Let’s play a game. If you folks are interested, please read the above statement and then comment on it. It is the UNESCO Seville Statement on Violence. It simply states that violence is not humanity’s Natural patrimony (or would it be matrimony, in keeping with the trope of “Mother Nature”?) Agree, Disagree, What have you? Over the course of the next few weeks, I’m going to post several other articles for those interested to read and comment upon.
The extent of violence in this universe is colliding bodies. The extent of anthropomorphic violence is the degree in which pain can be tolerated by an average type without making efforts to avoid it.
What is violent is what hurts physically. Pain is defined by degrees of sensation which are measured by the intensity of the urge to avoid a stimulus.
Non-sentient objects cannot experience violence, other than atomically through collision. If I threw a rock at you and it hit you, causing you pain, its not my fault because I affected the rock. The rock affected you, not me.
Just kidding.
Violence has everything to do with thresholds and nothing to do with language or any other existential object. It is a condition of the mysterious cogito and its direct relationship to the body through the nervous system.
I’m going to agree that massively violent behaviour isn’t the core nature of man, but to get excited by the violent minority seems to be.
I say this because the average person is not engaging in violence on a daily basis and may not do anything of the sort in the course of their life.
However, the few that gain some unique form of respect (which I cannot define) manage to inspire others to back them and actually do violence in their name. Political leaders can get others to fight in battles that they do not engage in!
Back in the midcentury it was literary to express the dark side of human nature as real and inherited, a throwback to the idea that we are Adam’s seed and share in his culpability and punishment. “Lord of the Flies” is an example of this way of thinking.
In the 1970’s a friend urged me to read Aubrey’s (Sp.?) “African Genesis”, a book that found us to be descendents of killer apes and thereby agressive, territorial, etc. I couldn’t read more than fifty pages of the book without protest. Luckily, I discovered Leakey’s “Origins” in which I found good refutations of Aubrey’s assumptions by Leakey and Ashley Montagu. Read “Origins” and see for yourself.
Combat stuborness with equal and opposite stuborness leaving intelect as the only way out.
Interact with the better side of people.
There is nothing in this world where you couldn’t escape persicution.
No one can force control. It takes personal reasoning to deal with problems. Forced control is ignorring the problem.
Violence is an overcompensation for your lackings.
Phil,
But is violence an inherited trait among humans? And if it is, does inheritance not in some ways justify it? Do you agree with Aubrey or Montagu?
Babies. A newborn babie shows that we are crazy with violence. They scream and flail about like nobodies business. This shows that without any proding at all, humans know how to throw a fit. I believe this characteristic is at least part of what later turns into violence.
The “sense of fairness”. I believe a sense of fairness is what can drive people to violence. That if a person feels that something is unfair, they will take physical action to right the situation. Sometimes folks would argue that it was the right thing to do, sometimes not. Even non-human primates have it:
And then there’s mental illness which can cause folks to rationalize cruelty. I’d say that’s somewhat natural also; kind of like when a cat plays with a mouse before killing it.
Actually (OK, I guess this my fourth point), I just remembered the Bonobo monkey:
The problem, with this, is just how much our genes contribute to the social environment. While I am not arguing genetic determinism, there is some question of overlap between the domain in which human beings conduct their lives and how that domain is formed by our genetic predispositions.
GTC,
Genes prescribe possibility. Minds sometimes defend isolationism and solipsism. From an evolutionary perspective, minds, as our latest sensors of reality, will attune to what exists or die fighting for comforting abstractions. There is no good or evil in genetic continuums. There are only throwings of the dice resulting in survival or death.
What I was simply saying is that the quoted passage did not account for the influence genes play upon the social environment. The most obvious example is gender.
From this one example one could postulate examples of genetic difference helping to form the very social environment in which the article itself argues serves as the domain in which interaction occurs.
Not sure what good and evil have to do with that, but okay.
frustraition turned into anger because they don’t know how to resolve the problems peacefully. It’s a lack of focus and meditation on a reasonable solution.
Anyone who hurts others is either the oppressed, or the ones who need to oppress to gain their selfcentered desires.
I think they have tried to contribute an overactive adrenaline gland toward agressive behavior.
Yet, if conditioning is involved???
I don’t think violence is born into us. I think it’s a side effect to indifference. I think it’s hate. I think it irrational and used because it’s easy in a tight situation. Then people train themselves to react to frustraition with violence, and perpetuate the problem.
The mindset of an abusive alcaholic… They come home and want to sit and relax. They drink a beer, but the kid in the background is making a racket. He gets irritated and lashes out. The release of adrenaline and silence reinforces the mindset that anger gets through to people. Yet life is never getting better, so they create a cycle of violence that never saticfies the rage building up in the subconcious.
…
The person who is indifferent toward the people he oppresses has no love to build understanding to the people he oppresses. Thus, perpetuating their need to oppress the people who are getting more and more angery for the things he takes without permission.
Any animal besides a human engages in an activity of defense or offense related to geographic territories, genetic resources, sustenance resources, etc., is said to be engaging in a “natural activity”.
The human animal engages in the same activity, and suddenly there is a stigmatised label attached of “violence”.
Human is animal. It is natural to act in such a manner, and our intellect means little in the face of natural consequence of instinctual behavior. At least thus far in known human animal history.
An irrational bout of “mother fucking”, fallowed by a bit of baby-blasting, and gut flinging, is perfectly natural and acceptable. (In the eyes of a crazy son of a bitch…)
“Mental illness”, despite the abuse of the term, is a format of cultural “compound-interest”, and as far as I can tell, nearly all men are more then a little bit insane.
Once any sort of evil or deformity becomes common enough, it will be defended and supported, simply due to…
I’d say the potential for violence is certainly part of our nature, but then so is the potential for love, mercy, and peace. Which of these potentialities come to fruition is up to us.
Violence is either defensive, protective or self gratifying. All humans are capable of these. Is the self gratifying violence a learned or innate part of a person? What I call Self gratifying violence are criminal, conquering/domination acts.
Then you have the person who like myself has a very nasty violent temper when provoked. I learned young how to control it. Some never do. This temper is a part of me I was born with it. If I lose my temper then I become very violent, I never remember afterwards what I did.
I have programmed myself to walk away from potential problems. By repeating a simple phrase:Walk, don’t talk.
How would you class a person who is a berserker, When the anger comes on I see the world in a redish hue, adrennaline starts pumping and all I feel is the need to kill or destroy. The last time I lost my temper I was trying to walk away from everyone and it took 5 grown men to hold me down, they believed they were trying to protect me. From what I understand I picked one or two up like they were nothing and set or threw them aside depending on who is telling the story.
They 180lb give or take, me 110lbs. I can’t pick up that much weight, let alone throw it or carry it but, I did according to my friends.
So if you all are going to talk about the violent nature of man you should realize that there are different types of violent natures. Some natural some maybe learned.
I believe that violence is a side affect of the real inherent nature of man. We are not inherently violent but we are inherently selfish from birth. Without control of this selfishness we will develop violent tendencies in the fight to serve our desires. The more selfish you are the less control you have, and the less control the more violent one tends to be IMO.
