Many intellectual works of art seem to ask the question "are humans any more than animals?" I especially associate that with war films, especially from the '70s-'80s. I enjoy some of those movies but ultimately, I think there's something that feels pointless about a movie that asks a question, "Are we inherently violent?" as opposed to asking "Since obviously we're inherently violent, what do we do about that?"
I don't think violence is a choice, in most cases, just as I don't think abusing drugs is a choice. Choice implies awareness--awareness of alternatives, awareness of possible implications and repercussions. I would argue that the level of consciousness and awareness in perpetrators of violence is rather low.
Same goes for hatred. Definitely in some cases violence requires hatred. More often than not, a lack of awareness precludes the ability to hate, and is just as, if not moreso, a predictor of violence.
Great piece. I really appreciate your self-reflection, and vulnerably revealing it through your writing. Not to mention the political philosophy you grapple with.
Your final thoughts reminded me of this inspiring art piece for the "Ape to Angel" album
I wrote a few days ago about this same topic (https://howtosavetheworld.ca/2022/08/23/our-unique-human-capacity-for-hatred ). I think we agree about it being a uniquely human quality and a necessary precondition for almost all human violence. But we disagree on the matter of choice. I think you are saying you believe we have the choice about whether or not to hate, or to allow the conditioning that leads to hatred. I don’t think we have any choice about it at all. I've become convinced, especially after reading Melissa Holbrook Pierson's The Secret History of Kindness, that everything we do is conditioned behaviour, and we have no free will over what we do whatsoever. I know that that's a real stretch for most people, but I'd recommend the book — it really jolted my worldview, and reading it has made it much more difficult for me to hate or blame anyone for anything.
"...we like things nice and tidy in our minds." This comment strikes me as getting close to what may actually be going on--love that feeling of control, everything in its place, everything figured out, all questions answered, including my brilliant justification for violence!
Aug 26, 2022·edited Aug 26, 2022Liked by Rhyd Wildermuth
Leaving aside the question of agency of the perpetrator of violence for a moment: the narrative around violence in the US is incredibly disheartening and is part of what leads me to believe that the country is on a steep slide into protracted factional violence.
When members of the media and public commentators excuse or ignore violence that is in general alignment with their political bent while highlighting the violence of those they oppose, it creates a fairly alarming environment. Ignoring and excusing violence creates an environment where those behaviors are normalized; the choice to engage in those behaviors becomes a lot easier. Highlighting violence committed by an opposing faction creates fear and distrust, where (as you point out), the vast majorities of people do not choose to use violence.
I also find the conflation of debate, language, and even silence with violence (that is, physically harming, damaging, or killing someone or something) troubling. Is it justifiable to kill someone for a belief? To punch someone if they debate a point you find repugnant? Burn someone's house down if they disagree with you? To use the state to jail someone for their political opinion? The conflation of ideas and belief with material violence certainly makes those choices more justifiable; after all, you're only responding to violence, not initiating it.
The point holds true even for people who don't believe in choice and individual agency; in the US, we are creating an environment where violence is far more likely.
I've been thinking about this topic a lot, that violence seems to be an innate part of the natural order, as does kindness, these things seem to co-exist together. I certainly think violence can be a choice, but for much of human history it seems not to have been, rather it was something that was taken for granted, which is why strength and the ability to do violence well have been seen as virtues. And the impulse not to do violence, to find less destructive ways of doing conflict seems to be a result of conscious evolution on the part of humans (and maybe some other mammals as well, like whales and elephants).
But if you really study human history, you realize how extraordinarily non-violent our current culture is when compared to the past. Beyond war and raiding, so much of sex would have been what we now call rape and infanticide and human sacrifice were very common across human cultures. And most of the time, people weren't walking around thinking about how evil it all was, they just accepted it as part of life. Infanticide makes sense in a world with limited food supplies and no birth control. People sacrificed humans because they honestly believed it served the good of the community.
It's why I often find the liberal fetishization of kindness to be so off-putting at times. To be clear, I am not opposed to kindness as a virtue, quite the opposite, but there's been a defining down of kindness to mean "don't ever do or say anything that might cause someone discomfort" and expansion of violence to mean "anything that someone objects to," to the extent that any disagreement gets redefined as abuse. And what's more, the people posting the "In this house..." signs in their front yard are often so smug in their definition of kindness that they fail to see the ways that they dehumanize anyone who falls outside their definition of the right kind of people.
I once had a boyfriend who used nonviolent communication to shut down any frustration I had with him, constantly instructing me on the "correct" way to frame my concerns and telling me to "sloooooww down" if I became agitated. Not only was it condescending and infuriating, we would talk around and around our issues forever, never really getting to the point because there are some truths that only come out in the heat of a good honest fight.
Or there's the way a lot of progressives look down their noses at sports, particularly contact sports, as being relics of some pre-historic age that perpetuate violence. Football hooligans and Philly fans aside, it seems obvious to me that sports are one of the primary ways cultures channel the testosterone-fueled aggression of young males away from violence.
I certainly don't want to live in a violent world. But at some point, we have to reckon honestly with our propensity for conflict, without moral judgement. I do not think most people make choices to be violent because they are bad people (whatever that means). But if we want to reduce violence, the kind that seriously wounds and kills people, we have to be clear about what it is and isn't.
The duality you mention at the end brings to mind that we would not violence if we knew what non-violence was or vice versa. It's such a conundrum, especially when you start talking with non-dualists. I'll be turning this over in my mind like a pretty stone for a few days...
Counterpoint: It's not that a mugger's skin color makes them any more or less culpable or, for that matter, superior or inferior. It's that going to an US slum and going' tz tz tz' is still clucking your tongue at that society's worst downtrodden. I think that is what is behind all the discussions about skin color and culpability.
I would not assume these smash and grabs are apolitical. It’s unlikely that the perpetrators are reading Marx on their way home, sure. Yet to get to the point of being willing to upset society and to transgress the norms in broad daylight implies a different view of events than the view held by, say, the local police chief. To say that such crime is “apolitical” seems to be artificially extracting politics from instinct, emotions, and motivations and abstracting it to a realm of thought. And the conclusion that we can choose not to do violence without side effects seems at odds with much of your work. Do we glorify the repression of our desires or do we consider where our desires come from and how to satisfy them without harm?
My question would be: what are the politics of the body? Is a resentment by a poor man for those who are portrayed to him as having more by hours and hours of TV and media daily apolitical? Do politics reside in the neocortex, untouched by our baser emotions? I don’t have good answers. I know people often develop resentment over things that are within their control or against people who are in the same situation they are or worse- incels, for example. Yet to write off the knee-jerk reaction to feel injustice at those who have businesses and SUVs as non-political seems off to me. It seems to flatten the world. The situation is more complex than that. Yes, there are people doing violence because they want to steal crap. They also feel justified by a political situation. I guess if I had to come right down to it, I remember one picture from the BLM riots. It was a black teenager with a big grin who had looted laundry detergent from a Target. Why does a teen feel happy to have laundry detergent? Sure, there must be some feeling of power to smashing stuff and taking stuff. But why resent Target and not the people who got there first and got the big TVs?
Finally, there is a point to be made that while individuals have choices, groups don’t in the same way. Anecdotally, individual people have a lot of power to change their lives. From a statistical view, we can see that certain conditions produce certain behaviors in enough people that we can reliably predict things like poor neighborhoods having more crime. When the behavior of groups of humans can be predicted across races, cultures, and time periods, it because hard to justify claims that people have a choice. Some do, and some will always make better lives. Most won’t.
That is a fairly idiosyncratic definition of hatred that as far as I can tell doesn't really have any etymological support, but I nevertheless agree with you that modern violence usually involves objectification or abstraction of the receiver. I wonder if it's always true, as in duels of honor or some such from the past. Anyway, I'll bet you would be interested in the work of Iain McGilchrist. You should definitely check him out, and somewhat tangentially but still very much related and interesting Rod Tweedy's The God of the Left Hemisphere.
I enjoyed this article primarily because you never resort to any of the glib (and maybe comforting for some) socio-political constructs people use these days to justify/critique the violence of human beings.
But I do wonder about your posit of choice as an intellectual exercise we humans go through that distinguishes us from the animals. I am a complete stranger these days to individual violence, having lost my one fistfight at age nine and having avoided any hint of such trouble ever since. But I've seen a pack of crazed feral dogs rip into an animal victim in Morocco, when each one of them as an individual was perfectly docile both before and after the orgy. And I imagine that humans might be equally prone to losing their minds when incited. At that point, can they really be said to be exercising a choice? Theoretically perhaps, but in practice?
And as long as I'm randomly picking, I'm not sure that violence requires hatred. For one reason or another, I've been involved in research on the Shoah, and one of the most chilling characteristics of many of the worst actors was an utter lack of emotion either way. Many of the Nazis involved hated the Jews as much as a cattle farmer hates the cows he butchers--or your owl hated that mouse--which is not at all. Many of them showed no hint of anti-Semitism either before or after their deeds. They were simply processing flesh.
In general, I'm not convinced that we live as far apart from the rest of the animals as the Western humanist intellectual tradition would have us believe. Maybe we're just more articulate in papering over and rationalizing our gut tendencies.
Many intellectual works of art seem to ask the question "are humans any more than animals?" I especially associate that with war films, especially from the '70s-'80s. I enjoy some of those movies but ultimately, I think there's something that feels pointless about a movie that asks a question, "Are we inherently violent?" as opposed to asking "Since obviously we're inherently violent, what do we do about that?"
I don't think violence is a choice, in most cases, just as I don't think abusing drugs is a choice. Choice implies awareness--awareness of alternatives, awareness of possible implications and repercussions. I would argue that the level of consciousness and awareness in perpetrators of violence is rather low.
Same goes for hatred. Definitely in some cases violence requires hatred. More often than not, a lack of awareness precludes the ability to hate, and is just as, if not moreso, a predictor of violence.
Great piece. I really appreciate your self-reflection, and vulnerably revealing it through your writing. Not to mention the political philosophy you grapple with.
Your final thoughts reminded me of this inspiring art piece for the "Ape to Angel" album
https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a1863730344_10.jpg
I wrote a few days ago about this same topic (https://howtosavetheworld.ca/2022/08/23/our-unique-human-capacity-for-hatred ). I think we agree about it being a uniquely human quality and a necessary precondition for almost all human violence. But we disagree on the matter of choice. I think you are saying you believe we have the choice about whether or not to hate, or to allow the conditioning that leads to hatred. I don’t think we have any choice about it at all. I've become convinced, especially after reading Melissa Holbrook Pierson's The Secret History of Kindness, that everything we do is conditioned behaviour, and we have no free will over what we do whatsoever. I know that that's a real stretch for most people, but I'd recommend the book — it really jolted my worldview, and reading it has made it much more difficult for me to hate or blame anyone for anything.
"...we like things nice and tidy in our minds." This comment strikes me as getting close to what may actually be going on--love that feeling of control, everything in its place, everything figured out, all questions answered, including my brilliant justification for violence!
Leaving aside the question of agency of the perpetrator of violence for a moment: the narrative around violence in the US is incredibly disheartening and is part of what leads me to believe that the country is on a steep slide into protracted factional violence.
When members of the media and public commentators excuse or ignore violence that is in general alignment with their political bent while highlighting the violence of those they oppose, it creates a fairly alarming environment. Ignoring and excusing violence creates an environment where those behaviors are normalized; the choice to engage in those behaviors becomes a lot easier. Highlighting violence committed by an opposing faction creates fear and distrust, where (as you point out), the vast majorities of people do not choose to use violence.
I also find the conflation of debate, language, and even silence with violence (that is, physically harming, damaging, or killing someone or something) troubling. Is it justifiable to kill someone for a belief? To punch someone if they debate a point you find repugnant? Burn someone's house down if they disagree with you? To use the state to jail someone for their political opinion? The conflation of ideas and belief with material violence certainly makes those choices more justifiable; after all, you're only responding to violence, not initiating it.
The point holds true even for people who don't believe in choice and individual agency; in the US, we are creating an environment where violence is far more likely.
I've been thinking about this topic a lot, that violence seems to be an innate part of the natural order, as does kindness, these things seem to co-exist together. I certainly think violence can be a choice, but for much of human history it seems not to have been, rather it was something that was taken for granted, which is why strength and the ability to do violence well have been seen as virtues. And the impulse not to do violence, to find less destructive ways of doing conflict seems to be a result of conscious evolution on the part of humans (and maybe some other mammals as well, like whales and elephants).
But if you really study human history, you realize how extraordinarily non-violent our current culture is when compared to the past. Beyond war and raiding, so much of sex would have been what we now call rape and infanticide and human sacrifice were very common across human cultures. And most of the time, people weren't walking around thinking about how evil it all was, they just accepted it as part of life. Infanticide makes sense in a world with limited food supplies and no birth control. People sacrificed humans because they honestly believed it served the good of the community.
It's why I often find the liberal fetishization of kindness to be so off-putting at times. To be clear, I am not opposed to kindness as a virtue, quite the opposite, but there's been a defining down of kindness to mean "don't ever do or say anything that might cause someone discomfort" and expansion of violence to mean "anything that someone objects to," to the extent that any disagreement gets redefined as abuse. And what's more, the people posting the "In this house..." signs in their front yard are often so smug in their definition of kindness that they fail to see the ways that they dehumanize anyone who falls outside their definition of the right kind of people.
I once had a boyfriend who used nonviolent communication to shut down any frustration I had with him, constantly instructing me on the "correct" way to frame my concerns and telling me to "sloooooww down" if I became agitated. Not only was it condescending and infuriating, we would talk around and around our issues forever, never really getting to the point because there are some truths that only come out in the heat of a good honest fight.
Or there's the way a lot of progressives look down their noses at sports, particularly contact sports, as being relics of some pre-historic age that perpetuate violence. Football hooligans and Philly fans aside, it seems obvious to me that sports are one of the primary ways cultures channel the testosterone-fueled aggression of young males away from violence.
I certainly don't want to live in a violent world. But at some point, we have to reckon honestly with our propensity for conflict, without moral judgement. I do not think most people make choices to be violent because they are bad people (whatever that means). But if we want to reduce violence, the kind that seriously wounds and kills people, we have to be clear about what it is and isn't.
The duality you mention at the end brings to mind that we would not violence if we knew what non-violence was or vice versa. It's such a conundrum, especially when you start talking with non-dualists. I'll be turning this over in my mind like a pretty stone for a few days...
Counterpoint: It's not that a mugger's skin color makes them any more or less culpable or, for that matter, superior or inferior. It's that going to an US slum and going' tz tz tz' is still clucking your tongue at that society's worst downtrodden. I think that is what is behind all the discussions about skin color and culpability.
I would not assume these smash and grabs are apolitical. It’s unlikely that the perpetrators are reading Marx on their way home, sure. Yet to get to the point of being willing to upset society and to transgress the norms in broad daylight implies a different view of events than the view held by, say, the local police chief. To say that such crime is “apolitical” seems to be artificially extracting politics from instinct, emotions, and motivations and abstracting it to a realm of thought. And the conclusion that we can choose not to do violence without side effects seems at odds with much of your work. Do we glorify the repression of our desires or do we consider where our desires come from and how to satisfy them without harm?
My question would be: what are the politics of the body? Is a resentment by a poor man for those who are portrayed to him as having more by hours and hours of TV and media daily apolitical? Do politics reside in the neocortex, untouched by our baser emotions? I don’t have good answers. I know people often develop resentment over things that are within their control or against people who are in the same situation they are or worse- incels, for example. Yet to write off the knee-jerk reaction to feel injustice at those who have businesses and SUVs as non-political seems off to me. It seems to flatten the world. The situation is more complex than that. Yes, there are people doing violence because they want to steal crap. They also feel justified by a political situation. I guess if I had to come right down to it, I remember one picture from the BLM riots. It was a black teenager with a big grin who had looted laundry detergent from a Target. Why does a teen feel happy to have laundry detergent? Sure, there must be some feeling of power to smashing stuff and taking stuff. But why resent Target and not the people who got there first and got the big TVs?
Finally, there is a point to be made that while individuals have choices, groups don’t in the same way. Anecdotally, individual people have a lot of power to change their lives. From a statistical view, we can see that certain conditions produce certain behaviors in enough people that we can reliably predict things like poor neighborhoods having more crime. When the behavior of groups of humans can be predicted across races, cultures, and time periods, it because hard to justify claims that people have a choice. Some do, and some will always make better lives. Most won’t.
That is a fairly idiosyncratic definition of hatred that as far as I can tell doesn't really have any etymological support, but I nevertheless agree with you that modern violence usually involves objectification or abstraction of the receiver. I wonder if it's always true, as in duels of honor or some such from the past. Anyway, I'll bet you would be interested in the work of Iain McGilchrist. You should definitely check him out, and somewhat tangentially but still very much related and interesting Rod Tweedy's The God of the Left Hemisphere.
I enjoyed this article primarily because you never resort to any of the glib (and maybe comforting for some) socio-political constructs people use these days to justify/critique the violence of human beings.
But I do wonder about your posit of choice as an intellectual exercise we humans go through that distinguishes us from the animals. I am a complete stranger these days to individual violence, having lost my one fistfight at age nine and having avoided any hint of such trouble ever since. But I've seen a pack of crazed feral dogs rip into an animal victim in Morocco, when each one of them as an individual was perfectly docile both before and after the orgy. And I imagine that humans might be equally prone to losing their minds when incited. At that point, can they really be said to be exercising a choice? Theoretically perhaps, but in practice?
And as long as I'm randomly picking, I'm not sure that violence requires hatred. For one reason or another, I've been involved in research on the Shoah, and one of the most chilling characteristics of many of the worst actors was an utter lack of emotion either way. Many of the Nazis involved hated the Jews as much as a cattle farmer hates the cows he butchers--or your owl hated that mouse--which is not at all. Many of them showed no hint of anti-Semitism either before or after their deeds. They were simply processing flesh.
In general, I'm not convinced that we live as far apart from the rest of the animals as the Western humanist intellectual tradition would have us believe. Maybe we're just more articulate in papering over and rationalizing our gut tendencies.
Wow! Thanks for posting on this big topic and inspiring all this strong feedback!