It’s saddening to admit that I finished reading Minette Marrin’s “Confronted with our own decadence,” in the London Times, with a mordant smirk. I recall, just about four years ago, having the very thought with which she ends:

Despite all this, I do, now for the first time, feel a faint glimmer of optimism. One of the responses to the bombings might be a new awareness of what matters most, and how best to defend it. If that means a new sense of purpose and a new sense of conviction, then perhaps some good will have come out of this evil.

Perhaps the intervening years have in actuality been marked by the death-throes frenzy of the faction whose demise would represent the “some good” of my own bittersweet optimism. But even if that proves to be the case, I’m increasingly disheartened to conclude that we may have no respite before evil finds ways to reassert itself, having been thwarted by the collision of its current manifestations in decadence and tyrannical extremism.