"Pointless slaughter is the supreme triumph of amoral will"

Mark Steyn writes today,

A republic requires virtue, and the decline of virtue is accompanied necessarily by the decline of the concept of evil, and its substitution by exculpatory analysis of the "motives" of evil. A more useful conversation would be on what it takes to remove the most basic societal inhibition - including the instinctive revulsion that would prevent most of us from taking the lives of strangers, including in this case eighteen-month-old babies. That inhibition is weaker in the dar al-Islam, because of Islam's institutional contempt for "the other" (unbelievers) but also because of the rewards promised in the afterlife. Thus, violence is sanctioned by paradise. That is the precise inversion of our society, and yet the weakening of inhibition seems to be proceeding here, too. A church sealed off by yellow police tape: a shameful and astonishing sight, and yet one senses that it will neither shame nor astonish us for long, that something else will come along to make the records books and distract a couple of news cycles.

It was not always so. Over five years ago, I wrote:

If you recall the spate of American school shootings around the turn of the century, you may also remember that in the immediate aftermath of September 11 they ceased — almost as if, in a nation fired to righteous anger and waging war in a just cause, even the most solipsistic psychos can discern that taking out Grade Six will look like an act of feeble narcissism. But the years go by, and righteous anger fades to WMD, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, Bush lied . . . and the lone-wolf sociopath returns.

"Solipsistic psychos" and "feeble narcissism": As I write, someone is on the airwaves promising that we will soon know the "motive" of the shooter. To dignify what drove this guy to do what he did as "motive" is to torture the word beyond meaning.

...I don't think it's a surprise that a vapid culture produces vapid murderers. In a sense, the unusual seriousness of the immediate post-9/11 era imposed a discipline on "feeble narcissism" that extended even unto those "solipsistic psychos".

One should not underestimate the effectiveness of cultural pressures. For a couple of days last week, everyone on TV was an Uzbek activist. My own experience of that benighted stan is limited to a few days in and around Tashkent and Samarkand, not long after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Say what you will about the Commies, but they held the lid on Islam: The Uzbeks I met were nominal, residual Muslims; they consumed alcohol at a fairly impressive rate to this semi-Irishman and there was no imam to give them a hard time over it because the mosques had all been closed. Then in the Nineties the Wahhabists and Salafists showed up and started walking around a ton of Saudi cash, and slowly, inevitably, Islam awoke...

...America's four deadliest single-shooter mass murders occurred in the last decade. Only one of them - the Orlando nightclub massacre - can be said to have a political or ideological component. The rest seem to be a peculiarly contemporary form of narcissism - that, when my life heads south, the only way to give it meaning is to take large numbers of people with me. There is no cause, no fealty, no "Allahu Akbar!" - because pointless slaughter is the supreme triumph of amoral will: Who needs Allah? You're your own Allah. Unlike Manchester or Nice or Paris or Berlin or Brussels, there is no meaning: Indeed, the only meaning is the meaninglessness; that is the point - the black void at the heart of the act.

Texas officials now believe they have their "motive" - in their words, "a domestic situation going on in this family"; in my words, "the black void at the heart of the act". It is a grim phenomenon, its accelerating proliferation is deeply disturbing, and it is not unconnected to the broader societal weakness in which Islam senses its opportunity.

Read more here.