SOCIETY, INDIVIDUALS AND VALUES

We all recognize violence when it is explicit and graphic.

The natural response in these cases is to question the self control and social conscious of the individuals involved. We are less able to recognize the sources of violence when they are social. As with greed, violence I am no less inclined to them than others, but that is no reason to question their social sanctions and wonder how impulses or forces can be channeled to positive outcomes.

ABC News reports an example of the graphic social violence that took place at Sydney Airport:

Police say four men in custody over the bashing death of a man at Sydney airport yesterday are likely to be charged with affray.

Botany Bay Police say it appears a group of men got off a plane at the domestic terminal where they were confronted by a another group of men, believed to be bikies.

Police say a fight broke out and some of the men picked up metal bollards from the airport check-in area and used them to bash the victim – a 29-year-old from Lakemba in Sydney’s south-west.

Detective Inspector Peter Williams says the victim died a short time later in hospital.

“At this point in time we are investigating a murder. It would appear that up to 15 men [were] involved in a melee that ultimately resulted in a man being killed,” he said.

The men in custody are aged 25 from Auburn and 21 from Pemulwuy, in Sydney’s west, and 22 from Casula and 22 from Ingleburn, in Sydney’s south-west.

Investigations are continuing. Detective Inspector Williams says police are viewing CCTV footage and talking to witnesses to piece together what happened.

He has described it as a disgraceful and cowardly act.

There is a tendency to think that certain persons behave in that way, without recognizing our own violent impulses, and that “better” people practice violence in other ways. In the case above the inference is that both sides sanctioned violence as part of their group dynamics to the point where they would ignore not just wider social norms, but close circuit television monitors and witness testimony. This suggests not just alienation but a failure to appreciate any social responsibility or connection to the society around them.

Arrogance may be seen as violence, but so might greed. There is too much glass around here to throw stones. Tom Dispatch, for example, describes the “A Second 9/11 in Slow Motion”. The financial genius’ of New York and London are continuing to take their bonuses despite the fact their institutions are now on social welfare. They are also apparently disconnected from the wider humanity. Perhaps the ideology of Ayn Rand buttresses their world view.

The Israelis, too, are a special people. They seem able to inflict monstrous cruelty on others without regard for them as human beings. So as not to be partial, the same might be said for what the Americans have done in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now the borderlands and beyond of Pakistan. Still, what is interesting is that the Israeli Army has an explcit religious sanctioned ideology for cruelty. Ethan Bronner in The New York Times reports on “A Religious War in Israel’s Army”. He notes:

“The officer corps of the elite Golani Brigade is now heavily populated by religious right-wing graduates of the preparatory academies,” noted Moshe Halbertal, a Jewish philosophy professor who co-wrote the military code of ethics and who is himself religiously observant but politically liberal. “The religious right is trying to have an impact on Israeli society through the army.”

For Mr. Halbertal, like for the vast majority of Israelis, the army is an especially sensitive institution because it has always functioned as a social cauldron, throwing together people from all walks of life and scores of ethnic and national backgrounds, and helping form them into a cohesive society with social networks that carry on throughout their lives.

Those who oppose the religious right have been especially concerned about the influence of the military’s chief rabbi, Brig. Gen. Avichai Rontzki, who is himself a West Bank settler and who was very active during the war, spending most of it in the company of the troops in the field.

He took a quotation from a classical Hebrew text and turned it into a slogan during the war: “He who is merciful to the cruel will end up being cruel to the merciful.”

I can barely make sense of this proposed dichotomy, except it seems to assume that Israel’s enemies are cruel and not deserving of human treatment. At the very least, despite it’s ancient source, the words are a sanction for indiscriminate violence.

Then there is the violence, often of a graphic nature that people do to themselves, but implicitly actions that have a social and more over a cultural origin. The Independent On Sunday goes into the details in reporting on “Self Harm: A British Disease”. They write:

The number of people harming themselves deliberately has leapt by a third in the past five years, according to new figures seen by The Independent on Sunday. The biggest rise in self-harm and attempted suicide has been among young women between the ages of 16 and 24 as they struggle to cope with the pressures of modern living in Britain.

The article quotes Rufus May, a Bradford Clinical Psychologist:

“Demonised by the media, subject to scrutiny and evaluation in terms of their looks and appearance, and a school system that is increasingly prescriptive, young people don’t have space to be creative or learn how to express how they feel. Self-harm is a release. It anaesthetises people from the pain of feeling wretched and unworthy. It helps us escape the pain of living in a competitive, self-conscious world where we rarely feel that we are making the grade. It can also be an expression of anger. This is one way to briefly be powerful and take back control. The scars of self-harm are like protest graffiti, and we need to listen to it. The answer is not more therapy. We need to teach young people how to communicate and care for themselves and one another.”

A silver lining in the Global Financial Crisis is that the dominance of cynical commercial values that demean people, and that set them in a perpetual fight with one another to win more consumer products, and to become products themselves, might be called into question. We might stop and think about the damage that is being done and might be done to people, as might those who may be inclined to engage in any expression of violence.

It astounds me how violent the Christian West has been and still disposed to be, given its founder enjoined not only the Golden Rule, but that one should love one enemies. And yet the whole edifice seems oblivious to any sense of cognitive dissonance. Let us not forget the slaughter overseen, for example, by the King of the Belgians in the Congo, an area of the world still beset by violence.

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