The New Fatalism A guy I ride the train with announced that it is no surprise that some psycho shot a bunch of people at a college. "There are millions of people in this country," he said. "One of them is going to go crazy and kill a bunch of people every few years."

I'm sure our national discussion will try for greater subtlety than this over the next few days, but it isn't necessary. The guy on the train has it right. Crazy may come in all forms, and there may be reasons we were not surprised that a young male shot up his college rather than, say, donning a pair of adult diapers and driving toward the house of a romantic rival, but what the hell does it matter? No matter what we do, crazy men are going to shoot the place up every once in a while, and crazy women are going to drown their babies, poison their lovers or visit violence upon their romantic rivals. If a man drowns his babies or a woman climbs a bell tower, I won't take this too hard: the point I want to make is only the one the guy on the train made.

I am going to take this moment to announce what I think is a new fatalism that I hope is about to sweep the country. America left the fatalism of two millenia of human history behind when we founded our country, but I think it is catching back up. Liberals tripped over it first because they were running faster. Liberals no longer believe that government can solve the problems of gun violence through gun control, nor the problem of criminality through reforming criminals, nor the problem of insanity through psychiatry. At one time they did. Liberals also no longer believe they can solve the problem of poverty through state assistance, nor homelessness through public housing.

Conservatives are about to realize they cannot solve the problem of Islamic fundamentalist violence through military might. The religious right is about to realize it cannot solve the problem of immorality through legislation. I cannot think of any other problem conservatives thought they could solve, other than the continued existence of liberals, and wresting the mass media away from liberals hasn't solved that problem. I predict that as long as President Bush is in office, conservatives will close ranks around their obsolete idealism, and that as soon as he's gone they will start fashioning a new conservative fatalism. They shouldn't have as much trouble with this as liberals have, because conservativism, to the extent that it implies conserving the status quo, requires a certain fatalism anyway, so it will be a familiar enough attitude.

The New Fatalism, in my view, will be a welcome development in foreign policy and anti-terrorism. If we can say that every once in a while, as long as we are sucking at the teat of Mideast oil, some angry Islamics will blow something up, we will be better off than we are now. It will be welcome for me as a teacher, because no longer will teachers be told they are responsible for the unequal outcomes of student from unequal family backgrounds. A fatalist would have no trouble recognizing that these outcomes, on average, are sure to be unequal.

The New Fatalism may be a giant bummer, though, for global warming. To confront this threat, we need to believe that we can outdo centuries of our predecessor societies, most of which lived for today and let tomorrow take care of itself when it came to resource exploitation and allocation. This is one issue that requires an idealistic belief that humans are changeable and our fate is not yet determined.  ¶ 6:09 PM