My first post as a lawyer was not in some genteel office with bookshelves and fountain pens, but in the rather matter-of-fact confines of the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office in New Jersey. Being the newest and youngest prosecutor, I was obliged to share space with a seasoned prosecutor — nice enough guy, mild, bookish — who was preparing a murder case against a serial killer, which actually created significant law in the state. If you’re interested, look up “State of New Jersey v. Steven Fortin.” You’ll find no shortage of caselaw.
Anyway, in our little office, my officemate kept poster-sized photographs of the victim that he intended to use at trial. This was before digital projectors were prevalent, and usage of posters was common, and it had the effect of turning our little office into a gallery of horror. There those pictures sat against the wall during my first weeks, gory images of a naked woman, left in the posture of her own humiliation, brutalized and mutilated to death by a maniac. It was quite an initiation to the realities of my new world, far removed from the theories and drab textbooks of law school.
Every now and then, another prosecutor, his partner on the case, would drift in and the two of them would gameplan together, as one would expect. What I did not expect, however, and what chills me even to this day, is how the two of them would look at those posters and laugh. They mocked the victim, they bantered about her body and joked. I remember witnessing this, aghast and agog, with the disbelief of a young man who had assumed that professionalism precluded barbarism.
This upset me enough that I spoke with some of my colleagues about it, and the consensus was that this was “coping” — that one had to desensitize oneself to horror in order to confront it. It was I, apparently, who had the problem. The remedy, and I’m not making this up, was that I watch a video that had been circulating around the office of a gruesome prison murder that the office was also prosecuting at the time. And let me tell you, this victim wasn’t just killed, he was killed five different ways, each more revolting than the last.
I thank God that I had sense enough back then to decline the invitation to watch that video. I knew about it, I knew what was on it, and I wanted no part of it. Even at twenty-five, it seemed obvious to me that to surrender to such desensitization was not to “cope” at all, but to capitulate, that it is precisely that sensitivity that they sought to anesthetize, that refusal to laugh at or be entertained by such brutality, that separates us from the animals who perpetrate crimes.
I am often asked how I cope with the more awful things I have to witness in my profession. I’ll tell you how: I dig a very deep hole, and bury them.
Unfortunately, this particular memory recently resurfaced when I came across a New York Times article describing a disconcerting trend: audiences laughing at moments of violence, tragedy, and intimacy in films such as Nosferatu, Anora, and Babygirl. The piece, entitled “At the Movies: To Laugh, Cry or Cringe?“, offers a range of explanations: perhaps we’ve grown too accustomed to watching movies at home and forgotten our theater manners, or maybe genre-blurring in modern cinema leaves us uncertain about how to react.
But these are surface-level rationalizations. They do not account for why we are becoming incapable of reverence, incapable of mourning, incapable of responding to the gravity of suffering with anything other than detachment or amusement. This is not merely bad manners or a generational quirk. It is the predictable consequence of a culture that has, through thorough secularization, become unmoored from God and godliness.
If you want to understand the moral and intellectual decline of a civilization, look at what it laughs at.
A society does not sustain itself on material prosperity alone. It must pass down moral traditions, spiritual awareness, and a sense of the sacred—not merely as abstract virtues but as practical, lived realities that shape how its people react to suffering, death, and even love. These instincts are not self-evident; they are cultivated, learned, and reinforced over generations. We take them for granted, imagining that human decency and reverence are innate. But they are not. They are the fragile inheritance of a civilization that, once abandoned, does not easily return.
We see this most clearly in our entertainment industry, which has spent decades transforming violence into spectacle, suffering into titillation, and death into mere content. Consider the action movie. Every gruesome death is accompanied by a joke, every act of savagery stylized for maximum visual pleasure, every moment of despair flattened into mere spectacle. Even so-called serious films smuggle in irony, detachment, and nihilistic humor, ensuring that audiences never fully engage with suffering as something meaningful.
The news media is not so innocent in this either. What’s the old maxim, “If it bleeds it leads”? And so, we laugh at brutality in movies, and then we wonder why we are so violent. Or perhaps it is the other way around—we have become so violent that we no longer see suffering as real, and so we laugh.
This is not an accident. It is the result of a culture that has turned away from moral seriousness—a culture that no longer believes in anything beyond itself, that has lost the sense that some things are sacred, and that now finds solemnity embarrassing rather than necessary.
Indeed, a common misconception in modern thought is that human morality is self-sustaining, that even without religion, people will naturally value each other and behave ethically in a way that values the humanity in each of us. This is a grave mistake.
To reject God is not merely to reject belief in a deity, it is to reject the very foundation that teaches us to value human life. God commands us to love our neighbor, to see each person as sacred, to recognize that life has meaning beyond momentary pleasure or survival. These principles must be taught because they are not inherent. The secular mind assumes that empathy and human dignity exist as default settings in our nature, but history, psychology, and literature tell a different story.
When a culture untethers itself from God, it does not become morally neutral, it regresses. We become more inward, more selfish, more callous. We become, in short, exactly what we see in our movie theaters today: a people who can watch violence and suffering unfold before them and feel nothing—or worse, find it amusing.
Orwell understood this well. In 1984, Winston Smith attends a Two Minutes Hate session, where the state shows a film of refugees being gunned down by a helicopter, culminating in a child’s severed arm flying into the air. How does the audience react? They cheer, and that’s the intended and predictable result of offering violence for consumption without the countervailing force of godliness to override it.
This is exactly what Huxley warned about in Brave New World. In that dystopia, people are not controlled through force but through pleasure, through endless trivial entertainment that reduces everything—even suffering—to amusement. In a world where everything is ironic, nothing is real anymore.
Bradbury made a similar point in Fahrenheit 451. Montag watches his wife Mildred and her friends consume grotesque, violent television, but they do not react as human beings should. They simply absorb it, detached, passive, conditioned not to care. But when Montag reads them a poem, they laugh nervously or collapse into tears, because they no longer understand how to process real emotion.
This is not just dystopian fiction. It is precisely what we are witnessing today. This is what happens when a culture has been overexposed to cruelty and desensitized to reverence. A civilization does not wake up one day and suddenly decide that violence is amusing. It regresses to this detachment. When a society abandons God and moral seriousness, it does not remain compassionate and self-restrained. It learns to see suffering as a game, as spectacle, as something to be consumed without thought or remorse.
I’ll give you another book, though, that perhaps better illustrates how civilization collapses, not through war or cataclysm, but through a slow erosion of values: Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The novel follows a group of British schoolboys stranded on an uninhabited island, who, in the absence of societal rules and moral authority, gradually descend into savagery. At first, they attempt to maintain order, forming rudimentary governance and assigning responsibilities. But as the constraints of civilization fade and self-interest takes hold, their worst instincts emerge. In one of the novel’s most harrowing moments, a group of boys, caught up in mob hysteria, kill Simon, their only truly moral member. The most disturbing part is that they do not even realize what they are doing until it is too late. They are not driven by hatred or conscious malice. They are simply acting out a ritual of violence they no longer understand, swept along by the madness of a crowd that, removed from civilization and its norms, has become morally indifferent.
The laughter in modern theaters is a lesser, though precursory form of this moral collapse. It is not simply an accident of movie theater etiquette. It is the sound of a people who no longer know how to grieve. It is the laughter of those who cannot comprehend the weight of human suffering. It is the logical conclusion of a civilization that has lost its faith and, with it, its ability to see life as anything other than a joke. The instinct to bow one’s head in reverence, to weep at tragedy, to respond to violence with grief rather than amusement, these were all products of a worldview that understood human life to be sacred. That worldview has now been dismantled, and in its place, we have a world in which nothing is sacred, nothing is serious, and therefore, everything is mockery. People giggle at brutality, not because they intend cruelty, but because they no longer recognize suffering as real. Like Golding’s boys, they have been so conditioned by their surroundings that when confronted with something solemn, they simply react the only way they know how: through nervous laughter, detachment, or indifference.
One might have hoped that the Times would recognize this for what it is: a symptom of something deeply wrong, something rotten at the core of our society. Instead, it offers rationalizations, encourages us to embrace the chaos, and assures us that this is just the way things are now. That is always how decline proceeds—not with a bang, but with a chuckle.
