And I think to myself, not a wonderful world

The story of Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan is an interesting one, I think, for what it tells us about the right, the left and human nature. These two youngish people — both 29, one of them a vegan, the other a vegetarian — jacked in their wonkish jobs in Washington DC in order to experience the world in all its glory. Their itinerary included dangerous areas — or at least areas deemed dangerous by western governments with an axe to grind. As Jay put it: ‘People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted. People are bad. People are evil. I don’t buy it. Evil is a make-believe concept we’ve invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own… By and large, humans are kind. Self-interested sometimes, myopic sometimes, but kind. Generous and wonderful and kind.’

But in a sense it was only after the couple had been stabbed to death by Isis maniacs near the Tajikistan-Afghanistan border that the story really began. It was immediately taken up by the conservative right as the quintessence of millennials’ credulousness and stupidity, their fatal misapprehensions about the world, their epic delusions. Everyone I have told their story to has guffawed — and then, having wiped the tears from their eyes, looked slightly ashamed and said something like: ‘Ah, yes, ummm… not really that funny, is it?’

This is presumably a societal norm kicking in, something we have all been taught. It’s not quite decent to laugh at the horribly murdered. Fair enough, I suppose — but I think the laughter was the genuine reaction and that fact, by itself, rather abruptly disproves Jay’s thesis. Incidentally, I was alerted to the story by my friend and Sunday Times colleague Camilla Long, who commented only: ‘A vegan and a vegetarian… never mind Isis, imagine the tension!’ I laughed long and loud at this until a semblance of civility kicked in and I stopped.