Book review: Violence is an unavoidable part of being human
Violence in human beings has something to do with our sense
of meaning, our sense that something is at stake in our identity or integrity
Richard Bessel - A Modern Obsession
Reviewed by Rowan Williams
It would help if we had a single, clear story we could believe about violence – it’s getting worse because of this or that factor in our world, so we know whom to blame; it’s getting better as we all become more educated and secular, so we don’t have to worry in the long term. But the evidence is profoundly confusing.
Richard Bessel begins his lucid and well-documented book
with a round-up of contemporary views, from those who think first of the
astronomical statistics of humanly devised injury and death in the 20th century
to those (like Steven Pinker in a much-discussed recent book) for
whom what matters is the gradual change in sensibility that has made us simply
more sensitive to the suffering of others – as well as the relative absence of
major international conflict in the past half-century or so. As Bessel
observes, Pinker’s statistics will seem a little academic if you happen to live
in South Sudan or Syria (or Baltimore or Johannesburg).
The paradox of our era in the modern North Atlantic world is
that while we are probably objectively more secure against the casual daily
risk of violence than our ancestors, we are more anxious and more outraged by
the prospect as well as the reality of violence, and more prone to extend its
meaning to forms of offensive or menacing speech and action that would not have
registered for those ancestors. We are, in a word, more preoccupied with
violence; hence the subtitle, A Modern Obsession.
Bessel goes on to reflect on various kinds of violent
behaviour: the theatre of judicial and pseudo-judicial punishment (including
some horrific pages on the rituals of lynching in the American South),
religiously inspired violence (a chapter curiously short on discussion of the
present situation in the Middle East), revolutionary terror, war, the impact of
violence on women and children (largely considered in the domestic context),
the processes of control through policing and the various ways in which acts of
extreme violence are remembered and dealt with in private or public ritual or
in therapeutic encounters. The breadth of reference is almost too generous for
clarity. And although there are dictionary definitions of violence offered
early on, it is hard not to feel that there is a slight lack of focus – as
there is also a lack of (sometimes, it seems, an impatience with) analysis of
the causes of violent behaviour.
The word tells its own story. Violare in
Latin describes excess, intrusion, transgression; no accident that it is so
often connected to sexual coercion and invasion, “violation” in the sense of
rape. If someone says that they are experiencing “violent” emotion, they are
trying to crystallise a sense that they have been taken over; something that is
not of their choosing or devising has entered them. And the paradigm cases of
violence for most of us would be when controls or borders are broken down, when
behaviour manifests that is hard to control or predict. In the light of this,
lynching is indeed a clear case, but extreme judicial cruelty – as in the
hideous narratives of public execution in Afghanistan that Bessel relates – is
not. Revolutionary terror directed in detail by a Robespierre or a Lenin or a
Pol Pot is not violence in the same way as a deliberate unleashing of or
collusion with mob activity by some partisan authority, in early-1990s Rwanda
or post-Partition India.
War in general struggles to justify itself through
conventions, guarantees of predictability, jus in bello (right
conduct even in the midst of conflict): it tries persistently to present itself
as not really “violent” in the strict sense. But it is always slipping
into transgressive chaos, unpredictability and excess. And, as Bessel’s
citation of interviews about the My Lai massacre shows so plainly, war often
includes what could be called calculated arbitrariness, the slipping of
the leash, the crying of havoc so as to intimidate populations by unpredictable
and excessive actions.
One of the disappointments of this book is that,
despite a good chapter on domestic violence and the glacially slow development
of legislation around marital rape, Bessel does not deal with the increasingly
common use of systematic mass rape as a tool of war in civil conflicts in
places such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and, most recently and
brazenly, in the activities of Isis and Boko Haram. Extreme violence in war
remains a gendered problem in ways Bessel’s discussion does not tackle fully.
His treatment of religious violence is judicious; he takes
on board William Cavanaugh’s carefully argued account of how modern versions
of the “wars of religion” in 16th- and 17th-century Europe frequently block out
the decisive role of the emergent nation state as a “sacred” authority, so that
an abstraction called “religion” is blamed for a complex of political and
economic upheavals and clashes. Without completely endorsing Cavanaugh’s
drastic revisionism, Bessel allows that the popular reduction of many-faceted
conflicts to religious disagreement is hopelessly mythical thinking (a point
reinforced by the work of the formidable English sociologist David Martin,
whose books would be a useful addition to the bibliography). Yet it can hardly
be denied that religious difference is, at the very least, a driver and a
rationale of conflict in many settings, even if it is not, as the more
simple-minded secularist might assume, a prime cause of conflict.
Lord Sacks’s book specifically addresses this problem of
“religious violence”, confronting candidly how what he calls “altruistic evil”,
killing for the sake of a supposed spiritual ideal, is one of the things that
religious language and practice make possible. Sacks grants that it will not do
merely to claim that religion – any defined system of faith and habit – is
essentially peaceful. The answer to religiously rationalised violence is not to
repudiate religion but to look harder at its diverse resources, so as to be
clearer about what animates or galvanises its less constructive features and
how the more creative elements can be foregrounded.
Sacks does this in a style, familiar from much of his other
writing, that uses brilliantly subtle and original readings of biblical
narratives. Having in the first section of the book broadly accepted René
Girard’s theory of the origins of violence in rivalry for identical goods (I
learn to belong in my society by learning the approved desires of my society;
but this means that I am at once in competition with others in that society for
the objects of desire), Sacks narrows this to sibling rivalry as a, perhaps the,
fundamental form of violent competition and he offers an analysis of the Book
of Genesis as a prolonged reflection on sibling relations.
Again and again in Genesis, younger brothers overturn the
legitimate expectations of older ones, and varying degrees of conflict result.
At first sight, this reads as a catalogue of simple displacement, yet it
becomes more interesting when we look at the verbal detail. Younger brothers discover
that their privilege is to secure the future of older ones; or they discover
that the blessing transferred to them from an older sibling is balanced by an
unexpected blessing for the latter which benefits both. The trickster Jacob,
when he next encounters Esau, the brother he has defrauded, says that to see
his face is like seeing the face of God. In other words, the stories are not
about favouritism and rejection, whatever the appearances: they are about the
blessing of difference – the dignity of difference, to quote the title of
one of Sacks’s best-known books. There is no firm ground for asserting
that divine choice makes an enemy of those not chosen, because God’s choice is
always purposeful, directed at a common good.
This reading is an ingenious and often moving turning upside
down of a rhetoric of “chosenness” that has often blighted Christian as well as
Jewish self-understanding, and has undoubtedly fuelled the anti-Semitism that
Sacks rightly sees as resurgent in so many contexts today. He is predictably
cautious about applying it as directly as it might need to be applied to the
situation of Israel and its neighbours now, but the implication is plain:
Israel’s security and well-being depend on those of its neighbours and vice
versa. Who has the strategic vision to put that into policy proposals at the
moment, when so much of what Sacks deplores seems to be what garners votes in
Israel, while a manic rhetoric of anti-Judaism flourishes in neighbouring
countries and cultures?
One of his most penetrating observations is to connect
monotheism not – as some would do – with intrinsically violent corporate
self-assertion and exclusion, but with the recognition that it requires us to
“internalise” conflict. Dualistic or polytheistic world-views allow me to ask,
“Who did this to me? Which of the countless forces in the universe is trying to
take me over?” Monotheism leaves me as an agent, challenged by the unitary
focus of all good to sort out the various impulses within and act intelligently
to redress an impaired balance or injured relationship. Given the refusal of
the Genesis stories to take sides once and for all, my job as an agent is never
to externalise the problem, but to begin from self-examination. What is my part
in this collision, this catastrophe? And what must I now do to avoid
perpetuating or worsening it?
Sacks is far more interested than Bessel in where violence
comes from, and so has more to say about what needs to happen to the human
psyche in order to control or channel it. Bessel plausibly concludes that even
if we are witnessing a heightened degree of empathy towards the pain of others
in our day, this is not an irreversible movement towards “non-violence and
sweet reason”. But to make fuller sense of why we can’t assume such an irreversible
trend, we need more of an anthropology of violence. Both these books hint in
this direction.
Yet there is a wider discussion to be had, for which a
study such as the American forensic psychiatrist James Gilligan’s 1996 book, Violence:
Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes, offers crucial resources. Gilligan,
writing out of long experience with extremely violent criminals in America’s
prison system, argues provocatively that the two most distinctive human
characteristics – our urge to create imaginative and spiritual identities,
religions and civilisations, and our proneness to both homicide and suicide –
belong together. Honour, respect, self-esteem, the stories we tell ourselves
and each other about what matters and why, so as to give us a sense of solid
worth: all of this also breeds the blind anger and pain that show in
uncontrolled words and actions and in the refusal to see and absorb the
feelings of others.
Violence in human beings has something to do with our sense
of meaning, our sense that something is at stake in our identity or integrity.
When things that are bound up with this integrity are threatened or thought to
be threatened, we can expect transgressive and extreme reactions. The betrayal
of a sexual partnership, the real or imagined humiliation, the undermining of a
national or cultural tradition, an insult to the symbols of faith – any of
these, or any of them in combination, may provoke invasive and abusive
behaviour, largely because they represent what is experienced as invasion and abuse.
As Gilligan explains, this does not mean that we cannot judge or condemn such
behaviours; but if we want anything to change we need to understand the
triggers a good deal better.
Violence is not a simple, self-contained phenomenon with a
straightforward set of causes, and thus a common package of remedies. It is one
of the things that happens to and in human beings, precisely because human
beings are always “transgressing” simple states of placid self-satisfaction and
passive coexistence, and discovering or generating new things to care about, to
invest themselves in – people, causes, faiths (secular or otherwise). We
project ourselves into the life of others and their lives are projected into
ours. We live not as rational atoms, but on the edge of various sorts of
“ecstasy”. When this capacity for ecstasy takes root, perhaps in damaged
or weakly developed egos, it becomes a capacity for forcible and uncontrolled
intrusion into the reality of what is other – because the other is felt to
be intruding on the self.
If violence is to be countered or controlled, it is in a
personal and social (and international) order, in which there is always some
commitment to mutual recognition and attention, so that the markers of identity
and value do not become weapons of revenge. As both these authors soberly
remind us, we are a long way from anything that much resembles this; and the
journey towards it is indeed not an irreversible and self-evident progression.
