7 Is violence necessary?

Is violence necessary?

Dear Lily,

In English, violence has a relatively narrow meaning, referring mainly to violent physical actions. It means using an unnecessary and unwanted amount of physical force against another. The ‘unwanted’ is important since much of life consists of the use of force. When a child is lifted off the ground, when a doctor or dentist do their work, when we play many games, force is involved. Yet we do not call this violence. If we punch a face, knock out the tooth or embrace a person against their will, then we call it a violent act. Always physical force is involved.

The French word violence includes a much wider set of meanings. Here both physical, social and what is called symbolic violence is included. For example we can talk of the symbolic violence contained in language, architecture, gestures, painting, government directives, class or gender. The very grand building I inhabit next to King’s College Chapel is designed in a way which instills awe into visitors, just as the lofty Chapel itself compels some feeling of reverence onto all those who enter. Many of these instances do not directly involve the use of physical force, yet they exert pressures on an individual which may go against her will and interests. In this Letter I will use the broader, French, meaning of the word.

Do we have to hurt each other?

There are very few human relationships in which there is no violence. Even if they do not control their children with physical force, parents almost always use symbolic violence to discipline them. They tell them to shut up, to obey what they say or else. They exercise control by using presents and gifts and even by the indirect violence of excessive love or guilt inducement. There are threats and encouragements; force is below the surface all the time. It is part of the inequality built into parent-child relations and it can easily move from what is considered justified control to ‘abuse’, that is the over-use or inappropriate use of power. It is a delicate balance.

In many societies the relations between parents and children are so unequal that the use of both symbolic and physical violence is often not considered ‘abuse’. In traditional Roman or Chinese society, the power of the father was such that he could kill his children if they were disobedient, or torture his wife if she was insubordinate. In some societies a brother may be duty bound to kill his sister if she threatens the family honour by having an affair. The levels of what we consider to be abuse are often very high indeed. In some places violence is almost an obligatory form of male behaviour, showing that you are a ‘true man’.

Yet it would be wrong to think that there has been a steady movement from the early stages of society where violence in the family was common to modern societies where it is frowned on. A number of hunting gathering societies have almost no inter-personal violence, while levels in many places in the so-called ‘civilized’ world are extremely high. In the three years I spent in a Nepalese village, I have seen physical violence in only one family over a short period of time. Otherwise I have not seen a single person hit a child, or a wife beat a husband, or the reverse. There is very little symbolic violence; little threatening, shouting, bribing. People, from infancy onwards, are nudged into certain actions or thoughts by gentle, if consistent, pressures and suggestions.

In England a fairly radical change has been occurring over the last two generations. The inequalities within the family are being challenged. There is talk of laws being introduced to ban all corporal punishment whether in school or the home.

Yet elsewhere the amount of inter-personal violence seems to grow. Crimes of violence, robbery, murder and rape, appear to be on the increase. The media is full of violent images, both in fiction and in the news. So people have a sense of anxiety about the threats of attack, even if these fears often bear little relationship to actual trends or crime statistics. In Japan or England the hundreds of thousands of people who are killed or maimed in road accidents are hardly noticed, but if one little boy kills another, or two schoolgirls are murdered, the whole nation is traumatized.

Why are we cruel to other animals?

Humans are just one species of animal. They share over 98% of their DNA with chimpanzees. Yet they often imagine themselves to be a different sort of creature, in some way superior, a view upheld by Christian theology. There is thus an ambivalence in human’s treatment of other animals.

It is difficult to see a single developing pattern in the attitude of humans towards other animals. In many early societies there seems to have been a belief in a good deal of overlap. Humans could turn into animals and vice versa, myths told of these changes and animals had human spirits. Then, with the domestication of animals some thousands of years ago, other species became both closer and further from humans. As they brought in the cats and dogs, penned the sheep and cows and goats and buffaloes, so animals paradoxically became separated off from humans. Often a three-fold classification developed.

Pets, that is companions of humans such as cats and dogs, as well as those they rode such as horses, were the inner circle. They were like children or very close relatives, dependent and submissive. Physical incorporation of pets through eating was forbidden. A second ring was formed by domesticated animals; sheep, cows, yaks, buffaloes and pigs. They were like cousins, close, but not family. They could, and usually were, brought close into one’s life by eating them. Finally there were wild animals, who were like enemies or non-kin. These were again divided into the edible, deer, wild game of various kinds, and the normally inedible meat eaters like leopards, tigers, bears and wolves.

So for thousands of years humans and animals were both inter-dependent, but also separate. In particular, certain religions assumed that a human-like God had created different species. In the Christian myth, God had created the animals on one day and humans on another. He had made Eden and filled it with animals and placed a man as its ruler. Animals were at the disposal of humans and they were created as formed and separate species.

The whole idea of a vast gulf between humans and animals collapsed in the middle of the nineteenth century when Charles Darwin outlined the long-term evolution of species and showed that humans were but one late, and minor, branch of a tree which included all the others. Ever since then we have become increasingly aware of how much we overlap. Almost all the things which were supposed to divide humans from animals have vanished. Some animals use tools, have a sense of humour, use simple forms of language, have self-awareness and perhaps even a sense of their own mortality. They feel, think, hope and fear.

As it becomes daily more obvious that animals suffer and think much like us, it might have been expected that there would be a growing sensitivity and care towards them. There are signs of this in organizations to promote vegetarianism or to prevent cruelty. Yet they just touch the edge of the problem. For it would not be difficult to argue that, as we witness the extinction of many species and the factory farming of animals and fish, there is more exploitation and systematic cruelty in the world now than there has ever been. We still manage to suppress our affinities to whales, pigs, cows, chickens and continue to torture, slaughter and eat them.

As we consume our steaks, sausages, hamburgers and fried chickens, millions of us have little idea (or interest) in the conditions of our fellow creatures. Perhaps it will not be until some new and superior species emerges on earth, some computerized android, which breeds humans in tiny cages, force feeds them, drains their bile, eats them, that we will seriously begin to crusade for the abolition of animal to animal cannibalism. Meanwhile the greatest predators on earth munch their way through the animal kingdom. For we are caught in the dilemma that we are a meat eating species, which gains much of its protein from consuming other animals. It is impossible to imagine that we will change, but we may, with sufficient will, find ways to minimize the pain we inflict on our fellow species.

Why do people join criminal gangs?

Criminal organizations exist because they serve a purpose. In the case of many of the mafia-like organizations, the criminal gangs run an informal or ‘black’ economy which enables the formal or ‘white’ economy to work. The normal market, in Russia, India or traditionally in southern Italy, does not operate properly. There is little trust in the legal institutions which are supposed to underpin the market. The police, bureaucracy and politicians are widely believed to be corrupt. There is often inefficiency and over-regulation. Nothing gets done without huge efforts and bribes.

In this situation the mafia, through the bonds of loyalty and fear, through the concepts of omerta (honour, keeping one’s word), and the punishment of deviation, provide the assurances and the security which the state cannot provide.

If one loses a valuable object it is no good going to the police who are inefficient and corrupt. Far better to engage the ‘brotherhood’ of the mafia who will put out the word and very soon the stolen object will be hastily returned and the thief punished. Or again, to do a deal, make a contract with another unrelated person, whether it is just to buy or sell a cow, or to build a new road or airport, it is essential that the other party be under some pressure to honour the deal. So the mafia is used as a general guarantee.

To avoid time-wasting and money-wasting obstacles, licenses, customs obstructions and regulations of various kinds, the mafia will smooth the way. The national and international reach of cosa nostra, ‘our people’, will overcome all difficulties.

The mafia ensure this by a blend of physical and symbolic violence. Occasionally the mafiosi are sent out to use the bullet, the knife or the fire-bomb, but most of the time the threat is enough. The dark glasses which stop the human contact through the eyes, the large, dark, bullet-proof car, the prickly pear leaf left as a calling card, the head of a favourite animal on the pillow, certain menacing tones and gestures, make offers of protection difficult to refuse.

The mafia tends to operate in the grey area between the legal and illegal. The inhabit the land of debased human desires, in gambling, drink, sex, illegal sports and drugs, which the State both tolerates and tries to eliminate at the same time.

Why do communities attack each other?

Of course ethnic and religious violence has been present in humans societies for thousands of years. When we hear about the terrible Hutu-Tutsi massacres in Africa, the Muslim-Hindu violence which periodically erupts in India, the awful events in Kosovo and the Balkans, we seem to be living in a world where the tide of inter-communal violence is rising. Yet when we remember the massacre of up to a million Armenians in the early twentieth century, or the millions of Jews in the genocide of the middle of the century, it seems likely that we could go back through history to find endless examples of this violence.

It appears that whenever people are held together by a sense of ‘we’, through notions of religion or race, then these concepts can suddenly become a dividing line. ‘We’ are humans, ‘they’ are sub-humans, no different from the animals which we torture and slaughter at our will.

What is perhaps most distressing and perplexing is that people who previously seemed to get on very well and be tolerant of each other’s difference can so quickly become deep enemies and commit terrible atrocities on each other. One week there is chat and coffee with a neighbouring family, the next they are demonized, so that to rape their daughter or chop off their son’s hand seems a reasonable thing to do.

Humans are clearly very malleable and suggestible. There does not seem to be an innate and ever present enmity which suddenly ‘erupts’. There are differences which normally do not matter or cause strong feeling. Yet when the feelings are manipulated by a Hitler, Stalin or Milosevic, or through a wider changing political context, fear is whipped up and sane, tolerant, people, become fanatical. The instincts to protect the family and community, of vengeance at perceived wrongs, become mobilized, and in a few hours your friends become your foes.

It is not unlike the psychology of witchcraft, where someone’s smile can very easily change from friendly to seemingly sinister if you suspect them of being a witch or an outsider. It would be a great service if someone could design an ‘ethnic and religious hatred defusing kit’ which could be applied as these terrible situations begin to catch fire.

What is State violence?

A State is the organization which has the monopoly of the use of violence. There are two major forms of this. One is against other states, which we call war. The other is the organized violence against its citizens practiced by almost all States. There is the symbolic kind, the fascist architecture, thought control through propaganda, giant parades and nationalist music. There is also the development of penal and legal institutions which often divides up the population into the free and the imprisoned.

In relation to imprisonment by the State, it is worth remembering that this punishment has varied over time. In most traditional civilizations it was too expensive to keep people locked up for 23 hours a day in a cell. So they were punished in other ways; mutilated, sent to the galleys, put in tread-mills, sent to plantations and labour camps. Some were enslaved. Only affluent civilizations have been able to imprison large numbers of their citizens or to keep hundreds waiting on death row. That the Americans can afford to keep one in every 200 of their citizens in prison suggests a very rich and, some would say, unimaginative and cruel society.

Given the wealth and attitudes in many modern States, there is a tendency for prison populations to grow rapidly as time passes. It is less bother to lock people away than to try to deal with either the roots of crime or to rehabilitate. So the British prison population inexorably creeps upwards and the profits of the increasingly privatized prison service grow. The reputation of politicians who are ‘tough on crime’ is enhanced.

The waste of human potential and the basic unfairness of creating an environment of hopeless degradation and then blaming the criminals, is ignored. The State tends to become a prison machine. It can easily become a surveillance State, its public places filled with closed-circuit cameras, its wealthy private citizens living in guarded and walled estates, its police increasingly heavily armed. To fight violence, violence of a slightly different kind is used.

So we end up with the grim fact that like all species on earth, humans are necessarily violent. They cannot survive without predating on nature and on each other. Some religions such as Buddhism and some sects such as the Quakers exhort their followers to renounce all violence and live in peace. This is a worthy ideal. Yet the moment we breath or walk we destroy other creatures.

It is all a matter of degree and of intentions. Quakers, or members of the Jain religion (who wish to avoid causing all suffering, even to small insects), try to avoid inflicting pain. They are clearly different from those who deliberately practice violence. Next time you eat some meat or kill a slug, it is worth considering what you are doing and whether it can be called violence.