The trouble with vandalism is that it is fun, especially for people of modest accomplishment. The urge to destroy, said Bakunin, Marx’s anarchist contemporary, is also a constructive urge, thus demonstrating remarkable obtuseness about the human heart. Destruction brings a sense of relief, albeit temporary, to the frustrated, to whose ears the sound of smashing objects and tinkling glass is sweet music. When aspiration comes, can resentment, and therefore vandalism, be far behind?
Where vandalism is allied to a deep sense of purpose, however stupid or evil that purpose may be, and also a desire for publicity, it is only natural that it should be directed at the most valuable objects within reach. The destruction of Palmyra against the wishes of the rest of the world must have given the barbarians who did it (some of whom probably came from Britain and France) an intoxicating sense of power. When finally ISIS is defeated, as one day it will be, its militants will look back with pride on its greatest achievement: the destruction of mankind’s heritage.
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I noticed that Richard Dawkins, the biologist–turned–Savonarola of atheism, tweeted that the destruction of Palmyra demonstrated the power of religion: the doleful power, of course. It seemed to have escaped his notice that temples are generally built in the first place from a religious impulse, and that Palmyra had survived for two millennia in a region to which religion was by no means entirely unknown.
No one could possibly deny that religious fervor and intolerance have often been destructive, though it may be doubted how far such episodes as Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, with all its associated physical destruction, was motivated by genuine religiosity. You would not have to be Marxist to suspect other motives.
Moreover, such destructiveness is not confined to the fanatically religious, at least not unless you redefine religion to include fervent secular political beliefs held with absolute assurance of their transcendent truth. The greatest outburst of cultural vandalism in recent history was probably Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which, as the late and great Belgian sinologist Simon Leys pointed out, had nothing cultural or revolutionary about it—nor anything religious, either.
