When news of the bomb blast in Oslo and the killings on Utoya island first came, it was suspected that this was the work of Muslim terrorists. Soon after it emerged that Anders Breivik in fact resented Islamic immigrants and was a self-confessed Christian. My instinctive response was one of relief. But why should it have mattered who had done these terrible things?
What matters most in this carnage, of course, is the terrible loss and pain of so many people. Around 70 people died, most of them school students or young adults. Many more were injured. Countless families have entered a world of pain and of incomprehension at the loss of children, brothers and sisters. Lives and communities will be scarred, some irreparably.
If this is what matters, the most decent initial response is not to analyse the events or to seek to assign blame. It is to keep in our hearts and minds those who have so suffered. The prayer services held throughout Norway offered many Norwegians words and silences to express bewilderment and compassion for those who had lost so much. Others expressed their solidarity in other ways.
The attempt to understand the massacre comes later. But understanding can reach only so far. It is impossible to explain adequately how one human being can make plans to kill and maim others, and can coldly carry the project through.
If we reflect on the killer's attitudes, personal history, social context and reading or viewing habits, we may receive some illumination. But many others with a similar background have never acted violently. In all human decisions there is ultimately an irreducible and mysterious spark.
In Breivik, that spark fell on combustible material. Everything suggests he had imbibed ideas that showed no respect for empathy with people as unique individuals. They were seen only as members of particular national, religious or political groups who were to be loved or hated accordingly.
Ultimately groups like Norwegians, Muslims, Marxists and the Norwegian Labour Party were undifferentiated abstractions, endowed with the qualities of the worst members of the group. So the lives of real people, including children, were expendable in the war against these abstractions.
This attitude to people contrasts