My son’s world sheds light on humanity’s dark side

Someone blew up my son’s realm. It was by all accounts an unprovoked stealth attack enabled by the fact that my son left the gateway to the realm open when he used a public computer and did not log out when he was finished.His realm exists in Minecraft, the supremely popular pastime – I can’t call it a game – that emphasises the creation of complex systems using an increasingly sophisticated set of tools, resources and weapons, which are generally only discharged against pixilated monsters called Creepers.

I suppose my son has learnt a lesson about the importance of passwords, but I have to wonder what sort of person thinks it would be fun to wander through a Minecraft realm – carefully designed and maintained by my 10-year-old son and a few of his friends – and blow everything to smithereens?

My son announced the destruction of his entire Minecraft realm as I was reading about Al Shabab’s terrifying attacks on university students in Girissa, in eastern Kenya. I never fail to be stunned by the ease with which people of all religions kill in the name of their god, despite the fact that every spiritual practice has, as a central tenet some sort of prohibition against murder. What do you suppose has to happen to someone to make him believe that shooting unarmed teenagers asleep in their beds will ennoble his faith and bring him closer to the divine?

I’m writing this column in Kathmandu, where I am visiting my sister-in-law, and in this city it is particularly difficult to ignore spiritual teachings. Religious holidays dot the calendar, monks and temples are everywhere and prayer flags flutter from every rooftop. It is not uncommon to walk around the Boudhanath Stupa and find yourself in the midst of people making 108 circumambulations on their knees as a sign of Buddhist devotion. And yet of course, even Buddhists aren’t exempt from religious violence, as illustrated by recent clashes between Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.

My son’s response to the destruction of his realm was despair. “Why would anyone be so mean,” he asked. “Why would anyone do that?” His older brother, the cynical teenager, said: “Humanity is evil, that’s why.” Remembering my own teenage years and that Darwinian hell known as the high-school cafeteria, I understand why the teenager has such an apocalyptic world view. I am beginning to wonder, however, if his comment doesn’t extend beyond the world of adolescence.

Are we, ultimately, a species intent on destroying each other, regardless of the consequences? That question comes to my mind more frequently these days, but I don’t want to answer “yes”. Because if we say that yes, the default setting for our species is violence, then doesn’t everything – teaching and learning, raising children, planting a garden, making art – become futile?

I try to hold my older son’s cynicism at bay and tell myself that the violence of groups like Al Shabab is aberrant, the exception rather than the rule. People have struggled with this balancing act since time immemorial: working to leave the world a better place despite the world sometimes behaving as if it would rather not be improved. There is terrible irony in the fact that the members of Al Shabab seem to think that their actions are making the world a better place, but history teaches us that violence begets violence. That saying must be true, because when I think about what Al Shabab has done, I want to smash the organisation the way some nameless cyber-punk smashed my son’s Minecraft realm. I am not proud of this response, and I won’t act on it, but the desire hovers, nonetheless.

My son says he can’t rebuild his Minecraft world because even his backups were destroyed. But I am sure that in a week or so, he and his friends will begin working on an even more complex city. It’s the families in Kenya, of course, whose lives have been blasted beyond repair; their devastation takes a toll on our common humanity. Are we evil? How will we prove that we are not?

Deborah Lindsay Williams is a professor of literature at NYU Abu Dhabi. She is the author of The Time Locket, a novel that she wrote as Deborah Quinn