I grew up watching “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” Regardless of how writers (e.g. John Zerzan) might feel about the militaristic or hierarchical aspects of the show, the basic lesson that the ever-reasonable Captain Picard, the wild-eyed Data and the rest of the motley crew imparted upon me was simple: Violence doesn’t solve problems; it escalates them.
Yet perhaps Star Trek is a bit too idealistic in this day and age. Because, undeniably, 21st century Western culture’s greatest vice is violence, violence and more violence. Like children sucking on the proverbial teat, we’re milked on this stuff from birth to the point that it’s just viewed as one more fact of everyday life, or in other words, “normal.”
In this visual nation, there is little respite from the addiction to violence. In his article, “We Are Training Our Kids to Kill,” Lt. Col. Dave Grossman –who spent nearly 25 years learning and studying how to enable people to kill — parallels military combat training with media desensitization.
Children “don’t naturally kill,” Grossman said. “It is a learned skill. And they learn it from abuse and violence in the home, and more pervasively, from violence as entertainment in television, the movies, and interactive video games.”
Grossman explains that a young child is brutalized when he or she is first able to discern what is happening on television, much like a soldier is brutalized upon arriving at boot camp.
“When young children see somebody stabbed, raped, brutalized, degraded and murdered on TV, to them it as though it were actually happening,” he says.
Two other examples outline Grossman’s article. Classical conditioning, which you may be familiar with through Ivan Pavlov’s famous experiments with dogs, operates as children watch vivid pictures of human suffering and death juxtaposed with pleasurable images of soft drinks, candy bars and perfume. The lesson? For a defenseless viewer, violence becomes associated with pleasure.
Operant conditioning is a repetitive procedure. An example of this would be a first-person shooter video game. “Aim, shoot, aim, shoot, aim, shoot,” to the point that pulling the trigger becomes a reflexive response.
As compelling as Grossman’s article is, he makes little connection to the institutions that condone violence in our culture. Media and video games are only symptoms, indicative of a larger problem. This perspective is summed up succinctly in the Michael Franti lyric: “You tellin’ the youth don’t be so violent / then you drop bombs on every single continent.”
In his book “9-11,” Noam Chomsky notes that the United States, by its own definition of the term, is the No. 1 supporter of state-supported terrorism. The public is relatively aware of the fact that we bomb Iraq and Afghanistan, but what about our August 1998 bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan? Or the United States’ support of Turkey crushing its own Kurdish population (we supplied 80 percent of the arms). Note, the United States is also the leader in global arms sales (Source: The New York Times, Sept. 25).
There are numerous other examples I could point out, but for brevity’s sake, I would encourage you to visit the Federation of American Scientists Web site, which maintains a list of United
States military incursions at http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/ops/.
In Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva’s book “Ecofeminism,” Mies draws a connection between violence and science, using Francis Bacon as an archetypal father of modern science, “(who) called for the subordination, suppression, and even torture of nature, to wrest her secrets from her.”
Mies argues that without the exploitation and subjugation of women, nature and foreign peoples and countries, Western civilization simply could not exist. Furthermore, these aforementioned scientific fathers such as Bacon “(have) constantly concealed the impure relationship between knowledge and violence or force by defining science as the sphere of a pure search for truth.” In other words, “progress” and “advancement” have come at the expense of a violence that is justified as truth.
In his article “No Way Out,” Michael C. Ruppert, editor and publisher of the newsletter “From The Wilderness,” discusses the American dependence on oil that causes us to “(engage) in a multitude of psychological and sickening rationales that will, in the end, amount to nothing more than saying, ‘I don’t care how many women and children you kill. Just let me keep my standard of living.’” Here, we have a version of violence caused by the desire to consume. Challenges to this desire are not likely to be met receptively. Americans in positions of dominance, affluence and advantage, tend to want to remain that way.
Violence is not just a vice rooted in the American way of life, however. It telescopes out a global scale. So I’ll close with a question: What can we do in our everyday lives to curb this addiction?