Confronted with a mass killing, it seems, in a way,
disrespectful to speak of anything else. We don’t want to cheapen the lives
lost by airing what might appear to be proportionally petty political
differences, or disrespect the pain of surviving family members by carrying on
as if there are other events remotely as significant.
And, yet, regarding events of the kind that occurred in
Manhattan yesterday there is little meaningful to say. A “man driving a rented
pickup truck mowed down pedestrians and cyclists on a bike path alongside the
Hudson River in New York City on Tuesday, killing eight people and injuring
about a dozen others in what authorities said was an act of terrorism.” [1]
He “was shot by police in the abdomen and arrested after he crashed the truck
into a school bus and fled his vehicle,” according to authorities. He had come “to
the United States from Uzbekistan in 2010, and had a green card that allowed
permanent legal residence.” [2]
Why? Why would somebody do such a thing? True, he shouted “God
is great” in Arabic when he jumped out of his truck. And it seems that he left
a note “claiming he carried out the attack in the name of the Islamic State
militant group.” But those are just words that only superficially appear to
carry meaning.
People talk about the greatness of God in houses of worship
all over the country, all over the world, and don’t run down pedestrians and cyclists
with trucks. As for the reference to the Islamic State, that conveys nothing
cogent by itself, because the Islamic State isn’t a cogent presence in the
world. It publishes videos showing the brutal execution of its hostages. [3]
It destroys cultural heritage sites. [4]
It “has carried out ethnic cleansing on a historic scale in northern Iraq.” [5] For
it to go by the name of one of the world’s great religions is an egregious abuse
of terms, for it is a nihilistic cult of death that is so extreme it was
disowned by al-Qaeda.
Yet here is an individual, who will not be named here, who
found himself attracted to that message of chaos. We struggle to ascertain a
rationale, fearing that we might be confronted with the horror that there is
none. But we are unavoidably confronted with the horror that there is nothing
we can do about such things; we can’t outlaw rental trucks or bicycle paths.
No, we are left with the bitter realization that human violence of this kind operates
like a force of nature that we have yet to comprehend, that emerges suddenly
without signs of imminence, and that we cannot prepare for in advance.
We will not find the answer to this in politics, for
politics is only a kind of window dressing in this connection. No, this kind of
behavior arises from the dark recesses of the human psyche. And we need to make
a serious effort to determine what causes it.
In doing so, we must eschew the sciolism that would lead us
to renounce either psychological or external causes in the fear that doing so
will undermine a criminal justice system grounded in personal responsibility.
Instead we must fearlessly, and, to the extent possible, scientifically come to
grips with the internal and external motivations that yield these results. We
need to find the way to address a sense of alienation so intense that it inspires
a person to mow over his fellow humans with a truck.
In a word, we need to find a way to stop things like this
from happening. But it seems likely that we will have to overcome some cultural
prejudices to accomplish it.
