Following the recent deaths of two controversial public figures, Jean-Marie Le Pen and Charlie Kirk, I have often found myself trying to understand under what circumstances it might be acceptable to celebrate the death of a person, as thousands of people did — both online and in the streets, through mocking tweets and cheerful pints.

I won’t dwell on the two men themselves. I believe they both supported as many truths as they did pieces of nonsense; truth be told, I regarded them with a fairly indifferent eye. Le Pen showed a certain lucidity on some aspects of Europe’s future, but his late-in-life venom toward Jews did little to make him sympathetic in my eyes. Kirk, for his part, had the commendable initiative of engaging peacefully with his country’s youth to raise awareness about a wide range of issues — issues on which he was not always right, and on which his rigid conservatism sometimes left me perplexed (despite being a staunch conservative myself), not to mention his unyielding faith, which could, at times and not without reason, unsettle some people.

These two men died under very different circumstances. Yet the reactions their deaths provoked are strikingly similar. And it’s been bothering me for months.

A collective moral disinhibition

To revel in the death of a man, whoever he may have been, is a telling sign of civilizational decay and a profound moral failing.

One may, of course, feel relieved upon learning of an adversary’s death. One may humbly think the world will be better off this way. One may feel appeased knowing that a bloodthirsty terrorist, a drug lord, or a repeatable rapist has been stripped of any further ability to inflict suffering upon others. I would add that it is futile to feel reassured by the death of a politician or a religious leader, since ideas never die with those who carry them.

But there is never any justification for celebrating death itself. Beyond being an act of gratuitous cruelty, it normalizes the notion that certain lives are worth nothing.

I would never even consider laughing about it, or blurting out a crude “serves him right,” because using such invective buries you deeper than any grave in a cemetery. Regardless of who the person was, and regardless of their actions, celebrating the simple fact of someone’s death betrays nothing but a staggering moral disinhibition.

Like everyone else, there are quite a few public figures I cannot stand — to stick with the analogy of Le Pen and Kirk, I would name Mélenchon and Hasan Piker. Were either of these men to die, in any manner whatsoever, I would under no circumstances rejoice. I would be just as genuinely shocked if they were assassinated as Kirk was. Of course, I wouldn’t mourn them to the point of starvation; I profoundly disagree with them and believe they promote dangerous ideas. I would simply allow myself to feel relieved, while never forgetting that, at the end of the road, a human being has lost his life.

But the very idea of raising a glass to the death of Mélenchon, Raphaël Arnault, Netanyahu, Salah Abdeslam, or any man or woman whatsoever makes me physically sick. Ask me to join in the loud and shameless celebration of anyone’s death, and I will tell you to go to hell without hesitation.

The paradox of moral superiority

The most ironic part is that the vast majority of people I have seen enthusiastically celebrating the deaths of these two men proudly describe themselves as humanists, progressives, and as being “on the right side of History.” In reality, they seem far too blinded by their absolute hatred of the enemy to understand that mocking a corpse or dancing on a grave is incompatible with any coherent humanist ethic. The more one demonizes the enemy, the less troubling it becomes to adopt the most monstrous opinions toward them.

This phenomenon is not the prerogative of any single political camp. But it is difficult to deny that it now expresses itself with particular confidence in environments where politics has been transformed into absolute morality, and where the enemy, once reduced to pure Evil, ceases to be seen as human at all. In these two specific cases, it was those who claim the mantle of progress and humanism who displayed it most fervently. Death is not a spectacle, even when the individual is guilty or rightly despised.

One can learn a great deal about a person by observing how they react to the death of another. I was stunned to witness this morbid jubilation among people close to me whom I believed to be, unfailingly, humane. From that point on, it ceases to be a question of politics, and becomes one of decency. And it is deeply unsettling to see how skillfully some conceal their hideous nature behind convincingly human masks.