Two Sullivans, One Headline
Andrew Sullivan, at 12:18pm today, under the headline: “Yes, Of Course It Was Jihad” (apropos of the Boston bombings):
Five words: “God is all that matters.” If some secular liberals could grasp that a modern human can say those words and mean them, they would have a better grasp of our core predicament.
At that time of day, it was obvious that the core predicament we face is that when you take seriously the idea that one thing matters above all – the way, say, Kierkegaard did – it is hard to stop you from becoming a mass-murderer.
But then, at 2:00pm today, under the same headline, he quotes Michael Moynihan on what it’s like to spend extensive time on jihadi websites:
His big takeaway? It works – by numbing followers to violence:
The further I crawled down the extremist rabbit hole and the more caved-in skulls and headless corpses I saw, the more I found that my natural revulsion, usually an uncontrollable instinct, was easier to suppress.
What happened to “God is all that matters” being the core of our predicament? A couple of hours later, the core problem would seem to be immersion in pornographic depictions of violence, something that – obviously – doesn’t require religiosity at all (though, equally obviously, it’s perfectly compatible with it).
I would respectfully suggest that if two wildly divergent interpretations of events can be plausibly lumped under the same screaming headline, then perhaps the headline is not serving the cause of analytical clarity.
