A Taste for Violence
The headline on the local madison.com newsfeed has become so repetitious that I rarely scroll down to read the details. It always begins with, “shots fired” at some location on the East, South or Northside of the city, adding that one or more spent cartridge casings were retrieved by responding police officers. Not infrequently, bullets penetrate automobiles, houses, and occasionally living people. Sometimes the offender is ID’ed and apprehended but often not.
I have to say that when our family first moved to Madison in the late 1980’s this would have been an unusual occurrence. At that time, Madison boasted one of the lowest violent crime and murder rates for a city of its size in the nation. By comparison, Little Rock, Arkansas, in which some of our relatives lived, experienced nearly twelve times our own homicide rate.
I bring this up because it seems inconsistent with claims Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker has made about the incidence of violence in modern society. “We are now living in the safest time in history,” he declares in his 2018 book Enlightenment Now. Pinker marshaled considerable statistical evidence to back up that assertion, but its legitimacy has been challenged in some quarters.
In light of recent developments in Ukraine, I was also struck by a second observation from the same book: “Today,” Pinker writes, ”the idea that it is inherently noble to kill and maim people and destroy their roads, bridges, farms, dwellings, schools, and hospitals strikes us as the ravings of a madman.” That Vladimir Putin is out of his senses may seem self-evident to those of us who have been watching in horror as Ukraine’s citizens come under increasing attack, but clearly there is a method to his madness. And while he has shocked Western sensibilities, it appears that more than a few African and Asian countries have signaled their approval of the Russian leader’s brutal incursions.
Like the recurring story of “shots fired,” we’ve seen these events play out before, in Bosnia Hercegovina, Rwanda, Syria, El Salvador, Cambodia, and even Vietnam (where our own leveling of villages was euphemistically described as “pacification”). Were these all the machinations of “madmen” and, if so, why has the response of the civilized world been so uneven? Part of the answer may lie in our own Eurocentric biases.
So, is the world a more violent place than it once was? When we consider the two million African lives lost during the infamous Middle Passage, the French Revolution’s reign of terror, the European wars of religion in the wake of the Reformation, the Mongol invasions, and the near-eradication of America’s indigenous peoples, there may be justification for cheering our species’ “progress.” Still, the beat goes on. Wars waged during the course of the twentieth century claimed more than sixty million civilian lives, and now in the twenty-first century we are teetering on the edge of yet another global conflict.
This leads me to ask whether war, and violence more generally, isn’t endemic to the human animal, hardwired in our psyche. The philosopher Immanuel Kant seemed to think so, writing that, “War requires no motivation, but appears to be ingrained in human nature and is even valued as something noble.“ Over fifty-six hundred years of written history, fourteen thousand six hundred wars have been recorded, the Jungian psychologist James Hillman calculates. That boils down to two or three wars for every year of human history, and this doesn’t take into account the war against nature humans have been waging since the dawn of the agricultural revolution.
Fairly early in my preaching career at the First Unitarian Society of Madison I delivered a sermon on this subject in which I drew from some recent anthropological findings. Describing the behavior of both humans and their closest primate relatives, chimpanzees, Harvard’s Richard Wrangham argued that violence is overwhelmingly confined to the males of the two species. In the U.S., for example, a man is nine times as likely as a woman to commit murder, seventy-eight times as a likely to commit forcible rape, ten times as likely to commit armed robbery, and almost six and a half times as likely to commit aggravated assault. This is not to say that all men are equally aggressive or that ours is a hopeless case. But baring a worldwide feminist revolt led by some twenty-first century Lysistrata (see Aristophanes), it is clearly a problem men must work more diligently and determinedly to resolve.
Wrangham holds that there is something unique in the emotional repertory of human and chimpanzee males that provokes violent behavior. Ironically enough, its name is “pride” - the most deadly of the Seven Deadly Sins. “We exaggerate only barely in saying that a male chimpanzee in his prime organizes his whole life around issues of rank,” Wrangham writes:
…Male pride, the source of many a conflict, is reasonably seen as a mental equivalent of broad shoulders (and) wars tend to be rooted in competition for status…the unexamined feeling that it’s always worth being on top.
Wrangham’s thesis does help explain the seemingly “mad” behavior of a Vladimir Putin or a Donald Trump, as well as much of the recent gratuitous violence aimed at vaccine and mask mandates. Of course, violence manifests in ways other than through the barrel of a gun or on the edge of a sword. When people have no access to the resources they need to lead healthy lives because of the prideful self-aggrandizing behavior of a few hundred oligarchs, that too, qualifies as violence, slower moving but just as relentless. As James Hillman observes, “War is permanent, not interruptive; necessary, not contingent.”
Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. both were assassinated for their efforts to change this equation and usher in a post-violence civilization. We have a long way to go, and I just hope there is still time for progress to be made.
