Sandy Hook - The American Face of Nihilism

The American face of nihilism reared its ugly head once again in the tragic shooting at a small town Connecticut elementary school. It is the latest in a long list of similar massacres that now scar the American landscape. I wonder if we are not, perhaps, witnessing the end of the Enlightenment experiment: having deposed God, have we ushered in the age of destruction foretold by Nietzsche? Our modern values have proved meaningless and uninspiring; where the pursuit of happiness trumps all other ideals. Our freedom is now wholly employed in the quest for self-gratification: the pursuit of our individual life-choices – ranging from the bourgeois to the outrageous. “We are decent, ironic, cosmopolitan people ,” commented cultural critic Lee Seigel after the Tucson shooting, horrified, “are we not?” Especially since this was a quiet town, "Stuff like this doesn't happen in Newtown," commented one of its residents.

Yet, somehow we fail to notice that we all swim in the same cultural waters as Adam Lanza. Seigel continued, “We are not killers no matter how much we enjoy being diverted by the spectacle of killing in movies, TV shows, video games, violent apps. But a mountain slide pulls down everyone, good and evil, innocent and corrupt, in its rush to the bottom. We all dwell complacently among the same cultural assumptions. Some of those assumptions are helping to drive society, through no conscious purpose of their own, to the bottom.” (Seigel, American Nihilism, The New York Observer, 1/12/11)

Some speak about a crisis of education or a crisis of mental health, y et it is more proper to speak of a cultural crisis. Closed to the transcendent dimension of life and the pursuit of the truly “good” as Pope Benedict reminds us, we are unable to hand on anything that remotely approximates, and hence buoys up, the infinite expectations of the heart. Is the glorification of ones own lifestyle really worth spending an entire life for? Hardly. To my mind there is a clear connection between rise of the secular worldview, that proposes nothing truly great, and the breakdown of the social fabric that pushes more people each
day toward the brink of insanity .

Henry David Thoreau wrote of American society well over a century ago, "Most men live lives of quiet desperation." Every once and a while an Adam Lanza comes along whose desperation is not so quiet; toting the means to make himself heard.


I believe Seigel was right on another score. Of course we need tighter gun control, but there will be no meaningful conversation around it in our nation because the underlying issue cuts to the heart of the Enlightenment idealization of freedom . Those on the Right promote the freedom to bear arms, while those on the Left promote the freedom of speech which supports the entertainment industry and its production of hyper-violent and sexualized content – paltry and passing satisfactions which are bound to leave of sea of bitterness, disappointment and emptiness in their wake.

The only "common good" we can com e to consensus on is that each one should be unrestrained in their pursuits. There is a striking contrast between the innocence of those school children and the courage of their teachers and the culture around them , yet we uncritically graduate them forward into that world.


And so we have seen a new slaughter of the innocents. Our children are being sacrificed on the altar of the will to power: our collective resistance toward recognizing a god bigger than our own bellies, while at the same time, our unwillingness to recognize Evil and our connivance in it.


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