Legal Law

Kill our children

It’s tempting to view the April 16 murder of 32 students and faculty at Virginia Tech as a horrific anomaly perpetrated by a singularly insane person with access to guns. Period. End of discussion. We know how to handle this (although, somehow, we didn’t). Before we settle into a comfortable stupor of believing that the authorities have handled it, some of us might take a moment to reflect that the “land of opportunity” has not really described America for at least a hundred years.

In 1900 or so, when the last frontiers of the world disappeared, they took the option of fleeing and starting over. Some people are affected more than others, but the disappearance of borders and the events at Virginia Tech, at Columbine High, at the World Trade Center and other icons of terror are linked by an inexorable logic that we have not yet understood.

In that regard, here are two questions to consider:

Computer users know that operating systems require periodic reboots, or that the computer does strange and destructive things, in a way perhaps analogous to dysfunctional human social systems. So how do you restart a society?

In the wild, animals that challenge the dominant male in a group become marginalized. Expulsion or voluntary departure is the expected result. The rejected individual starts from scratch. But what if geographic limitations make eviction impossible?

We first take the second question. What if there is no way for an individual to escape a desperately bad situation?

The late Dr. John C. Calhoun, an ecologist of some importance, was interested in the social behavior of confined rodent populations. His research began at Johns Hopkins in 1946 and continued through the 1960s, when Calhoun, then a research psychologist at the National Institutes of Mental Health, published a report in Scientific American (among other places). What fascinated students and readers of this research, then and now, is that the rats in Calhoun’s experiments developed social pathologies similar to the behavior of humans trapped in cities. Among men, behavioral disturbances included sexual deviance and sudden and gratuitous violence. Even the most normal males in the group went berserk occasionally, attacking less dominant males, juveniles, and females. The failures of reproductive function in the females – the rat equivalency of neglect, abuse and danger – were so severe that the colonies would have eventually disappeared, had they been allowed to continue.

Before continuing, it is especially important to be clear on this point: none of Calhoun’s experiments began with crowds. All their populations started small, with overabundant resources, and grew after many generations to a state of what is called overcrowding (80% of nest boxes occupied). And that is why we tend to think of the rodent problem as a population density problem. It is common to question the extension of Calhoun’s experimental results with animals to human populations on the basis of an “infinitely adaptable” humanity. Many Asian cities are said to have high population densities without having the social problems characteristic of enclosed rat colonies. (But those populations consist largely of agrarian workers who move into the city and out of the city at will in boats.) In reality, the problem is not one of overcrowding. It is one of containment, or “lockdown”, after an old English system of abusive laws of the same name.

Appropriately, Calhoun called his confinements “universes,” since the animals within them knew nothing of an outside. The rats of the early days needed whole rooms like universes. This, and the fact that mad rats are notoriously difficult to care for, is what must have transferred Calhoun’s affection to mice in later experiments. Full details of Universe 25 appear in a 1970 article titled “The Explosive Growth and Disappearance of a Mouse Population.”

Some highlights from the article:

* The mice in Universe 25 developed a social system with a fixed number of places. In nature, excess population migrates to what, in human terms, would be a frontier. But in Calhoun’s Shangri-La rodent, the possibility of emigration is excluded because environmentalists define emigration as a “mortality factor.” Therefore, it is not utopian. The rejected males gathered in “puddles” on the floor of the universe, where they fought frequently. Females not accepted into the social structure withdrew to less preferred nests on the far reaches of the universe.

* Dealing with a large number of mature competitors overloaded the territorial males. In response to invasion of nesting sites by intruders, the females became aggressive, taking over some of the defensive functions of the males. This aggression was generalized to their young. A pronounced increase in mortality before weaning marked the end of the social structure in Universe 25.

* With the end of successful reproductive activity, the population plummeted exponentially and the age distribution became senescent. The population was expected to rebound after dwindling to a few remaining groups. It did not. Furthermore, the healthy young people of Universe 25, transplanted into an empty universe of their own, were unable to develop a social structure or participate in reproductive activities.

Human behavior is complex, not infinitely adaptable, and not necessarily different from that of Calhoun’s rats. For example, after being locked up, people create causes to justify their violence. Religious causes have been a favorite, especially recently, as we have a global campus and there are a wide variety of religions in the world to fight for. The economic disparities are perhaps more famous.

England’s most pronounced lockdown episode, one that nearly led to the genocide of farmworkers in the southern agricultural districts of that country, produced spectacular concentrations of wealth accompanied by dramatic poverty, unemployment and underemployment. The phrase “surplus population” (one of Ebenezer Scrooge’s favorites) became popular in 1834, when English manufacturers proposed to Poor Law Commissioners that they send surplus population north so that “manufacturers could absorb and utilize it. “. This strategy, arising from the confinement, produced the abuses that led to the creation of communism as a response to capitalism, and the need for a kind of welfare system, not to prevent people from starving, but to prevent them from expressing their resentment by the conspicuous. wealth by violence. Richard Rubenstein of the Florida State University Institute for the Humanities put it more succinctly in his 1983 book | The Age of Triage: Fear and Hope in an Overcrowded World |.

“The oldest motive for helping the poor in England was not charity, but public order … Had it not been for the escape valve of emigration, in all probability the history of Britain in the 19th century it would have been a lot bloodier than it was. “

What prevented that violence was the transfer of a quarter of the population of the British Isles to the Great Frontier (mainly North America and Australia) between 1840 and 1880. Today, with emerging global enclosure problems that are similar to those of England in the nineteenth century, there is no such escape valve.

The attack of 23-year-old gunman Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech, the son of immigrants working at a dry cleaning establishment in suburban Washington, appears to have been motivated by economic envy, as indicated by his videotaped spiel about the rich “. brats” and their “hedonistic needs”. This echoes other terrorist acts such as those of December 2000 by school-age activists who embrace the extremist environmental ideology of ELF. The children burned several luxury homes on Long Island, New York. Messages spray-painted on the charred remains said not “save the forests,” but “burn the rich.”

Some of us thrive mightily. Global (as well as US) sales of private jets are on the rise. So is yacht production, to the point where the world’s 70 or biggest yacht builders are overworked. There are many more billionaires than there used to be, and many more unemployed or underemployed workers than there used to be. The latter cannot emigrate to another country to work. It can be argued that those with the rich have acquired them at the expense of others. “Burn the rich”, in fact. So how rich do you have to be to be resented? Ron Kohl, former editor of “Machine Design” magazine, an engineering magazine, once made an estimate. Kohl was famous for his incendiary editorials on things only marginally related to machine design. However, they generated a lot of mail and helped to immerse a generation of engineers in their social environment, a pretty good thing. The estimate resulted in around $ 200,000 per year. A typical (not very important) CEO makes that much.

Take another quick look at the English response to the Great Frontier of the 19th century, circa 1860. Due to the existence of the frontier, wages went up, the government provided more legislation to correct labor abuses, parents took better care of their children and because of the multiplier effect, not all poor people had to leave England. Due to the border, British society made a restart to avoid further loss of manpower.

Making a border is how to reestablish a society.

As for the alternative, large rocks from space are not required to annihilate us. Global warming is superfluous.

If a border is truly impossible, violence (let’s call it terrorism, to use today’s political vernacular) escalates until the cost of controlling it exceeds the sum of economic output. It increases until the reproductive damage to the locked society becomes an extinction-level event. I mean, you kill your children.

Other readings:

Turner, Frederick Jackson, | The Frontier of American History |, ISBN 0-88275-347-9 (1920)

Webb, Walter Prescott, | The Great Frontier |, Without ISBN (1952)

O’Neill, Gerard K., | The High Frontier |, ISBN 0-688-03133-1 (1977)

Heppenheimer, TA, Colonies in Space |, ISBN 0-8117-0397-5

Rubenstein, Richard L., | The Age of Classification: Fear and Hope in an Overpopulated World |, ISBN 0-8070-4376-1 (1983)

Duration organizing principle:

The world needs a way out.

The only way out is up.

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