Courtesy of mass murderer Adam Lanza, Sandy Hook School in Newtown,Connecticut has been deprived of 26 members of its community, six adults and twenty children between the ages of five and ten. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Our hearts break\u2014as they should. Unfortunately, to judge from the endless commentary on this matter, it would appear that our heads are just as fragmented.<\/p>\n
The demand for better \u201cmental health\u201d treatment is a classic case in point.\u00a0 Yet this focus on mental health reflects, not just massive intellectual<\/em> confusion, but equally massive moral<\/em> confusion.\u00a0<\/p>\n The ever perceptive writer Ilana Mercer was among the first to recognize this.\u00a0 Just hours after the Newtown shooting, legions of commentators\u2014\u201cself-serving tele-experts, twits of psychology and psychiatry,\u201d as Mercer refers to them\u2014stormed the airwaves to \u201cdiagnose\u201d the shooter.\u00a0 But as Mercer was quick to note, the diagnosis of evil doers can only lead to the denial of evil itself.<\/p>\n \u201cAdam Lanza,\u201d she declares, is \u201cevil, not ill.\u201d<\/p>\n And she is right.<\/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 Mental illness is as incompatible with moral judgment as is physical illness.\u00a0 Neither Asperger\u2019s syndrome nor cancer has anything to say regarding the moral worth of Lanza\u2019s character or actions.<\/p>\n Adam Lanza, the man who shot up a school murdering 20 little boys and girls and six of the adults who tried to protect them, was evil, not ill.<\/p>\n The sick deserve our compassion.\u00a0 The wicked deserve our condemnation.\u00a0 Do you see the inconsistency between describing Lanza as both \u201cill\u201d and \u201cevil?\u201d If it is some mental \u201cillness\u201d that compelled<\/em> him to commit mass murder, then he no more warrants blame than he would if it was some physical illness like cancer that compelled him to vomit uncontrollably or suffer a dramatic weight loss.\u00a0<\/p>\n The great conservative Edmund Burke had famously declared that the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.\u00a0 Yet good men cannot do a thing about evil unless they are able to recognize it for what it is\u2014and what it is not.\u00a0 <\/em>In fact, in the absence of this ability, men can\u2019t hope to be good at all. \u00a0\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 This conflation of illness and evil gives rise to an even greater problem, however: far more evil promises to be done in the name of \u201cmental health treatment\u201d than would ever be done in the name of justice.<\/p>\n C.S. Lewis is among those who took note of this nearly 60 years ago.\u00a0 Lewis wrote that when \u201cthe idea of mending tails off into that of healing or curing,\u201d then the healers are likely to \u201cact as cruelly and unjustly as the greatest tyrants.\u201d\u00a0 Indeed, \u201cin some respects,\u201d they could \u201cact even worse,\u201d for \u201ca tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive\u201d of all tyrannies.\u00a0 The therapists will \u201ctorment us without end\u201d because they have \u201cthe approval of their own conscience.\u201d<\/p>\n Lewis makes another crucial observation.\u00a0 The language of good and evil affirms the moral agency of men and women\u2014even human monsters who would deliberately harm children.\u00a0 The language of mental illness, in contrast, deprives us of it.<\/p>\n \u201cTo be \u2018cured\u2019 against one\u2019s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet when punishment<\/em>, even capital punishment, is visited upon a person because he is believed to deserve <\/em>it, the subject in question is \u201ctreated as a human person made in God\u2019s image.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Those of us who are resolved to combat evil must be just as resolved to differentiate it from illness.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Courtesy of mass murderer Adam Lanza, Sandy Hook School in Newtown,Connecticut has been deprived of 26 members of its community, six adults and twenty children between the ages of five and ten. \u00a0\u00a0 Our hearts break\u2014as they should. Unfortunately, to judge from the endless commentary on this matter, it would appear that our heads 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-673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n