Getting to the root of the Virginia attack

By Paul Schratz

It's been pointed out that the Virginia Tech murders hardly compare with ravages taking place on a more global scale. Yet the Virginia Tech shooting stands out because, unlike the multitudes perishing from hunger and AIDS around the world, 33 people don't get mowed down by a madman every day in America.

That's the way people are. We take note when death comes on a large scale to a supposedly tranquil academic environment in a First World country. One wishes equal attention were paid to suffering elsewhere around the globe. One also wonders whether, as these campus killings become more frequent, people will gradually stop trying to figure out the cause behind them.

As with Africa, AIDS, and war, there are pet theories as to what led to the Virginia slaughter; there is some truth in all of them. Slack gun laws, a society lacking in compassion, a health-care system ill equipped to deal with mental illness, and even the impact of pornography have all been suggested.

Most of us, however, sense that something else is at the root. We may not know how to say it, or want to say it, but our faith imparts to us a more transcendent understanding of so much of what's wrong with this world.

Of everything I read and heard in the days after the shooting, Rick Salutin of the Globe and Mail came closest to nailing it. That's a bit surprising because Salutin, who has been called his paper's token lefty, rarely has much favourable to say about traditional views. In this case, however, he's worth quoting at length.

He starts out by pointing out "how desperately unclear" everyone is about how to deal with the Virginia shooting.

The most popular answer, better gun control, leaves him strangely unsatisfied. As for the impressive actions of many faculty, staff, students, and health care workers in dealing with the shooter beforehand, "they were ineffective in the crucial task of protecting the community from danger compared to the less professional players of earlier eras: family, friends, community, religion. Those societies seemed better than ours at containing the violent, anarchic impulses of individuals."

Salutin recognizes that he's sounding "awfully traditional," and so here he back-pedals a bit. "Let me try to save myself from nostalgia for the fifties (or 1500s) by saying what I think `worked' in earlier times. The ability to keep the dangerous impulses of individuals under control was based on an entire social fabric that was hierarchical and patriarchal. It included religion, institutionalized in churches, and a moral code that tolerated sex within narrow limits. Parental authority was backed by religion (honour thy parents) and by sanctions such as the threat of hell."

Salutin isn't thrilled with the notion of returning to the past, but he can't get past the inescapable fact that in many ways, partly because there was a sense of guilt and shame when violations occurred, it worked better than today's culture of individualism and entitlement.

He points out that the justice system of old wasn't overly constrained by civil rights, and society suffered from institutionalized racism, lynching, and war. On the other hand, there was "reverence for country, and a sense of debt to those who died in war `for us.'"

Society's "dissenters," such as artists, rebels, etc., "could feel a certain security that their acts would not lead to total social breakdown and chaos frightening even to themselves. It all `worked' in the sense that it largely kept the lid on menacing impulses, or channelled them elsewhere than the local schoolyard or college. With the breakdown in recent decades of this fabric, particular players can try to impose controls and limits - parents, schools, teachers, courts, governments - but they will not be nearly as effective as they were within a total framework that no longer exists."

To repeat, Salutin is not in reverie for a society long since faded. He obviously deplores what he saw as restrictions on freedom during those halcyon days. "People were dulled to their own experience and each other. I would not want to restore this set of constraints if one could, and one can't. You can't put that lid back on again. You can only try and fail, with further disastrous consequences."

His solution is to devise a new set of social controls that produce a "non-racist, non-patriarchal, non-sexually repressive, non-hierarchical, non-authoritarian, yet orderly society that manages to control its potentially aberrant members."

It all comes down to this: the Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us "there is another order of knowledge, which man cannot possibly arrive at by his own powers: the order of divine Revelation." All searches for order without authority are simply bound to end in the same disastrous consequences Salutin has shrewdly noted.