Some choice snippets:
The president of the university, fumbling for the right cliché, described this as a tragedy of monumental proportions. Setting aside the misleading metaphorical use of “monumental,” it would be interesting to learn what he thought he was saying other than “This is really bad.” These incidents are inevitably called tragedies, but that is precisely what they are not. In a tragedy like Oedipus or Macbeth, a basically great man, trusting in his own abilities, deludes himself into making self-destructive decisions. Flaws in his character lead him first to arrogance and then down the path of folly and ruin. Tragedies make sense of the human world, while these pointless murders seem to reveal a world that makes no sense. In calling them tragedies, we are essentially saying that human existence is pointless.
This is not just a “semantic point.” It is all too true that most Americans are like most people everywhere in all periods of history: They speak without thinking. But unreflective peasants relied on proverbs and clichés that were deeply rooted in historical experience. Our clichés and mental tics are almost always bits of propaganda invented by liberals ignorant of human nature and human history. In our mythology, children are smarter than adults, racial minorities smarter than whites, women stronger and braver than men. We believe that we really do care about people killing each other in Nigeria, even though we do nothing about the murders taking place on the other side of town, and we insist on calling every pointless misfortune a tragedy. We can only talk this way because we have tossed away our moral compasses.
I've also used the word "tragedy" in reference to what happened at Virginia Tech. I can't judge Cho Seung-hui's soul, I don't know his motivation and what happened to him. How can I describe his particular path to self-destruction, while at the same time praying that God is merciful?
Were the murders pointless? Yes. They were great evils inflicted upon others, though not the greatest evil. Still, I would not say they were unintelligible, even if Cho Seung-hui was acting under some sort of psychological compulsion (and it does not appear that he was). Some have tried to understand him by calling him insane or mentally ill, as if what he did could be explained through a pathology concerned with mental illnesses having only organic causes. Is this a simplistic, knee-jerk response involving a denial of the real possibility of malice and hatred? On the other hand, it would be better for him if he were not responsible due to mental illness.
I saw some of the video clips that he recorded throughout the week before the shootings; he appears to have deliberated and been fully cognizant of what he was doing, but was he responsible for what he was about to do? Or was he afflicted with a form of mental illness that diminished his responsibility? Only God knows the answer for certain, and only God knows if there was repentance or perpetual despair.
So how do we describe or refer to this particular path, unfortunately travelled so many times in America's recent history?
In principle I believe, as I have always believed, that an armed citizenry is the only solid basis for political liberty. However, the more I see of my fellow citizens in action, the more I am beginning to see the point of gun control. Few of them seem to have any part of the old American character, and still fewer have any understanding of republican government. Most of us, left and right alike, are consumers and subjects, but not citizens. Would free-minded conservative citizens have allowed their minds to be controlled by the neoconservatives at the Wall Street Journal, much less have voted twice for George W. Bush? Half of them still think Saddam used his weapons of mass destruction to attack the US on September 11.
Americans today are not free nor do they wish to be free. Judging by the average American’s boorish behavior in public, in shopping malls and behind the wheel of their cars, they should not be allowed to own pellet guns, much less a semi-automatic pistol. If we had an effective authoritarian government with a responsible constabulary that kept the hooligans in order, I might be willing to surrender my weapons. Since that day seems a long way off, it is better to be armed.
In the past few days, I have been asked what people can do to protect themselves against random violence. The simple answer is “I do not know.” In high schools and universities, much of the fault lies with boards and administrators, who have almost entirely abrogated their responsibility to act in loco parentis. Coed dorms, open campuses, toleration of drugs, promotion of athletics, and a refusal to maintain a vigilant scrutiny over the students has turned once safe havens into cesspools of violence and vice. Cho had been caught stalking two different coeds and taken in for counseling. The parents of the victims have a right to know why he was still in school.
Naturally, educators always claim that schools only reflect society, but throughout the past 100 years, educationists have claimed they are transforming society by changing the minds of students. None of the changes in school life is an accident; all of them could be reversed. But the administrators would rather promote their leftist agenda than protect the young people who have been entrusted to their care. And, when a conscientious teacher actually does warn the counselors and police about Cho’s violent propensities, she is rebuffed on some theory that students have rights.
So my first piece of advice is never to trust the institutions. Most of them are so big as to be unmanageable. Schools like VT, with student populations that number in the tens of thousands, are anonymous jungles. In a school of 500, Cho would either have learned to fit in or have attracted such hostile attention as to force him out. My second point is to be very careful about whom you associate with. In the old days, young women did not keep company with people her family did not know. It sounds old-fashioned, but one way or the other we have to reproduce some of the old gossipy community spirit that snooped on neighbors and kept tabs on oddballs.
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