“Whether or not the fiery demon that possesses the world is going to destroy us or give us a new birth I cannot say. All we know is that only a few years ago we were too smug in our beliefs touching the ultimate triumph of man’s coming humanity to man. We now know, hit or miss, that love is far more remote a power than we suspected, that it is a difficult master and that if we expect to realize it in any part we must labor with all our zeal toward its realization.”—William Carlos Williams, letter to Harvey Breit, January 25, 1940, The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, edited by John C. Thirlwall (1957)
Once again this past week, we had a glimpse of “the fiery demon that possessed the world” in the person of the murderous Nidal Malik Hasan. Twenty years after Francis Fukuyama, surveying the end of the Cold War, hopefully anticipated “the end of history,” Hasan—in the grip of an all-encompassing ideology as much as mental illness—demonstrates that we have indeed been overly confident about “the ultimate triumph of man’s coming humanity to man.”
We should not leap to any policy conclusions regarding the Fort Hood massacre until we have fully investigated the long train of circumstances that brought Hasan to that point. But at least for now, as we see how the military psychiatrist rejected the tenets of his own healing profession in favor of an ideology of centuries-old grievances, it is apparent, just as the poet Williams observed the consequences of Hitler’s hatred spread like a stain across Europe nearly 70 years ago, that “love is far more remote a power than we suspected.”
Once again this past week, we had a glimpse of “the fiery demon that possessed the world” in the person of the murderous Nidal Malik Hasan. Twenty years after Francis Fukuyama, surveying the end of the Cold War, hopefully anticipated “the end of history,” Hasan—in the grip of an all-encompassing ideology as much as mental illness—demonstrates that we have indeed been overly confident about “the ultimate triumph of man’s coming humanity to man.”
We should not leap to any policy conclusions regarding the Fort Hood massacre until we have fully investigated the long train of circumstances that brought Hasan to that point. But at least for now, as we see how the military psychiatrist rejected the tenets of his own healing profession in favor of an ideology of centuries-old grievances, it is apparent, just as the poet Williams observed the consequences of Hitler’s hatred spread like a stain across Europe nearly 70 years ago, that “love is far more remote a power than we suspected.”
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