“Why why why?”

Gentle reader need not actually consult this link from the Times of India, though if she reads mass media at all, she will be inured to such material. Delhi, the centre of India’s vast bureaucracy, had already the reputation of being, too, the “rape capital of India.” But gang rape in a moving city bus is perhaps a new development. Note further, young ladies, that having a courageous boyfriend with you is no use when the assailants are wielding iron pipes. Oremus.

And it is not just rape, in the nexus of the “liberated” attitudes that have overthrown India’s erstwhile sexual inhibitions. As an Indian lady said to us a few years ago, while we watched rhesus monkeys at play by a boulevard in that city, “I prefer the monkeys. They don’t leer at you like the Delhi men.”

The monkeys have their own little foibles, however, & tourists should be warned to keep their distance. They are surprisingly dexterous, & quick, & will mug you for any food you might be carrying, while you are still babbling, “Look, he is begging! How cute!” They bite viciously, when resisted, & will go for the face of a person to whom they have taken a dislike. On the plus side, few are rabid, & the bacterial infections can usually be cured with conventional antibiotics.

For the homeowner in Delhi, caged as in a zoo while a tribe of these macaques cavort in his garden, the answer is to hire a much larger monkey, such as a grey langur, to urinate around the perimeter. The smell is intensely acrid, but it keeps the smaller monkeys away; until the smell fades, & the operation must be repeated.

That Delhi’s municipal administration has utterly failed to deal with the monkey problem, despite extravagant trapping campaigns, could go without saying. (Move them out of the city & they come right back.) And India’s new Green movement wants to give the monkeys rights. So far as we know, no one has proposed to give them corresponding duties. Hell, most monkeys can be taught to draw an “X,” why not give them the vote? (We might even train them to vote consistently for some fascist, anti-environmental party, that will have them all exterminated.)

“Our monkey friends lack malice,” said this (Catholic) Delhi friend. “They have ‘invincible ignorance’,” she added. They do what they do from the purest motives of self-interest, in pursuit of food, sex, & the like, including shelter for they nest in stolen human clothing. In that sense, they are exemplars not only of Darwinian eugenics, but of Smithian free market economics. Humans, by contrast, are unreliable & unstable. They cannot even do “self-interest” consistently. Instead of behaving as “rational actors,” pursuing “enlightened self-interest,” humans do things that make “no sense at all” — unless perhaps on the theory that, through the rough & tumble of natural selection, we are gradually evolving into urban monkeys.

Whether in India or America we have developed this neurotic tick, often blamed on moral notions engrained in our species, which have served their evolutionary purpose & should now be cast off. We read the latest horrific report — gang rape on transit bus, massacre in kindergarten — then ask, “Why why why?” But the feminists of the ‘seventies had an answer for that: “Pourquoi pas?”

Alternatively, it is a subject with which “traditional” Christians, or “traditional” Hindus, should have no difficulty. Indeed, all religious traditions are by force of circumstance (they must bear the weight of the human condition) prepared for the assault of this “Why why why?” The Hindu conception of Dharma — shared by Jains, Buddhists, Sikhs — is of a divine righteous order, distinct from all the gods of any pantheon & commanding the obedience of all men, in their myriad walks of life, in reverence according to ritual & station. It might be compared with our “Natural Law.” The antonym Adharma describes the terrible condition of disobedience, through acts that are unnatural & imbalanced, & therefore evil & wicked & wrong — & which will certainly require rectification, purification, & re-balancing, in accordance with the Shastras.

Humans, uniquely among the animals, are capable of something called Evil, a transcendental phenomenon. (Paradoxically, this makes them also capable of Good.) But in an environment “progressively” freed from the restraints of transcendental religion — which acts to restrain evil impulses not only through the individual conscience, but also through external social pressure, & a legal order founded on Divine Commandment — they will do what they do do.

Radical Evil has been around for some time: since Adam, according to the Biblical narrative; since before, as Milton points out. It is not something new on Delhi buses, or in Connecticut schools. The new thing is our pathetic inability to deal with it. For we can’t really deal with anything whose very existence we doubt; or refuse to believe even when we see it. (“Why why why?”)

On the morning of 11th September 2001, even the progressive types of our acquaintance suddenly recovered this transcendental concept. What they saw that morning was irreducibly evil. But by Christmas, in almost every case, they had got over it. The problem then became technical again. It was “Bush.” Get rid of him, and the problem with those Islamists is solved.

Mike Huckabee impressed us (not for the first time) in a couple of items from Fox News a reader kindly ping’d. After the Connecticut horror, he had the temerity to observe that people who had spent the last thirty years trying to remove God from every visible place in America were now theatrically asking, “Where was God?” Huckabee answered this question by noting the behaviour of several Christian heroes at Sandy Hook, including one modest schoolteacher who, from presence of mind, was able to save every child in her classroom, by the sacrifice of her own life.

God is present or absent, in us. He is present in the Saints, & in every act of human decency & unfeigned kindness, by Christian or by another. His absence is conversely marked by indecency, by faithlessness, & in the extreme, by the behaviour of real devils in human flesh. (Next question?)

Other old political pros are using the emotion of the moment (“never waste a crisis” as the leftists say) to grandstand for gun control. The effect of this is to disarm the very people who could put a prompt stop to such massacres. Instead we wait for the police to arrive, while the devil continues, gunning people down at so-many-a-minute. This is why, around the world, where gun control has tightened, gun-related crime has increased, often quite significantly: for now the devils are assured that their intended victims will be unarmed. (The legality of their own weapons tends not to be a concern with them.) This is why mass murders are already almost invariably performed in officially gun-free environments, such as schools & shopping malls in liberal jurisdictions.

The “liberal mind” is undistracted by such prudential considerations; its vanity is incurious about the payment to be made in other people’s lives. The point is for the liberal to make a lewd display of his own pretended virtue, that will be applauded by those easily conned. Even the cops are replaced by “violence awareness programmes” for the kiddies — consisting of yet more indoctrination for that fatuous worldview, in which evil is an artefact of short funding for progressive social schemes. Each advance prepares the ground for another. “Liberalism,” in this contemporary sense, is a cancer eating away at the body politic, rendering it defenceless against its own metastasis, & flourishing until the body dies.

In Delhi, as in Sandy Hook, “the people” do grasp there is something wrong, perhaps even seriously wrong. But cause & cure are alike beyond them. Outrage over the transit-bus gang rape is evident through the Indian media. But as in the West, the thinking in India becomes focused on the technical fix, & away from wrestling with intractable human nature. This is a big marketing break for purveyors of the sort of video recorders we’ve spotted on the ceilings of buses & trolleys in the Greater Parkdale Area. These cameras can’t stop anything, but they provide an important supplement to the spontaneous iPhone coverage, so we can all see what happened on the evening news. And we will all be demeaned by it.

No one has defended the behaviour of Adam Lanza. His mother may have loved him, but he shot her anyway. The strange “survivalist” culture in which she participated is itself a response to increasingly plausible fears of an impending social & economic meltdown. When told to register or surrender their guns, such people will hide them. Keep pushing them, & the blowback will occur.

It’s not just guns. America is more copiously supplied than India with shrinks & mad doctors, for the time being; & with psychiatric protocols themselves rapidly “changing with the times.” Thanks to broad public interest in pop psychology, which offers cures for the guilt once associated with sin, we get a range of truly irresponsible answers to that “Why why why?” question. We have, for instance, read some appallingly misinformed blather about “autism” & Asperger’s syndrome. One would think those suffering were witches. Today, of course, we don’t burn witches, the way they did at the height of the Reformation. We have more efficient means. Modern science seeks ever more “creative” biological interventions, such as new tests to predict autism, that will help moms pick which children to abort, the way they do already with Down’s syndrome babies, or unwanted girls. Oremus.

In fact, the studies we’ve seen show that the autistic are no more prone to violent or any other sort of crime than the rest of the population, & possibly less so. They may have wrangs, usually harmless, when their habits & the routines around them are disturbed. The outpouring is more likely to reflect pain in themselves, than hatred for some “perpetrator.” The notion that they are indifferent to affection is a lie. They may be fearful of strangers, may shy from intimate contact, express themselves in ways by which strangers are dismayed; but those who love them learn to understand. Like every other kind of human being, they benefit from a loving & secure home, indeed desperately crave it.

Conversely, crime correlates quite spectacularly to broken homes, especially fatherless homes, in one of which Adam Lanza happened to reside. (We gather it was an acrimonious divorce, that left both children traumatized, but Adam positively unhinged, alone with his mother in a gleaming high-tech mansion, her trophy from post-modern family law.)

That information is no use, however, to a generation taught that marriage is neither Sacrament nor trust, but a right & an entitlement like every other gift of Nanny State — a contract between “two persons,” that now comes with stipulated buy-out arrangements. Two generations have been taught, by both instruction & example, that inconvenient children may be discarded. Subtly or unsubtly every child learns that he is there if “wanted”; that he is potentially in the way of an adult “relationship” that trumps his own wellbeing; & that he may suddenly become another disposal problem. This is what the destruction of marriage has achieved: unloved people spreading their unlove; & sex expressing itself as pure animal hunger & aggression.

Indeed, for the state, the whole fiscal point of “traditional” marriage — one man & one woman, for life — was to limit claims on the welfare rolls. Even if cynically, the older politicians grasped the connexion. Progressive politicians have been overcoming this “uncaring” backwardness through legal & social engineering, with ever greater enthusiasm. For they have discovered that single moms, & vagrant dads, welfare dependents, & even the criminal class, vote overwhelmingly for progressive politicians, & respond like Pavlov’s dogs to “make the rich pay.” They benefit directly from the destruction of the social & moral order. It secures their monopoly on power.

What can one add, besides, “We have seen the past, & it works.” It is meanwhile incumbent upon every reactionary soul to explain why it worked, to people who may by now be too far advanced in moral & intellectual idiotization to understand a word they say. Who have become in effect voting monkeys, “selecting” for their own extinction.

Oremus.