One of the old saws needing serious qualification is the one about safety in numbers. The dangers presented by the madness of crowds as an important historical theme was first drawn to my attention by a book I read many years ago: George Rudé’s The Crowd in the French Revolution. The dangers are especially great when large numbers in the crowd are literally or, perhaps more commonly, metaphorically intoxicated. By metaphoric intoxication I mean possession by an intensely powerful shared immediate objective, passion, prejudice, or religious fervor. Race riots, pogroms, lynchings—all of which are well documented in modern history—are examples of the dangers of mob violence.
If crowds can be the incubators of criminal violence, they often have been the convenient targets at which criminal violence has been directed. The “crowded market-place” has been one of the favorite venues for Middle Eastern suicide bombers, but any large gathering, such as those congregated for religious services and weddings, has proved vulnerable. Four or five years ago a demented man in Las Vegas murdered some sixty people attending a music festival. About eight hundred others were wounded by his gunfire or injured in the ensuing panic. Without attracting the attention of any of the hotel staff he had successfully brought up to his complimentary rooms in an upper floor of the flashy Mandalay Bay hotel a veritable armory of high-powered rifles, some of them modified in such a fashion as to turn them in effect into continuous-fire machine guns. As a concert neared its conclusion he fired down into the large crowd in attendance in the plaza below. He set a new record, which will doubtless prove temporary, for mindless slaughter before killing himself. Nobody knows why he did it, but there is no why that could really explain it. He had big gambling debts, but he carefully paid them off before getting on with his mass murder. If people are packed closely enough together, a shooter need not be much of a marksman to do a lot of damage. In Colorado a graduate school dropout shot up a cinema audience gathered to view the film “The Dark Knight Rises.” In Florida an Islamic terrorist dealt out devastation in a packed nightclub.
In all these instances, and indeed in dozens of others like them, journalists are wont to underscore the dichotomy between the carefree, often celebratory mood of the congregated victims and the inscrutable dark motives of the perpetrators who strike without warning or comprehensible motive. Yet as we have been reminded by a terrible event of the last few days, crowds have demonstrated time and again that they are very great dangers to themselves.
Religious pilgrimages, sporting events, rock concerts—anyplace where large, het-up crowds are trying to get into or out of constricted areas—are potential sites of slaughter. The latest disaster, last Friday, was at a Houston music festival at which the rapper Travis Scott was performing before an audience of fifty thousand people. That is roughly the population of a small city like Joplin MO or Troy NY. At such events the authorities normally have on hand a medical tent to deal with drug overdoses. For Mr. Scott’s performance, this facility was overwhelmed before the actual concert began. Mr. Scott is apparently one of those “the-show-must-go-on” types, so it went on as, unbeknownst to him, people were being suffocated and trampled to death. Altogether, eight died. Many more were injured, including a ten-year-old child. One of the dead was fourteen. Am I simply too unhip to know why a ten-year-old would possibly be at such an event?
There have been a few times in my life when I felt endangered by being in the midst of a crowd. Mainly this has simply been a feeling of enforced immobility and uncertainty amidst sensations of obscure shoving and jostling. Once in London I felt overwhelmed and threatened among a sudden rush of drunken Scottish soccer fans who swamped an Underground train on which I was riding, packing the car far beyond its intended capacity.
The only time I have been really scared was on my one visit to Israel many years ago now. My son-in-law, who grew up in Jerusalem, had arranged a marvelous tour for me, and directed most of it personally. But he thought, correctly, that I would like to visit some of the traditional pilgrimage sites in and around Bethlehem. There I was on my own. Bethlehem, a West Bank village under the administration of the Palestinian Authority, is probably not more than ten kilometers from the Old City in Jerusalem; but in my experience it has much in common with Virgil’s Avernus, or perhaps the Roach Motel. It is much easier to get into than out of.
I don’t know what to call the formidable fortress through which all travelers between the two territories must pass. Terms like check-point or customs station are clearly inadequate. It seemed to me very large, and reminded me most of a heavy concrete subterranean parking garage. It was roofed with a grill of heavy metal bars. You could hear and also see military boots walking noisily about on top of it. There were some roped stanchions to direct lines of visitors toward the kiosks where officials, again I think military people, asked you what you were about and examined your passport. Except there were not any lines of visitors, only me and three or four others, one of them a Christian nun. After a brief but thorough inquiry into my papers and purposes I was directed to a door quite some distance away. This opened onto the Palestinian West Bank in the form of a grubby and littered parking lot where there were waiting, as I had been told to expect them to be, a number of drivers in their taxis hoping for visitors to employ them as guides to the principal tourist sites of Jesus’s birthplace. My “guide” was a pleasant man who took me to all the right places and let me poke about on my own. I enjoyed the experience, parts of which were quite moving.
This essay is about crowds, however, and specifically the large crowd already gathered at the parking-garage frontier barrier on the return trip. I had been one among five on the exit from Jerusalem. I was now one among five hundred—one conspicuously tall Caucasian bobbing above a choppy sea of Semites. There was a lot of shoving and jostling. It was as though everyone in the crowd was trying to stake out an ideal place from which to race to an exit, the exact position of which no one knew. This seemed wholly irrational. Though more people kept arriving, there was plenty of open space behind; yet people jammed in like voluntary sardines. There were loud arguments in Arabic, louder peremptory commands from the military police. There was no independent volitional motion. The whole crowd swayed and staggered to capricious but irresistible forces. Some people were being pushed against the iron bars of the cage. My rational mind knew that there were twenty yards of open space not far distant behind me; still I was terrified. What must it feel like to be trampled by a hundred soccer fans or rap enthusiasts who have nowhere to go except across your body?
