but talk of Lanza that simultaneously oscillates between references to his \u201cmental health\u201d and references to the \u201cevil\u201d of his deeds\u2014and this includes virtually all such talk to date\u2014is nothing if not confused, both morally and intellectually.<\/p>\n
The language of \u201cevil,\u201d like that of \u201cgood,\u201d is the language of morality. <\/em>\u00a0The language of \u201cmental health\u201d and \u201csickness,\u201d on the other hand, is the idiom of science <\/em>(whether pseudo-<\/em>science or not is beside the point).\u00a0 It is just as incoherent to conscript a scientific idiom in the service of rendering moral judgments as it would be meaningless to describe the law of gravity as unethical.<\/p>\n If Lanza is\u2014or was\u2014\u201csick,\u201d then he is as much deserving of our compassion as is a child born with leukemia.\u00a0<\/p>\n So, point one: lest we know this elementary difference between evil and illness, we will render ourselves incapable of making pronouncements concerning either.<\/p>\n Moral thought runs into another snag, though, when we insist upon describing episodes like today\u2019s shooting as a \u201ctragedy.\u201d\u00a0 The language of tragedy, unlike that of \u201csickness,\u201d does <\/em>indeed belong to moral discourse.\u00a0 But it does not <\/em>belong to a description of the events of the sort that unfolded inNewtown.<\/p>\n A tsunami that decimates a human population is a tragedy.\u00a0 <\/em>However, Adam Lanza is not the author of a tragedy. He is an abominable punk\u2014a \u201cwaste of sperm,\u201d my late father would have said\u2014who is responsible for an outrage.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n Edmund Burke had famously said that the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.\u00a0 The good men (and women) of our generation who wish to confront evil can start by responding to it by recognizing it for the outrage that it is.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As of the time of this writing, just hours after the shooting rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, 27 people are dead. Courtesy of mass murderer Adam Lanza, twenty children between the ages of five and ten are forever gone from this world.\u00a0 For the victims and their loved ones, we are…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n