When we think of someone spraying bullets through stained glass windows into a Catholic church where young children are observing morning mass, we should feel horrified. In an effort to make sense of our horror, however, we should not resort to psychological categories like “mental illness.” If we do, then, sadly, we’ve failed to reckon with Philip Rieff’s thesis that modern culture has been “therapeuticized” (see also Charles Taylor’s monumental A Secular Age) and, more importantly, we’ve overlooked, by so doing, to take note of the more obvious reaction that we no doubt actually had: “That act was pure evil.”

I offer up this case simply to introduce the topic of evil, not to discuss this particular incident at any length. In fact, politically motivated acts, one’s based on political ideology, don’t seem that hard to explain whereas what I really want to discuss next does. Doing so will invite us to grapple with metaphysics, if only briefly.

A recent story from Albuquerque, New Mexico, will help us to focus on what Hannah Arendt termed “the banality of evil.” We read:

[18-year-old Sheliky] Sanchez is accused of shooting his Uber driver in a calculated killing and will stay in jail. He allegedly told police he ordered the Uber last Thursday [simply with a view] to kill[ing] anyone he could find and [he] chose Joseph Andrus because he needed to “let off some steam.”

Are you serious? I mean: notice what Sanchez didn’t say. He didn’t tell police that he was filled with ire that stemmed from a personal vendetta he’d long held against this particular driver, Joseph Andrus. Nor did he launch into a tirade that was laced with venomous hatred. There is, shockingly, no depth here: no great motivations, no twisted soul, no dark chambers, no conflicted conscience, no monstrosities.

Instead? We live in dark times! He just needed to “let off some steam.” That’s it! That’s all! He had nothing against the guy–and it could have been any old Joe. And out of callous thoughtlessness (such is at the heart of Arendt’s thesis), he blew the guy away. In E.M. Forster’s words, this was a “flat character” (not a “round one”) who played an anti-heroic role but–and this beggars the imagination–shouldn’t have. The play is all wrong, the characters all mismatched, the incidents without sense or stage direction. In other words, the whole thing is really, really screwed up.

Consider, also, the manner in which he speaks about his action. He could, perhaps, have engaged in any other peccadilloes that night–like masturbating, or binge-watching Netflix, or trying to shoot at cats in some alley, or yelling at a younger sister. Here is a very, very trivial creature for whom killing is “on the same moral-metaphysical level” with any other form of diversion.

“That’s,” we’ll hear, “because he’s really mentally disturbed, so disturbed that he should have received the psychological services that he didn’t.” This standard leftist canard won’t do because it fails to grapple with the problem of evil. Sure, he should have received help. But if we really want to “go there,” then we’d need a modern culture that was rooted in virtue education. Such, the late Alasdair MacIntyre once argued, has not been the case for a very long while.

My question is akin to Arendt’s: “How is it possible for so many people living today–and this is just one mundane story among countless others–to act so atrociously and not because they’re monsters, villains, or masterminds but because they’re so morally and intellectually shallow as to never have reflected upon all the suffering they have caused, or could cause, others due to callous, cold, stoney-hearted thoughtlessness?”

And now, for the finale, we come to what Byron Katie might call “the turnaround.” To what extent have many of us been so thoughtless, so absent-minded, so daft, so off in La La Land that we’ve hurt other beings in minor yet often ongoing ways? Isn’t this too an unsung and unspoken of tragedy? Shouldn’t we be filled with contrition?

We cannot hope to love all–indeed, to love any–until our hearts, having bowed down in contrition and devotion, have been purified.