A couple of weeks ago, a German man decided to kill himself. There are thousands of such occurrences every day, except this time the man was a pilot, and in the process of his self-destruction, he also killed everyone on the plane along with him. Nobody seems to know why—he was depressed, disillusioned, etc.—but not to the degree that anyone thought him capable of such an act.

The black box of the smoldering wreck reveals the co-pilot’s pounding on the bolted cockpit door, and the screams of the 149 lives soon to be obliterated in a firebomb amongst the French Alps. Who knows what was racing through the mind of the man who had doomed the innocent along with himself. Was he lost to all sense, or was he impossibly indifferent? G.K. Chesterton considered the suicide a type of mass murderer: “The man who kills himself kills all men. As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.”

No one can know how free the troubled pilot’s act really was; nevertheless, we live in a world of killers now—if not the type that will fly a plane into a mountainside, then the type that takes pleasure in the killing of hope, faith, loyalty, the kind that relishes in the art of the subtle demoralization and the slow chipping away. For some time, the spirit of the age has been one in which the sneer is the common gesture, and the snide mock is the common retort. Everything must be brought down, burnt. It is the fashion.

Regardless of the approach, be it the jaded tripe of a comic before a clubhouse brick wall, or the tiresome pablum of a graphic novel protagonist or an Xbox anti-hero, the lesson is largely the same: truth is for suckers; nothing lasts. No one can seriously challenge that such is the modern credo. It has long won the academy, the arts, and the fourth estate in the Western world. Seriousness in those realms is indistinguishable from it.

The young are often the most derisive now, the most misanthropic. They have an arrant remorselessness about their disdain. Their apathies are as immoderate as their hates; for them to profess a love is to admit a shame, to show compassion is to betray a weakness. But then, they’ve been taught by masters.

For decades we’ve heard the cynics tell us that nothing is as it seems: History is only a set of crimes by hypocritical power structures, they say. Whatever corrective influence such an impulse had—to deconstruct mythologies, to pierce veils of corruption—it has grown out of all proportion to its usefulness. Strong medicines often turn upon the patient, killing where they meant to cure. The guillotine, thirsty butcher, has dispatched not only bloated tyrants and fawning prevaricators, but swept beneath its blade any close enough to wet it.

Now Robespierre apes about the streets, pulling down monuments and preaching stale sermonettes: that there are no heroes; that whomever we’ve lauded as strong or generous merely seemed that way—as though only the most depraved of acts can ring with the hard bell of honesty.

He says that there is no honor, and mocks the honorable; he says that there is no love but self-love. He says that any standard of rectitude is a farce because no one has ever met it, and that no one has ever met it because no one has ever wanted to. The “truth” always shifts, he says, and demands we accept that as the only truth that never does. There is no good or bad, but just a way of looking at things, and it’s merely a comfortable coincidence that everything looked upon is ugly. Gray is the only color.

Oh, it is indeed a hard world, one that does seem forsaken. There is suffering at every quarter, and not one breathing soul totters into his twilight without a backbreaking share of the same. We are all undone, and largely of our own undoing.

But however lost, confused, or disillusioned I may be or eventually come to be, that cannot make me believe that all is lost, confused, or disillusioning. Because I have only seen rotten fruit cannot convince me there is no such thing as the crisp, bright, fresh. Though all I know are liars does not make all men liars, or even most men liars. That would be to degrade the world to my own experience, to shrink existence into a small ledger of my grievances.

Our very cries scream of the opposite. When we see injustice and taste cruelty, remorse and outrage arise a priori. A womb of instinct precedes our sight, from before we ever knew what it was to fall and not be caught. We storm in disgust because we sense the pure. No one would curse the darkness if he did not believe that there was such a thing as light.

I remember good people and noble deeds. I will not be told they were a lie. I remember men and women whose name it is an honor to call. They worked and fought and loved even when awful things happened to them; they were perhaps no better than others in some things, perhaps even worse than others in a few—but they strove to be better than they were because they knew that there was a better for them to be.

I am a part of that world, as that is the world I believe in—one in which a man will wrench the steering column free from the death spiral in which it is caught, who will hear the pounding on the door, hearken to the innocent’s screams, and give his last strength in trying to rescue them. Even if he fails, even if they all die and he along with them, his will still be a world that is living; it will still be a world that is saved.

A.G. Harmon teaches Shakespeare, Law and Literature, Jurisprudence, and Writing at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. His novel, A House All Stilled, won the 2001 Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel.

Photo used above credited to Kunkana Giron and used under a Creative Commons license.

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