If you have ever felt that previous times were pretty good, maybe great, you might long for them with a sigh and mention the good ole days. Probably many of us have no such experience unless we want to include the least bad days. But you’d be short-sighted to feel deserving of pity. No matter how bad you have it, probably someone else has it worse.
To prevent personal trauma, one can avoid the news or escape into video games or drugs or drink. Others feel better by trying to analyze the situation, place blame, and find countermeasures. These folks are trying to be responsible human beings.
We call it placing blame or, if you prefer, identifying root causes. Violence, however, not only eludes such analysis but also inserts the seeds of violence into the analysis itself. As always, a definition provides a vital start to the discussion.
What is violence? Most succinctly, violence is harm to one or more humans caused by one or more other humans. The harm may be immediate and physical, like murder, or it may be ongoing and sustained, like oppression. Slavery is violence. Intimidation is violence. Fraud is violence. Indifference to any harmful effect of personal privilege or societal status on other humans is violence.
Given this expansive definition, must we conclude that humans are inherently violent? Self-restraint may be required to refrain from it. Violence may be the lazy response to life’s stresses. As far back as ancient Greece, societies recognized the drawbacks of violence. They experimented with democracy as a way to respond as a group to unhelpful actions by individuals. Previously, people responded to a harmful act with reprisal. Action followed by reaction is the human way. I have a right to hit back if I have received a blow. What can my enemy expect? Consequently, he will hit me again, but harder, if he thinks he didn’t deserve my reprisal.
All violence invites more violence. Humans seeking justice consider payback an obvious suitable response. But if the Greeks saw something out of whack with this idea as far back as the beginning of civilization, shouldn’t we at least pause for reflection?
Violence is a flywheel. You might think this metaphor is less applicable because heavy flywheels take work to get going, whereas human expressions of violence are easy and natural. But the flywheel of violence has never been still. The cycle has always been spinning. Before you were born, your parents heard the whir of this wheel. The sound hummed before America was founded, before the Middle Ages, before Jesus, and before the Roman Empire. The flywheel has always spun, and every act of violence gives it an additional little kick.
If each kick of the wheel left a little black mark, then you might think we could identify a cause for some recent violent act. But the wheel spins so fast that you cannot make out such a mark. Even a scientific application, such as a strobe light, would fail to reveal anything. The wheel has been kicked so many times that accumulated innumerable marks blend into solid black. The strobe light can seem to slow it down to any desired degree to enable scrutiny, but the solid black color still prevents you from separating one violent act from another.
Finding the root cause of a current violent clash is impossible. If you try to say that a particular kick of the wheel five years ago must have been the cause of today’s violence, you will be ignoring previous kicks that led to that one. If our need for justice is so irresistible that we find some recent act to be “close enough” for blame, then we get sucked right into the vicious cycle. Having identified the culprits, we kick the wheel again. Ahh, doesn’t that feel better? We have struck a blow for justice. We have helped bring the precarious scale of justice back into balance. Can we help it if the darn thing won’t stay there?
If placing blame doesn’t help and our superior intelligence cannot ferret out a stand-alone root cause, are we left helpless? No one sees refraining from kicking the wheel as an action, but the opposite. Non-violence feels like passive inaction; it is doing nothing. And humans feel the urge to do something! Maybe graffiti will make us feel better. Perhaps breaking into a store downtown will make a statement.
On the contrary, not kicking the flywheel is an action that begins slowing it down. Still, no one has ever seen the vicious cycle of violence significantly slowed. Envisioning the flywheel even slightly decelerated might seem unrealistic, much less to imagine a heavy flywheel completely stopped.
What actions might work as a brake on the vicious cycle of violence? Not taking sides might be required. To take a side, you must have placed blame. Yet, not taking sides does not mean either side is innocent. Treating both sides as entitled to justice is a start. The vicious cycle of violence will have long previously harmed everyone. Compassion will grant that, however tempting a violent response is for those feeling aggrieved, a response that rewards one side and punishes another merely kicks the flywheel of violence again. The utter defeat of one side remains in memory, passed down through generations. Reprisal lies in wait for its opportunity to strike again.
Yet, the onus is on humans with greater power to be vigilant against violence done toward the powerless in society. Another unrealistic expectation?
Working against the proliferation of violence requires recognition of its many forms, especially the forms that are not blatant or physical. The United States Constitution records that human rights belong to all people, regardless of race, religion, gender, or national origin. It also states that all citizens are entitled to equal protection under the law. Anyone who wishes to claim these rights must grant the same rights to others.
In the United States, editing the Constitution is no small matter. Making a change or amendment requires much more than a mere simple majority. Future historians may compare the wisdom of the US citizenry concerning democratic rights to that of the ancient Greek society. Yet, after their early insight, over two millennia passed before a world power would enshrine human rights in a constitution.
When physical violence is rampant, such as in war, any calls for peace lack force if they seek to perpetuate the preexisting lack of justice. Lasting peace requires both a quelling of physical violence and the redressing of other insidious forms from earlier in the vicious cycle. Do not merely seek to take away weapons. Seek to remove all oppression of human beings and to provide the American vision of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.