Culture

City Journal | Andrew Klavan
Where incendiary political rhetoric truly resides in America

Judging from his website, I would guess that Jared Lee Loughner suffers from schizophrenia. The man who opened fire with a nine-millimeter Glock in Tucson, Arizona, on Saturday was obsessed with mind control and bizarre, incomprehensible theories of currency and government. He read books by Hitler, Marx, Plato, and Orwell, among others. He did not believe in God. By all appearances, his mind was ruined by madness and his soul by evil. In any case, he murdered a nine-year-old child, a federal judge, and four others while wounding at least twelve, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, a Blue Dog Democrat well liked on both sides of the aisle.

I wasn’t going to write anything about the incident because—unlike, say, the frequent and ongoing atrocities inspired by the very intent of Islamism or Communism—it didn’t seem to be a murder caused by any sort of coherent idea. Bad ideas have to be answered by the best ones we’ve got, or they continue to claim the minds of believers and the lives of the just. Madness and evil, on the other hand, are simply things that happen in this broken world. The only proper response is the one in King Lear: “Howl, howl, howl, howl!”

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I wrote this as a comment below but it just might qualify as essay material so I have included it here as well.

Darwinian evolution (a process of linear development) would not have been conceptually possible in the pagan world because the notion of linear time and thus progress, require Christian philosophical presuppositions. This notion entered the world through Genesis, the narrative that portrays time and space as created, rather than eternal entities. This radical break from paganism, to which the entire world was subject until Christ entered the world, was difficult even for Christians to fully comprehend at first (Origen for example, despite his brilliance, could never shake the notion of circular time), and it would be many centuries later before the full power (freedom really) of these concepts would bear fruit. The scientific system in other words, could not have developed anywhere except in a Christian culture.

Darwin was a philosophical materialist. His theory (randomness in particular) is wholly dependent on philosophical materialism. I approach the Christian – atheist debate in terms of the history of ideas (I have to leave the science to others). Freud fell, Marx fell, and I believe that the Darwinian collapse is inevitable as well. Taking a long view it might be that Dawkins, Hitchens, and the other radical atheists represent little more than the last gasps of a dying philosophy.
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