Sin City provides more proof of evil among us

Illustration by Eric Lobbecke.

What produces this evil in men’s hearts?

There is a sense in which the shooting in Las Vegas is beyond comprehension. Can we ever ­imagine ourselves into the mind of a Stephen Paddock? His quotidian normalcy, at least as reported so far, makes it much harder for us, for one of the things we like to do with evil is medicalise it. This helps us avoid confronting it.

There is a familiar arc about our response to such tragedy. First we console ourselves with the hero­ism of the survivors and the first responders, and often too the heroic dead. The story of Sonny Melton resides in that category. He wrapped himself around his wife, as any husband should, so that the bullets would kill him and not her. He saved his wife’s life.

Then there were the police, as always running towards the danger, and the off-duty police and firemen and nurses and ordinary civilians attending to the wounded and the slain. The basic human solidarity in such moments, the kindness of strangers: it is our ­species at its best.

Another sensible point of ­response, familiar in such incidents, is to ask the practical questions. What can we learn from this operationally? How can we make it less likely?

Although it seems Paddock had no political affiliation or ­motives, as far as we know at this stage anyway, we fit the incident into our own policy debate about protecting large gatherings of people. In our case we think of this in a counter-terrorism context. We need police who can respond very quickly with deadly force, and they need the authorisation to use that force.

In the US the debate should be about what practical steps could be taken in gun control. This is a very difficult American debate for outsiders to penetrate. I love America, I love it tenderly, but this permissiveness towards guns is just a terrible mistake American society has made. It is baked in, however, and profoundly difficult to change.

It is in the constitution, in the second amendment. It has been fortified by a number of, in my view, foolish court rulings that have overturned the minor ­restrictions states and cities have tried to impose.

America is not being faithful to its past here. Guns today are almost infinitely more lethal than they were when the US constitution was written. Since the US has been an urban society, most Americans have never owned guns and carrying them routinely is a recent phenomenon. This kind of American gun fanaticism, like Islamist terrorism, is a phenomenon not of tradition but of deranged ­modernity.

I have American friends, very good people, who own guns. Though I know them well, this is baffling to me. Why would anybody own a gun?

On one cut of statistics you are 40 times more likely, proportionately, to die of a gun wound in the US than in Britain.

Most of the practical steps that gun control advocates suggest would not have stopped Paddock but they might have stopped a few others.

The most depressing thing about the predominant political response to the Las Vegas shootings is how routine and predictable everyone’s response is. People acknowledge the tragedy, then take their ritual positions in the culture wars.

All of this is a way in part of avoiding the deepest question to arise out of the Las Vegas shooting: what produces this evil in men’s hearts?

Compare it to other evils that we know about. Some commentators try to take the evil out even of terrorism and attribute it to ­social marginalisation, as though people who decide to kill other innocent people do not have free choice.

Consider what is surely one of the worst types of evil we can ­imagine — the sexual abuse of children by men. Christopher Hitchens, a fine journalist though one I disagreed with profoundly about many things, once wrote that if he had been guilty of child abuse he would want more than anything to die, by any means available.

This may or may not have been a sound reaction but when I read it I admired at least Hitchens’s effort to imagine himself morally into the position of a child abuser.

The orthodox Christian view of human evil, which was the view of Western civilisation until a minute ago when the West stopped believing in the transcendent, was that mankind is universally challenged by original sin, that man lives in a fallen state. We used to know more, intellectually, about evil, and know it more routinely, than we do now. The Western media likes Pope Francis because of his social, economic and environmental radicalism. But they never report how often he talks of the real presence of evil, the real work of the devil in the world.

Our modern ideology of follow your dream, be yourself, get in touch with your own feelings, often makes me want to ask this question: what if your dream finds you attracted to six-year-old children, or makes you fantasise about shooting innocent strangers? If your only ultimate standard for what is good is how something makes you feel you will be led to many strange and sometimes terrible expedients. The truth is people always need to be educated, from childhood on, into an understanding of what is right and wrong. Human beings are all caught in a perennial struggle ­between the good and evil within themselves.

That a single priest could ever have abused a child is something I would have found inconceivable in my youth. But part of the mystery of human nature is that the line between heroic virtue and ­appalling corruption can be astonishingly narrow, more like, for some, the precipice of a cliff.

Human beings are good and bad, sometimes at the same time. You don’t conquer evil just by being yourself. Though we all have some innate sense of what is right and wrong, this sense is not infallible. We need to have it re­inforced, explained, interpreted. Habits of goodness need to be fortified by repetition and constancy.

Here is a hard truth: virtue lies most often not in our instincts, which are variable and dangerously unreliable, but in the rules and norms we have learned, and our attachment to them even when they are costly to us. Human nature never changes. There is no evolution in the human soul, just social change that can make it harder or easier to fortify a good conscience. Like everything else of any worth, to be good requires struggle. Evil never goes away. It seldom even takes a holiday.