THE UNCONSCIOUS HUMS, "DESTROY!"

By LANCE MORROW

THE SEARCH FOR AN EXPLANATION IS ALWAYS TOUCHING, and painful in a sort of secondary, aftermath way--morally and intellectually heartbreaking. There must be a reason. Find the reason, and the thing becomes easier to bear.

So, after the man slaughtered the children in Dunblane, Scotland, and used his last shot to obliterate Exhibit A, which was his own brain, people ransacked whatever evidence remained. They looked in the man's past for telltale shreds, for that tracery of cause and effect that lets the mind begin to make peace with such events. The horror needs to be processed in words, to be identified as scientifically as possible, and thereby locked, uneasily, in the confines of explanatory language.

We seem to think a monstrous effect must arise from a monstrous cause. But not much evidence turned up to make the eruption plausible. An isolated, unwholesome smudge of a life: Thomas Hamilton, unmarried, 43, a thwarted scoutmaster with an obsessive interest in guns and a habit of photographing very young boys naked from the waist up. It seemed a familiar but dislocated story, the kind usually set in dreary rooming houses across the Atlantic--narratives pieced together after the grisly, ground-breaking crimes that are an American genre.

But if one looked at the faces of the Dunblane children, the endearing, goofy blossoms in the class picture, and superimposed upon them a knowledge of what was to come, then a mere gun-amuck mind or a squalor of pedophiliac-itch-gone-violent seemed an inadequate, trivializing explanation--almost sacrilegious in its asymmetry. Almost everyone, therefore, looked toward that last unopened door at the end of the moral corridor, the one with the word Evil on it.

If evil exists, then what happened in the gymnasium at Primary 1 was evil. An eruption of such violence aimed at such targets, at such spotless innocence and hope, cannot be comprehended or diagnosed in language that is less than absolute. "Haywire" won't do. "Psychotic," "maniac" and so on suggest mere dysfunction, or else a morally neutral spasm of the reptilian brain, a bug or two in the limbic system. Nor is there much comfort in thinking that such behavior arises from some Darwinian maladaption. "Man has developed so rapidly," Loren Eiseley wrote, "that he has suffered a major loss of precise instinctive controls of behavior. So society must teach those controls. And when it does not, then the human arrangement breaks apart." In the Leopold-Loeb case in 1924, Clarence Darrow argued essentially that crime (including the murder of 14-year-old Bobby Frank) was to be understood as a disease. A banal defense, but Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb got off with their lives.

Sometimes a crime as disturbing as Dunblane calls forth a line of universalizing nonsense. It billows forth like aerosol from Nietzsche's melodramatic thought that "there are secret gardens in all of us. Which is another way of saying that we are all of us volcanoes that will have their hour of eruption." This produces the "In a Sense, We Are All Guilty" fallacy. Actually, we're not. The fallacy began its modern career in late November 1963, just after the assassination of John Kennedy. We were all Lee Harvey Oswald, some editorial writers wanted to believe. Of course, anyone who does not know the difference between a person who kills and one who does not kill has failed to grasp the first of civilization's house rules. That everyone is capable of murder, at least theoretically, but that most refrain from committing it is the start of social order.

But the nonsense of universal guilt--a sneaky bravado posing as self-accusation--has yet to show up in the wake of the slaughter in Scotland. What happened there was so surprising and so unrefractedly awful that it was almost impossible to react dishonestly to it. The mind simply filled with pain and disgust, and pure incomprehension.

The world may be less shockable than it was once, but Dunblane made the universe tremble a little. The killings needed to be set in a darker, more absolute context.

Almost any definition of evil stipulates that crimes against children are uniquely satanic. The 20th century has also learned to recognize evil in the violent eruptions of nonentities: an absolutely insignificant man bursts out of the rented room into sudden, violent, gaudy, world prominence. Tiny cause, titanic effect--this is the social equivalent of splitting the atom. When Nonentity massacres Innocence, an especially horrible fission occurs.

The Dunblane murders suggested a split that D.H. Lawrence discussed in his famous meditation on American literature, "Destroy! Destroy! Destroy! hums the unconscious." The killer of children wishes to annihilate the contrary impulse that Lawrence wrote of, the upper consciousness that urges, "Love and produce! Love and produce!"