In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, the usual chorus of statesmen and social-media aristocracy has gone through the motions of its ritual denouncements of violence—perfunctory, lazy, and usually confined to two or three lines online: “Murder has no place, thoughts and prayers, now back to pictures of me at some campaign event.” That’s just par for the course. What is new is the narrowing of the plea. This time, as Bernie Sanders and many others intoned, it was not a general condemnation but a call for “an end to political violence.” And one feels bound to ask: why the adjective? Violence, of any stripe, is not to be compartmentalized. To suggest that we must only renounce the “political” variety is less a declaration of leadership than a reflex of self-preservation. It’s the political class saying, “please don’t kill us,” rather than saying, “let’s put an end to all killing.”
But more to the point, if ending violence is the goal, then we need more than perfunctory posts from the political class, which, of all of the classes in our stratified society, is consistently the most useless. Don’t expect anything from them and you won’t be disappointed.
This is up to us. And if we want to end violence, we must acknowledge first our own role in causing it. We must acknowledge that violence persists because we demand it. We gorge on it in films and television, marinate in it through music, rehearse it in video games, cheer for it in the ring, practice it in speech, sanitize it in politics, enshrine it in the destruction of the unborn, and even inflict it upon ourselves in subtler, self-despising ways. We prefer to imagine violence as a pathology limited to a small criminal subset, but each of us contributes to this depraved culture through our consumer appetites and our tacit indulgences which keep the machinery humming.
If you want to know a people, just look at what they spend their hard-earned money on. We reject violence with our mouths and social media posts, but demand it with our time and our wallets and our applause, and even our laughter.
Here’s a thought: maybe it’s not others who need change. Maybe it’s us. Me. You. Yes you, the person reading this right now. All of us!
But since we’re so incapable of self-reflection, the calls for “unity” arrive, as they always do, with the weasel clause: “look what the other side is doing.” This misses the point with almost athletic grace. Unity cannot be built on the foundation of “yes, but they.” It begins, if it begins at all, with the scandalous admission that the enemy is not chiefly “them,” but “us.”
It is astonishing that we live in a culture so enamored with the self — self-promotion, self-aggrandizement, self-indulgence, self-love, self-absorption, self-pity, self-importance, and lest we forget (how could we?) selfies to no end — and yet when tragedy strikes, almost no one dares self-reflection, no one dares to look inward and ask the most obvious question: how did I contribute to this? What can I do better?
It is a sad society that only looks at others when looking for someone to blame. And a sad society is soon a violent one.
Let us be candid. Each of us has, at some point, contributed to this atmosphere—by sneering when we could have sympathized, by consuming what coarsens us, by rewarding cruelty with our clicks. We then wonder why the air tastes of gunpowder. The truth is not complicated; it is merely unpleasant.
We are conservatives, are we not? The hallmark of the Left is they always look at what others should be doing for them. Conservatism, however, is rooted in personal responsibility, which demands self-reflection. What can we do better? How can we change?
Here are some ideas:
Perhaps today we forgo the violent spectacle, skip the gore-drenched game, refuse the algorithm’s invitation to outrage, and loudly denounce them with the same volume and fervor we denounce the murder of Kirk. Perhaps we exercise more patience with others, and recognize the patience others already exercise with us. Perhaps we attempt the more arduous task: treating the other as a fellow bearer of the image of God. Be charitable. Lend a helping hand. Lend money with no expectation of repayment.
If you wish to spite the devil, then do not spite him with slogans, nor with finger pointing. There’s a time and a place to identify problems. That’s fine. But the devil plays both sides of the ball: he can be found in the violence, and in the response to the violence. He feasts on our mutual disdain. He balks, however, at kindness—the very currency we spend so sparingly online. Instead of conducting a brittle cross-examination of strangers who fail our moral pop quiz, try this radical experiment of humanity: say you’re praying for them; say you love them; offer help without attaching a bill or a barb.
And do not swallow the devil’s whispered lie of insignificance. Each of us will meet perhaps a thousand people in our lifetime, and they a thousand more. That’s one billion people right there, and social media no doubt multiplies even that. It’s easy to feel powerless, but I believe that millions of small acts of goodness can make an enormous difference. Major changes are not usually the result of major actions, but of countless small actions in the aggregate. Millions of small acts of goodness are not trivial; they are tectonic.
As a lawyer, I often solve problems by flipping them on their head, by asking what my opponent would least want me to do. In this case, more than anything, the devil would want us divided, pointing fingers at each other. He would not want us to be kinder, gentler, and more loving. But each of us is made in God’s image. So let’s do the very thing he fears: let’s be better to each other today, and see the image of God in each other.
So yes, by all means, denounce violence. But have the honesty to denounce it without qualifiers and the courage to begin the renunciation with yourself. Violence is not merely what others do; it is what we, in our depravity, have demanded. Let us have the decency to admit it—and to do as Christ required when he told us to remove the plank from our own eye.
I’ll start.
Related: CDC: Understanding Violence Prevention • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Moral Responsibility • Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5)
