Articles
Degrees Of Separation
Between my wife and me and some of the victims of the recent Colorado shooting are two degrees of separation. Many of our close friends know people who were in that horrific place, and one had an employee who was killed and another who was critically wounded.
Actions like this shooting and others that have taken place in the western world in the past 40 years don’t have a single cause and certainly don’t have a single solution. There may be steps our society can take to make these events less common and less deadly. But a person with evil in his heart, given the availability and the power of lethal technology, can hurt a lot of people very quickly.
To say that there is not a simple, reliable way to stop such events, however, is not to say that we cannot and should not recognize the factors that underlie and nurture this disastrous evil. The frameworks of thought that drive the political and sociological discourse in our society today clearly and strongly trend to the actions of that Aurora gunman.
Historically, most murders have been “crimes of passion,” acts committed by people who were at least acquainted with their victims, in whom strong and uncontrolled feelings — love turned to hate — might spark the desire to hurt others. But particularly in recent years, there has been a tendency toward killings in which the perpetrator does not know the victims and has no feelings at all toward them — not hatred, not dislike, not personal or racial or economic animosity. To return to the term used at the beginning of this essay, the killer creates between himself and his victims a buffer of many degrees of separation, which allows him to use and destroy others to make his “statement.”
Sociologists call this separation anomie. It is a sense of disconnectedness from other people, an abandonment of the standards of courtesy, thoughtfulness, caring, even right and wrong by which we judge community behavior. Indeed, the literal meaning of anomie is “without law.” Anomic homicide thus would be an appropriate designation for mass murder.
But why are we here? How did our society, our “civilization,” reach such an uncivilized state that when a gunman in riot gear enters a theater and tries to massacre everyone, we shrug and say, “Well, that’s just the way it goes”?
Again, there is no one answer. Many factors, including individual responsibility, have to be taken into account. But it is hard to ignore the political and conceptual polarization of our collective thought, and it is particularly hard to not see clearly that both of the poles are taking us in the same direction — toward “infinite degrees of separation,” in a serious oxymoron: societal anomie.
Consider conservatism, to which most of us hold to some degree. Its guiding lights are people like Ayn Rand and Frederick Hayek, with their glorification of individualism and self-reliance, elevation of property rights to the highest place in a value system, and freedom from obligation to others. Success means rising above “the pack,” and the sweet taste of success is contempt for those who have less.
As one politician put it to rousing cheers, “If you’re poor, it’s your own fault.” You’re a fool to sacrifice for others, because life is a zero-sum game; what they get is denied to you, and you must excel by taking from somebody else — indeed, the ultimate self-satisfaction is to have something precisely because you took it from somebody else. Of course, we as Christian conservatives don’t subscribe to that entire creed, but it is undeniably the vision of those with the money and control of that movement.
Is the “other side” any better? Ha! Its spokesmen decry “social Darwinism” yet spare no scorn for anyone who questions biological Darwinism, which was begotten already pregnant with its social spawn. How are pure materialists to make a case for non-material values? How, indeed, will they make a case for anything because in their conceit there is no argument or will or choosing, only the “epiphenoma” of chemistry in a material brain?
With his flair for the apt phrase, Richard Dawkins famously attributes all living action to "The Selfish Gene" — survival through struggle and alienation. Dawkins once gave a truly priceless interview, in which he answered one question by proclaiming, “there is no purpose for anything,” then one breath later called people who deny the omnipotence of evolution “wicked.” No purpose means no standard (anomie!), and with no standard how can any act or attitude be “wicked”?
Pick your poison, but don’t be deluded into thinking that there is a political solution to societal anomie. As long as materialism dominates both poles of thought (and in this world it almost always will), those who use political weapons can change nothing. “The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds” (II Cor. 10:4).
The gospel of Christ is ridiculed by the most powerful and persuasive voices in our society, yet it is only in that evangel — proclaimed in word and life to one good-hearted hearer at a time — that true answers to social anomie can be found. The contrast to both poles of Darwinism could scarcely be more stark: “He who hates a brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him” (I John 3:15). “As we have opportunity, let us do good to all people” (Gal. 6:10).
The ultimate vision of anomie must be in C.S. Lewis’ "The Great Divorce," a dream of Hell as a tiny place where tiny individuals who were once human engage in a single-minded quest: to move farther and farther away from one another, as they shrink toward infinite smallness and infinite separation.
We have the alternative. Are we telling people how to diminish the degrees of separation?
