The cause of this tragedy lies in the human heart
What can you say when a driver plows through innocent pedestrians on a sidewalk killing at least 10 and wounding many others? You express condolences, reflect on the fragility of life, ask whether it was terrorism, discuss mental illness, and urge everyone to stay strong. And people have. But no one has mentioned van control.
I haven’t even seen anyone refer to the make of van. It would be weirdly irrelevant, possibly even prejudicial to the manufacturer since it clearly had nothing to do with the incident. Nor has anyone hailed the police officer’s gun. They have hailed the officer. And rightly so.
I don’t just mean “rightly so” in that his courage and coolness captured the driver without further death or injury. I mean rightly so in that it was the officer’s decisions, backed by his character, that were decisive and praiseworthy.
As for the driver, it does not appear the motive was terrorism. In Tuesday’s Post Terry Glavin noted that we should not draw too sharp a line between terrorism and madness; as I have written before, to ask whether someone is a real jihadi or a lunatic is to imply that there might be entirely sensible motives for slaughtering civilians. And the same applies to other kinds of atrocious violence including sexual and random.
In the Toronto van homicide we are clearly in the presence of disastrous madness. Whatever the driver’s motive for deliberately killing all those people it cannot have been one that makes sense. So one possible lesson is the need to be more alert and more responsive to mental illness. Unfortunately another is that certain kinds of derangement only become evident when it is too late.
A third is that mental illness is a complex problem. Some conditions are organic; the mind malfunctions because body and brain chemistry are out of whack. And someone suffering such a condition cannot be held responsible for what they do when not medicated. But if diagnosed and given appropriate treatment, they must be regarded as responsible for continuing to take their medication.
Other forms of madness are fundamentally a matter of moral rather than psychological derangement. If someone attacks a fellow bus passenger genuinely believing them to be a hostile extraterrestrial they are not guilty by reason of insanity, though they may certainly be confined indefinitely due to their condition. But while deliberately running down pedestrians is also “insane” in common parlance, we may very well declare the person involved responsible for not resisting the inner voices, seeking treatment, finding some way not to act on them.
The Toronto driver has been charged with murder. And if he pleads not guilty by reason of mental disorder the court will weigh the matter; it is not established prima facie by what he allegedly did.
None of us is perfect. We are all in the apparently paradoxical position of monitoring and seeking to control our flawed brains using the same flawed brains that are the initial cause for concern. And despite the apparent paradox we must all do so.
Consider alcoholism. Its complex origins are partly environmental and partly physiological. But the solution is moral: Those suffering it must not drink. Some may say the fact that one alcoholic stays on the wagon and another falls off proves it’s not a question of will because both wanted to be sober. But to take that view is to drift into determinism, a Godfree materialist Calvinism that says we are just lumps of meat whose pointless preprogrammed stimulusresponse reactions are the inexorable mathematical working out of our brain chemistry and behind it our DNA and ultimately the original configuration of the Big Bang.
If so villains can’t help misbehaving, heroes can’t help being brave and none of us, as C.S. Lewis put it, are really here. But we know that view is deeply wrong, intellectually and morally. It’s why we executed captured Nazi leaders.
For the same reason we do not react to a grisly vehicular homicide by calling for van control. I heard a TV pundit on Monday morning declare, of the Waffle House shooting by a half-naked lunatic tackled by a heroic bystander, that the real criminal was the AR-15. He didn’t say the real hero was a fist, but it follows logically from his position.
So does the notion that the real killer in Toronto was the smashed-up rental van behind police tape. And by that logic, we would be asking why vans are so readily available, why there aren’t background checks and why anyone needs a van anyway.
We aren’t, of course. Because we understand that the cause of this tragedy lies in the human heart and that almost all of us, even those who commit dreadful acts, are moral agents accountable for the use we make of mere things.