'Man is the only animal for whom his existence is a problem which he has to solve and from which he cannot escape.' Erich Fromm, Man for Himself (1947)
To be called sane might be regarded as a salutary point. To be regarded as insane is, however, another matter — a point that is hotly debated in legal circles.
Insanity confers a tag of exceptionalism on the human subject — the killer undertook his task without awareness of what he was doing. Insanity presumes not merely that your views hailed from Martian premises — it also assumes that, for the rest of your natural life, a diet of drugs, needles and surveillance is appropriate. The rational crime is, it would seem, the best outcome for a criminal, though that poses its own set of challenges.
The case of Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in Oslo and the island of Utøya in July 2011 as a bloody political statement against Islam and multiculturalism, has demonstrated this point with severe starkness. The prosecutors have been seeking, unsuccessfully, a verdict of insanity.
Sanity assumes purpose and responsibility — the guilty mind or mens rea; insanity assumes its absence, that you have been dislodged from the world of meaning and symbols.
This is hardly applicable if one consults Breivik's testimony. His critique of Islam, his vengeful attack on the processes of 'cultural Marxism' as he terms it, suggest a radical and violent conservative response. Conservative, Christian radicalism, that is not anti-Semitic, is on the rise in Europe, and Breivik is its foremost proponent.
The gymnastics of reason that has been undertaken at the Breivik trial suggests the complexity of what is at stake in terms of conceptualising mental illness, aggression and crime. To be declared sane has an awful implication — one kills rationally and voluntarily, suggesting that the human race has not progressed that far from the days of its precarious survival.
If aggression is simply viewed as a form of behaviour, then we have scant moved from the premise that resolving disagreements requires a resort to brute and lethal force.
That said, human beings have always justified killing with cold, rational premises. The aggressive tendency in the human species, discussed by such individuals as psychologist Erich Fromm and ethologist Konrad Lorenz, suggests that we are disposed to such tendencies. For Lorenz, the lust for human violence was contained by ceremonial acts and rituals; for Fromm, the desire for destruction was motivated by necrophilia.
Famously, Sigmund Freud saw civilisation as the taming of more violent, death-driven tendencies (the motivation of Thanatos) where life is reduced 'to its original condition of inanimate matter', though it also came at the cost of repressing the drive of life-giving and nourishing Eros. Everything has its stabilising, if retarding price.
It would be more striking to examine the case from other perspectives, rather than examine the fruitless, even redundant point of whether Breivik was insane. His politics and the way he chose to enact it is what matters. The prosecutor's brief can be crudely limiting, as was the brief of the Israeli prosecution team when it came to mounting the case against one of the 20th century's greatest killers — Adolf Eichmann.
Famously, Hannah Arendt, in examining the trial in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), spoke of the false assumption on the part of the prosecutors of 'the unequivocal voice of conscience'. Eichmann was being neatly packaged as uniquely evil when he was, in fact, a bureaucratic phenomenon of dullness, evil as banality. What more terrifying assumption of rationality can there be than the reduction of killing to process and ideology?
The great calamities of human misery were the handiwork of rationalised states — the gulag, the death camp, industrialised genocide. To exterminate human beings because of their headdress, custom and manner might be deemed without foundation, but it hardly speaks about sanity.
It was a rationalised technique of killing humans, truth and history, a form of historicide and ethical reversal that characterised Auschwitz and the Archangel camps. One killed because it was ethical to do so.
Should Breivik be ever declared insane, it will be more a case of exculpation than explanation, more a case of making cruelty a product of disease rather than the outcome of cold, certain calculation. As Fromm warns us, humanity's existence is the problem that cannot be escaped.
Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.