We try to blame tragedy on tribalism, but it’s usually just a sad loser.
Kay, A13
‘Some might say Toronto has lost its innocence, but let me assure this House that we are strong,” Liberal MP Marco Mendicino told Parliament this week, a day after Alek Minassian allegedly went on a deadly rampage with a rental van on a busy Toronto Street, killing 10 and wounding 14. “Together we will emerge more united than ever.”
Politicians are required to say comforting things in the aftermath of tragedy. Mendicino’s riding of Eglinton-Lawrence sits close to the site of the attacks. I’m sure that he and his constituents were shaken by the killings. And his message felt right for the moment: a hole was pierced in our collective being, but we will suture it through the healing power of courage, caring and civic trust.
But it isn’t true. The Greater Toronto Area has a population of more than six million people, many of them refugees or immigrants from countries where horrifying crime is part of the daily news cycle. And so it seems unlikely that a single mass murder will be a defining event in their lives. Nor can Toronto itself be credibly cast as some sort of collective ingénue, despoiled for the first time by bloodshed. An official review of police actions during the 2010 G20 protests described Toronto as a city that had “lost its innocence.” Four years after the G20, politicians and pundits offered variations on the same theme in regard to Canada when a lone Islamist nut killed Cpl. Nathan Cirillo in Ottawa before dying in a futile attack on Parliament.
This conceit of innocence lost and regained and lost again comes from a noble place: we have high expectations of our fellow citizens. And we feel betrayed when those expectations are run down. But there is a blurry line between civic uplift and civic hubris. It’s nice to imagine that these tragic episodes show how “strong” we are. But we’re not. At places where ordinary people congregate, like fast food restaurants and the baseball game, the dominant reaction I’ve heard has been anxious fretting about followup attacks. On Twitter, meanwhile, my feed is full of ideologically motivated bickering and point-scoring over Minassian’s alleged motives.
Tribalism is encoded in the human brain. It’s a useful reflex when leaders are rallying the masses to fight foreign invaders, or root out a real force of fifth columnists. But it can misfire badly when spasms of carnage are authored by random loons — because there’s no foe to fight, just bodies to bury. The perverse result is a tendency to artificially inflate the historical importance of emotionally disturbed killers — reimagining them as supervillains, or as disciples of an insidious exterminationist force lurking in every nook and cranny of our society.
As part of the usual post-slaughter drill, ideologues routinely scrutinize a killer’s social-media babblings as a means to support their own pre-existing political beliefs. Just as many Canadian conservatives treated Parliament Hill killer Michael Zehaf-Bibeau as a oneman vanguard for a coming Islamist insurgency, social media this week was afire with claims that Minassian is a men’s-rights culture warrior channelling a cult of toxic misogyny. It all reminds me of the hysterics who responded to the 1999 Columbine High School massacre by insisting that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were goth occultists and “Trench Coat Mafia” members waging a terrorist war on jocks and Christians.
The truth is that those who know Minassian describe him as an anti-social loner who has “special needs.” By one account, he would appear in school hallways, “making meowing noises and hugging his arms around himself.” A military recruit who met Minassian during the latter’s brief, unsuccessful training stint with the Canadian Forces believes he had “some sort of condition.” These facts are highly inconvenient to anyone seeking to turn the man into the #MeToo equivalent of Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik.
Then again, facts tend to be brushed aside in the shadow of horrific crimes, because most culture warriors settle quickly on a narrative that corresponds with their understanding of evil (which, at root, is the central preoccupation of all ideologies). Many American liberals, for instance, still insist that Omar Mateen shot up Orlando’s Pulse nightclub in 2016 because he was a closeted homophobe — despite clear evidence to the contrary. And in Canada, there were wing nuts who for months after the 2017 massacre at Quebec City’s Islamic Cultural Centre continued to believe the killings were perpetrated by a Muslim.
Movies have taught us that all tragedies come with some kind of happy, emotionally satisfying ending. In another age, these endings were supplied by religion: the killer went to hell and the victims went to heaven. Without God, the only way to supply emotional closure is to imagine that we are engaged in a larger struggle that can be won by exhibiting “strength” and “unity,” or by infusing us with a sense of ideological mission against the killer’s (often imaginary) creed.
The shared nature of this exercise helps us bond with one another. But it’s based on an intellectually dishonest overhyping of both threat and response. Misogynistic supervillains don’t walk around school hallways making meowing noises. And Toronto remains one of the safest large cities on the face of the planet, for men and women alike. Const. Ken Lam, the police officer who exhibited extraordinary professionalism and restraint in the arrest of Minassian, is a true hero. But the most heroic thing most Torontonians did this week was fight the additional traffic caused by police road closures.
So how should we react to mass murder? In many cases, by doing nothing. Human beings are social creatures who always will coalesce geographically in a way that makes them vulnerable to their neighbours’ violent tendencies. And those tendencies always will remain somewhat obscure until they are acted upon, since no one knows with certainty what lurks within the minds of others.
But there are some strategies for enhancing our safety that don’t depend on mind reading. We fly Canadian skies with confidence because we know that millimetre wave scanners don’t check what’s in your brain when you pass through airport security. They check what’s in your pockets.
Ironically, the horrifying trend of using cars and trucks for mass murder is taking place at the same time as new forms of artificial intelligence and sensor technology have permitted the creation of autonomous pedestrian-detection safety features in new cars, including otherwise non-autonomous conventional vehicles that are driven by humans. This year’s line of Daimler buses, for instance, offers what is described as “the world’s first system built for buses that incorporates both autonomous emergency braking and pedestrian detection.”
As several well-publicized accidents involving fully autonomous vehicles have shown, the technology isn’t perfect yet. But in cases where it is being implemented as a driver-assist feature, it doesn’t have to be perfect to help save lives. I’d be surprised if, a decade from now, such technology weren’t mandatory on all new Canadian passenger vehicles — especially rentals, such as the van Minassian was driving.
The subject of enhanced vehicular safety features doesn’t arouse strong emotions. It doesn’t evoke dramatic themes such as good vs. evil, toxic misogyny or militant Islam. And it won’t help us become “strong” or “united.” But it may help prevent the next episode of mass murder on four wheels.