In End of the World: Civilization and Its Fate, philosopher Jon Mills reflects on the Taliban attack with machine guns and explosives on a school in Peshawar, in which 132 schoolchildren were slaughtered. The act is almost incomprehensible. “The immediate dislocation of understanding any rational means behind such atrocities,” he writes “is emotionally unfathomable for the simple fact that it disrupts our psychic need for a moral order in the universe.” It represents a “pathological breach” in our implicit conviction that we live in a civilized world. “It takes only one act of barbarism,” he concludes, “to remind us that evil is no illusion.” Of course, the single act of barbarism can be and is multiplied exponentially all over the world every moment of the day, but there exists one world-historical belief system in which such occasions are both justified and mandated.
h/t PA Cat
