Las Vegas police have declared that the motives of Stephen Paddock, the man who slaughtered 58 people and wounded hundreds of others at a country music festival in Las Vegas last October 1st, are still unknown. It is indeed strange, I suppose, that a wealthy man in his sixties would commit such a horrible crime.
I thought of Paddock and Devin Kelley, the man who killed twenty six people in a Texas church in November, and a number of other mass killers while reading Charles Taylor's highly acclaimed book, A Secular Age.
Taylor writes that the spectre of meaninglessness is haunting Western culture as a consequence of modernity's denial of transcendence. One result of that denial is that secular man is left with a view of human life "which is empty, cannot inspire commitment, offers nothing worthwhile, and cannot answer the craving for goals we can dedicate ourselves to."
This "flatness", the emptiness so many feel since the banishment of God from the public square, has been called the "malaise of modernity". Perhaps this malaise, the desire to rise above the ordinary humdrum of existence, the desire to break through the stifling ennui of daily life, the wish to give some meaning to a meaningless life by performing great feats, the yearning for significance in a universe that reminds all who think about it that we are just dust in the wind, maybe this is what impelled these men to commit their horrible crimes.
Paddock was said to be a man without convictions. He was indifferent to religion and politics. He seemed very much like Camus' antihero in The Stranger, a man named Meursault who murders someone for no particular reason. For Meursault the deed amounted to little more than something to do to rise above the tedium of an otherwise pointless and empty life.
Kelley, on the other hand, was an outspoken atheist. His life was devoid of any ultimate meaning because for him death is the end of existence and thus negates all proximal meanings in life. He was also, apparently, consumed with hatred for Christians.
Both men were nihilists in that neither believed that anything had any real meaning or value. Nothing really mattered for either man, certainly not the lives they took, nor even their own. They saw both their own lives and those of their victims as utterly worthless.
So perhaps in searching for a motive for these awful crimes we should bear in mind that in a life so flattened, so meaningless and empty, there's sometimes a deep yearning to do something significant, something memorable, to be recognized, and even, like Meursault in The Stranger, to revel in being execrated by the crowd.
Join all this together with the fact that in their world there's no ultimate accountability for anything they do and thus no real guilt of any kind, and we have all the ingredients necessary for a deed that shocks people who don't see the world the way these men did.
In a world without God nothing really matters. Living, in the words of the Smashing Pumpkins' song Jellybelly, "makes me sick, so sick I want to die". In the throes of such a sickness suicide makes sense, but why do it anonymously? Why not go out in a blaze of public horror while venting your hatreds and your frustrations on as many others as you can?
If that's the sort of psychology that lies behind what Paddock, Kelley, and numerous others have done in schools, churches and movie theaters across the country then we might well fear that in a culture whose fundamental premises inevitably spawn such twisted, dessicated souls, it's going to happen a lot more in the future.
