By “this” the Courant intended to indicate the anti-gun
legislation newly passed by Connecticut’s General Assembly.
The mercifully short but emotionally inconvenient answer to
the question is – “No.”
Possibly the most thoughtful column among the three featured
on the paper’s Opinion front page was written by Colin McEnroe, who struggled manfully
with the usual heart-mind dichotomy.
“He could not afford, also,” Mr. McEnroe wrote of emotionally
overcome Republican leader John McKinney, “to lose the Battle of Who Cares
More.”
Mr. McEnroe has been around the legislative block a few
times in the course of his writing career and knows, as most of us do, that the
chief battle – sometimes the only
battle – that will secure a legislative victory is won by those who are most
able to appeal to raw emotion -- and Sandy Hook has rubbed every emotion raw.
“The problem with most people,” said a philosopher full of
years and wisdom (my mother, in fact) is that they think with their hearts and
feel with their heads.”
I once brought her C.S. Lewis’ essay “Men Without Chests” to
read. The point of the essay was that a heart properly belongs in the chest and
not on the sleeve, where it might readily be shown by social deciders to those
unpersuadable few as an incontrovertible ipsi
dixit.
If only humankind, Mr. Lewis sighed, could manage to
negotiate the perilous abyss between the heart and mind that is sometimes
opened by the jagged and sharp events of life. Mr. Lewis thought, some think
credulously, that Christianity might provide a bridge. So did Saint Augustine,
the bishop of Hippo in Africa who argued against pagan Rome but wept when Rome
fell. The human heart, Augustine knew, was rootless, in perpetual motion, and
could find rest only through a sometimes treacherous return home: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and
our heart is restless until it rests in you."
It is doubtful that
the 20 year-old Mr. Lanza read much of Augustine or Lewis. His spiritual
template was drawn from the murderous acts of Anders Breivik, who slaughtered more than 77 people in
Norway. Did Mr. Breivik also wear his heart, such as it was, on his sleeve? Is
there a pill one might take to move the heart and head where they belong?
There is something
nearly pagan, certainly pre-Christian that hovers like a black halo around mass
murder crimes and their consequences.
In the Golden
Bough, Sir James Frazier recounts an Athenian sacrifice known as “the murder of the
ox” or bouphonia. An ox is slaughtered with a knife to propitiate the gods of the
harvest. The slaughtering instruments, axes and knives, are first washed in
pure water by maidens, then sharpened on whetstones by men, after which they
are given to the butchers who slaughter the ox. Following the ceremony, a trial
is held by the king-judge to affix blame on behalf of the murdered ox.
Ritualistically, all are accused: The water carriers shift blame to those who
have sharpened the weapon; these point to the butchers as the guilty parties.
And finally, the butchers lay blame upon the axes and the knives – which
“accordingly are found guilty, condemned and cast into the sea.”
The pagan ritual – every bit detailed and precise as the seemingly
endless political folderol following the murders in Sandy Hook – provide
an example of homeopathic magic, during
which human guilt is ascribed to inanimate objects such as, in the deliberations
of our post-pagan General Assembly, a blameless rifle, found guilty and
metaphorically cast into the sea.
Albert Jay Nock, one of the early influences on Bill Buckley, wondered
in “Memoirs of a Superfluous Man” how a modern living in the 20th century
would know if the world were descending into a new Dark Age.
The mercifully brief answer to that question is – by the signs of the
times.
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