Does Violence Beget Violence?
There’s been another school shooting, this time at Brown University. And before long, there will be a search for “what caused the violence.” But most of the answers will be insufficient because they don’t take seriously enough one of the most fundamental, but also cliched, statement of modern ethics: violence begets violence.
We hear this said all the time in moments of violent crisis, e.g., after the killing of Charlie Kirk. And yet very few who say this really commit to what that statement implies. Because, if violence is truly contagious, then we’ll never see peace for humanity unless we also see peace for animals, too. This was, in fact, why Leo Tolstoy famously said, “As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will also be battlefields.” But why might we think this is the case?
The first answer is psychological. Perhaps the patterns of thinking and behavior in cruelty to animals inevitably lead to cruelty to other human beings. There is some evidence for this, of course, but it fails to explain why cruelty would become systemic. After all, most people on a battlefield — or involved in a school shooting — will not have worked in a slaughterhouse.
A second answer is political. Perhaps the legal norms of a society, when they allow violence against some parties, inevitably will fail to prevent mass violence from spreading. This gets closer at the truth. Societies high in violent crime, for example, are much more likely to end in war. Yet there’s still something insufficient. After all, why wouldn’t it be possible for there to be laws where violence is only allowed against one category of beings, but not any others? Legal slavery lasted for thousands of years, for example, and did not lead to collapse even in places like the Roman Empire, where perhaps 15% of the entire population was violently enslaved by law.
The best answer, I think, is one that goes even deeper than politics into shared identity and meaning. For lack of a better, term, I’ll call it the spiritual answer. A society that does not have a spiritual commitment to nonviolence—one that is embedded in its shared identity and meaning—will inevitably see that violence spread. Violence of the heart, even more than violence within the law, is hard to contain. Here, finally, we are getting closer at truth. Over the long term, the shared identities of a society define who the people are. And when these shared identities allow for violence, it’s hard to contain them to a narrow class of targets. It is hard to say, “Torture for thee, but not for me.” Once torture is allowed, it spreads because all of us are an “other” or “thee” to someone.
I’ve written y on this subject previously. But I think it’s important for this argument to be shared and debated more regularly. Because, if we are to escape the curse of violence, we have to understand its origin: the (collective) human heart.