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Most of us who care most are condemned to watch the cruel miscreation while so many others, Charlie's closest friends and confidantes in so many cases, sat and still sit in execrable silence, or its politically craven near-facsimile. Another multiplying horror. Another revolting spectacle, not on the stage but from the crowd all around us, a crowd we thought we were a part of and then realized we cannot escape now that we see it for what it is.
The whole damned thing deserves curses and retribution, but that's where we come to the point.
A year ago, on the very evening of Charlie's murder, I asked: Catharsis or Civilization? Today, I ask a baser question: Men or Monsters?
That is, which are we? Are we men, or are we monsters?
Since time immemorial, human beings have asked and wondered what kind of being, in fact, we are. What about our being makes us human? Is it our intellect? H. sapiens might flatter himself that way. Is it our economy? H. economicus leaves something to be desired. Is it our sociality? H. sozialismus can't be it. What is it that makes us men rather than rude beasts?
They might be cruder than ours, but beasts have many faculties in common with us. Beasts have emotions. Beasts have language. Beasts have memories. Beasts have friends and relations they recognize and trust. Beasts in some cases even care deeply about their dead, more perhaps even than we do.
Beasts, however, do not recognize what is sacred. What is set apart. What demands to be honored and not spoiled. A bird, as anyone who has seen them knows, will shit where it eats, and everywhere else. Nothing, to a beast, is sacred. That sets us apart from them.
One way to put this might be to say that the right Homo from among them all is not the wise sapiens or whatever else but that we are, in fact, H. religiosus. We are religious beings, not necessarily because we recognize God, but because we organize ourselves around what we recognize to be sacred. We can conceive of the set-apart and honor it, and we can do so, so profoundly that it forms the basis of civilizations.
Charlie Kirk understood this. He didn't know it. He didn't think it. He understood it. He lived it, breathed it, walked it, taught it, and embodied and exemplified it. I know he did; not just because it's obvious but because it was Charlie Kirk more than any other human being ever to walk this Earth who taught it to me, to my lasting gratitude.
Put otherwise, Charlie Kirk was a man.
But there's more. Not only was he was no rude beast; he knew and called others not to be bestial. He sought to raise up men out of the masses of humanity, whom he knew it was his obligation to serve. But there's even more than this.
While we might fear them, and they might often be fearsome, the beasts are never monsters. Monsters require something else that goes beyond rude brutality. Monsters are defined by something else that only H. religiosus can exhibit among the many kinds that fill and cover the Earth. Monsters are anti-sacred.
Monsters look at what is to be set apart and venerated, kept holy and not desecrated, and they profane and desecrate it. They do evil to that which is good because it is good. They spoil that which is worthy because it is worthy. They are not beasts, though. They don't shit where they eat; they pour filth and excrement where others recognize their own humanity. They sully what ought never to be soiled. They ruin what is meant to be set beyond ruination, and they do it because they cannot abide it being that which it is: holy.
Charlie was a man. He was not holy, at least not beyond mortal limits. He was not set aside or beyond criticism. The dignity of his memory, of what he represented and meant to so many, both in life and after, and particularly of his loving widow, however, are another matter.
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