Breivik shows there is no solution to 9/11

This is Postmodernism writ large.

If there's no formal truth, there can be no official good or evil, right or wrong, no line between us and them. While this has undoubtedly eviscerated literalistic forms of traditional meaning and identity, it's also brought Man to the edge of glory, to the West's defining ideal of a common humanity. By undermining the idolatrous misconception that a higher authority – divine or secular – can save us, Postmodernism compels each and every individual to take personal responsibility for rising above the petty demands of this material world.

This unfulfilled challenge is both unavoidable and rational.

If a knockdown remedy for our woes exists, and Fish is wrong to claim there "can be no independent standard for determining which of many rival interpretations of an event is the true one", then free will is worthless, since all that's required of us is mindless adherence to a specified moral code.

If Fish is right, and life cannot be reduced to a state of mechanised certainty, because the truth cannot be contained within a system of human thought and language, its essential mystery grasped in the heart alone, then the only genuine moral authority available to us lies within, as Kant and others surmised.

For centuries, joyless religious leaders abused the truth about the truth, capitalising on its metaphysical element to simultaneously needle and allay our deepest existential fears. Man is alone, racked with doubt, forever ignorant of God's grand plan.

Well kind of. Actually, there's a legion of haughty men who do appreciate what's required. These esoteric rules and rituals guarantee redemption. Mission Accomplished!

Having cast off a corrupting faithlessness in Man's capacity to be good without fear or favour, contemporary Western societies still find themselves subject to the same shameful temporising and manipulative paternalism that the Enlightenment sought to free us from. Democracy may have supplanted the church, but love of power over truth continues to flourish.

At the Tucson memorial in January, Barack Obama quoted scripture to remind mourners that because "terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding" it's vital we "guard against simple explanations" for the shootings.

Feeble stuff. Either the actions of Loughner, al-Qaida, McVeigh, Breivik can be understood, in simple or complex terms, and prevented, or they can't. End of story.

Instead of hammering home how the egotistical wish to "pose some order on the chaos and make sense out of that which seems senseless" fundamentally conflicts with the radical message in the Book of Job, the President, unable to trust America with unsparing realism, hedged his bets, thus prolonging our confused and damaging epistemological quest.

As Hayek warned upon accepting his Nobel Prize for Economics, "If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible."

What Breivik did was inconceivable, which was partly his point, why he felt it was "gruesome but necessary." The more desperate our need for life to go to plan, the more heinous the crime required to shock us from our self-important, need-to-know stupor. Astonishing brutality from a seemingly normal citizen is a terrible reminder that control and certainty are beyond us. It also represents the ultimate test of unconditional belief in ourselves and others.

A "solution" to the carnage, a decade on from 9/11? Be brave enough to admit there isn't one and embrace absolute scepticism as our decisive, unifying non-ideology, the unsettling source of true peace and happiness.