March 11, 2004
Evil stalks
The entire premise of the question in this Washington Post headline, Victims' Relatives Still Ask, Why -- Snipers' Motives Remain Unresolved is based on the secular humanist belief in man as essentially good and perfectable.
Reading further, we learn:
During the trials of John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, Larry Meyers often attended the proceedings, a poignant figure on a wooden courtroom bench trying to learn something about the men who killed his youngest brother, Dean.He is still in the dark. Dozens of witnesses, hundreds of pieces of evidence and two sentencings later, he cannot comprehend what drove two drifters to become coldblooded snipers.
"I will never understand the total depravity of mind that causes something like this to occur," Meyers said this week as he left the Prince William County courtroom where Muhammad was sentenced to death. "I can never walk in those shoes and understand."
My heart goes out to Larry Meyers, in his quiet loyalty to his slain brother, but there is a good reason the snipers' crimes elude rational comprehension.
Religious believers know that man is flawed and struggling on his way to a relationship with God. There is good and evil in the world, and Muhammad and Malvo are evil made plain. One can readily envision the same Satan as strolls with a Mona Lisa smile on Golgotha in Mel Gibson's Passion as present in the sniper's blue Caprice as they mowed down innocents in Maryland, Virginia and D.C. [As A. Larry Ross notes today, The Passion is really a war movie, pitting good against evil.]
I recall a conversation in my kitchen with a housemate with a housemate holding a Ph.D. in psychology. I had just read a gripping biography of John Wayne Gacy (Tim Cahill's Buried Dreams). As with the sniper victims' families, the author ultimately could find no complete explanation for Gacy's murders -- achieved with careful calculation that suggested a sane mind -- without concluding that he may have simply demonstrated the real presence of evil. I asked my housemate about this explanation and she was utterly dismissive -- "It's not important."
So much for the ability of psychology to grapple with society's most dangerous individuals.
One can look forever for "motives" for the inexplicable monsters of history, and come up empty, if one holds that there is no higher presence in the world than that of humankind.
