It’s human science. We are a species that gathers. We must gather, connect communicate and socialize. It’s quite simply in our DNA. And to our detriment, it’s our gathering in these two years of the pandemic that has been our undoing. And now it’s the fifth wave, the Omicron wave. The number of COVID-19 patients in Canadian hospitals rose 67 per cent last week over the week before, and Ontario is leading the way in high case numbers. So, once again, the Ontario government has decided to lock everything down to prevent us from gathering.
“We face a tsunami of new cases in the coming days and weeks,” Premier Doug Ford told reporters at a news conference on Monday. “The math isn’t on our side.”
But there are, I think, much more dangerous aspects to our species’ gatherings these days than just pandemic viruses. Today is Jan. 6, 2022, one year to the day when supporters of former president Donald Trump reacted to his “stolen election” rant at the Ellipse near the White House. Thousands of Americans had gathered from all over the country, as if waiting for instructions from their leader. They heard more of the lie they expected to hear from him.
“You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore,” Trump told his supporters. “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
Then, he encouraged the riled crowd, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women,” meaning that he did not recognize democratic voting in his country (nor should his faithful) and that they should therefore break into the Capitol building and stop the electoral college from voting to recognize Joe Biden as fairly elected president of the United States.
In the course of that day’s violence, five people died, hundreds more were injured, and the Capitol chambers and offices were trashed by the misinformed rioters.
I’ve been wondering a lot this past year, when and how our natural instinct to assemble as a human species, drifted into dangerous gathering. I think of historical examples of popular assembly gone mad: the so-called witch hunts in Europe in the 15th century, the rise of Hitler and Nazism in Europe, or the lynching of African Americans by white mobs in post-Civil-War America.
Research by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People indicates that as many as 4,743 Black Americans were summarily executed between 1882 and 1968. The NAACP recounts how white citizens were provoked into a frenzy by racist leaders to murder Black men on trumped up accusations of murder, rape, arson, robbery and vagrancy. I’m sure I’m not the only one to consider the videoed killing of George Floyd, a modern-day lynching.
Coincidentally, this week, Louise Penny appeared on CBC Radio’s The Next Chapter. The bestselling mystery author from Knowlton, Quebec, talked about her latest Armand Gamache novel entitled The Madness of Crowds. The storyline has the chief inspector assigned to provide security for a visiting professor of statistics about to speak at a nearby university; the professor’s views blur the truth and begin to inflame the community.
Penny readily points to a Scottish poet and his book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds as her inspiration for the novel.
“We find whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit,” Charles Mackay wrote in 1841. “Men think in herds … they go mad in herds.” The book, a study in psychology, took a look at the lunacy that gripped people in crises real or imagined, where normally rational, well-balanced people lost their minds. “The crowd psychology is fascinating and terrifying, how it can get out of control,” Louise Penny worried. But it yielded another bestseller.
A few years ago, when I joined a European battlefield tour, made up principally of American travellers, I had ample opportunity to listen to them discuss their politics. Several of them openly predicted the gerrymandering of electoral constituencies in African-American ridings, the appointment of politically affiliated judges and the potential for another civil war in their country.
In a quieter moment with a retired U.S. civil servant on the tour, I asked him how his nation, more than 200 years into its democratic history, could descend into such chaos.
He looked over his shoulder, then back to me and said: “It’s tribalism. And he who gets enough of the tribe on his side, wins. No matter if he’s right or wrong.”
This was four years before the Jan. 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill.