Choosing To Be Violent

"I heard a mouse scream..."

Last night after watching several videos of “smash and grab” burglaries, I heard a mouse scream.

If you’ve never lived in the countryside, or never had a cat, perhaps you’ve never heard this scream. It’s a really chilling sound, one that you never really quite get used to.

If you’ve not heard it, then perhaps it’s difficult to imagine. One thinks of a mouse “squeaking,” or perhaps chittering, or maybe not making any sound at all. In its death throes, though, a mouse’s screams can be quite terrifying.

This may already seem morbid to some, and for them my description may seem even more so. When a mouse screams, it sounds like a very young child. If it’s particularly close but not within sight, it’s easy for a moment to mistake it for a girl getting brutally and horrifically attacked

That’s the sound I heard at first last night. It was late, and because of the extreme heat here the window in my office was open. That window overlooks part of a stream, one of the few that still has any water in it around here. Because of that water and because of its dense and lush plant and tree cover, it’s a bit of an oasis for all the animal life here. Deer come to drink at it, as does a fox. There is a blue heron and several white cranes I see there quite often, especially right after we’ve chased them away from our koi pond.

That’s where the mouse died, screaming.

I suspect it was one of the owls who live in the large oak just behind our house. I hear them at night, and very close. Occasionally their calls will echo through our house—again, because all our windows are open at night to deal with the heat of the day—in a way that they seem to be inside. Other birds actually do come inside, and they are not very easy to coax back out no matter how desperate they are to actually flee.

The owls never come inside, though. Sometimes a mouse does, more often before our cat died, rather than after. Our cat would bring them in proudly, and they’d still be screaming, and we’d do our best to contain her trophy. If it were already dead or at least immobile, we’d let her eat it in the house. When it was still screaming, still fighting, we’d instead rush to capture it and bring it outside.

Our cat was rarely happy about this, and I think she often felt betrayed. Our intention wasn’t really to save the mouse (though if it fled and survived we’d be fine with that outcome too), but rather to make sure it would not end up somewhere inside our walls. Occasionally she’d play with it too much, wait too long for the coup de grâce, and consequentially it would escape and hide somewhere she couldn’t get it.

Sadly, our cat is gone, and I don’t think it was a neighbor’s cat killing that mouse last night. Again, I think it was the owl, though it’s just as possible it was the fox. I heard it barking a few nights before by the stream, so perhaps. I’ve never seen a fox kill a mouse (they’re too crafty to let you witness), so I don’t know if it’s slow and loud or fast and quick.

It was either a fox or an owl, then. Or maybe a cat. Regardless, someone killed it, and its screams filled my ear for a good 45 seconds until it finally went silent.

II.

Now maybe eight years ago, around this time of year, and around the same time of night I heard the mouse screaming, I remember standing on a balcony of a house in Seattle. I had been writing late, and went outside to smoke a cigarette and think. Not far in the distance I heard a staccato sound repeat, first four, then one more, and then after a pregnant pause, a final.

“Six,” I had said aloud to myself. I remember thinking it both odd and interesting that there was such a long pause between the fifth and sixth gunshot. The first four had been quick, fired in urgency. The fifth sounded a bit more thought-out, a shot of more even intention. But what was the shooter thinking between that fifth and sixth shot? What thoughts had filled his head, what emotions ran through his body, and what logic had swept through him to consider five shots not enough? Was his victim still moving, twitching about as the blood gushed from his body? Did the shooter want to make sure he was dead, or was that final shot just a statement? Or, because the sorts of people who will blow each other to pieces aren’t really the most thoughtful sorts, maybe it was a bit like drinking that last bit of an oversized soda he’d ordered. He wasn’t thirsty anymore, but there was still some left, so why not empty it?

The sound of gunshots in the neighborhood I lived was rather common. I lived for a time in the “Central District” of Seattle, a historically black neighborhood with intense poverty and a very, very high crime rate. Crack was everywhere, and muggings, and break-ins, and even that old-timey urban crime, “purse-snatching.” I witnessed that latter event quite often, and one time was even knocked to the ground by the thief fleeing his victim. I’d been too slow to notice what was happening, and then he ran into me and I fell, and then thirty seconds later the young woman the thief had stolen from was helping me up from the ground. She was crying, she’d broken a heel trying to run after him, her house keys and her phone were both in the stolen purse, and there was nothing I could do to console her.

I got so used to such events that they stopped feeling noteworthy. I say that, but that’s not fully honest, because I remember each time I’d witness such an incident I’d actively try to narrate it away. I’d filter events such as that shooting to make sure I didn’t draw racist conclusions about it. Sure, there were a lot of people with one skin color shooting other people of the same skin color just down the street, and every purse-snatching and burglary I’d witness or hear about was done by someone with that same skin color, but it was all actually just institutional and systemic forces tying them together. And anyway, people of that skin color were poorer and so had “more reason” to steal than others, and they were in a way justified in doing so especially if their targets had more wealth than them.

Listening to that mouse screaming last night, I finally understood how much of that mental filtering and re-narration I’d done while in the US, and how artificial it had all been. I was trying to make sure I never became a “racist,” but there was never actually any risk of that. I didn’t think then, nor do I think now, nor will I ever think that people of one skin color are inherently anything that people of another skin color are not.

Why the re-narration, then? Why filter every event through an ideological frame that minimized guilt and offered justification for some really absurd violence? Why tell myself that the woman who’d been robbed was somehow not really a victim because of her skin color while the man who’d robbed her was not really a victimizer because of his?

III.

Judging by its screams, the mouse outside my window last night died a really violent death. The man that shooter murdered 8 years ago near my house also died a really violent death. Humans kill other humans, and they kill animals. Animals kill other animals. This is all how it is, how it always has been, how it always will be.

Where things go awry is when we try to assign meaning and justification to violence, to develop moral frameworks about when violence is not “really” violence. Such frameworks can only ever apply to humans, and they always in the end come down to ideological sympathies—whether or not we might imagine ourselves doing it also.

Was the owl (or again, possibly a fox) “justified” in its violence against the mouse? It’s the wrong question of course, because justice and justification are only human constructions. We might feel bad for the mouse, perhaps, but we understand that our sympathy for it is irrelevant to its existence as a mouse and the owl’s existence as an owl.

We are neither mice nor owls, but rather humans. No matter what kind of preferences we might have for one or the other, any application of morality to their interactions would be irrelevant and ridiculous.

For humans, though—well, we’re also human. And because we’re human, we can then use imagination and “empathy” to figure out whether we’d do the same thing as another given their circumstances.

IV.

I heard the mouse scream after watching several videos of “smash and grab” burglaries. I find these rather fascinating, especially because they seem to be increasing rapidly in the United States and have become a raw field of propaganda for both the far right and the anarchist left in America.

In such events, a group of people—sometimes up to a hundred or so—swarm a business, a mall, or sometimes even a vehicle stopped at a traffic light. They then force entry and quickly take everything valuable in sight before absconding just as fast from the scene, often scattering in multiple directions so that police cannot capture everyone.

Such events aren’t unique to the United States, nor are they even new. They’re a form of brigandism, a common form of ‘highway robbery’ in which a group of men would swarm a traveling merchant or peasant caravan and steal everything they could carry away. In fact, it’s one of the oldest forms of what Marx called “primitive accumulation,” the direct taking of wealth by violent and extra-economic means. Piracy is another form of this when it happens on the water rather than on land. Technically, this is also what the vikings did.

What particularly fascinates me about these events is the political narratives that spring up around them, re-narrating them either as a sign of the sudden collapse of civilization and order (the far-right narrative) or a people’s movement to take back wealth stolen from them (the American anarchist narrative). Both are baseless: there’s neither nothing new nor politically conscious happening in these events. At best it’s just the ‘lumpenproletariat’ looking for a quick way to profit, and while some of the incidents are certainly rather spectacular, the stolen wealth from these recent thefts are a drop in the ocean compared to the British Museum’s antiquities collection.

When I first saw videos of these years ago, right about the time of the gunshots heard from that balcony, I recall feeling a kind of glee for the perpetrators and a complete callousness towards the businesses. While not embarrassed by that reaction I had at the time, that mouse scream made me wonder why I’d felt that way then.

That feeling, I now understand, came from the same place as those re-narrations of street crime and shootings. I’d merely switched the polarity between victim and perpetrator, convincing myself that the owners of the shops “deserved” the event and those that robbed them were affecting political justice. That is of course what anarchists do now, overlaying their own ideological goals and co-ordinates over apolitical events.

I still find them fascinating, of course, and the reason for this is precisely because they’re not new. They re-historicize our modern present, or to borrow from Dipesh Chakrabarty they ‘provincialize’ our supposedly post-historical age. Such brigandism is exactly how the initial wealth of the capitalists was first gotten, wealth which they then institutionalized as capital. Smash-and-grab burglaries are just people trying to do the same thing, despite whatever justifications and narratives they—or we—might try to overlay upon them.

V.

Would I go rob a mall or smash in the windows of a stopped SUV with a group of people? Nah, because that really just sounds like an awful thing to do. Would I shoot up another person because he owed me money on the crack I gave him to sell for me? No, unless I was addicted to crack also. Then maybe I would, but of course it would take a lot of really epic transformations in my personality to get to the point where I’d even consider smoking crack. Would I run past a woman and steal the purse off her shoulder? Gods no, nor can I imagine the kind of mindset I’d have to get into in order to even consider that an idea worth entertaining.

Maybe, maybe, decades and centuries of “institutionalized” and “systemic” racism might have been able to create a version of me that would do such a thing. Maybe generations of despair and hopelessness might lead me to such a point. But even then, there’d still be something missing.

That something would be hatred. You need to actually hate someone in order to do something willfully violent against them, but that hatred need not be the enraged sort. Hatred could also be the dehumanizing sort, the sort that turns people into objects rather than connected beings. Both sorts of hatred together are necessary for genocides, and for wars, but they’re also required for more singular crimes.

To kill someone with a gun, or to rob them, or to rape them, you have to hate them. They have to be not-human to you, and there are plenty of ways to get to that point. You can decide they have hurt you in some way and you are therefore justified in harming them, as with the narcissistic and psychopathic sorts who create stories in which they are eternal victims. You can decide they’re part of some larger “system” that harmed you or “keeps you down,” meaning their bodies and belongings are fair game for pillaging. Similarly, you can decide they are non-human because of some fantasy about race in either direction. Or you can just see them as objects, filtering out and narrating away any proof of their humanity.

VI.

None of that happens anywhere else in nature. The owl doesn’t need to “dehumanize” the mouse, or even to “demousify” it. It’s a mouse, and owls eat mice (among other things), and that’s all. There’s an order to it, and it’s one that humans haven’t imposed, cannot alter, and really probably cannot fully understand.

All we can understand is the human, and that’s all a right mess. If there’s an order to human violence, it’s a terrifying order, and probably also unalterable. The most we can ever do I think is to re-assert what’s probably the only really unique thing about humans: choice.

The owl doesn’t choose to be violent. It just is violent, and also other things as well. Humans are likewise violent and many other things, but the difference is that we actually have some sort of say in our acts of violence. We can choose to rape or not to rape, to shoot someone or not to shoot someone, to rob a woman on a street or not to rob her. Most of us, the overwhelming majority of us on earth, choose the latter of those options.

On the other hand, anyone who decides the first of those, the option of violence, has chosen. Sure, there might be all sorts of justifications they might come up with or we might narrate in to explain why that choice seemed like a good one to them or even seemed like the “only” option. The thing is, that’s all just ideological masturbation, mental contortions we go through because we like things nice and tidy in our minds. We like to have reasons for violence, external and traceable causes for it. We don’t like to admit humans are inherently violent, even though we are happy to believe we’re inherently other things.

The problem is that our inherent violence is specifically what makes the choice not to be violent that much more beautiful. It’s the same with other qualities: our inherent kindness is what makes being unkind or malicious that much more tragic. Our inherent rampant sexual desire is what makes a committed choice to be with a person that much more powerful; our inherent care and nurturing is what makes abandonment of a person in need that much more sorrowful.