Humanistic Judaism August 1968
The assassination of Robert Kennedy has revived the worry about domestic violence. With the killing of popular leaders like Martin Luther King, black rebellion and student riots, American anxiety about the “sickness” of contemporary society dominates private and public conversation. Old liberals and young conservatives stand frightened before what they consider to be the spectres of social anarchy and individual terrorism. How can the democratic dialogue persist in an environment where guns are politically preferable to the power of reason and the privilege of majority rule? How can personal freedom survive the hate which justifies the murder of opponents?
Gloomy assessments of American culture prevail. Some assert that we have entered a new domestic age of violence. The old value system which sustained a proper respect for law and order has collapsed and has been replaced by a permissive indulgence of individual autonomy. The increase in crime and delinquency, the non-safety of city streets, the callous penchant for looting and property destruction, as well as the hateful contempt for all authority, reveal a degenerate society. Others complain that selfishness has become fashionable. Alienated by the rootlessness and anonymity of urban living, the modern citizen is divorced from the disciplines of group loyalty and public service. Unable to “belong” he withdraws to the lonely world of personal pleasure and irresponsible action. Without any real family or clan attachments, he views the outer world as both hostile and oppressive, deserving of neither respect nor allegiance.
Many denounce the mass media. The newspapers, cinema, and television seem obvious culprits. While themes of violence dominate their stories, they vie with each other to invent new horrors. A public which is regularly fed a grisly diet of movie murders may find street killings a normal condition, A society which is daily stimulated by ingenious TV tortures may have no time for peaceful reflection. The most powerful forces for the molding of public opinion are addicted to the display of guns and are fascinated by every perverse expressibn of immoral assault. It seems as though the old ethical guidelines have vanished. While the virtues of a simple but clear morality are indispensable the mass media ridicule the very principles which enabled our Western world to grow and flourish. Without the support of certain absolute standards, our sophisticated openmindedness yields only sick entertainment and antisocial behavior.
To some, the skepticism of intellectuals has undermined ethical commitment. A reliance on critical analysis has made a deep faith in any person or institution no longer possible. Universities cleverly expose the defects of all belief systems and inhibit strong attachments. Without the disposition to reverence, education is an invitation to violence and destruction, If nothing is holy then all action is permissible To many observers, America has become a “sick” society in which the moral restraints of democratic decision are vanishing into the chaos of lawless self-assertion.
These complaints of conventional analysts are now legion. Although they the pulpit and the press, they are usually less than perceptive. They confuse cause and effect, prefer the lurid to the ordinary; and derive from values more dangerous than the ones they condemn. For example, to describe the Modern American era as an age of violence (in contrast to earlier. ages) is to .be guilty of a certain social blindness.
Unorganized personal assault, like assassination, murder, and mugging, are responsible for only an insignificant number of violent deaths. The major source of instant human destruction is-the now Old, and, quite vulnerable institution of war. It seems particularly ironic and “sick” that most Americans are uncontrollably grieved by the death of Robert Kennedy while displaying a matter-of-fact indifference to the thousands of weekly casualties of the Vietnam war. Thirty thousand dead Americans and half-a million dead Vietnamese were not the victims of insane personal attacks. (Individual and mob action are harmless in comparison to the efficiency of armies.) They are the products of the socially respectable organized violence called military action. The weaponry of modern battles is so destructive that the cobble-stones of Sorbonne students and the tiny gun of Sirhan Sirhan seem playthings by contrast. Our world suffers from a perverse morality. Collective killing is decent and normal; personal killing is a sign of savagery. National aggresion makes death patriotic; personal aggression turns it into a crime. Is a culture with war and obedient soldiers really less violent than one with war resistance and militant anarchists?
As for the “deplorable” breakdown of domestic law and order, this conduct is really non-existent. What is characteristic of our contemporary society is not defiance but overwhelming conformity. We live in an age of revolutionary change. Technology has totally transformed the human landscape and radically altered all styles of living. Urbanization has wrecked the stability of peas economies and swiftly thrust us into the insecurities of mobile employment. Wandering populations have juxtaposed Culture against culture in a single city and have assaulted the frightened citizen with difference and variety. Centrized government, with the aid of computer doubles (every ten years) the laws and regulations we have to contend with, while increasing the efficiency of enforcement. And all these massive changes occur in an overcrowded world where the struggle for status and power becomes competitively ulcerous. What is amazing in such a world is not how much violence there is; but, given the relentless and extreme provocations each of us confronts, how little violence takes place. What is striking about our revolutionary world is the overwhelming display of passive and unquestioning compliance by the great majority of citizens. In a culture with the burden of laws so much more oppressive than before, most people do not choose to resist.
No will the assertion about alienated selfishness survive much scrutiny. Sirhan Sirhan did not kill Robert Kennedy because he fancied himself alone. He shot the fatal bullet because he thought himself a martyr for-his people. His act was, in his mind, an act of patriotism. It was as a loyal and devoted Arab that he performed this murder. After all, most of the killings in this world are executed under the banners of national defense and tribal dedication. Unstinting love for the members of one’s own group and unremitting hostility to those outside are the historic definitions of the honorable man. The irony of human history is that one of the most destructive forces in human relations has been loving cooperation. War is only possible because individuals are willing to forego the pleasures of personal freedom for the sake of group discipline. Armies are built on the virtues of fraternal loyalty and unselfish risk. The heroes of all cultures are those who are willing to die for their country. If all men were universally selfish, war and the weaponry of national violence would not be possible. Perhaps, as Arthur Koestler says, modern man’s genetic defect is chauvinism, an inherited inability to extend cooperative feeling beyond the tribe. And tribal man is less dangerous when he is selfish than when he is patriotic.
With regard to the claim that the mass media promote violence, there is a reversal of cause and effect. It is usually asserted that television and the cinema, with their themes of torture and assault, stimulate antisocial behavior. Although little evidence exists to verify this statement, and even though an alternative view of the mass media is equally plausible, the opinion persists. It is quite possible that the movie and TV violence are not the cause, but the result ot an already angry culture. The more frustrated people feel in an industrially regimented society the angrier they become; the angrier they become the more they need to find appropriate outlets for their pent up resentments. The fantasies of our entertainment world are a socially acceptable catharsis. The increase in fantasy violence merely reflects this need. If the citizen could not act out his anger harmlessly in the theater, he would be expressing it harmfully on the street. The grislier becomes our desire the grisler becomes the make-believe world we need for sanity. Television does not create our anger, it only responds to it.
Appeals to return to the simple absolute standards of the past do no survive our evaluation either. The simple moralities of the past derive from a chauvinistic and tribal prejudice our technological world can no longer endure. They are the very cause of our present trouble. An ethic which makes group survival more important than individual happiness and human survival is inappropriate in a cosmopolitan age. The sexual mores and work habits of an undercrowded world are unsuited to an overpopulated one. The paranoia that arises from the historic view that evil has a sin and “simple” external cause is too dangerous to be encouraged. Much of contemporary violence is due to the effects of forcing big city living in the straitjacket of small town morality. Rebellion is inevitable. Nor will intense commitment to any set of rules solve our problem. Violence is the result of intense commitment. Only people who have a fan attachment to a particular set of ideas are capable of killing or dying them. The dangers of the contemporary world come from neither the right the left. They arise from the humorless conviction that the truth is no man who can laugh at himself is a public danger. If he acknowledges his beliefs are both tentative and revisable, and that his desires are of no purer than those of his opposition, he is ideally suited for rational discussion and democratic change. Self-righteousness and self-pity are traditional companions of unyielding faith; and they inevitably lead to violence. Conviction without doubt is always the enemy of public peace.
As for the dream of transcending the “sick” society and eliminating forms of private violence, the price of that achievement is to make society even sicker. The risk of a free society, with all its potential for diversity and bizarre provocation, is the personal act of uncontrolled and unpoliced rage. Gun laws can reduce but not eliminate the danger. The alternative to such a risk is a semi-fascist state in which private behavior is under constant surveillance. It is to replace the danger of individual assault with the less than subtle violence of state oppression. The free society is imperfect; and open to the constant danger of political murder; but it is the best of all possible choices.
We are often too harsh on our contemporary world. In the idealism of its youth, it is morally far better than what has preceded. Cynicism about war and patriotism are not signs of moral decay; they are omens of a world in which the organized hate of tribal nationalism may be reduced. If national violence would disappear, the inevitable personal violence of a free society would be more than tolerable.