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The right brain, meantime, goes to the other extreme and lays down, "Nothing foreign is human to me"--a thought that is not merely a nice motto for xenophobes, but also points, if you think about it, toward one of the deepest dynamics of human nature. A healthy character, in its raw state, is a nasty little fascist, equipped with an intolerant immune system; it rejects such deeds as the Cambridge murder and necrophilia in the way that a healthy body rejects an invasion of microbes. This vigorous state of mind has no sympathy for what it identifies as alien life forms and thinks such sympathy would be dangerous weakness, a breakdown of a society's natural defenses. In some ways, of course, it is right.
But "Nothing foreign is human to me" is the cry of the lynch mob. The mob does not wish to listen to the psychiatrist--or to the theologian, or to the lawyer. A civilized mind, on the other hand, has all four voices (mob, theology, psychiatry, law) speaking to it at once. That interior argument is confusing.
The theologian in us speaks of evil and has the floor when outrages against children are committed. For evil is a concept that blossoms out of the causeless, and crimes against children seem the least explicable of human brutalities.
The psychiatric appeaser goes to work on causes: if an act can be explained and is therefore part of behavioral cause and effect (well, Hitler had an unhappy childhood, therefore ...), then it does not deserve the name of evil. Which, the theologian replies, is nonsense: the person who did the deed may be a victim himself or may have merely been having a bad-hair day, as someone remarked in trying to figure out Susan Smith's murder of her children in a South Carolina lake. But the deed is, indelibly, evil.
The voice of the law will have to sort the other voices out. And after all the screaming in our mental auditorium, we acquiesce at last to that. But the screaming itself is exhausting. What have we learned from it? Anything new? Perhaps. But even the knowledge is contaminating.