Pure Crime

We are more Aristotelian than we would like to admit. We believe that things happen for a reason. As a result, we wonder about the causes of things that happen. And when we can’t come up with one, however remote or vague, the uneasiness causes us discomfort. Two weeks ago, it happened again, after midnight in a cinema in Aurora, Colorado. A man appeared wearing a helmet, gas mask and bullet proof vest, and carrying an assault weapon, a rifle and two pistols. The last installment of “The Dark Knight” series was showing. Indifferent and cold, he opened two gas canisters, fired several shots at the ceiling and then went down the aisle, from the screen to the last row. One by one, he shot 71 viewers. The result: 12 dead and almost 60 injured.

The man was James Holmes, a 34-year-old doctorate student in the department of neuroscience at the University of Denver. He did not have a criminal history; only a traffic ticket. Yet today, two weeks later, it is difficult to absorb, even from a distance. Moreover, it is bothersome to think that news such as this is flashing up on our screens at dizzying rates and then disappearing almost without a trace, quickly erased by the flow of events. However, the uneasiness remains. And it is frightening.

Then, perhaps because it is still fresh, a memory resurges of another seemingly-similar barbarity: The crime of Anders Breivik, responsible for the killing in Norway, which took the lives of almost 100 young attendants at a Labor Party summer camp. However, beyond the dimensions of mass murder, the differences are vast. Breivik was ultra-right, Islamaphobe and anti-Marxist. While he was shooting, he yelled at least two times: “You are going to die today, Marxists”. Later, he admitted that he blamed the Labor Party youth for promoting multiculturalism and for facilitating what he considered the Islamization of his country. So extreme were his beliefs that his defense council maintained, “The mother of these actions is not violence, it is an extreme, radical, political attitude.”

In the case of Breivik, and many other mass murderers, the rampage had an ideological motive; something that one can understand the roots of, if not the act itself. Examples of both large and small crimes like his are endless. To know the reason in these cases, while not dulling or minimizing the effects of the killing, does help us to understand what Bergman called “the serpent’s egg,” the seed of hatred and the mechanisms of destructive violence. A representative and terrible case of this unjustifiable murder is the case of Daniel Pearl, which Bernard-Harvey Lévy investigated for more than a year and on which he published his shocking book, “Who Killed Daniel Pearl?”(Tusquets).

However, the killing in Colorado is different. It is what could be called a pure crime, without personal or collective ideological or political motivations. It is a pure crime because it abandons death in the territory of the free, the unjustified, of the ultimate philosophical aberration: the dominion of why not. We must approach the center of this massive horror to be able to think of something meaningful, even where it may appear that there is not anything. Identifying this crime with others of massive nature and different mechanisms can only guard our conscience against the excessive anxiety which horrifies us, pushing our thoughts to their limits.

Philosophy has tried, without much luck, to reflect on acts such as this one which appear to be inconceivable and defy reason. Kant tried, calling it “radical evil” (verified) during his time. It was a notion which from then on, allowed him to understand an absolute, but also somewhat irrational belief that worse acts can always be conceived. Hannah Arendt, in relation to the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel, abandoned the notion of radical evil for that of the banality of evil. What she found in the Nazi leader was the absence of thought and, additionally, an inability to discern between good and evil, and make moral judgments accordingly. As a result, according to Arendt, Eichmann was a moral idiot, deprived of ethical reasoning and of the capacity to equate his action to the result of his moral discernment.

However in my opinion, this explanation seems insufficient today. The inability to make distinctions in moral terms does not imply, by itself, a criminal or murderous instinct. It does not give reason to unreasonable. In the absence of political or personal motivation there is something unbearably disturbing about pure crime, in the act of killing just to kill; just because. And this perhaps has to do with contempt for the uniqueness of another.

I believe that Hannah Arendt herself, in an unforgettable letter to her teacher Karl Jaspers dated March 4, 1951, went far beyond these notions: “What radical evil is I don’t know, but it seems to me it somehow has to do with the following phenomenon: Making human beings as human beings superfluous”. (Correspondence 1926-1969)

This is a brilliant and chilling insight. And she guessed, I think, the key to criminal hate. Cain’s natural instinct: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” becomes the rotten root of crime. The criminal thinks, “Why should I care about the other?”