Across all cases, perpetrators are using violence to create, conduct, sustain, enhance, transform, honour, protect, redress, repair, end, and mourn valued relationships.
Individuals and cultures certainly vary in the ways they do this and the contexts in which they think violence is an acceptable means of making things right, but the goal is the same. The purpose of violence is to sustain a moral order.
I’ve linked to this essay before. More recently, Charles Chu reminded me of it.
I speculate that personality and culture interact when it comes to violence. Culture signals when violence will be approved. Some violent practices have been greatly reduced over the last few hundred years, because they now meet with widespread disapproval.
But I believe that individuals differ in their attraction to violence. If you are inclined to violence, you are likely to seek out situations in which violence meets with widespread approval; or you may come up with ways to justify violence even when most people in your society would not condone it.
I suspect that there is a vicious cycle. A movement or cause that justifies violence will attract people who are inclined to violence. They will engage in violent acts, which the leaders of the movement or cause will feel a need to justify. The more that they rationalize violence, the more their movement will attract violent supporters. And so on,
I suspect that there is a vicious cycle. A movement or cause that justifies violence will attract people who are inclined to violence. They will engage in violent acts, which the leaders of the movement or cause will feel a need to justify. The more that they rationalize violence, the more their movement will attract violent supporters. And so on,
I believe this does happen. But such organizations don’t inevitably grow — they also wither and die, and not only when they are defeated by a stronger power. Consider what happened in the late 60s in the US and elsewhere. People were attracted to revolutionary groups and they engaged in violent acts (bombings, shootings, kidnappings). And yet, by the mid-70s, it was over — not because government forces stamped it out, but apparently because the groups failed to attract new adherents or keep the ones they had.
I almost choked on my sandwich. Tage Rai didn’t include anger in the causes of violence.
You write “A movement or cause that justifies violence will attract people who are inclined to violence.”
I would include any kind of group of people (police, sports etc.), not just what we think of as morally motivated groups.
Thanks for an interesting article.
Some interesting thoughts on violence from the perspective of Catholic natural law:
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2018/10/violence-in-word-and-action.html#more
Demonization.
He’s talking around the word, without mentioning it, yet in his ideas about social morality, it is hugely implicit. Those receiving violence in some way have been demonized, and thus deserving of, violence, by those giving the violence.
Demonization of Jews, of Blacks, and now, increasingly, of Republicans (not just Trump supporters).
Misguided? Silly? Evil (demonic)? People who first demonize others, then use the fact that they are “fighting demons” to justify violence.
We need a culture that more strongly identifies, shames, and makes fun of those people who demonize others – knowing such folk should not be subject to alternative demonization, yet remain wrong.