A man is charged with murder in Thailand. A girl’s body found in a suitcase. The headlines are lurid, the details gruesome. And yet, as a civilisation, we respond not with horror but with a kind of weary prurience. We have seen too many of these tales, from the suitcase to the ski mask, from the locked room to the shallow grave. They have become the dark fairy tales of a decadent age.
But let us resist the urge to moralise in the usual fashion. The usual fashion is to blame the individual, to call him a monster, to demand justice from the Thai legal system. All of which is true and just, but insufficient. For this is not merely a crime; it is a symptom. A symptom of a world that has lost its moral compass, where the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain have become the only goods, and where the sacredness of human life has been replaced by a hollow legalism.
Consider the Australian perspective. My own country, a nation founded on the ideals of the Enlightenment, on fairness and the rule of law. Yet we export our decadence as readily as we export our mining technology. The man in question, an Australian citizen, allegedly committed this act on foreign soil. But the spiritual and intellectual soil from which he sprang is our own. We have spent decades dismantling the moral foundations of our society, telling ourselves that freedom means the absence of restraint, that the individual is sovereign, and that any talk of right and wrong is mere prejudice. And then we are shocked when a man treats a young girl as a piece of luggage.
This is not to say that Australia is uniquely guilty. The same rot infects the West as a whole. We have become what the Romans called "decadent": we have lost the capacity for self-correction, for shame, for awe. We can still feel outrage, but outrage is a cheap emotion, easily manipulated. What we cannot feel is a sense of the sacred. And without that, a suitcase is just a suitcase, and a body is just an object.
Thailand, too, is not innocent. It is a country that has traded its spiritual heritage for a tourist economy, a place where the exotic and the sordid are marketed side by side. The suitcase murder is a grotesque emblem of that transaction. But at least the Thai legal system still believes in the reality of evil, in the necessity of punishment. They will try this man, and they will likely convict him. And we in the West will tut-tut and move on, never asking the deeper question: what kind of society produces a man who thinks he can dispose of a body in a suitcase?
The answer is our own. We have created a culture of moral anaesthesia, where the only sin is to be judgmental, and the only virtue is to be non-judgmental. We have evacuated the word "evil" from our vocabulary, replacing it with "mental health issues" and "socioeconomic factors." And then we wonder why our young men, lost in a world of screens and signs, commit acts that would have made our ancestors blanch.
The suitcase in Thailand is a mirror. It reflects a civilisation that has lost its nerve, that no longer believes in anything strongly enough to die for, or to live for. The man charged is a symptom, not a cause. Until we address the sickness of the soul, there will be more suitcases, more bodies, more headlines. And we will read them, and we will feel nothing.
