Europeans are different. Houston and New York City exhibit quite different norms from Frankfurt or Glasgow, let alone a decorous country town like Dunblane. Of violence rooted in the fabric of everyday life–whether deprivation, or drugs, or simple score-settling on the streets–the United States experiences more than any other society in the developed world. When I’m in the States, I live in Vermont, in a place so small it could hardly be called a community. Tranquillity rules, even where poverty is endemic. But one is not blind to the narcotic disorders and the rituals of fear that are more or less the condition of life in the city.
The comfort a Berliner or Londoner might draw from these comparisons is, however, no longer available. The Dunblane catastrophe illuminates the fact that there is no longer any refuge to be found, if there ever really was, in believing America to be unique. Loner-dom, the psychic terrain of the solitary killer, knows no frontiers. The pathology of an affectless world is an international phenomenon. At the leading edge of progress, in the most technically sophisticated societies man has ever been able to construct, the seeds of a terrible doom also seem to be planted.
Within 48 hours, we knew almost all there was to know about Thomas Hamilton. Hamilton was a man alone, nursing a perversion and distanced from society. He turned out to be notorious, a grudge-merchant who was nevertheless allowed a license to carry guns. But he was a solitary, the fevered resenter of a world in which he could find no place. He was thus a slightly elderly, crazed version of the social category that now menaces our societies more than any other: the single male who has no hope.
They aren’t all murderers, of course. But unskilled and unemployed, humiliated by sisters who get the part-time jobs that are the only ones on offer these days, lacking any social role, they find that the only identity available is beyond the pale.
The politician’s response is to look for solutions from the only repertoire he understands, the array of statutes and small admonishments under his control. These aren’t just a way of pretending to impose some kind of order on the moral chaos that lurks so close to the surface. It makes sense to try to keep guns out of the hands of people whose mental state tempts them to shoot. Just as necessary is the better protection of schools and other gathering places. I would add the case for far larger resources to be devoted to the study and care of mental illness. For if there is one condition common to these events, it is their perpetrators’ tragic unfitness for modern life.
But there, perhaps, lies the most painful recognition. Maybe these are sicknesses for which there is no cure: the degeneration of feeling, the collapse of community, the growth of loneliness, the exaltation of acquisitive individualism. But are we prepared, in this liberal age, seriously to examine how violence legitimizes itself, through television and other images available 24 hours a day? Onanistic solitude, lived out in a fantasy world ruled by terror and thrilled by incessant gunfire, poses a lethal combination. Media moguls, enriched by promoting these fantasies, deny any blame for society’s degradation. They are only giving society what it demands, they say. And that exposes the explanation that is hardest to accept: that the price of modernity is madness. As our societies progress, they leave ever more people behind–while drastically reducing care for the mentally ill, which is all that stands between these trends and social disaster. In that prospect all are yoked, from Dunblane to Oklahoma City.
