Controlling Violence

I run the risk of over psychologizing an already sad situation, but here goes.  The Greeks had a word for it, the Dionysia, the Romans, Saturnalia, the Germans, October Fest.   In Latin countries, it’s Carnival, in New Orleans, Mardi Gras.  In just about all orderly societies, under the sponsorships of differing gods, mythic histories, whatever, we have an annual celebration of unbounded spontaneity, venting the spleen, “the world turned upside down.”  It enables the society to live at relative peace with itself the rest of the year.  Some societies do it in subtler forms.  One of the foundation papers in social anthropology is about such a role for cockfighting in Borneo.  In South Africa, Mandela used soccer to help turn a nation around.  The Greeks wrote their tragedies to provide Catharsis; in addition to Saturnalia, the Romans used “bread and circuses.”  They are all ways of finding socially acceptable ways for venting and dissipating the violent streak in all of us that comes from our animal past.

I see in the papers and on TV about yet another shooting in a high school, about 91 children age 10 or under killed in 2012, 37 of them by family members, about random killing and tire slashing and beatings of total strangers, and ask Why?  Part of the answer of course is our clinging on to the frontier mythology of keeping weapons handy to fight off a dangerous world.  But Australia and Canada have had equally recent wild histories and discarded them for modern life.  We have to explain why we cling to our own wild history so desperately that we create our own modern libertarian mythology and are willing to sacrifice children to do so.  Part of the answer is racial strife, our inability to adapt to each other, a third generation punishment for the sin of slavery.  But that does not explain white teenagers in mostly white high schools shooting each other.  Part of the answer is the totally out-of-hand commercial exploitation and glorification of violence by our media, from video game makers to professional sports; we have our own gladiators and circuses, violence made easy.  One excuse is that now there are just so many of us that bad things are bound to happen, but that does not explain why our per capita violence rate is so much higher than elsewhere, including in countries with far higher populations or higher population densities than ours.

Part of the answer may be found in W.H. Auden’s poem about grey citizens living grey lives, and that may speak to the deeper issues.  We pile inequalities onto inequalities, more and more deeply stratifying our society into lives of grey drudgery and frustration that lead to what sociologists call anomie, a sense of alienation. We are busy creating an underclass of grey drudges by our rapidly falling social mobility.  But we are not worker ants, and, forced to live like ones, we grow angry and frustrated.  Left with no vent, sometimes people snap.  At all levels of society, we teach and provide our children no other outlets to their frustrations but violent ones, and when they act out that violence we are shocked.

It has become obvious that gun control is desperately needed, and that gun control by itself is not enough.  The conditions that lead to the anger and frustration being acted out violently must be addressed. Income inequality and low social mobility must be tackled by redistribution of wealth through the tax system.  Unemployment must be eased both through extended unemployment benefits and through jobs creation promoted by government.  Education must be reformed to enable people to live out their dreams through their own skills.  Our health systems need better ways of recognizing and treating the emotionally ill.  The media needs, on moral grounds if for no other reason, to shift its focus away from killer winner take all competition.  No one thing can make the violence go away.  Together many things can.  We owe it to our children.