Decoding Violence

Violence is ubiquitous now. It seems we are living in a violent time. Every day, when we go through newspaper or turn on the TV news channels, we see mostly the news of violence and of death. Every day, many innocent people are being killed for no good cause. Kidnapping, extortion, intimidation and rape have become common things. But, I am haunted by a childish seeming question: why is there violence?

 The same childish question had haunted many intellectuals for centuries. They tried to go to the root cause of violence. Thomas Hobbes and Sigmund Freud claimed that violence is inherent in human nature. Freud argued, humans have two drives inherently in them--death and love. The same death drive leads to violence. However, this view is countered by the French Enlightenment thinkers who assert that man is good by nature. It is the social circumstance that corrupts him and incites to do violence. Violence is learned.

 Man (I am using 'man' in sex neutral sense) by nature is not a violent animal. It is a social and cultural climate that incites him to do violence. And if it is social product, it can be controlled. To do so, we need to find out the important factors that breed a temper of violence. Powerlessness of the individual which creates boredom, passivity and its offshoot unaliveness, lack of social support, marginalization, and mechanization of life are some of the conditions that create a state of mind which is conducive to violence for those who lack material comforts, whose hopes and expectations have little chance of being fulfilled, and whom the progress is far-fetched.

 People opine that violence can be stopped through the stricter punishment and the enforcement of law and order. But this paradoxically increases violence rather than reduce because it will create new resentments, hostilities and frustrations in those who are subject to punishment. In the name of stopping violence, the cry for law and order can in itself be an expression of violence. Human society started codifying law since antiquity when it entered the civilized stage. But can anyone claim that violence has decreased at all? As argued by the western leftist theorists like Foucault, Benjamin and Agamben, in the name of controlling violence, state itself started doing violence against its citizen. Walter Benjamin, for instance, says: “law itself depends upon violence both in its origin and its continued existence.”

 So, the only means I see for changing the general tendency toward violence and destructiveness lies in the humanization of the society that is characterized by individualism, selfishness and mechanization. By this I mean our society must serve human ends. Humanity should take precedence to every other phenomenon like religion, economy, culture, ethnicity, and so on. In other words, what we need is not increasing control of aggression and violence but reduction of destructiveness and violence by making individual and social life more meaningful and humane.