We Are All Dark

Four years ago I wrote a blog post (that I can’t find) after watching The Dark Knight in which I lamented that the movie had been praised for the raw manner in which it depicted evil.  It was hailed for its “creativity” and “uniqueness.”  I am a fan of Christopher Nolan movies, but I found these plaudits to be wide of the mark.  I stated that at its core the movie was not creative at all because there is nothing difficult about imagining evil.  Evil is simply the end result of pure selfishness, and we are all selfish.  Nolan was able to imagine, and Heath Ledger was able to portray, a character completely devoid of compassion and full of desire to cause pain, but if we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that doing so is not much of a feat.  Taking selfishness to the nth degree unfortunately is all to easy.  What is difficult is rising above that selfishness to view others as just as important–indeed more important–than ourselves.

Fast forward four years later to early last Friday morning, and heart-wretchingly a mass murder occurred at a theater in Aurora, Colorado during a midnight  showing of The Dark Knight Rises, the sequel to the much-discussed film of four years ago.  By all accounts the man who committed the ghastly crime was a quiet 24-year-old who had been an honors college student and until recently had been immersed in graduate studies.  It does not appear there were any warning signs that he would do anything remotely so horrific.

The trend in our society has been to call the people who commit horrible crimes “deranged,” “crazy,” “disturbed,” and so on.  We do this at least in part to make ourselves feel better in the midst of tragedy because it suggests that such occurrences can be chalked up to mental aberrations and not to something systemic in the human condition.  The fact is, however, that the worst crimes often are committed by sane and even very smart individuals.  Indeed, the reason they are able to “succeed” in causing such carnage is because they have carefully planned to do so.  I could cite several examples, but unfortunately the Aurora shooter appears to be a case in point.  He clearly put a lot of planning and effort into his cruelty.  What’s more, he also clearly did not care about the fact that he was mortally wounding other people.

This matters because it should force us to ask ourselves how a smart, sane person could do such a thing?  The answer is because he is evil, just like you and me.  The difference between the Aurora shooter and most of the rest of us is that he let the evil in his heart completely consume him.  Most of us just allow it to infect parts of our lives that reveal themselves in less violent ways, while this person became obsessed with darkness.

Please understand that I am not attempting to minimize the shooter’s crime by indicting all of us with possessing the same disease of evil.  Willful destruction of human life is the worst manifestation of evil for which the shooter deserves to forfeit his own life.  Nor am I asking us to “identify” with the shooter in such a way that would enable us to “understand” what led him to do this.  We do not need to “study” evil in this sense because it inevitably leads to rationalizing it away in order to avoid the ugly truth that evil is something we come by all to naturally.  What I am saying is that the difference between the Aurora shooter and us is one of degree, not kind.  We are all dark, and we all need the Light of the World to save us from that darkness.

Such bloody, senseless crimes also should cause us to wonder what fanned the flames of the shooter’s evil?  Dare I suggest that in part it could be a pop culture that glorifies evil in its movies, television shows, and video games?  “Oh, we all watch that stuff and we do not do such things,” you say.  True enough, but does that justify those depictions or does it just suggest that such things can make a more profound impression on some than others.?  Even if such things only help lead a person down such a wayward path when they become obsessed with those violent images, it does not absolve the fact that the images are there to be obsessed over.  The fact that most of us choose less destructive paths demonstrates why the shooter can be held accountable for his actions; choice implies responsibility.  Such does not, however, mean that what we see does not influence our choices.

I suspect that this tragedy will not cause our nation to have a conversation about what is obsessed over in this culture because it is simply too easy to ascribe this act to insanity.  The fact remains, however, that in our culture violence is glorified, which makes it more acceptable, and people are objectified, which imperceptibly causes the mind to think of people as something less than human.  At this point we do not know why the Aurora shooter committed this heinous crime, but let’s be honest that it is easy to imagine that he might have viewed what he was doing to be like a video game or that maybe he thought it would be cool to dispassionately dispatch people the way the Joker did in The Dark Knight.  I grant that if something like this was the case then the shooter was unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality.  But at some point shouldn’t events like this cause us to wonder about the types of fantasies that are created for public consumption?

Of course, I do not equate questioning the dominant themes of our current entertainment culture with a need for government limits on what the marketplace of entertainment offers to the public.  Instead, such horrific events should cause us to renew our efforts to police ourselves and energize parents to be more careful about what they choose to expose to their children.  Such efforts by no means guarantee preventing another tragedy, but at least then we can say that we have played no part in contributing to a culture that is obsessed with evil.

The only other point I feel compelled to add on this sad subject is that inevitably when a horrific act such as this occurs there are people who immediately question why, if God exists, He would allow such a travesty to happen?  I understand that this can be hard to grasp, but for me this particular aspect of the so-called “problem of evil” is less perplexing than natural disasters.  The reason is that human choice plays a much more prominent role in situations like this than it does when a hurricane, tornado, earthquake and so forth strikes without warning.

People like having freedom of choice, but then they complain to God when someone makes a choice that causes destruction.  But you cannot have it both ways.  You cannot say “let me choose what I want to do” and then turn around and say that God should have stopped the shooter from making his cruel choices.  Possessing the power of choice is better than being a robot (as Dostoevsky beautifully illustrates in The Brothers Karamazov’s “The Grand Inquisitor” and the chapter which follows it), but the cost of such power is the possibility of people causing immense pain to other people.  We cannot eliminate the possibility of such pain without sacrificing the freedom (and love and joy) that accompany it.  What we can do is choose to help ease the pain and suffering of those caught in the aftermath of a person’s evil choices.

Moreover, the fact that God allows us to make choices does not mean He is indifferent to those choices.  In Genesis 6, which describes the story of Noah and the great flood, it says that God’s heart was grieved by all of the evil that men were committing.  Rest assured that what happened last Friday morning grieved God’s heart, and His heart is such that He wants to bring comfort to those who are in so much pain as a result of this crime.  So, above all, pray for the families of the victims of this horrific crime, asking God to bring them the only comfort that surpasses human understanding.