by Gerard McCulloch, Member, Federation of Writers, Scotland

MARSHALL County High School, Kentucky, January 23, two people shot dead. A 17-year old girl dead in a March 7 shooting at Huffman High School, Birmingham, Alabama. Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in, Florida, February 14, 17 people lost their lives. At least 20 people killed in US schools since only the beginning of 2018. Cold statistics. And this week a message of support and solidarity to them from Dunblane, the scene of our own, home-grown horror many years ago.

Try naming any era in history that is not replete with graphic accounts of “man’s inhumanity to man” of a horrendous, well-nigh unconscionable, kind. Notwithstanding the current political correctness surrounding “man”, I think you might struggle. Hitler, Pol Pot, Fred West, Herod, Ghengis Khan, Stalin, Myra Hindley, Caligula, Osama Bin Laden, Mao Zedong, Atilla the Hun. And that’s before considering mass revolutions, coups d’etat, inquisitions, genocide and crimes against that very humanity.

Yet, lately, barbarity in all its guises has focused on the individual to an unparalleled extent. There is no need here to give such creatures the oxygen of publicity by reprising their names but, ill or evil, sexual assault, rape, kidnapping, child trafficking, people smuggling, torture and murder are their stock-in-trade.

However, an even more unconscionable notion might be that we – you, me, mum, dad and our dippy but loveable aunts and uncles – are of the exact same species that commits such acts. Indeed, given accepted cosmological assumptions that every person/thing on our planet comprise identical building blocks of creation, it is difficult, from that perspective, to claim otherwise.

But it’s the “human” dimension to such behaviour that appears to have outraged the Western world: if you like, the immorality of it all. Morality? Really? Find “morality” in any dictionary and you’ll discover definitions like “the quality of being in accord with standards of right or good conduct”. No mention of which or whose standards, note. Anyway, what does “good conduct” actually mean? Indeed, if placed in the situation where “shoot-to-kill” meant you shooting someone before they shot you, or, your child, for how long would you contemplate the notion that killing is wrong, morally? Would you steal and kill to feed a starving child? Would you torture someone to discover the whereabouts of your child or loved one after a kidnapping?

Though not particularly amusing in this context, Groucho Marx opined: “I have a set of principles…and if they’re not to your liking I have another set you might like.” Accordingly, morals are like principles, neither “good” nor “bad”: simply expedient in a given time, place, or situation. And you needn’t be a professor of moral philosophy to test that statement.

So when I say that “we are of the exact same species” that commits such acts, I mean, sadly, that our materialistic, throw-away, nihilistic, modern society now finds itself in a political, cultural and moral vacuum through sheer collective, apathetic indolence; the consequence of long-term desensitisation to the virtues of selflessness and common feeling.

In arguably his most profound analysis of what makes us human, Shakespeare, in Hamlet’s “play-within-a play” observes, “what a piece of work is man” and whilst a modern interpretation of “a piece of work” is generally pejorative, the bard meant it ironically continuing: “How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me: no, nor woman neither.”

Are you, reader, in this 21st century, “delighted” by mankind?