NOT NICE

“We are reminded once again that France is at war!” So said Christian Estrosi, the president of France’s Southeast region, this morning after the Nice massacre. He was, of course, both wrong and right.

Wrong, in that this is not a war in any accepted sense, even the asymmetric: there is no national entity facing France, there is no coherent enemy, there is no enemy command, there is no clear war aim, and there is no realistically imaginable moment when one could declare victory.

But right in another, stranger, sense. And in that sense all Western countries are part of the war. We did not declare it. Curiously, a series of unofficial persons and groups have been declaring it repeatedly for decades, but the communicosphere was not active or developed enough to make it work beyond local outbursts. Now that that sphere is humming 24 hours a day on a planetary scale, several detonators have come dangerously close to an explosive mass.

The mass consists of several million young men between 15 and 35 with hormones raging, frustrated by the cards life dealt them and without the knowledge, means or even sometimes motivation to change the hand. And gradually, their condition can mutate to Hatred.

The detonators are 1) jihadist Islam (an evil stepchild of Wahhabism), 2) a cable-social-network-and-smartphone culture that enables one to find and attend to only sympathetic voices all too glad to pour oil on small flames, 3) a society that constantly weakens the intermediate structures of responsibility between the individual and The State or The Church or The Deity, 4) continued discrimination in hiring and other career-forming processes, and 5) the siren song of the goddess Violence, flattering and seducing the testosterone trolls that live in young men’s brains. Her answers are simple and exciting, flavoured with adrenalin. Any or all of these can bring the mass to explosion.

So far, I have said nothing new. How, though, do we react to a condition that allows, even encourages, an anonymous petty criminal to hire a truck and mow down more than a hundred celebrating people, thus giving him passing fame and (he thinks) eternal glory? The point is that this is not coordinated and commanded as the earlier assassinations were. This is more like the American shooting rampages (except that it shows that a determined assassin can use anything as a weapon): unforeseeable and virtually unpreventable.

In one sense, the conclusion is that we must learn to live as people do in Israel or other toxic environments punctuated by death: i.e. not let the killers win by living terrified but accept that we are all mortal and that, just like a fatal traffic accident, it can happen at any time and in any place. That is passive courage, and it relates to Stoic philosophy.

Do we, though, have weapons of our own? I believe that Christians, Jews and Muslims have two common weapons: our belief in a loving God and our resultant conviction that hatred of other humans is corrosive and evil. (Some may oppose certain verses of the Koran to this, or certain passages from the Old Testament; but I am conviced that on the whole Allah loves the human race, as does YHWH.) We may hate forces that draw people deliberately away from a God who loves them, but we must not hate those who have been drawn into becoming such forces’ instruments.

Our weapons, then, are the recognition that Hatred is the key; that hatred corrupts its desired instrument but that the instrument in question is still human and thus someone (to speak as a Christian) Christ died for and was resurrected for. We do not necessarily have the power to root out the original causes of hatred; but Hatred itself is our business.

Contemplate it. Try to understand where it comes from, and how it works. Study it: it has habits, just as wasps and vultures have habits. Learn its habits and behaviour. Find out where it lives and what it eats. Discover which human beings are its chosen breeding-ground. And look very, very carefully at the people you personally know. Do any of them show any signs of the disease? Not of “radicalisation”; not of “Islamism”; not of “racism”; of the early stages of Hatred.

If you see that X and Y do, make friends with them. Unobtrusively, but do things for them. Go the extra mile. Help them get jobs. Uninvasively, see if you can help them straighten out tangles. Ease them away from drugs, depression or despair. Get them through a relationship breakup. Take them to dinner. Smile and touch (uninvasively, but a hug is often as good as a therapy session). Show them the good things you like and respect in them. If you find yourself discussing politics or public matters, ease them away from rancour, resentment and rage, and toward something or someone they admire for generosity. Ask them to help you, sometimes.

Like cancer, Hatred can sometimes – often, even – be beaten if it is diagnosed early. For Christians, perhaps this is the best interpretation of what Pope Francis means by a Year of (dedicated to) Mercy.

If we can all become alert and aware to the individual (often the lonely) humans around us, frequently young and male but not always and not only, if we can discreetly but generously act, we may have found the one weapon that can eventually win this war.