Meaningless Meaning
Maturity in the aftermath of evil
In the hours and days immediately following the murder of Charlie Kirk, professional and amateur commentators alike speculated about the accused killer’s motives. Most of these seemed interested in figuring out where to place the young man on the partisan spectrum. Was he a disgruntled member of the right? Angry that Kirk hadn’t gone far enough with his political project? Or was he an enraged leftist, motivated by Kirk’s rhetoric?
The murkiness that remains about what motivated his actions hasn’t kept influential people from trying to fit the gunman into the mold of their ideological enemies. In his opening monologue on Monday, Jimmy Kimmel characterized “the MAGA gang” as “desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.” From the other end of the spectrum, also on Monday, Vice President JD Vance asserted that “left-wing extremism” is “part of the reason” Kirk was killed.
In our partisan society, such accusations are at least partly motivated by the need to maintain the ideological purity of my group by associating your group with something inherently nefarious. This sort of impulse easily succumbs to enemy-making, something that could be heard in President Trump’s comments earlier this week when he claimed, “the radical left causes tremendous violence, and they seem to do it in a bigger way. But the radical left really is -- causes a lot of problems for this country. I really think they hate our country."
There’s something else in these speculations though, something more innocent. As has regularly been observed, one of humanity’s deepest instincts is to make meaning out of our circumstances. Unique among creatures, we need to know why things are they way they are. We are driven by purpose and it’s our assumption that some sort of discoverable meaning exists behind even the most chaotic and confusing events.
The scramble for a cohesive narrative after any spectacular tragedy is compelled, in part, by a very natural human desire for meaning. But the problem with allowing our meaning-making instincts to take over in the wake of wickedness is that evil is uninterested in meaning. Evil is chaos. It is deception for the sake of destruction. Evil will attach itself to one meaning-making myth for its ruinous aims before infiltrating another, ideologically opposite myth for those same aims.
The wicked, writes the Psalmist, “conceive evil and are pregnant with mischief and bring forth lies.” (7:14) Proverbs 17:11 observes, “Evil people seek only rebellion.” Evil sows chaos, thrives on deception, and foments insurrection against righteousness and shalom. Evil is its own meaning. Or, more precisely, evil is meaningless.
Which isn’t to suggest that nothing can be said in the aftermath of evil’s many manifestations. There are words of lament that can respond to the wickedness. Truth can be spoken over patterns of injustice. But meaning, claiming the authority to know that this is exactly what that evil means, will continue to escape our grip.
And so, given our shared impulse to create meaning even when it doesn’t exist, the ability to acknowledge meaninglessness is a sort of spiritual and emotional maturity. It is the mature person who can stare into evil’s oppressively insatiable void and refuse the allure of an always-too-simple story. Who refuses to conflate the persistently nihilistic aims of what Paul calls “the cosmic powers” and the “spiritual forces of evil” with any person or group. (Ephesians 6:12)
Acknowledging this meaninglessness focuses the mind. No longer can we adopt the sloppy characterizations of others which always devolve into dehumanization. Instead, space is opened for all of the absurdities and contradictions which are always true about our fellow humans. Neither will we fall for the shallow, short-term enemy-making which characterizes so much of our contemporary social-political discourse. Rather, the person who is mature enough to accept the arbitrariness of evil understands where the actual fight lies.
Thanks be to God, in Christ that fight has already been won. So rather than futilely trying to create meaning out of meaninglessness, we can get about the business of overcoming evil with good.
The View From Here
What a joy to walk in the Mexican Independence Day parade on Sunday afternoon in support of our immigrant neighbors. ICE continues to threaten and target these neighborhoods in our city; please pray for them and look for ways to advocate for their safety. (Thanks, Seth, for the photo!)