It is tempting to view the April 16 slaying of 32 students and faculty members at Virginia Tech as a horrible anomaly perpetrated by a uniquely insane person with access to guns. Period. End of discussion. We know how to handle this (although, somehow, we failed to do it). Before settling into a comfortable stupor of belief that the authorities have it handled, some of us might take a moment to reflect that "land of opportunity" hasn't really described America for at least a hundred years. In 1900, or thereabouts, when the world's last frontiers vanished, they took with them the option to run away and start over. It affects some people more than others, but the disappearance of frontiers and the events at Virginia Tech, at Columbine High, at the World Trade Center, and other icons of terror are related by an inexorable logic that we haven't yet grasped.

In that connection, here are two questions to consider:

Computer users know that operating systems require periodic resets, or the computer does bizarre and destructive things, in a manner perhaps analogous to dysfunctional human social systems. So how do you reset a society?

In the wild, animals that challenge the dominant male in a group become outcasts. Expulsion, or voluntary departure, is the expected outcome. The rejected individual starts over from scratch. But what if geographical constraints make expulsion impossible?

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

The late Dr. John C. Calhoun, an ecologist of some note, was interested in the social behavior of confined populations of rodents. His research began at Johns Hopkins in 1946 and continued through the '60s, when Calhoun, then a research psychologist at the National Institutes for 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 the males, behavioral disturbances included sexual deviation and sudden, gratuitous violence. Even the most normal males in the group occasionally went berserk, attacking less dominant males, juveniles and females. Failures of reproductive function in the females -- the rat equivalence of neglect, abuse and endangerment -- were so severe that the colonies would have died out eventually, had they been permitted to continue.

Before going on, it is especially important to be clear on this point: None of Calhoun's experiments began with throngs. All of his populations started out small, with superabundant resources, and grew after many generations into a state of what is called crowding (80% of nesting boxes occupied). And that is why we tend to think of the problem with the rodents as one of population density. It is common to challenge the extension of Calhoun's experimental results with animals to human populations on the basis of "infinitely adaptable" humanity. It is said that many Asian cities have high population densities without having the social problems characteristic of enclosed colonies of rats. (But those populations consist largely of agrarian workers who move in an out of the city at will on boats.) Actually, the problem is not about crowding. It is one of containment, or "enclosure", after an old English system of abusive laws by the same name.

Appropriately, Calhoun called his confinements "universes," since the animals inside them knew nothing of an outside. The rats of the early days required complete rooms as universes. This, and the fact that crazy rats are notoriously difficult to care for, is what must have shifted Calhoun's affections to mice in later experiments. Full details of Universe 25 appear in a 1970 paper titled "The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population".

A few salient points from the paper:

* The mice in Universe 25 developed a social system with a fixed number of places. In nature, the excess population emigrates to what, in human terms, would be a frontier. But in Calhoun's rodent Shangri-La, the possibility of emigration is excluded because ecologists define emigration as a "mortality factor." It is therefore not utopian. Rejected males gathered in "pools" on the floor of the universe, where they fought frequently. Females not accepted in the social structure withdrew to less-preferred nesting boxes in the higher reaches of the universe. * Dealing with large numbers of maturing competitors overtaxed the territorial males. In response to the invasion of nesting sites by interlopers, females became aggressive, taking over some of the defensive duties of the males. This aggression generalized to their young. A pronounced rise in pre-weaning mortality marked the end of social structure in Universe 25. * With the end of successful reproductive activity, the population plunged exponentially and the age distribution shifted into senescence. It had been expected that the population would rebound after declining to a few remnant groups. It did not. What's more, healthy young individuals from Universe 25, transplanted to an empty universe of their own, failed to develop a social structure or engage in reproductive activity.

Human behavior is complex, not infinitely adaptable, and not necessarily different from that of Calhoun's rats. For example, upon enclosure, people create causes to justify their violence. Religious causes have been a favorite, especially recently, since we have global enclosure and there are such a variety of religions in the world to fight about. Economic disparities are perhaps more famous.

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

"The earliest motive for poor relief in England was not charity, but public order ... Had it not been for the safety valve of emigration, in all likelihood the history of Great Britain in the nineteenth century would have been far bloodier than it was."

What prevented that violence was the removal of one-quarter of the population of the British Isles to the Great Frontier (mostly 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, no such escape valve exists.

The attack of 23-year-old gunman Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech, the son of immigrants who work in a dry cleaning establishment in suburban Washington, appears to have been motivated by economic envy, as indicated by his videotaped rant about rich "brats" and their "hedonistic needs". This echoes other terroristic acts such as those in December of 2000 by high school-aged activists espousing the extremist environmental ideology of ELF. The kids burned several upscale houses in Long Island, New York. Spray-painted messages on the charred remains said not "save the forests", but "burn the rich".

Some of us do prosper mightily. Global (as well as US) sales of private jets are way up. So is yacht production, to the point that the 70-or-so big yacht builders in the world are saturated with work. There are a lot more billionaires than there used to be, and a lot more unemployed or underemployed workers than there were. The latter cannot emigrate to another country for work. It can be argued that those with riches have acquired them at the expense of the others. "Burn the rich", indeed. So how rich do you have to be to be resented? Ron Kohl, a former editor of the magazine "Machine Design", an engineering journal, once made an estimate. Kohl was famous for his inflammatory editorials about things only marginally related to machine design. Nevertheless, they generated plenty of mail, and they helped immerse a generation of engineers in their social environment, pretty much a good thing. The estimate came out at about $200,000 per year. A typical (not big-time) CEO makes that much.

Take another quick look at English response to the Great Frontier of the nineteenth century, around 1860. Because of 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 due to the multiplier effect, not all of the poor people had to leave England. Because of the frontier, British society did a reset to prevent greater loss of labor.

Making a frontier is how you reset a society.

As to the alternative, big rocks from space are not required to wipe us out. Global warming is superfluous.

If a frontier is really impossible, violence (call it terrorism, to use the current political vernacular) escalates until the cost of controlling it exceeds the sum of economic production. It rises until reproductive damage to the enclosed society becomes an extinction level event. That is, you kill your children.

Further Reading:

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

Webb, Walter Prescott, |The Great Frontier|, No ISBN (1952)

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

Heppenheimer, T.A., Colonies in Space|, ISBN 0-8117-0397-5

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

Organizing Principle for the Duration:

The world needs an exit. The only way out is up.

About the Author

Laurence B. Winn is an engineer, pilot, adventurer, and author. His web site www.alienlandscapes.biz provides insight into the greatest escape adventure of all time.