By Dr. Robert P. Abele
Global Research, January 17, 2014
Theme: Culture, Society &
History
Perhaps the greatest
unacknowledged brutality wrought by violence on a personal and cultural scale,
and by war on an international scale, is not what one person, group, or nation
does to others; it is what one (individual or group) does to oneself (itself).
Although it is largely ignored by U.S. media, everyone is implicitly, if not
directly aware of the incredible physical violence war itself does.
But the hidden aspect of war is
the psychological fact that, as one inflicts physical violence on another, one
is simultaneously inflicting great psychological violence on oneself. Then one
(individual or group) becomes more brutish with each repeated act of unfettered
violence. When more and more people in a society develop this psychology of
brutality, it becomes a fait accomplifor political leaders to appeal to it in
using domestic violence and international war to further their own
self-interested ends. Psychologists call this process “desensitization.”
Let us examine, then, the
consequences violence and war have on us as individuals, particularly on our
ethics, our consciousness of others, when we see others as just an object to
absorb our violence, as thereby being less human than ourselves. It is
especially important to examine this because of to two contemporary
social-political factors. First, the federal government, under the auspices of
President Obama, is engaged in the ongoing activities of heightening violence
overseas.
Drone strikes on unsuspecting
people, mainly innocents, are continuing. In addition, the arbitrary arrest and
torture processes begun by the Bush administration, continue unabated during
the Obama tenure (and Obama has even upped the ante on state violence by
claiming the right to assassinate as well) [See the Open Society report, “Globalizing
Torture,” 2013].
This type of government violence
is not limited to weaponry. The U.S. sanctions on Iran, to name but one example
of U.S. government violence, is deliberately crippling the Iranian economy,
which now has an inflation level of over 40 percent, with oil exports reduced
by another 50 percent. This deliberate attempt to cripple another country’s
government, and more importantly, its people, for the sake of imposing one’s
will (e.g. U.S. corporate control of Iran’s oil) is a form of violence without
weaponry.
Second, the concerted effort by
corporate and political/governmental elites (two groups without a distinction
today in the U.S.) to reduce the standard of living of American citizens to
nearly pauper status continues. The poignant fact here is this: as has been
studied and reported by social psychologists since the 1960’s (e.g. most
recently, social psychologist M.H. Bond’s work on culture and aggression),
there is a direct correlation between one’s economic status and their tendency
to resort to violence. This means that in cultures that demonstrate rising
economic inequality, such as the U.S., there is usually a rise in interpersonal
violence.
Add to these two factors the
well-known and strong social-psychological link between a culture that
glorifies war and its military and the disposition of individuals toward
violence in their personal lives, and we are now ready to analyze the
consequences of our violence on ourselves. (For just one example documenting
this, see the studies by social psychologist M.H. Bond, especially his “Culture
and Aggression: From Context to Coercion,” Personality and Social Psychology
Review, vol. 8, 2004.)
One of the consequences that is
nearly self-evident from all of the above is that, as we become ethically
insensitive to what ongoing violence and war do to us, we end up allowing
brutes to control our social and political institutions. Such is the case right
now in the U.S. government and mainstream media. The war-after-war syndrome we
are currently experiencing, and the ongoing drumbeat for war we see from both
of these social institutions, is a function of the psychology of violence that
is inculcated in a population by its leaders—whether that population is
inherently for or against war—to reduce their natural ethical repulsion to
violence and war.
This ethical desensitizing is
necessary for any individual to inflict violence on another to begin with. So
on the social level, the ethical desensitizing process begins with a psychology
of brutality that dehumanizes human beings or the groups with which they are
associated, and is fostered and girded by institutional interests in money
acquisition and political dominance.
There is a second consequence of
the fact that the more violent we become as persons and as a culture, the less
human we become: we cease to be free in the distinctively human sense. The more
we give credence to our violent impulses and emotions, the less we actually
make rational choices for what we have thought-through to be the morally right
course of action. Morally right action requires the exercise of thinking, since
it requires the use of norms and principles.
There are two actions contrary to
this lack of morality that a violent culture engages. First, we surrender to
our emotions in our actions and in our beliefs. This becomes raw
impulse-satisfaction, and in this sense is not real personal freedom, since we
then become slaves to our impulses. Rather, real human freedom consists of
being able to engage in understood behavioral norms, which requires examining
and controlling our impulses (For more on this, see Immanuel Kant, Groundwork
of the Metaphysics of Morals, especially Part I).
The second way that using
violence as a solution to problems limits our freedom is a social one: our
thought process becomes a simple “means-to-chosen-ends” approach of
instrumental rationality. This uses human thought only to plan on ways to
achieve a pre-ordained goal, without considering seriously the ethical
character of the goal or the contemplated means to achieve it. On a political
level, when the mask of Obama’s version of the war on “terrorists” is removed,
all that remains is a tendency to use any violent means necessary to procure
total dominance over other peoples. We need to understand that such actions are
inherently and exorbitantly immoral, just like they would be if we engaged in
such actions on a personal level.
Martin Luther King perhaps put it
best when he said of this type of thinking: “’The end justifies the means’
[thinking] is the way of (totalitarianism)” (In “Love, Law, and Civil
Disobedience” [1961], King actually uses the term “communism,” but immediately
defines it in a way that we can justifiably use “totalitarianism” in its
place.)
Television adds to the psychology
of brutality by magnifying violence as sport. By this I don’t mean just
organized sports such as American football, but the wider understanding that
sees the use of physical force against another as a standard and acceptable
modus operandi between persons. Violence is a particularly visual form of
engagement, and the drama that is woven into and out of that violence serves to
keep us visually and emotionally engaged, while being intellectually absent
from what we are viewing. To put it succinctly, as the 1993 American
Psychological Association youth violence commission reported: “The irrefutable
conclusion is that viewing violence increases violence.”
In fact, television must appeal
to such drama because it is such an intellectually passive media. This is
because it is strictly image-based and not cognitively based, and images have
emotive impact (i.e. affect) prior to cognitive abilities used to ferret out
our impressions. As such, television itself only reaches—and can only reach—the
lower-levels of human cognition (I euphemistically refer to this level of
cognition as “brain stem thinking,” in order to highlight its lack of appeal to
the full human mind).
I won’t even get into violent
video games here, but there is abundant empirical evidence in psychology that
shows that there are at least five consistent effects of regular use of violent
video games: increased physical arousal (i.e. pulse and blood pressure), increased
aggressive thinking, feelings, and behaviors, and increases in antisocial
behaviors (for just one example, see the multitudinous studies by the social
psychologist C.A. Anderson from the 1980’s to today. Many, but definitely not
the majority of them are published in the Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology).
As a side but importantly related
note, I take it that this is the most critical message of the contemporary
environmental movement, which seeks an end to practices leading to climate change:
as we inflict violence on the planet to the point of its mortality, we inflict
violence on ourselves, to the point of our mortality. A dead planet will result
in dead people, and a people and/or its leaders who are psychologically and/or
ethically desensitized to the consequences of this Terran violence have no
chance of long-term survival.
There are a few clear solutions
to this problem, but they are difficult to implement without great personal
effort. They include rewarding cooperative behavior, especially in conjunction
with threatened punishment for aggressive behavior; substantially reducing
reliance on physical punishment; and learning and using nonaggressive
conflict-resolution strategies. On the most pronounced level, the solution is a
clear preference for nonviolence, of the kind that Gandhi and Martin Luther
King advocated and lived. This is perhaps the most difficult solution, since,
as King said: “Nonviolence avoids not only external violence but also internal
violence of spirit.” For Gandhi, this requires the attitude and practice of
“ahimsa,” which means complete non-injury to living things.
Further solutions exist on a
political level. Because we now know that aggressive stimuli trigger aggressive
behavior (again, see C.A. Anderson), we should reduce both the availability of
handguns and most importantly, demanding of our politicians—at the cost of
their being elected out of office—the stop to the wars and brutality that we
have witnessed most sharply with the Bush and Obama administrations. Engaging
in war and glorifying the military in media only serves to increase the
propensity for violence of the citizens in their personal lives. We can notify
television networks and programs that we will not watch programs and movies
that extol military aggression and militarism in general.
If this reflection regarding the
ethical desensitization of ongoing violence and its reinforcement by
television, the dominant media of choice, is accurate, then there are obvious
questions that confront us. What if the greatest violence we are inflicting,
when and while inflicting violence on others, is the violence we do to
ourselves as persons? Perhaps the most critical question is this: If we
recognized this self-inflicted violence, would we demand an end to individual
and cultural violence and an end to war? If so, then now is time for the sane
and rational anti-violence and anti-war voices to point this out more
emphatically. But if we would not demand an end to violence, then we embody
psychopathy and even masochism to accompany our sadism in inflicting pain upon
others, and then, as a species, we are in real trouble. Put differently, to
what degree can a nation, culture, or race of people go with such an ethical
ignorance of the results of our violence on ourselves, before the culture
implodes?
To put the question being asked
in this essay into its most direct form: how much time does humanity have left
if all that is left to humanity is a species of being that has become ethically
and psychologically self-anaesthetized not just to the external, but to the
internal/personal results of the violence they inflict on others and on the
planet? The clock seems to be ticking more loudly as each minute passes.
Dr. Robert P. Abele holds a Ph.D.
in Philosophy from Marquette University He is the author of three books: A
User’s Guide to the USA PATRIOT Act (2005); The Anatomy of a Deception: A
Logical and Ethical Analysis of the Decision to Invade Iraq (2009); Democracy
Gone: A Chronicle of the Last Chapters of the Great American Democratic
Experiment (2009). He contributed eleven chapters to the Encyclopedia of Global
Justice, from The Hague: Springer Press (October, 2011). Dr. Abele is a
professor of philosophy at Diablo Valley College, located in Pleasant Hill,
California in the San Francisco Bay area. His
web site is http://www.spotlightonfreedom.com/
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