They’re right, in a way—we don’t kill people in America every time a political dispute doesn’t go our way, and a good thing too. (Florida, anyone?) But the secret isn’t out vaunted human rights tradition, or our investment in psychotherapy—it’s our limitless resources, our wide open spaces and our money. We in the West have made a deal, brokered by John Locke, who told us that God gave the world “to the use of the industrious and rational,” not to the fanatics and troublemakers and priests. Locke, and later Adam Smith, declared that we could have everything that people used to kill for, and have it cheap, as long as we buried the hatchet on religion and ideology and racial hatred. And (after a while) we listened, put down our swords and went into the business world instead.

The deal has worked, in a way—we’re rich and peaceful and (arguably) happy. But the hatchet is still there, waiting to be picked up by anyone who isn’t satisfied with the honeyed words of the English philosophers—by Timothy McVeigh and Theodore J. Kaczynski ’62 in the ’90s, by the Black Panthers and the Weathermen in the early ’70s, and by Adolf Hitler in Weimar Germany only seven decades back.

Civilization, Joseph Conrad writes in Heart of Darkness, is “like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.”

And it may be here tomorrow—despite the best ministrations of every “expert on evil” that the good people at Newsweek call in to deal with the meaningless, tedious “problem” of Timothy McVeigh.

Ross G. Douthat ’02 is a history and literature concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears regularly.