Reflecting on recent terrorist attacks around the world, Cynthia Ozick recalls hearing a prominent novelist a decade ago arguing the need to understand the “humanity” of terrorists. To Ozick, this sort of reasoning—perhaps particularly tempting for writers of fiction—leads only to moral muddle:
[N]otions of . . . impoverishment, grievance, impotence at the hands of powerful faraway forces, humiliation, spiritual misery (a fresh coinage particularly worthy of the novelist’s art) . . . have become unassailably commonplace to the point of vacuous triteness. And more: terror can now be counted among matters urgently spiritual.
What comes of these divinings is, finally, a confusion of categories. The Paris atrocities, the Jerusalem stabbings, the San Bernardino shootings are not chapters in a novel to be intensively parsed. A novel is a cultural artifact. A human mind, whatever culture it is born into, is privately, even instinctively, free to enact individual will. Everyone . . . can choose whether to murder or not to murder. . . .
At bottom, an open-hearted willingness to understand everyone is an appalling distraction from the intrinsic depravity of the act of premeditated murder. The evil deed speaks for itself; to search out the evildoer’s “backstory,” to look for some exculpating raison d’être, is no more useful or edifying or moral than an attraction to pornography.
Read more on Weekly Standard: http://www.weeklystandard.com/understanding-terror/article/2000198