Way of the warrior

But now a women’s group has launched a campaign to persuade parents not to give their children toy guns for Christmas. Apparently, they believe that this will help reduce murders and violent crime.

Unfortunately for the time and energy they are putting into this initiative, there is absolutely no evidence that guns per se create killers. But this is a grassroots group, and such organisations rarely let evidence stand in the way of their causes. Obviously, guns make killing easier. But not giving children toy guns when they are small will not dissuade them from getting real guns when they get big, if that is what they want.

The idea that toy guns and action-movies and video games are factors in youth violence is refuted by a simple question: why is it that most young people who are entertained by these items do not become violent criminals? Proponents of the guns-movies-music-videogames explanation also have to account for the fact that Canadians are fed the same media fare as Americans, but Canada has one-fourth the homicide rate of the US. They need to explain why crime rates fell in the 1990s in America, exactly at the time when the video games craze took off. They would need to explain how Switzerland, where every adult male is issued an assault rifle which they keep at home and where they have a saying: "We don’t have an army. We are an army" — how Switzerland still has one of the lowest murder rates in the world.

Confronted with these facts, proponents of the toy thesis shift position. Coupled with poverty and abuse, they then say, the media message sends youth over the thin red line. But this is not a convincing argument since, if it were true, it would mean that banning poor, abused children from playing with toy guns, seeing action movies, listening to rap and playing violent video games should virtually eliminate criminals.

Apart from being impossible in practical terms, such a programme would obviously bear little fruit.

History, after all, tells us that people were violent long before guns, movies and video games were invented.

The archaeologist Lawrence Keeley calculated the percentage of male deaths from warfare in various indigenous tribes in South America and New Guinea and compared them to death rates for the United States and Europe. Keeley found that between 20 to 60 percent of men in tribal societies had been killed in war, while the figure for the US and European nations was less than five percent — including the deaths from the two world wars. (Remember, two killings in a band of fifty persons is equivalent to ten million killing in a big nation like the US.)

But what, you may ask, about all the evidence showing that media makes people more violent?

The psychologist Jonathan Freedman did a survey to discover this supposed plethora of studies, and what he found was that there were only 200 actual studies of media and violence. And, of those 200, more than half found no connection at all! And even those studies that did find correlations could be explained in other ways (violent children seek out violent entertainment; or children are temporarily aroused, but not permanently affected, by violent films and music). "Freedman and several other psychologists who have reviewed the literature have concluded that exposure to media violence has little or no effect on violent behaviour in the world," writes psycholinguist Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate.

So, before we go rushing off to run campaigns to reduce murders, it might be useful to ask what creates a killer in the first place. The key factors are psychological and cultural. Psychologists have a pretty clear profile of the typical murderer: he is impulsive, low in intelligence, hyperactive, and attention-deficient, vindictive, easily angered, resistant to control, deliberately annoying, and likely to blame everything on other people.

Given this list, I was lost in admiration at Patrick Manning’s imitation of a pot at last weekend’s PNM convention, when he said that a major cause of crime was poor adult exemplars. But psychological factors alone are not a sufficient explanation. There must be environmental cues which cause such a personality to adopt violence as a rational method of negotiating the world. And this society provides plenty such cues: contemptuous of intelligence but awed by certification; valuing impulsiveness and hyperactivity, because these are good party qualities; combining sheep-like submissiveness with undisciplined abandon; and identifying everything from slavery to capitalism as causes of our backwardness.

Indeed, the very fact that our instrument of national aspiration nowadays is a football team called the "Soca Warriors" is a telling symptom (but not, let me emphasise, a cause). In his incisively reasoned book, Why Globalisation Works, economist Martin Wolf says, "The essence of the commercial syndrome is voluntary agreement, honesty in dealings, openness to strangers, respect for contracts, innovation, enterprise, efficiency, promotion of comfort and convenience, acceptance of dissent, investment for productive purposes, industry, thrift and optimism.

This is the attitude of the merchant through the ages. Guardians, on the other hand, shun trading, control territory, show obedience, bravery and discipline, follow precedent, respect tradition, are loyal, admire leisure and treasure honour. This is the ethos of the warrior."

Wolf argues that both warrior and merchant are necessary for the survival of prosperous liberal democracies. But this is true only for the large countries. In small nations like our own, economic and social progress depends on us adopting the values of the merchant. But the dominant ethos imparted to young black men, by both their pseudo-intellectual elders and their badman mentors, is that of the warrior. And, whether they play with toy guns or not, it is an ethos that helps unfit them for the new world.

E-mail: kbaldeosingh@hotmail.com

Website: www.caribscape.com/baldeosingh