The Caine Mutiny is primarily remembered for Captain Queeg’s ball bearing clicking eccentricity. But the gripping novel also contained good insights derived from author Herman Wouk’s naval combat experience in the South Pacific during the Second World War. Among them was his suggestion that the key to the many massacres of that campaign might be the combatants’ obliviousness to the fact that their opponents were human beings. War promotes extreme thinking. But the fact that a great many ordinarily decent and compassionate individuals can become caught up in the malady sounds an alarm as to the dangerous lengths to which human thinking and emotions can go.
War involves two adversaries, but such a mental attitude also promotes one-sided striking out. Alberta has recently seen a couple of high profile instances. Last week the vicinity of Claresholm was the scene of a ghastly shooting spree. The shooter, according to reports, was upset over the end of a romance. He apparently thought it valid for him to respond by taking the lives of his erstwhile love and two other people at the scene, and wounding a fourth, before shooting himself to death. Just over a year ago a young man upset by being ejected from a bar in Olds responded by accelerating his truck into a crowd outside the establishment, killing one young man and seriously injuring another. A Calgary jury recently convicted him of murder. Such incidents are far from rare. In recent years it has become commonplace to learn of someone annoyed at being fired, or angry over a slight, or gripped by a compelling obsession, walk into a workplace or a restaurant or another location where people are gathered and commence shooting, or set off a bomb, or undertake other fatal aggression.
It is natural to ask how anyone could act in so callous, even depraved, a manner. Reasons sometimes emerge, offering rationales for scrutiny. The thinking can be fuzzy, so convoluted as to be unintelligible, or stark with a cold and distorted logic manipulating questionable premises. But none of the reasoning displays any sign that the malefactor was giving the least recognition to the principle that the people assailed were human beings and entitled to life. This moral oblivion is not the motivator for the deadly conduct. The genesis of the attack generally lies in rage (whether sober or alcohol fuelled), lingering rancour demanding revenge for a slight, criminal practicality, or an obsessive sense of mission. What the lack of human empathy does is remove a brake, a sense of restraint. There is nothing to rein in the aggressor’s murderous intentions.
How people get into this indifference to the sanctity of human life is far from clear. It may reflect an attitudinal shift in society whereby too many people focus only on their own thoughts and feelings and seek a sense of worth through domination of others. Probably rage, particularly when stoked by booze, blinds a person to feelings which might otherwise enforce a more sensible course.
But there are people with little or no such feelings to begin with. As we have often seen in recent years from serial killer cases, there are people who feel entitled to take other peoples’ lives for their own entertainment. The difference between that and an enraged, juiced-up punk ramming a high-powered vehicle into a crowd is more apparent than real — the result is people callously slaughtered.
St. Albert resident David Haas is retired from legal and military careers.
