Christopher Nolan’s 2008 masterful film, “The Dark Knight,” features a particularly insightful piece of dialogue, especially in light of the tragedy we had witnessed this past week in Paris.
Bruce Wayne: Criminals aren’t complicated, Alfred. Just have to figure out what he’s after.
Alfred Pennyworth: With respect, Master Wayne, perhaps this is a man that you don’t fully understand, either. A long time ago, I was in Burma. My friends and I were working for the local government. They were trying to buy the loyalty of tribal leaders by bribing them with precious stones. But their caravans were being raided in a forest north of Rangoon by a bandit. So, we went looking for the stones. But in six months, we never met anybody who traded with him. One day, I saw a child playing with a ruby the size of a tangerine. The bandit had been throwing them away.
Bruce Wayne: So why steal them?
Alfred Pennyworth: Well, because he thought it was good sport. Because some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.
Those criminals who murdered and rampaged in Paris were, pure and simple, terrorists. What’s their role, their job description? They wish to cause terror. And indeed, they were successful.
Dario Fertilio, in an article in L’Osservatore Romano published shortly after the horrific events in Paris, questions the nature of terrorism, wondering if it’s not so much done in the name of religion, but as an act of nihilism. He writes:
“The totalitarian collectivism aims at the destruction of humanity and to its self-annihilation. A dark soul beats from the deep of this ideological hell, and there lies a sense of what we may think without a scope. We are still in front to nihilism, that some of philosophers have declared overcome and obsolete … every totalitarian ideology hides a human inclination to dominate the other and to instrumentally use terror and violence for its own purpose.”
Powerfully, Fertillo comments: “… terrorism and acts of ruthless violence may solely be masks of their true totalitarian nature…like a parasite, uses every tool at its disposal – a sacred book, national pride, the worship of land, of blood, of social class belonging – only for instrumentalization, with the task to pursue the real hidden target of controlling power. And this control may be in turn only functional to perpetuate its system of dominating.”
These madmen did not commit these acts in the name of Islam. They did it in the name of death. They offered their sacrifice at the altar of nihilistic destruction and, perhaps by other like-minded sick individuals, are seen as martyrs and heroes. They chose to commit these crimes not because they loved their faith and were protecting it against those who sought to destroy it. These terrorists murdered people in Paris because they loved hate; in fact, their actions prove that they love not God, but they love death so much more. As the line in the film goes, “They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
The issue at stake goes far beyond radical, fundamentalist Islam to a deeper philosophical one, namely life’s value and meaning.
Today, in the light of those who died in Paris, slaughtered by murderers to make a point, each of us needs to move beyond the darkness of nihilism and rediscover the true meaning of life. We are born to love, not hate; to live, not die.