The Orlando massacre and the crisis of humanism

The massacre in Orlando reminds us that there are wicked individuals who will mow people down simply for the ‘crime’ of being gay. It confirms that Islamist violence, fuelled by a profound intolerance of anyone who dares to live freely or irreligiously, is a pressing problem in the 21st-century West. But most tragically of all, it has revealed a deep crisis of humanism in the West. The response to this act of barbarism has exposed the fracturing of human ideals, of the very notion of a human family, and of the West’s commitment to trusting individuals to live as they please, to be sovereign over themselves, regardless of who it offends. The awful truth unveiled by the obscenity in Orlando is that we in the West lack the moral armoury and collective spirit to withstand Islamist intolerance.

The most striking thing about the reaction to Orlando is how speedily observers made it about themselves; how swiftly they marshalled this massacre to political ends, whether to the traditional political ends of promoting right or left agendas or to the ends of the new politics of identity and its obsession with cultivating narratives of victimhood. The bodies were still warm when political ghouls on the left were claiming the massacre as proof that we need greater gun control and clampdowns on homophobia, and political ghouls on the right were using it to push their case for greater border controls and clampdowns on Islamist speech. From across the spectrum, people used the remains of that blood-stained gay club as a foundation for the construction of their shallow political case: a deeply ugly spectacle.