Violence is the Last Gasp of Moral Breakdown
Violence is the Last Gasp of Moral Breakdown
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When attacked, verbally or physically, the internal response is often the same, an immediate dissociation from any connection with that person. They become "other." When explaining their actions and determining our response, labeling them as being wholly separate from us is easy. Once an “other,” it becomes easy to declare their actions a complete disavowal of a value we hold sacred, and thus makes a violent response feel not only right but inevitable. Let's face it, the purity of violence as it shuts down our frontal lobes and engages our emotional brains feels good. The liberating feeling is the reward center kicking in.
"More specifically, we need to understand the irrational allure of mass violence, the forms of self-deception that are its handmaidens, and the true human costs concealed behind fantasies of valor and righteousness." (David Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War)
The self-deception and fantasies Smith talks about are rooted in the distortion provided by what I call value politics. This is the practice of linking the identity of a group with a particular value such that supporting it through any behavior other than one's own is inherently invalid. By limiting an inherent aspect of humanity to a particular group, it creates the space to dismiss the potential for dialogue and allows for an easier acceptance of a violent response. Years ago during the Bush Jr. Presidency, much rhetoric was spent on declaring that the terrorists, itself an othering term, did not care about freedom or family. Certainly a debate should be had about just how a group expresses their concern about freedom and family, among other values, but that’s a debate of worldview, not about their capacity to care about things that are indelibly human.
Limiting a human value to a particular group is a way of avoiding broader discussion. Bush Jr. wanted to avoid the idea that we were at war with Islam, falsely equating, even tacitly, a national identity with a religious one. This avoidance though curtailed the ability to broaden awareness of cultural differences and thus contributed to a great many of the failures that happened in attempting to instantiate a Western-style form of representative democracy.
A Return to Morality
Quoting Abraham Edel concerning a naturalistic morality, Mark Johnson in his “Morality for Humans” notes:
“…morality functions to further human survival, maintain community, and regulate relations to keep them effective; it can improve as well as support institutions, give scope to human capacities, and shape ideals as directions of activity in goal-seeking.”
Morality is a social mechanism. Violence is the declaration that the social relationship no longer allows for reflective dialogue to occur in a way that leads to mutally beneficial goal-seeking.
For the mechanism of morality to flourish, there’s an assumption of a shared reality, humanity, and the social extension of our individual embodiment. This is where absolutist ideologies, whether in the form of religion or politics, lay the groundwork for the inevitable usage of violence. Absolutism is a denial of our fallibilistic humanity and therefore a cessation of the shared space for dialogue. Absolutism requires a form of epistemology, a way of knowing, that is fundamentally limiting. This is why the notion of revelation in religion and identity-based knowledge claims in politics, are used, because there has to be a way of removing one’s claims concerning reality from the probabilistic realm of the human socialized mind.
Various religious ideologies, like their secular political forms, develop out of a need to organize our experiences and direct the use of our limited resources in a way that is predictively constant. Life is inherently uncertain and the existential angst that developes out of it can only be met by perceived levels of control. One way of garnering a sense of control is to be able to identify who is and isn’t with you. Enter therefore the social identity and the creation of community.
Community doesn’t need to be tribalistic, much like the difference between compassion and empathy. The latter is based on felt similarities and therefore easily prone to bias, the former based on intentional expansion of individual principles, like rights, to others despite differences. Isolating differences allows for the creation of an "other," limiting the need for dialogue. If the person is "other," any potential for finding similarity is prima facie impossible and therefore there's no need to look. The "us VS them" version of tribalism is felt here at the individual level, unfortunately making this adversarial view of life feel inevitable when in reality this is farthest from the truth.
On the other hand, generative dialogue requires searching for what is similar and then determining why different behavior evolves out of those similarities. This "us AND them" builds community, a social communion, stemming from first identifying as human beings a shared set of values and then recognizing where ideologies or worldviews generate different behavior. Differences are still accepted and acknowledged, but by beginning with the shared reality as human beings we can then endeavor to seek why people who value freedom and life defend and express this value in very different ways.
Violence is Simple, We Need Not See Ourselves That Way
Violence is a simplistic defense, it affords no discussion, no requirement of understanding, and is most easily demonstrated within an adversarial paradigm. While there are certain situations where violence is the only remaining means of defending a value, like life, it should be done so with the utmost of caution. Introspection, generative dialogue, and rational skepticism are the means of understanding ourselves and others within a world of democratic living.
We do not uphold the values of freedom of expression and diversity by grossly labeling an entire group and removing all sense of nuance. We do not uphold the values of fairness and rational inquiry by failing to differentiate between identification with an ideology and a race.
Violence is the most simple, the most instinctually basic of responses to a situation. By resorting to violence as an immediate and first response people show themselves to be committed to an authoritarian exceptionalism. Questioning authority through generative dialogue is a way of seeing where any and all ideologies can go wrong. The way of the gun supports only the notion of might makes right. What the terrorist shows us by resorting immediately to violence is not that he hates our values, but that his worldview or ideology places dialogue outside of an appropriate response to differing perspectives. He has self-identified his actions as being the only proper and meaningful way of upholding the values we all share. Justifying their actions through a divine or otherwise unquestionable authority is simply a means of further distancing themselves from their adversaries, their "other."
Answering terrorism by upholding our values means attempting to do so in the best way possible. This means focusing on the rule of law, reflective critical inquiry, supporting freedom of expression through a free and powerful press, including humor and satire. What the terrorist wants is the abdication of our capacity for a shared world. We win not by shooting them, but by continuing to laugh, to joke. We win not through bombings but in every engaged nuanced discussion. We win not by hurling racial epitaphs, but in seeking through rational inquiry an understanding of people who belong to a different group. We win not by denying the humanity of those who oppose us, but by displaying the best of humanity that we can be.