Over the past few years there have been a series of shootings at high schools in America, students appearing with guns blazing. Most recently a woman in Texas drowned her five children.
Such things stretch the limits of society’s moral envelope because there is absolutely nothing anyone can possibly say to make them understandable. We are forced to fall back on the ancient sense of “the mystery of iniquity,” but our culture does not believe in evil.
In England relatives of the murdered boy are outraged that his killers are being released and that the taxpayers are going to spend many thousands of pounds to give them new identities. The English government at this point regards the murderers as more victims than perpetrators, hence to be shielded from unsophisticated citizens who angrily condemn child murder.
The perpetrators of the various high school slayings, some of whom were themselves killed, have been treated by the media with a certain sympathy. In one case the girlfriend of a murderer went on television to talk about how “sensitive” he was, she and her mother conceding that “we did not agree with what he did.”
The Texas mother is said to suffer from “post-partum depression,” and that diagnosis brings into focus all the treacherous ambiguities of our prevalent attitude towards evil. Post-partum depression is defined as a psychological state affecting a small minority of mothers, usually soon after they have given birth. In a tiny number of cases the mother does violence to her children, or at least wants to.
But what makes something a bona fide psychosis is not clear. We make a common-sense distinction between crimes committed for obvious benefit to the criminal, such as money, and those which seem irrational. But if post-partum depression is a genuine pathology, it has parallels in the history of crime. Probably at least as common is the case of a father who murders his wife and children, often as he faces debt, unemployment or alcoholism.
If women who suffer from post-partum depression are not really responsible for their actions, then it would seem that men who murder their families are not either. And what about “serial killers” — men (almost always) who kill women (almost always) for no understandable motive?
The distinction between killing for profit and killing as irrational starts to break down if we assume that people who kill “irrationally” experience some anxiety or frustration which murder alleviates, so that such crimes turn out to be not so irrational after all.
We can understand murder for revenge, even if it achieves nothing except to make the murderer feel better.
In the Texas drownings some people affirm their “support” of the mother in her suffering, and bulletins are issued reassuring the public that “she is doing as well as can be expected.” Her trial will elicit sympathy for someone who was allegedly stretched to the breaking point.
What lies behind these public reactions is an extreme application of society’s sole moral absolute — “don't be judgmental.” Even though people are shocked at the murder of children, something also tells them that such things are yet a further test of their willingness to be “understanding.” A psychologist told the media, “The biggest taboo in society is killing your own children.” But the word “taboo” has long been used to mean a mere social convention, an irrational scruple of some kind, which will eventually be discarded by a more enlightened age.
Modern relativist morality begins with the claim that everything is permitted so long as no one is harmed. But this allows each of us to decide for ourselves whether we are harming anyone. In the recent child-murder cases it appears that enlightened opinion accepts a trade-off — the willingness to “understand” such deeds is the price which must be paid for escaping from absolute moral judgments.
(This article courtesy of the Arlington Catholic Herald.)
