God help us in a world infused with anger

Like kittens and libraries, marathons are intrinsically benevolent. They raise funds for charities, provide a day out for families, and present athletes with a demanding challenge. Beyond the front-runners, the race is not even especially competitive, since most amateurs are attempting to beat only their own personal bests.

Thus the double pressure-cooker bombing of the Boston Marathon last Monday was perfectly designed to garner no sympathy whatsoever. It was contrived to be as appalling as possible in order to draw just the scale of outraged international coverage that the carnage has duly received. Of every stripe, terrorists eat denunciation for breakfast.

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We don’t yet know much about the flimsy ideological pretext these two young men of Chechen heritage, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, had for despoiling an event of pure joy, celebration and heroic physical exertion, for murdering three spectators, and for maiming more than 170 exhausted runners and their friends and relations.

Yet we’ve met enough of these miscreants by now to be pretty sure, on the deepest level, what powers these people. Whether the killers are foreign or domestic, the constellation of underlying emotions is always the same: resentment, grievance, envy, mean-spiritedness and contempt. Doubtless, delusions of superiority.

It cannot be an accident that the Boston Marathon is an occasion of festivity, of unity, of community – because to two disgruntled young men it represented a party where they did not feel invited.

(How telling that the younger was flunking in university; that the older was also floundering, after having failed to make the US Olympic boxing team.)

That sense of having been left out, and a subsequent vengefulness, is nothing new, and traces back to fairytales such as Sleeping Beauty, in which the evil fairy who wasn’t asked to the christening crashes the affair anyway in order to curse the crib. This urge to annihilate whatever seems to elude or exclude you is not the inclination of terrorists alone; it is not only a problem for foreigners or disaffected outliers beyond our ken. It’s all over the web. Take a look at the shrill, venomous threads that run after articles just like this one. Take a look at the rancid blogs and vile tweets.

Terrorism is merely a physical manifestation of the spleen that contaminates nearly all public conversation these days. The internet is awash in bile, sometimes so acidic that it drives teenagers to suicide. Vandals on the sidelines sneer at anyone foolish enough to say something, under the misguided impression that demolition is a form of creativity. Hence packing pressure cookers full of nails, ball bearings and explosive and crafting an especially vicious, below-the belt comment on a website seem to entail their own admirable flair and daring.

I wish I could find those bombs at the Boston Marathon baffling – alien, horrifyingly incomprehensible. However, the same drive to tear apart whatever you can’t be part of, the same loathing and scorn, runs in a thick seam not only through our culture but, I fear, through the veins of our very species.

If the internet is any guide, we are not dealing with occasional coteries of zealots with offbeat political grudges. Apparently, a whole swath of the human race feels ostracised, under-appreciated, sour and fiercely resentful of anyone who seems to have found the happiness that life, or ”society”, or the rich, or the West, or immigrants, or white people, or the unjustly celebrated have denied them.

Whether the weapon of choice is explosives or expletives, the underlying spirit of violence is identical. All I can say is, God help us. We can search backpacks at the London Marathon; we can track down culprits with meticulous examination of street-camera and mobile-phone footage and bring individual perpetrators to justice. But the spite that drives acts of despoilment such as the one in Boston is out there in buckets.

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Likewise encouraging are the lone voices of reason, support and simple admiration in electronic forums – the people who refuse to be intimidated by the malice that too often characterises our communal discourse. The ”small, stunted individuals who would destroy instead of build” cited by President Barack Obama in an interfaith ”service of healing” on Thursday can be defeated, whether on the Boston Common or in the virtual public square.

Read the full essay, The Age:
http://www.theage.com.au/comment/god-help-us-in-a-world-infused-with-anger-20130421-2i88o.html#ixzz2RR9uyCrA

Lionel Shriver is a US journalist and author. First published, The Telegraph, London

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“What a chimera then is man. What a novelty! What a monster, what chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy. Judge of all things, imbecile worm of the earth; depositary of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error: the pride and refuse of the universe” Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)