To Kill a Child and the Loss of the Sacred

Written May 24, 2022 just after news that 14 (now, 19) children, their teacher, and the gunman’s grandmother were killed during and prior to a mass shooting at a Texas elementary school. I write this to both express my pain, to voice my frustration, to tame my anger, to ponder what must be lost.

Emmanuel Levinas tells us that philosophy is useless unless it tells us what we ought to do. “Ethics is first philosophy,” he tells us. So, today, as a proper Levinasian, I turn my philosophical duty to the matter of morality. For Levinas, morality – the great question of what one ought to do – emerges from the face-to-face relationship with another. In another, we see the Other – pure alterity, something that cannot be relegated to the language we use to name or to call. The face of the other is purely and firstly pure vulnerability: baring itself to me before I know of its arrival, demanding a response from me. This demand for response is the root of my responsibility, and it is here that I become first and foremost responsible for the Other, and so, for my neighbor. This first disruption which escapes my language, escapes discourse, simply making a demand for recognition is total alteriority that presses against the limits of my consciousness and resists thematization. The face bares itself and says: “do not kill.” Logically incapable of negation – and where total negation is murder – the face of my neighbor begins a responsibility that categorically adheres to a single law: do not kill.

So, then what is to be said of nineteen children dead at the hands of a gunman in an elementary school in the bible belt of the United States of America? What did those faces say?

I find it harder to believe with the passing days that atheism is the answer to such tragedy. The question of God’s presence and even God’s existence isn’t one that is answered by negation when a child is slaughtered. The face of a child in the most human of senses bares no look of suspicion, and so the negation of this innocent request for protection can only signal, to me, a lack of sense for the sacred. If one can look innocence in the face and act as though it deserves death, then something profound is missing in the subjectivity of the one who commits such an act; and even worse to idly sit by waiting on democratic processes to do do anything about this… is senseless atheism at best.

Yet, we know that the subject doesn’t arise purely from Cartesian egotism. The subject is always a product of the norms which produce it and so those norms bear a certain responsibility for that which is lacking in the subject that pulls the trigger again and again on children.

To ask “Where is God?” is such an arrogant question when the face of the child at the very least bears the same identity of the divine! Where is God? He was slaughtered today 21 times by a gunman — who them killed himself — in Uvalde, Texas. How can one dare to demand an accounting when one cannot even see the face of the divine in the face of an innocent child? In fact, to demand an account of God for the death of the innocent is to have not recognized the sacrosanct divinity that emanates from the face of the innocent.

To ask now, “Where was God?” is to fail to acknowledge that perhaps our own account of godliness (or even our lack thereof) is one cause of such evil in our communities. This take may be controversial, but I believe truly — despite my own religious sensibilities — that what the U.S. of America needs today more than ever is to learn to truly recognize God, to see God, and to seek godliness or the sacred in the world and those creatures which inhabit it. Only once we can recognize and learn to respond to the divine in all things can we understand the meaning of true justice and the sense of true peace. Only when we can see the infinite in the face of the Other – or at the very least in the face of a child – can we truly know what to do or how to be in order to stop this senseless killing. In this way, Levinas encounters Spinoza; that the one adequate thought for the moral life is the idea of that which one might call the divine, and it is after this that we must strive to take care.

Edited May 25, 2022 at 7:30 AM to reflect an accurate death count of 19 children, 1 school teacher, and the gunman's grandmother.