The value of violence

Violent acts are almost always rational. I do not by this mean that such acts are moral. Whether an act is rational or not depends on the goal you are trying to achieve, and moral logic may not necessarily justify that goal. But moral logic rarely underlies moral conviction, which is why evil men are always convinced of the rightness of their actions.

Take the killing of a baby, which is the most heinous act human beings can conceive. We have had two such incidents recently, one where a man hanged his son and then himself, the other where the man chopped the child in its mother’s arms and then chopped the mother. To say that the men in these cases were mad is to miss the point. In the first case, the man knew that nothing would hurt the mother more than the death of her child. He himself also felt that he had nothing to lose since the woman did not want to be with him. Ergo, by the cold logic that often underlies ungovernable passion, killing the child and himself was the most effective course of action.

This same logic applies to the man who chopped the child and mother, except in this case I suspect there was an additional twist: the man was almost certainly convinced that the child was not his. And, just as there is no more heinous crime than baby-killing, so too there is no greater blow to a man’s status than for his spouse to conceive a child by another man. It is, in fact, status which underlies most kinds of violence, and it is because men more than women are concerned about status that most violent acts are committed by males. Of course, the main reason men are so concerned about status is because of women: status is necessary to win them. This is why most violent acts are committed by men with little or no status, often over trivial incidents like spilling beer on someone or a two dollar debt.

Psycholinguist Steven Pinker, in How the Mind Works, explains, “Among polygynous mammals such as ourselves, reproductive success varies enormously among males, and the fiercest competition can be at the bottom, among males whose prospects teeter between zero and non-zero. Men attract women by their wealth and status, so if a man doesn’t have them and has no way of getting them he is on a one-way road to genetic nothingness…The combination of maleness, youth, penury, hopelessness, and anarchy makes young men indefinitely reckless in defending their reputation.” But make-work programmes like URP and CEPEP do not mitigate violence — indeed, they appear to exacerbate it. The reason for this is that status is always relative: it is not enough to have money, you must have more money than the next guy.

This psychology not only underlies violent crime, but also official corruption, since the people who tief from the public purse are obviously not doing so to put food in the mouths of their starving children. So, because URP and CEPEP provide resources to fight over, the fights become more violent. While this is not the rationale behind the violence in schools, status is involved here too. All kids, boys and girls, try to win status through their particular gifts: looks, charisma, wit, brains, money — and pretty much in that order. Interestingly, the way status is judged in the school environment, in terms of precedence, is almost exactly reversed to the way it is judged in the adult society. But what the outbreaks of school violence show is that many children find that the best means of achieving status is through violence. This is hardly surprising in a materialistic, authoritarian culture: especially since the vast majority of teachers believe that physical punishment is the best method for achieving their goals of maintaining discipline and imparting knowledge. Yet in Japan, quite possibly the most disciplined society in the world and one whose students always rank in the top five in international test scores (but, let it be noted, also a society with a high suicide rate and the lowest frequency of sex acts between married couples), corporal punishment in schools has been outlawed since 1895.

In my view, even extreme acts like baby-killing are made easier by quotidian social attitudes. Trinidadians are very careless about their children: they drive recklessly with kids in the car, they put ten-year-olds to watch over three-year-olds, they go to cinema and calypso tents with babies in their arms. The neuropsychologist James W Prescott has done a cross-cultural analysis of 400 pre-industrial societies and found that societies which punish infants as a matter of discipline, and which place a high value on virginity, tend to be more violent than societies where infants are caressed and which are not especially restrictive about adolescent sexuality. Prescott also noted that the most violent societies had a high degree of religious belief and activity, oppressed women, practised slavery, and killed and tortured enemies. Not surprisingly, this is a pretty accurate description of traditional Islamic, West African, and Hindu cultures, as well as Europe when it was dominated by the Catholic Church in the Dark and Middle Ages. And, contrary to popular belief, it is secular nation-states, not theocracies and tribal societies, which have the lowest rates of violence.

If, therefore, Trinidad and Tobago is not as violent as it could be, it is actually because of those very values that the hypocritical exemplars among us like to oppose: a secular ethos, respect for individual rights, and sexual liberalism. And this is where the active promotion of rationalism could help us stem the tide of violence: because then moral values wouldn’t be taught on the basis of irrelevant holy texts, but on the basis of ethical logic and hard data. This is a task for intellectuals, who must both do the work and set the example. But the challenge is made more difficult when congenital liars posing as intellectuals do violence to the truth, like claiming that evolutionary theory is wrong and that Uganda controlled its AIDS epidemic by an abstinence-only policy.