Killing Monsters by Gerard Jones

Author:Gerard Jones [GERARD JONES]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2011-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

8

The Courage to Change

For millennia, symbolic violence held a noble and accepted place in human culture. Rage, cataclysm, and irreconcilable conflict, both external and internal, were once taken for granted as elements of the human condition, and violence stood as a symbol of them in every kind of narrative. The keynote of Classical literature is sounded in the opening phrase of The Iliad: “Menîn aide Thea,” “Of rage sing, Goddess,” an invocation of poetic power to express the divine but destructive passion of Achilles. Every body of sacred lore is woven of conflicts and murders and bloody devourings. Even pacifist traditions are transmitted through metaphors of violence; Jesus brought not peace but a sword, and if we meet the Buddha in the road we are urged to kill him. Until the last few decades, all our civic myths, all our entreaties to collective action, were written in war and martyrdom. Generations of children were soothed to sleep with the witch-torturing, limb-severing, child-devouring horror of fairy tales. Across every social and philosophical stratum, children were expected to carry toy weapons and gleefully reenact the stories of murderous pirates, monsters, and heroes.

Now we tell kids to stop playing war. We’ve turned history class into a series of quaint reenactments of daily life. By the deftest bowd-lerizations we’ve cut the images of slaughter from the background of the Christmas and Passover stories. The narratives we consider good for them are devoid not only of bloody violence but nearly all physical conflict. We leave the telling of violent stories to the commercial entertainment industry–and then spend considerable intellectual and political resources trying to demonstrate that they’re harmful.

What changed?

The rise of science and rationality in the eighteenth century brought the belief that reason and planning had the power to change human behavior. During the nineteenth century, the strains of industrialization put a premium on the reduction of civil conflict and the promulgation of polite values. Then the development of modern weaponry steadily raised the stakes of war, until the threat of nuclear holocaust made thoughts of violence more horrifying than ever before. Those forces have brought us to a profound, unprecedented questioning of the role and rightness of violence in every form. Every society has condemned violence that threatened order. Many have cherished ideals of a lost age or a coming salvation marked by absolute peace. But even those accepted violence as inevitable in this world and celebrated it unquestioningly when it served the group. Some small, isolated groups may have eschewed violence, but no large society has ever attempted a thoroughgoing reconsideration of violence as such–until the modern, industrialized world.

Our renunciation of violence is still far from complete. Every nation continues to use it in law enforcement, and many use it in foreign policy. America, in particular, tolerates forms of violence–capital punishment, individual gun use–that have been rejected by most other nations in the industrialized world. But we are deep in the same process of reconsideration. Even our responses to the terrorism of 2001,

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