Preventing Violence by James Gilligan

Author:James Gilligan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames & Hudson

CHAPTER 5

HOW TO CREATE LESS VIOLENT SOCIETIES

The first step toward learning how to prevent any health problem is to discover what causes it, so that we know what causes need to be removed or neutralized. That is why I discussed the causes of violence at such length in the previous chapters. Once we know the causes, we can apply that knowledge to the issue of prevention in a very direct way: we can stop causing it. We know how to cause violence: by shaming people. Therefore we know how to prevent it: stop shaming them. That does not mean that we either can or should eliminate shame from the world, for the capacity to experience feelings of shame is as necessary as the capacity to experience physical pain. Just as physical pain signals to us that there is a threat to our physical health, so shame warns us that there is something lacking in our repertoire of social or cognitive skills and knowledge, some failure of development and maturation that needs further work. But unless we provide people with access to the means by which they can develop and mature further, such as education and employment, we leave them with no means other than violence, of protecting themselves from potentially overwhelming and intolerable feelings of shame.

We know how people shame other people, namely, by treating them as inferior, on an individual scale, or by assigning them to an inferior social and economic status on a collective scale. Not everyone who is shamed in these ways will become violent, because most people have enough independent sources of self-esteem and self-respect to withstand even fairly intense disrespect from others. But if the goal is to start a fight, that is the one method that is most guaranteed to work with whoever is vulnerable to becoming violent. Thus, the first steps toward preventing violence consist of not shaming people (as by disrespecting them), and not depriving them of access to the tools they need in order to attain and maintain their self-respect even when they are disrespected by others.

The most important implication this has for the issue of preventing violence is that violence does not occur spontaneously, it occurs only when we cause it; so that the task of preventing violence does not so much require us to do something special, as it requires us to stop doing the things we have been doing that cause violence; in other words, to discontinue the individual and social practices and behaviors that have been shown to cause violence. Once we stop causing violence, it will disappear by itself.

That simple statement is not as optimistic as it may sound, however, because it is not at all clear how many of those things people will be willing to stop doing even if they can be convinced that they cause violence. For preventing violence is not the only goal that many people value, and there are many other goals that some value more. As Elliott Currie wrote:

We have

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.