So shootings are about ideology after all

OUR PROBLEM HERE IS EVIL, NOT METAL. AND EVIL IS PERPLEXING.

So it’s ideology after all. For years, mass slaughter of civilians prompted politicians to insist it was nothing to do with the killer’s ostensible beliefs and pundits to distinguish mental illness from genuine terrorism. But with the Christchurch, New Zealand mosque massacres nobody said “oh, that’s not ‘real’ white nationalism.” Instead it was pretty much “yeah, evil beliefs, told you so.”

I think the instant analysis was largely correct. I wish we could have avoided weaponizing the incident until the dead were buried. But since people have already blamed guns and Trump, let’s be clear that the murderer was motivated by “alt-right” and “white nationalist” hostility toward Muslims.

To say he had comprehensible motives is not to diminish his guilt. Three days later a tram shooting in Utrecht appears to have been “terrorist,” probably Islamist, possibly intended as revenge for Christchurch. Surely one can accept that those were the motives, if they were, without expressing any sympathy for the reasoning. Quite the reverse. It means such killers deliberately create the

mens rea at the core of guilt. Moreover, if ideas matter, some of that guilt attaches to their fellow-travellers.

Not everyone who worries about immigration or Islamism is complicit in those New Zealand murders, of course, even those whose views are crudely expressed or genuinely nasty. We certainly would not say terror in the name of Allah taints every Muslim, or even every Muslim angry about history or current events. Nor that a murderous attack by an “incel” indicts everyone concerned about modern gender orthodoxy or bitter because they can’t get a date. But we are fallible beings and must be careful.

Even about words. For instance casual use of “terrorist.” As a technical not a moral matter, terrorism is the targeting of civilians to induce changes in government policy. When that goal is not the method behind the madness, something is not “terrorism” just because it’s despicable. Or necessarily “cowardly.” Certain types of evil take very strong nerves and we can surely be clear about what we are condemning without ceasing to condemn it.

Also, gun laws don’t matter much. New Zealand has relaxed laws, many guns and few murders; the Netherlands strict laws, few guns and few murders. But bad guys can always get weapons. Our problem here is evil, not metal. And evil is perplexing.

Anything sufficiently depraved we colloquially call “crazy.” But we don’t mean the perpetrators are not guilty by reason of insanity. (Including Hitler.) People with genuine, organic-brain-disorder madness don’t know right from wrong, can’t comprehend the consequences of their actions, and are locked up with pity not anger. But a far larger category of madness is a disorder of the soul rather than the mind, self-inflicted and therefore culpable.

If people indulge dark thoughts repeatedly, brood on slights real or imagined, harbour resentment and feel noble because they’re persecuted, then gradually, deliberately, they poison their own brains. In the end they are incapable of behaving or thinking normally. But they did it to themselves. Which is precisely the older understanding of how evil works.

Following his conversion, C.S. Lewis looked within and “found what appalled me; a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds. My name was legion.” Can any reader say otherwise? I can’t. But some resist carving deep, smooth, evil ruts for bad thoughts to run round and round in, and others do not.

If this explanation is valid, we cannot only condemn those whose resentments we reject. Instead sympathy with a murderous cause becomes a dangerous path on which to take even tentative steps.

In Northern Ireland during “the Troubles,” a revealingly greasy euphemism, most Ulster residents were not terrorists or advocates of mass murder. But too many sympathized with republican (or loyalist) paramilitary ideologies, and some did not tell what they knew because they sympathized. Others, probably far more, did not tell out of fear, and there’s a big difference between blood on your hands and sweat on your palms.

Likewise one can be angry about colonialism, or indignant at heresy, without condoning terrorism let alone abetting it. Or critical of Islam’s rejection of the separation of church and state and of the doctrine of original sin without being implicated in the mass killing in New Zealand. But one can yield to temptation from any number of directions, and the internet offers too many places to cheer on others’ descent into darkness while conducting your own.

To speak of evil, or the Father of Lies, sounds naïve and archaic. Until you try to understand how someone who did understand what they were doing could enter a place of worship and systematically murder men, women and children in the hope of tearing a society apart.

So yes, it matters what we think.