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| Image from American Psychological Association (apa.org) |
Just like all of you, Gentle Readers, I'm struggling to come to terms with the number of school shootings occurring in this country. I'm not going to wade into politics here; blame whoever you want - the gun lobby, lax mental-health support, the free availability of assault-style weapons, the breakdown of the family, whatever - just don't blame the victims. Something needs to change, and it's not our attitude toward violence: we cannot become numb. We must fight this rise in savagery by whatever means are available to us.
It's a bad cliche that human beings are inclined to violence. From the beginning of our history, and quite a ways before that, we've been maiming and killing each other as casually as batting our eyelids. Everything from war to crime and punishment, on down to domestic abuse and self-harm, we're infused with bloodthirstiness and a savage intent to create pain.
While we "civilized" 21st-century Americans are shocked and appalled to see the rise of onshore terrorism and school shootings, as well as the xenophobic ugliness of our fellow countrymen and government (and rightly so), I'm here once again to play Devil's Advocate and speak objectively about what it means to be a violent, bloodthirsty Homo sapiens.
I'd like to first aim a significantly pointed arrow at the whole notion that "It used to be better." You know, back in the good old days when people got along all the time and never resorted to destroying each other over their differences. It gave me pause to hear, at a church book study, the priest intone to a parishioner darkly, "Do you ever remember a time when politics were so divisive?" To this of course I would answer "No", being younger than 40; but in the next breath I'd ask, "Do you remember a time when politics were not divisive?" There's a certain amount of historical editing that goes on as a human being ages, and along with the golden haze of youth, they seem to remember everything as being gentler.
The preceding decades were not gentler. How about the 90's? The hatred of Bill Clinton among a certain subset of the population was extremely virulent, especially after his affair with Monica Lewinsky; Timothy McVeigh perpetrated the most destructive act of homegrown terrorism in US history, as culmination of a rising wave of antigovernment white nationalism; or what about Ruby Ridge, the Unabomber, Gulf War I, the continuing murder epidemic. The 80's tore the benign mask off the ugly face of establishment homophobia as AIDS spread like a flood and Reagan pretended it wasn't happening; that same president ratcheted up a dormant Cold War with more and better nukes than ever before; the rise of the Christian Right as a political movement led to veritable witch-hunts. And don't get me started on the 60's and 70's, those fabulously violent decades featuring the, uh...second longest war in US history, as well as political terrorism, race riots, and a Space Race that was little more than a proxy contest and might have led to space-based nukes. Go back as far as you can, and you'll quickly realize that the "Good Ole Days" were exquisitely violent - if there wasn't a war, or riots, or political strife, it was the man-on-man combat of the everyday. You could get punched, bludgeoned, stabbed, or shot for simply walking into the wrong neighborhood; crime was rife, and not just in the cities; people of similar classes, ethnicities, and races formed gangs for protection in nearly every neighborhood. Parades and protests turned ugly in a heartbeat as opposing sides marched past one another.
The list goes on and on. One almost wishes for a simpler time, before cities, before civilizations, when Rousseauian innocence prevailed, non? Where men lived in harmony with nature, and diseases were nearly nonexistent, and the tribe looked out for its members...
And everyone was trying to murder everyone else.
It's calculated that, in the Good Ole Hunter-Gathering Days, the leading cause of death was being killed by another human being. Young men especially were either killed in raids (as raiders or raided), or in interpersonal disputes. Ever wonder why codes of manners seem so complex and counterintuitive across cultures? Because slighting somebody - even your own tribe-mate - could get you killed very quickly. Grudges and blood-feuds were normalized, almost casual: you hit somebody, they hit you back, you hit them harder, they escalated. Human sacrifice, including ritual cannibalism, was not uncommon, and among the Celts, for instance, the "overkill" phenomenon was well-documented, where a victim could be stabbed, strangled, and drowned in the same ritual. Sacrifice victims were often captives captured in war.
Added to this was the fact that, in many societies, war was a no-holds-barred affair. Accounts of raids by Comanches against settlers in northern Texas depict male settlers being tortured and mutilated to death, burned alive, having limbs chopped off, scalped, gutted, nailed to doors...the women, carried off as slaves and wives, were brutally gang-raped and beaten into submission (for more on the Comanches, read the fascinating Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S.C. Gwynne). The circumstances may have been slightly different, as the Comanches had a special hatred of the white trespassers and were leading a systematic campaign to drive back the edge of the frontier (they almost succeeded); but the methods used will be recognized by anthropologists as not all that unfamiliar. Across time and geography, humans in so-called "primitive" societies don't have Geneva Convention codes and proscriptions against torture-killings. In order to understand this, we as "civilized" 21st-century Americans, imbued with the Ten Commandments (whether we like it or not) and Roman law, have to shed our preconceived notions and view this interpersonal violence objectively. In a twisted way, the relationship of two Enemies in pre-civilized socieities is one in which such behavior is expected: while I certainly don't want to be tortured to death simply because I was caught, I'd have no qualms about doing the exact same thing to you. Being caught by you, instead of the other way around, was simply my bad luck.
Do you find the above paragraph shocking? Bizarre as it may sound, I'm not passing judgment on the 19th-century Comanches, or on any other tribe - from Papua New Guinea to Amazonia - that engages in this kind of behavior. They are simply human beings, with thousands of years of being taught that We Are the People, and those other guys are Not People. It's tribalism in action. It's human instinct, to a greater or lesser degree. And here's the kicker: the mix of tribal loyalty, dehumanization, rage, thrill, fear, and numbness that attends war - along with the amorality of it all - is still with us today; it's just that we daren't celebrate the number of enemy heads we've collected, and attempt to turn massacres into pitched battles, and try to force our soldiers' hyper-expanded amygdalas back into the tame matchbox society has arranged for them back home. At one time, war was an essential aspect of culture; now it is a shriveled, diseased limb, poisoning the bloodstream of society that can't figure out how to cut it off.
I think the dichotomy in violence between hunter-gatherer and settled cultures is that, as settlements turned into cities and chiefs into kings, interpersonal violence became more and more proscribed by law...and at the same time, taken up by law. Justice - that is, establishing parity between two or more people when an unfairness was committed - was handed over from the individual or Chief to a separate enforcement body. Kings sat in judgment, and had special soldiers that dispensed justice; these soldiers slowly transformed into functionaries, such as jailers and torturers and executioners. Once again, the victim (here called a "criminal") was often mutilated, and in some cases tortured to death, their gruesome fate couched in rituals of public humiliation. Torture was no longer a consequence of gleeful bloodlust on the part of a warrior against his enemy, but a ritual that served three purposes: to punish the criminal, to serve as a warning to other criminals, and to entertain the public. "Entertainments", in this sense, took the place of interpersonal bloodletting - they provided catharsis through vicarious experience.
Violence has always attended the Justice System, acting as its grisly shadow. Dungeons and keeps provided excellent means of dispensing with criminals if one wanted to seem "lenient", but in fact amounted to a form of passive torture, as the body rots from malnutrition, damp, and lack of sunlight, and the mind rots from social isolation and degrading conditions. Scores of human beings simply disappeared into these places and were never seen again. For variety, torture was given over to machines that stretched, maimed, and killed with exquisite slowness. We're endlessly fascinated by stories of the martyrs at the hands of the evil Romans and others because torture is a fascinating thing: who knows how far an arm can stretch without breaking? Let's find out. How much pain does it take before an individual will renounce God, their mother, their own name? Toss him on the grill. An argument could be made, perhaps erroneous, that the propensity to torture human beings comes partly from our innate curiosity to see what's under the skin, to see how far things like arms and spirits will bend and break. Punitary justice, in that sense, is a kind of laboratory: notes are taken, efficiencies gauged, numbers crunched. The bureaucracy of violence has been with us since the first time a king pointed at a sniveling subject and said, "Break him."
And yet humans are also squeamish. At some point the cries of another human being stop being entertaining for the masses, and they start to feel uncomfortable. Maybe there are other torture victims in the crowd. Maybe the crime doesn't quite fit the punishment. As information is distributed more freely throughout the populace, humans were able not only to get their vicarious thrills, but to feel others' pain as well - to empathize, even with so-called "evil" criminals. Torture as punitive justice began to wane (although it hung on in the Western until world well into the 18th century). The Inquisition in Spain brought a new, subtler justification for torture: to coerce a confession. Their reasoning was that, by obtaining a confession from a heretic, they forced him to renounce his former error, and begin the road to salvation...if he weren't a heretic after all, God would give him strength to hold on. What it amounted to was a Catch-22: if a "heretic" proved stubborn, the monks would simply continue to torture him until he died. If he confessed, then he was a heretic, and would be burned at the stake. The most horrible part of this reasoning was that the monks and the religious authorities believed they were doing the Christian thing, saving the soul by destroying the body. This essentially amounted to a Reign of Terror which successfully kept the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment out of Spain until the Napoleonic Wars.
Despite the Inquisition, torture was steadily on the decrease as a state function, even as public executions remained very popular. But on a small scale, violence and justice continued to attend each other, and still do to this day. Up until very recently, it was normal to be beaten by the police simply for standing in the wrong place at the wrong time - never mind what happens once you get to the station. And our society accepts and even embrace a penitentiary system where beatings, rapes, and murders amongst inmates are considered absolutely normal and even expected. The Prison Wife is a cultural cliche. The argument that this serves as a deterrent to criminals is laughable, as the prison system is bursting at the seams; it merely hearkens back to our lust for violence through punitive justice.
(Another aside, and a word on PTSD: If the past is so violent, you may ask, where was all the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder? Were humans simply mentally "tougher" back then? There's a lot of baggage in the question which would take a whole other article to unpack, so I'll just sum up a few key points. Firstly, PTSD describes a Pavlovian response to a violent occurrence and attending helplessness in an individual; in this sense, of course there was PTSD. History and literature are rife with accounts of individuals going mad due to violence, especially rape, which carried a further burden of shame heaped upon the victim. However, there are two factors here which separate a modern occurrence of the disorder with one occurring in the past: firstly, before our modern era, healing was attended to much more intensely, due to the close-knit nature of communities and spiritual authorities; one may argue that sufferers of PTSD recovered more quickly because of their support systems and their openness toward expressing psychological pain, as opposed to today. Secondly, the feelings of helplessness were assuaged by the culture of revenge. If a violent act was committed against you, you were obliged to track down and destroy your assailant, whether this took years or even decades to carry out. While violence never cancels violence, the code of vengeance gives some means of redress which modern PTSD sufferers don't have recourse to. On the whole, I'd argue that entire cultures suffered a kind of collective PTSD, which helps explain their familiarity and use of violence - hurt people hurt people. One last but significant difference in modern PTSD diagnoses is due to the nature of warfare: the advent of explosives-driven warfare was the main driver of Shell-Shock in WWI and concussions in Gulf War II, both of which exacerbate the symptoms of PTSD a hundredfold).
So there's the historical backdrop: we as human beings are dealing with ages of violence, and have only recently awakened to the idea that destroying another human being isn't normal. In order to fully understand the current epidemic of mass shootings, we have to put everything into perspective. Here's the good news of the bad news: the world is getting steadily less violent. Correcting for population, the percentage of human beings executed, casualized in war, victims of sexual and physical violence, and brutalized in any sense is lower than it ever has been before. The reason we feel as though violence is on the rise is a) due to more intense reporting, and b) due to the number of people killed in any occurrence of mass violence. Look at it this way: if a plane falls out of the sky, killing 180 people, it amounts to a day of mourning. Air traffic is halted, investigations are launched, Congress gets involved...but even mention the 37,461 people killed in automobile accidents on US roadways in 2016, and you're likely to get a shrug. Only particularly bad accidents are likely to make the news - the local news - and we cluck our tongues in sympathy, and maybe remember them for a day, before forgetting all about them. The same attitude applies to violence: interpersonal violence is treated with a shrug, while massacres are given the full extent of our moral outrage.
So there's definitely hope. The advent of social media has blown the lid off of police treatment of minorities, as the public raises a hew and cry over the killing and treatment of black men. Sexual violence, hushed and papered over and forced into the shadows, has met its match with the #MeToo movement. I'm not saying we should ceased to be appalled by violence in all its forms; in fact, I believe we should push for an end to all violence, whether interpersonal or justice-related or war-related. At the same time, we shouldn't despair. The numbers don't lie: we're very slowly heading toward a much more peaceful, kinder world, where violence is no longer considered the norm for human beings.
Rick Out.
(I thoroughly acknowledge my leanings in the above article; though I try to remain objective, I maintain a certain hostility to the "decline of civilization" hype that constantly runs through every conversation surrounding the current state of violence in the US. I'm skeptical of the Peacenik ideation of hunter-gatherer cultures; while I don't think civilization is necessarily the best and greatest thing to happen to humanity, or that we are necessarily more intelligent than our forebears, I'm thoroughly against all rosy notions of what the past was like. I'm a hard-line anti-nostalgiac. While there is plenty of evidence for the downward trend in interpersonal violence, the details of violent crime reporting are rife with chances for error; the 1930-2014 report from jrsa.org shows the violent crime rate at an all-time high during the Great Depression, then bottoming out in 1962, then rocketing up steeply to its second-highest rate in 1983, dipping and rising again for another peak in 1990, and steadily declining through the 90's and into the 2010's. Since then, American justice has swung back and forth, the prison population exploded along with executions, the drug war was in full swing...it's difficult to say, without viewing estimates pre-1930, whether or not the trend is truly downward. All I know is that each successive peak is lower.
I encourage you to see the sources below for more fascinating reading on the subject of human violence; perhaps you can find evidence to overturn my claims completely, or will be able to write more intelligently and with greater conviction on the subject).
Sources:
Malanga, Stephen. "Welcome to the Jungle: Napoleon Chagnon’s study of human nature in the Amazon—and the academy". Online article. City Journal. https://www.city-journal.org/html/welcome-jungle-9810.html
Gwynne, S.C. Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History. Scribner, 2011.
JRSA Historical Data - http://www.jrsa.org/projects/Historical.pdf
Wikipedia. "Motor vehicle fatality rate in U.S. by year". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year
The Economist. "Hunter Gatherers: Noble or Savage?" https://www.economist.com/node/10278703
Mole, Beth. "Humans’ murder rates explained by primate ancestors, controversial study says".
Ars Technica. https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/09/controversial-study-pins-humans-murderous-ways-on-our-primate-ancestors/
"Is War Over? A Paradox Explained." Kurtzgesagt - In a Nutshell. Online Video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbuUW9i-mHs
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