Doomed-might

Cite as Cameron-Perry J E (2017) Doomed-might (II)

Doomed-might: Historical and Philosophical Observations on the Concept of Violence Once any quantity of air has been rendered noxious by animals breathing it in as long as they could, I don’t know that any methods have been discovered of rendering it fit for breathing again. Joseph Priestly (1790) Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air

P a r t I: Fragments for a Future

Introduction

Estimates vary, but the total number of combat casualties from WWII is in the vicinity of 60 million people. That is nearly twice the combined military and civilian loss of life from WWI (38 million). By 1948, those who witnessed and survived the conflagration of our planet would have known that the two world wars had claimed, directly or indirectly, nearly 100 million lives. They would also have known in 1948 – and perhaps with a degree of terrible intimacy foreign to the fortunate among us - that human beings had proved themselves capable of: the horrors of the Holocaust; of employing with wonderful efficiency the technologies of modern warcraft and the sublime power of atomic weapons; of succumbing to their own propaganda; and of every abominable excess that is born of prejudice, fear, and hate. The men and women who created the World Health Organization, founded in 1948, were inhabitants of a world which - could it at the time have been seen from space with the all glorious color of our Google Earth - would surely have appeared to them tired, sickly, and fragile; charred, and scarred. Both hemispheres were populated by peoples lately busy with burying their dead, and still occupied with nursing their wounded, mourning, and wondering how modern, civilized human beings could be so brutal, and so stupid. Emerging from the good which somehow persisted and remained, the World Health Organization focused initially on infectious diseases, child health, and hygiene. But the WHO made no statement whatsoever about violence. This is curious, because it strongly suggests that - however the founders experienced War, and whatever they saw when beholding battle-fields and killing-fields, shallow-graves and the maimed – these abundant vistas onto human atrocity were somehow insufficient to say unto them, Here is the handiwork of Violence. The war and its slaughter spoke of barbarism, and of cruelty, and in all tongues the devastation and carnage whispered of its madness and horror. But had they in 1948 perceived the hand of Violence Itself as clearly as many claimed to see the claw-marks of Evil, it is unlikely that the WHO would have delayed by nearly half a century its first declaration on the subject. Krug et al (2002), commenting in The Lancet on the World Report on Violence and Global Health, state that “The attention devoted to violence prevention by public health experts has increased substantially since the 1970s”.1 This is true. Before, during, and after the two world wars, many thought long and hard about the causes of war, and dug deep in search of its roots, some frankly doubtful whether a lasting, perpetual peace was possible. It is also true that the WHO did not in 1948 make violence prevention among its initial priorities. Public health experts did, as Krug et al. point out, turn their attention to violence prevention in the 1970s; yet it was still decades beyond that (1996) before the

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I have intentionally kept footnotes and in situ references to a minimum. Each hyperlink, when it is not offered in lieu of a citation, directs readers to a source intended to help contextualize a statement or remark, or to provide one representative example of the sources I have consulted and do cite in Horror Autotoxicus: The Myth of Violence.

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World Health Organization recognized – do we mean: declared? – that violence is a health problem. And so one wonders: Was Violence not “a global health problem” for the millions killed in the two world wars? Are not battlefield deaths, gas-chamber exterminations, deaths at the hands of torturers violent deaths? Or is it that, in decrying Violence in 1996, the WHO had something altogether different in mind? Did the new minds at the WHO understand the words ‘violence’ and ‘health’ -and contemplate the scope of public medicine - in ways the founders of the WHO did not? These questions are not the grave riddles or ponderous enigmas they may appear to be, for one simple reason: The very idea of “violence” – of Violence Itself – did not exist until the 1960s. Defending and documenting this occupies most of Horror Autotoxicus, and I offer now - with much oversimplification and as few citations as possible - a preview of the ground I will cover. Though there are many trail-heads onto this path, I will in this paper begin with aggression. * Research into human aggression appears to have gotten underway in earnest with the publication of Dollard et al’s 1939 Frustration and Aggression. The book generated discussion and debate; and, though perhaps it threw more heat than light, it may be credited with making “aggression” a subject of research. This research gained momentum in the 1940s, but it was not until after WWII - in the mid-1960s - that we find evidence of two things: social and behavioral scientists thinking about and treating Aggression and Violence as cognate subject-matter, and a growing conception of Violence Itself, which countenanced Violence it as a force or an entity. This, I propose, is a point of monumental significance, and it appears either to have been overlooked or glossed-over. Until such a time as Anglophones could (and did) both think and talk about Violence as if it were a thing, as an agent in its own right, any discussion either of the causes of violence or of how to prevent violence would not have been possible. Until the word ‘violence’ was understood as referring to an agency, probing for its causes or quantifying its effects would have been no more intelligible than posing questions like What causes music? or How can we prevent color?. In Horror Autotoxicus I document - and I now summarize - a process that appears to have involved the following steps or stages. In the first two decades of the 20th century, scholarly and academic literature on labor disputes and strikes pushed the noun ‘violence’ into the foreground, 2 giving it a prominence in print it had not enjoyed before in English and which it would not have during the two world wars, when the major thematic preoccupations were peace and the salvage of civilization itself. Peace was the opposite of war. “Violence” as yet had no opposite – though Rational (using reason and not force) Gentleness (the condition or state when thing are done without vehemence) were once possible contenders. It is true that social scientists and others discussed whether humankind is innately disposed to warmaking, and this is an important part of the march towards a conception of Violence Itself.

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See for example this issue of The World’s Work (November 1911 – April 1912), XXIII (here: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044092798693;view=1up;seq=7). If one searches the term ‘violence’ within these pages, there are thirteen returns (21 use-instances) of the world ‘violence’ from the volume’s 724 pages. Two examples (in the same article) refer to the combustible character (viz., instable) of coal dust in coal mines. One example refers to a perturbation of one’s mood or character, and one appears in reference to an uprising/revolution (“In Portugal they have overturned the government by violence,” p.16). The remaining 17 examples are in the context of a commentary or analysis of labor disputes.

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Between 1900 and the 1940s, however, it is almost exclusively in the context of labor disputes that we find the word ‘violence’ being used in English, used to refer specifically to fights, brawls, and small-scale combat between workers and the hired-security forces of mine and railway owners, the constabulary, and on occasion the military. It is telling that “violent crime” had not, up to that point, nudged criminologists, sociologists, psychologists, or philosophers into treating Violence as a phenomenon or entity in its own right – viz., Violence carved-off and isolated from things done-violently, or actions which are adjectivally “violent.” (Nouns, and not adjectives or adverbs, are the kinds of something which have causes.) Before the mid-1950s, there was only one other place in American printed-matter in which one might find Violence treated of as a quasiindependent phenomenon: concern and disgust with the lynching of black men. Work by Freud and the first generation of psychoanalysts on “repression” seem to have kicked-off academic interest in internal conflict. This of course has an obvious and interesting analogue in the intra-state civil strife we see in labor-ownership battles. But there is another even more interesting parity: internal conflict, and the formulation of the concept of the allergy.3 The story of how the concept of allergy (and the neologism which both did and did not accurately identify it) was distributed throughout the scientific and medical communities, and how it gradually percolated into non-specialist language, is an interesting one. The very idea of the body being at deadly odds with its own defensive mechanisms was a difficult one for many physicians and experimental physiologists with which to come to grips – not in the least because they had only recently begun to better understand phagocytosis. The new mass-homicide technologies of WWI however gave many surgeons opportunities to experiment with skin-transplantation and reconstructive surgery, and thus discover for themselves a physiological basis for a self/other distinction – at the time an increasingly popular Weltanschauung in both literature and psychology. The word ‘allergy’ (a compound of the Greek allos + ergon, “other force”), coined in 1906, was slow to graft onto mainstream medical thinking. It cannot be more than coincidence that 1906 was the same year as the appearance of one of the first scholarly papers in English to give pride of place to the subject of “violence,” and to put the word ‘violence’ in the title: Adams T (1906) “Violence in Labor Disputes;” but I am unaware of any scholarship which explores in detail the possible role played by the distribution of the concept of a discordant or rebellious immune system in the emergence of the habit of using the word ‘violence’ to refer to autochthonous internal-strife. My suspicion of a possible influence is the reason the title of my forthcoming paper is Horror Autotoxicus. We can also observe clearly a rather abrupt transition from discussion of “aggressiveness” (Durbin & Bowlby 1938) to “aggressive behaviours,” to “aggression” as a behavior itself, an instinctive propensity of an organism, or as deviation from norms for eusocial behavior. This is important for three reasons. First, the application of the word ‘aggression’ to animal (including human) behavior was itself a bold step. Use of the word ‘aggression’ had previously remained confined almost exclusively to interstate conflict or to acts of provocative trespass (territorial or otherwise) by one government or regime upon another. To the extent that etymology matters, the aboriginal meaning of the word ‘aggression’ - is indeed not dissimilar from that of ‘trespass:’ to aggress upon was (once upon a time) little more than to trespass upon. The difference between the two was that a trespass could be accidental or unintentional, whereas to aggress implied hostility – not hostility in the sense of anger or any affectivestate, but in the sense of active belligerence. An “aggression” was a violation that might recommend or require redress or defense, which redress would be justifiable in proportion to the degree the aggress was not – see generally Sharp M (1947) “Aggression: A Study of Values and Law,” Ethics 57: (4) ii: 1-39. 3

See generally Silverstein A (1989) A History of Immunology, Boston: Academic Press; Dwyer J (1993) The Body at War, London: J M Dent; Jackson M (2006) Allergy: The History of a Modern Allergy, London: Reaktion Books.

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“Aggression” and the response to it could upend a state of peace and lead to a state of war, for which reason an alleged “act of aggression” would be deemed hostile. But neither the aggression nor the reply to it need be “violent,” or done “with violence.” A century ago, an aggression and an act of aggression were one and the same thing, and would never be confused with an act of violence, or vice-versa. One understood “an act of aggression” in terms of violatio, not violentia or vis – that is, in terms of the wrongdoing, and not the vehemence or the character of it. Second, the historical record seems to suggest that social and behavioral scientists had warmed-up to the concept of Aggression before they began to address (what they had only just begun to call) Violence. By the late 1950s, the word ‘violence’ had become associated with strikes, syndicalism, anarchism, and civil unrest. I suggest that the new concept of Aggression Itself paved the way for the emergence of a conception of Violence Itself.

Third, the notion of Violence Itself was almost immediately annexed to Aggression. This is not surprising: since there was little or no scholarship on Violence Itself, the first people to write about “violence” as a problem in its own right drew from a number of sources. Mainly these were social histories and analyses of war and revolution, and any such sociology, anthropology, primatology, and comparative ethology as was available,4 and seemed to the researcher relevant. What counted as “relevant” was, initially, any reference to war or to fighting, to theories about why peoples go to war, and why people and other animals fight. Subject-matter which pertained to war, revolution, and aggression (in the original sense), and in due course early explorations in child/adolescent psychology and abnormal psychology, became part of the Wissenschaft of nascent “violence studies” even before extant literature on violent crime did – pace, for example, Rodrigo Guerrero (Bulletin of the World Health Organization 2002, 80 (10), 767).

Readers ought to linger a moment on the importance of this. Throughout most of the history of the English language, Anglophones talked neither about “aggression” nor “violence” in the abstract. Propositions beginning with phrases such as “aggression causes” or “violence causes” were not always common in English – and, once upon a time - they may not even have been immediately intelligible. Just as canren 残忍 “cruelty”, qinlv 侵略 “aggression,” and baoli 暴力 “violence” are not conceptual cognates in Chinese, Aggression and Violence were not ordinary-English conceptual cognates until such time as these words were being used by social and behavioral scientists as framing-assumptions or functional-correlates of human behavior. That wasn’t until the late 1950s and 1960s.

The premiere florescence of violence prevention in the 1970s was therefore necessarily subsequent to the emergence of a new understanding of the meaning of the word ‘violence.’ Although we are today used to the phrase “violence prevention” - as goal, task, or desideratum – the very idea of “preventing violence” emerged only after the words ‘violent’ and ‘violently’ had imparted all of their awesome sense (despite their humbler

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See Stam H & Kalmanovich T (1998) “E L Thorndike and the Origins of Animal Psychology: On the Nature of the Animal in Psychology,” American Psychologist 53(10):1135-1144 (October 1998) DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.53.10.1135, available here.

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adjectival and adverbial utility) to the noun ‘violence,’ thus enabling the noun to function as an indexical for a conception of Violence Itself.5 While this transformation was happening in part within ordinary-language outside the Academy and down on the High Street, it appears that it was a series of acts of scholarly apotheosis which legitimated its status. Dr Martin Luther King, Jr (1964) spoke movingly against “violence,” and President Johnson (1967) assembled a task-force to deal with it; but it was scholars of the 1960s and thereafter who confirmed for the Anglophone world how we should understand the word, and who packaged for us distinct (but not really clear) ideas about the that-to-which the word should refer. *

In the USA, violence was declared a public health emergency in 1992 by the then Surgeon General, Everett Koop. The Ministers of Health of the Americas made the prevention of violence a public health priority in 1993, in a resolution of the Directing Council of the Pan American Health Organization , and the World Health Assembly adopted a similar resolution in 1996 [fotonotes omitted]. Source: Guerrero R (2002) Bulletin of the World Health Organization 2002, 80 (10): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2567663/pdf/12471394.pdf.

* This new idea of Violence Itself was both a postwar entity, and a kind of lexical GMO. Its conceptual DNA contained fragments of older and newish academic ideas about irritation, repression, strife, frustration, oppression, and aggression. In time, we were assured that Violence was the sort of thing which – like Aggression - could be studied and analyzed. True: the first few papers and monographs in English written mainly or specifically about Violence drew from historical and sociological analyses of war and revolution, rebellion and terrorism. If by that point Violence Itself had not yet been subject either to philosophical-vetting, or to laboratory experiments and controls, it mattered little: Aggression had been -- or at least it appeared to have been. (We are still living with the consequences of the failure to expose the apriorisms and weaknesses of Bandura et al’s “Bobo Doll” experiments.) If Aggression (no longer “aggressiveness” or “aggressive behavior,” but Aggression Itself) could be learned, perhaps it could be prevented from expressing its causal-efficacy; and if Violence is the expression of Aggression, then maybe Violence too could be prevented. Neither the argument nor the premises of the enthymeme were ever particularly promising. Dr King spoke of Violence as a Method (a bad one), and President Johnson understood Violence primarily as a cognate of Crime (a manageable one). With this sort of conceptual dissonance crackling like lightning in the noosphere, it should have been a sign that perhaps American behavioral and social scientists were performing elegant linguistic pirouettes on the cusp of a formidable misunderstanding. But nobody noticed, or cared. For the press, Violence was a good headline. Back in the Academy, the ascension of Violencespeak did nothing to harm (and may have advanced) the interests or threaten the paradigms of Marxists, Freudians, pacifists, positivists, functionalists, structuralists, phenomenologists, experimentalists, or existentialists. Since none complained about the fact that everyone during these years was becoming languagebewitched - either a little, or a lot - the juggernaut of semantic mission-creep continue to roll on, and gain momentum.

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Regarding the polymorphic use of ‘aggressive’ as an adjective, see this.

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Roll onward it did, and social and behavioral scientists from 1968 onward would begin to discuss Violence as something which could legitimately be contemplated and engaged as a problem in itself, and not merely as an aspect of a criminal act, or of any act which sentiment suggests should be proscribed by law or at least denounced and greeted with censure and disapproval – even if it was an unfortunate (but ideology-approved?) means to a worthy end. “Violence, being instrumental by nature, is rational to the extent that it is effective in reaching the end that must justify it,” wrote Hannah Arendt in 1968. “And indeed, violence, contrary to what its prophets try to tell us, is a much more effective weapon of reformers than of revolutionists.”

It seemed not to occur to anyone - Arendt and Rollo May (1972) included - that the lately apotheosized noun was nothing more than an adjective on stilts; but it isn’t difficult to see why. Arendt’s 1970 On Violence – released five months before the Kent State Massacre - had the “Manson Family” murders (1969) and the Stanford Prison Experiment (1971) as bookends. These, for their part, were bookended by the most graphic of the televised broadcasts from the Vietnam War: the 1968 Tet and the 1972 Spring Offensive. * For researchers who have devoted their careers to studying the causes of violence and/or researching theories of violence, the preceding pages are likely to appear naïve, absurd, or both. Readers inclined to that opinion are encouraged to review the bibliography of the World Report on Violence and Global Health, or indeed the bibliography of any book or monograph which purports to articulate a theory of violence, or to address analytically (interpersonal-, sexual-, social-, etc.) violence. Excepting some fanciful musings on the part of a translated Freud and his enchanted translated Continental descendants (and such things as: the mischievous readings of the mischievous Walter Benjamin) readers will not find much on the subject of “violence” qua “violence” published in English before 1960.

Why this is the case is simple: Prior to the 1960s, the word ‘violence’ did not attach to any notion or conception which made the word ‘violence’ intelligible as an agent, much less materia medica.6 This is why the WHO made no pronouncement on the subject of Violence in 1948, when the stench of death was still fresh, and the bowflies fat. But until cooler-minds have reassessed the foundations of Violence Studies and Violence Prevention work, researchers in this domain are sure to suffer the same fate as one who mistakes the sign for the thing-signified.

J Ellis Cameron-Perry 31 January 2017

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One example of conceptual confusion emerging from best-intentions is Gordon J (1949) “The Epidemiology of Accidents.” Gordon argues: “It is not so generally appreciated that injuries, as distinct from disease, are equally susceptible to this approach [viz., the epidemiological method], that accidents are health problems of populations conform to the same biologic laws as do disease processes and regularly evidence a comparable behavior” (p.504). In the very broadest of terms, or as a heuristic, this is not without merit – provided all Gordon meant was: mathematical models may help us analyze statistically, perhaps predict, and maybe prevent some accidents and injuries resulting from accidents. But an ‘accident’ and an ‘injury’ are not commensurate concepts; and, while a pathogen has a life-cycle, and an infectious disease a typical course, “accidents” do not. Accidents most certainly do not conform to “biologic laws as do disease processes,” even if at least some injuries consequent to accidents do. Accidents are not “health problems of populations,” though injuries from them may be.

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