Harry Targ
(Every report of violence between individuals, groups, or nations makes me reflect on the structures of violence, and particularly the culture of violence in our society which celebrates it and its corollary, competition, rather than cooperation. A culture of violence may not be a root cause of individual acts of direct/physical violence but a culture that celebrates violence, rewards violence, and encourages competition rather than cooperation provides the context for it. October 6, 2022)
***
When
we humans see instances of violence, we are often quick to respond, sometimes
with efforts to assist the victims, often with efforts to punish the
perpetrators. It is important that we are able to feel the pain of each
individual case. It is equally important to find out why there are so many
cases. For this to take place it is important to examine what common underlying
levers are causing the human family to engage in such protracted and recurrent
violence. (Marc Pilisuk and Jennifer Achord Rountree, The Hidden Structure of Violence: Who
Benefits from Global Violence and War, Monthly Review Press, New York,
2015, 11).
Peace research, education, and activism have been
animated by concern about violence. For centuries, scholars, theologians,
philosophers and activists have studied the meaning and causes of violence in
human affairs, primarily motivated by a desire to reduce or eliminate it.
Some have pointed out that, for the most part, human
beings have engaged in cooperative forms of behavior. The vast majority of
human interactions are designed to sustain life, maintain communities, and
support individual development. But, it is true that the dark side of history manifests
massive slaughter, starvation, enslavement, and destruction of natural
environments.
Contemporary theorists identify three kinds of
violence; each separate but all three inextricably interconnected. Direct violence refers to the immediacy
of killing, maiming, bombing, gassing. It is the physical form of human
interaction we usually associate with war, murder, rape, and terrorist acts. Structural violence refers to those
forms of violence that are institutionalized--embedded in economic, political,
and social systems--and destroy life gradually. Class exploitation, racism,
sexism, homophobia, and environmental destruction are examples of these slow,
steady, and historical forms of violence. Cultural
violence refers to the patterns of habits, beliefs, states of
consciousness, forms of intellectual justification for cut-throat competition,
demonization of others, normalizing hate, and killing. It is the intellectual
glue that gives legitimacy to direct and structural violence and is the
byproduct of killing and the structures that crush human potential.
The disaggregation of the concept of violence is
vital to understanding killing today. While most discussions of violence would
not challenge this trifold definition, conventional scholarly or journalistic methods
of study of violence are limited in their efforts to understand its occurrence
or how to address solutions. These methods, often based on narrow statistical
or anecdotal conceptions of cause and effect, tend to ignore the historical and
current context of violence. For example, Facebook and twitter communications
are analyzed more carefully than history and context.
However, if the reality of killing in the
twenty-first century is to be addressed, history and context become profoundly
important. Such an examination requires a frank evaluation of human history,
the brutality of contemporary economics and politics, international relations and
how they help to understand individual acts of brutality.
The historical context in which direct, structural,
and cultural violence arises begins at various times and places. In the United
States case, it is critical to be aware of the slaughter of ten million Native
Americans who lived on the land expropriated by Europeans and their descendants
from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. In addition, slavery and racism
established the structures and consciousness that made the capitalist economic
system flower and grow. Along with the slaughter and kidnapping to plant the
seeds of a capitalist system, European settlers began the process of
clear-cutting the natural environment that was the North American continent.
Violence against nature paralleled the violence against humans.
Therefore history is a necessary template for reflecting
on violence, the institutionalization of oppression and exploitation, and the
justification for the development of a culture of manifest destiny, racial
superiority, and the normalization of killing.
Part of the context of American economic and political
life today involves the inculcation in the popular consciousness the idea that
society is a collection of atomized individuals, each in competition with
others. Sometimes groups of people with socially constructed identities--physical,
cultural, religious-- are defined as in competition with other such groups.
Other times it is individuals and/or families that exist in stark struggle
against all others. In a world of individuals, not communities, security is
bolstered by accumulating enormous wealth, building fences and walls, and
stock-piling arms. Governments are collective manifestations of potential
enemies. The only positive function government can play, according to this
popular rendition of cultural violence, is when it kills others (preferably
peremptorily) who might be a challenge.
Since human societies historically have required
cooperation, sharing, and acts of altruism, a culture in the service of direct
and structural violence must be created to destroy the “natural” propensities
of human sociability. In modern United States history, the great social
movements around class, race, and gender solidarity and their connectivity have
been challenged by economic and political ruling classes. The solidarity that
emerged during the Great Depression was opposed by corporate and financial
elites, particularly after World War II, who sought to instill in education and
popular culture a demonic view of collective action and solidarity. They called
it “communism.” They promoted educational curricula that celebrated markets,
individualism, competition, and the value of a society of winners and losers.
Deeply embedded in such narratives were racism, sexism, and homophobia. And
they were instrumental in promoting a foreign policy that saw threats to this vision
in the international system.
The promotion of the economic underpinning of a
competitive global economy helped create and reinforce the construction of a
military/industrial/educational complex that created a permanent war economy.
In the twenty-first century threats to United States economic hegemony and the legitimacy
of the war system itself provoked wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the spread
of a United States military presence to over 700 military bases around the
world and thousands of drone attacks. As some predicted, United States global
violence and its permanent war economy inspired and expanded movements of
direct, structural, and cultural violence in response. Enemies from the past to
the present have rationales for their own promotion of violence.
None of the discussion above can “explain” the mass
murders in Charleston, Colorado Springs, San Bernardino or the 350 other places
were such direct violence has occurred over the last year in the United States;
nor does the discussion of structural and cultural violence lead logically to
policy fixes. But it does help us understand the depths of the problems of
violence, historically and contextually. And it does suggest that the most
comprehensive way to address killing in the twenty-first century is to begin the long
process of radical structural change and
the development of a new economics, politics, and culture that celebrates human
community.
