2022.05.26 杀害儿童的文化是没有前途的

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A Culture That Kills Its Children Has No Future
An America vacillating between violent struggle and idle nihilism is shuddering toward its end.

By Elizabeth Bruenig
Red, white, and blue candles snuffed out with smoke coming from the wicks
Getty; The Atlantic
MAY 26, 2022, 7 AM ET
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About the author: Elizabeth Bruenig is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

The grieving people of Uvalde, Texas, a town in the Hill Country about 80 miles west of San Antonio, now confront the irreplaceability of life in one of its most ghastly and unnatural incarnations: the murder of at least 19 children and two adults, with several more injured. In their mourning they will join dozens of other communities scattered throughout the country where school shootings this year alone have injured or killed people, and in their special torture—these children were elementary schoolers; they still had the faintly round faces of babies—they will join the families of the children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in another episode of stochastic annihilation only 10 years ago.


Yet somehow that brief report of conditions on the ground understates both the scope and the nature of the problem. The nature of the problem, as best I can tell, is that American life isn’t about what is good but is rather about nothing at all (which is, at least, broadly inoffensive and inclusive of most tastes and creeds) or about violence itself. The scope of the problem includes every facet of life that culture touches, which means most every element of daily life.

David Frum: America’s hands are full of blood

Violence begets injury begets death, and any culture debased to vacillating between violent struggle and idle nihilism is shuddering toward its end as a culture of death. And a culture of death is like a prophecy, or a sickness: It bespeaks itself in worsening phases. Right now, we find ourselves foreclosing upon our own shared future both recklessly and deliberately—and perhaps, gradually, beginning to behave as if there is no future for us at all; soon, I sometimes worry, we may find ourselves faced with a darkening present, no faith in our future, and a doomed tendency to chase violence with violence.

The murders in Uvalde barely begin to describe the scale of American violence, but they do provide insight into its character. School shootings are only a subcategory of mass shootings, which are themselves only a subcategory of gun crime. America sharply surpasses other comparably developed countries in each of those classes of violent crime. A country in which those indicators aren’t necessarily signs of terminal decline is conceivable. But these aren’t the growing pains of a society making difficult advances toward an orderly peace. These are the morbid symptoms of a society coming undone, and they arise largely from policy choices made by interested parties with material motives.

Graeme Wood: Think gun laws are hard to change? Try gun culture.

Call that deliberate foreclosure of the future, a category of offense that also includes the impoverishment of American mothers and children far out of proportion to their international counterparts; blithe indifference bordering on outright malice toward any policy or practice suggesting care for the climate, environment, or preservation of the majesty of the natural world; the subtle but rising set of pressures and risks coupled with an overall sense of stagnation that, taken together, amount to the reason Millennials now have the lowest birth rate of any generation on record. The reckless foreclosure of the future is perhaps most visible in the daily, wanton mistreatment of others that is part of the warp and weft of American life.

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But perhaps the most troubling symptom of our cultural rot is the sense, detectable already in some people, that there simply is no future for us at all. This sentiment takes many forms, whether individual or national. Some people are taking their own lives in despair or exhaustion, a phenomenon reflected in spiking suicide rates. Some say there’s going to be a “national divorce,” a coward’s term for a Second Civil War, and some say there ought to be such a war, and it’s difficult to distinguish the two; either way, if you take them at their word, there is no future for the United States of America. Some say the planet is dying and we’re already living on borrowed time. Those people have something like an end point in mind.

Clint Smith: No parent should have to live like this

Then there are some who say that every terrible thing—including even this untenable thing that no civilization could endure, this demonic murder lottery of schoolchildren—simply must go on, and somehow, they are winning. After all, wasn’t the Newtown massacre like the breaking of a seal, the final entry in a national catalog of stunned loss that had begun with Columbine? It wasn’t that there would be no more losses. It was only that we could no longer be stunned. Yesterday, before the families of Uvalde had buried their children, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a televised interview that he would “much rather have law-abiding citizens armed and trained so that they can respond when something like this happens, because it’s not going to be the last time.” That is to say: It’s going to go on indefinitely. It’s not an end, exactly, but life inside a permanent postscript to one’s own history. Here is America after there was no more hope.

Carol Ann Davis: 10 years after Sandy Hook, here we are again

We are already living through this. It is hard to bear. All around us things that ought to matter shrink in proportion to things that ought not to; a sense of real agency in politics or government feels limited, distant; lives that used to seem perfectly accessible to your average young person seem impossible now, while darkly fantastical lives—like those of the mass shooters whose profiles are now too many and too common to differentiate, with their weird paramilitary bravado and meme-inflected manifestos—are growing more familiar to us. I fear they’ll become more familiar still. When we say, in despair, that “these men are by-products of a society we’ve created; how could we possibly stop them?,” we could be referring to almost anyone in the great chain of diffuse responsibility for our outrageous, inexcusable gun-violence epidemic—the lobbyists who argued for these guns to be sold like sporting equipment, the politicians who are too happy to oblige them, the shooters themselves.

Moral decline of this kind produces strange and grotesque effects as it works its way, acidlike, through a society. Resignation takes the form of anger, mistrust, hypervigilance, depression, withdrawal. Nihilism arrives not as society fading quietly to dust but as fruit flush with lurid color, ripening until it bursts. It is the fruit of a culture of death.

Elizabeth Bruenig is a staff writer at The Atlantic.



杀害儿童的文化是没有前途的
一个在暴力斗争和无所事事的虚无主义之间摇摆不定的美国正在颤抖着走向它的终点。

作者：伊丽莎白-布鲁尼格
红、白、蓝三色的蜡烛被掐灭，蜡烛芯冒着烟。
Getty; The Atlantic
2022年5月26日，美国东部时间上午7点
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关于作者。伊丽莎白-布鲁尼格是《大西洋》杂志的一名工作人员。

德克萨斯州乌瓦尔德镇位于圣安东尼奥以西约80英里处，该镇悲伤的人们现在面临着生命的不可替代性，这是生命最可怕和最不自然的化身之一：至少有19名儿童和两名成人被谋杀，还有几人受伤。在他们的哀悼中，他们将加入分散在全国各地的其他几十个社区，仅在今年就有校园枪击案造成人员伤亡，在他们的特殊折磨中--这些孩子是小学生；他们仍有婴儿的微弱圆脸--他们将加入桑迪胡克小学被害儿童的家庭，在仅10年前的另一个随机毁灭事件中。


然而，不知何故，对当地情况的简要报告低估了问题的范围和性质。据我所知，问题的性质是，美国的生活不是关于什么是好的，而是关于什么都不是（至少是广泛无害的，包括大多数品味和信仰）或关于暴力本身。问题的范围包括文化所触及的生活的每一个方面，这意味着日常生活中的大多数元素。

大卫-弗鲁姆。美国的双手充满了血腥

暴力催生伤害催生死亡，任何堕落到在暴力斗争和闲散虚无主义之间摇摆不定的文化都在颤抖着走向死亡文化的终点。而死亡文化就像一个预言，或一种疾病。它在不断恶化的阶段中显示出自己。现在，我们发现自己不顾一切地和故意地取消了我们自己的共同未来--也许，逐渐地，开始表现得好像我们根本没有未来；不久，我有时担心，我们可能会发现自己面临着一个黑暗的现在，对我们的未来没有信心，以及一个注定要以暴力追逐暴力的倾向。

乌瓦尔德的谋杀案几乎无法描述美国暴力的规模，但它们确实提供了对其特征的洞察力。学校枪击案只是大规模枪击案的一个子类别，而大规模枪击案本身只是枪支犯罪的一个子类别。美国在每一类暴力犯罪中都大大超过了其他可比的发达国家。一个国家，如果这些指标不一定是最终衰退的迹象，是可以想象的。但这些并不是一个社会在向有序的和平艰难迈进时的成长之痛。这些是一个社会走向衰败的病态症状，它们主要来自于有物质动机的利益相关方的政策选择。

格雷姆-伍德：认为枪支法难以改变？试试枪支文化。

这叫蓄意剥夺未来，这类罪行还包括美国母亲和儿童的贫困化，远远超出了国际同行的比例；对任何建议关心气候、环境或保护自然界威严的政策或做法的轻率冷漠，甚至是公然的恶意；一系列微妙但不断上升的压力和风险，加上整体的停滞感，加在一起，相当于千禧一代现在的出生率是有记录以来最低的原因。对未来的不计后果的剥夺也许在每天肆意虐待他人的行为中最为明显，这是美国生活的经纬度的一部分。

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但是，也许我们的文化腐烂的最令人不安的症状是，在一些人身上已经可以发现，我们根本就没有未来。这种情绪有多种形式，无论是个人还是国家。一些人在绝望或疲惫中自杀，这种现象反映在自杀率飙升上。有些人说将会有一场 "全国性的离婚"，这是懦夫对第二次内战的说法，有些人说应该有这样一场战争，这两者很难区分；无论如何，如果你相信他们的话，美国就没有未来。有些人说，这个星球正在消亡，我们已经在借着时间生活了。那些人心中有类似终点的东西。

克林特-史密斯。没有父母应该过这样的生活

然后有一些人说，每一件可怕的事情--甚至包括这种任何文明都无法忍受的事情，这种对学童的恶魔式谋杀抽签--都必须继续下去，而且不知何故，他们正在获胜。毕竟，纽敦大屠杀不就像一个封印的破灭，一个从科伦拜恩开始的全国性的令人震惊的损失目录中的最后一项吗？并不是说不会有更多的损失。只是我们不能再感到震惊了。昨天，在乌瓦尔德的家庭还没有埋葬他们的孩子时，德克萨斯州总检察长肯-帕克斯顿在一次电视采访中说，他 "更愿意让守法的公民武装起来，接受训练，以便在发生这样的事情时能够做出反应，因为这不会是最后一次。" 这就是说。它将会无限期地持续下去。确切地说，这不是一个结束，而是生活在自己历史的一个永久的后记里面。这里是不再有希望之后的美国。

卡罗尔-安-戴维斯：桑迪胡克事件10年后，我们再次来到这里

我们已经在经历这样的生活。这是很难忍受的。在我们周围，应该重要的事情与不应该重要的事情成比例地缩小；对政治或政府的真正代理权的感觉是有限的，遥远的；过去似乎完全可以为你的普通年轻人所接受的生活现在似乎是不可能的，而黑暗的幻想的生活，如那些大规模射击者的轮廓现在太多，太常见，难以区分，他们奇怪的准军事的夸张和备忘录反映的宣言，对我们来说越来越熟悉。我担心他们会变得更加熟悉。当我们绝望地说，"这些人是我们创造的社会的副产品；我们怎么可能阻止他们呢？"我们可能指的是对我们令人愤慨的、不可原谅的枪支暴力流行的巨大责任链中的几乎任何人--主张将这些枪支像运动器材一样出售的说客，那些太高兴答应他们的政客，以及枪手自己。

这种道德滑坡产生了奇怪而怪异的影响，因为它像酸一样在社会中运行。辞职的形式是愤怒、不信任、过度警觉、抑郁、退缩。虚无主义的到来，不是像社会一样静静地褪去尘埃，而是像果实一样泛着鲜艳的色彩，成熟到爆裂的程度。它是死亡文化的果实。

伊丽莎白-布鲁尼格是《大西洋》杂志的工作人员。