Violence

“Often have I heard you speak of one who commits a wrong
as though he were not one of you, but a stranger unto you
and an intruder upon your world.
But I say that even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond
the highest which is in each one of you,
so the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower
than the lowest which is in you also.”

Kahlil Gibran, “The Prophet”



I want to write about violence.
About rage –
in men, fighting each other.
Not with tanks or guns, but with their naked fists.

A few days ago, I experienced it closer than I could wish for. Thank God it wasn’t directed against me, but I was no more than a meter away from it. The following thoughts are ‘inspired’ by that experience.

Maybe the most powerful of human conditions, rage knows no laws, no logic, no justice and once unleashed, it will laugh at any form of self-restraint and leave reason far behind.
Hatred boils over into a seemingly uncontrollable, raw force that feeds on the sight of blood on the other man’s face. A force that will not stop because that other man is helpless, wounded or on the ground; in fact, too often it will stop nothing short of killing and cold-blooded death.

Insatiable and contagious, it tires not – only the bodies executing it may tire, or expire.


Through our media, we see or hear of people like that every day – enraged, committing brutal atrocities. At this very moment, tribes in Kenia’s Rift Valley are splitting each other’s skulls in ruthless acts of revenge and hatred with the poor excuse of ‘tribal differences’. Violent rage has taken hold of them and they cannot shake it off.
When we do see or hear of people like that, who seem to have surrendered themselves to this force, we tend to describe them with words such as ‘inhuman’ or even ‘animalistic’. I find this quite insulting to our fellow creatures – have you ever seen an animal fuming with rage or killing for the joy of killing or for the sake of brutality? Maybe it is this, which differentiates us most from the beings further down in the food chain: our ability to take physical force out of its natural context, in which it serves to maintain a livelihood.
So physical force is natural and violence is human?

We might also describe people who commit such acts as ‘possessed’, ‘under a spell’ or ‘out of control’. The beloved thesaurus gives me ‘beside oneself’ as a synonym for ‘enraged’ – these are examples of what seems like a desire to externalise this very compelling force and deny its origin within ourselves. If gentleness and intimacy are the physical manifestation of love – one extreme of human interaction, then surely violent rage is the embodiment of the other: hate.
Especially in an institutionalised moral context, which most of us live in one way or another, it is essential to at least keep up the image of a ‘good person’, not only to others, but also to oneself. And hence it is useful (if not necessary) to have a way of dealing with the ultimate wrong – violence – as something outside ourselves, beyond our control, giving us a chance to lessen the blame and the guilt that comes with it. And although some people might walk around proud of their violent acts and with full conviction that what they did was right (hence no blame or guilt), the majority of us will see such people as ‘criminals’, different to ourselves. This links to the quote at the beginning, arguing that violence is in the very nature of our existence as much as more favourable human conditions are. This is hard to admit for most of us, I believe. An exception to this might be the British author JG Ballard, who has witnessed a lot of violence as a boy, when he was caught up in the in south-east Asian part of World War Two (“Empire of the Sun” is Steven Spielberg’s 1987 Hollywood version of these events, with an incredible first performance of a young Christian Slater). In a recent interview on the BBC, Ballard said the following:

“Violence in many ways is quite seductive, particularly when
you’re in your teens. It’s not the glamour of violence that you see in
Hollywood films, violence very clearly defines itself. Brutality […] is
really a matter of routine. […]
Violence is very sort of settling, there’s no disputing it. It’s seductive
in that it has a logic of its own. One always misses it when it’s gone –
a terrible thing to say, but there’s an element of truth in that. One tries
to recreate episodes of violence, because they do tell a sort of final truth
about human beings and what we are.”
[JG Ballard in BBC Radio Three’s “Arts and Ideas”, 4th February 2008]

Seductive. Strong word. But how else could we explain the huge popularity of violent action films? I will not go into the discussion of TV/film influence on violence, except for one aspect that I am sure most of us have all witnessed at some point, which very well illustrates the seductive nature of violence:
A child, playing alone in the sunshine. When you look closer, you see it is fighting. With invisible swords or guns against invisible enemies. Butchering them brutally, making awful grimaces and ghastly sounds as it stabs its sword into the enemy’s chest, lying at its feet.

Violence is cool.

I think there is an argument that this might be more the case for (straight) men than for women, generally speaking, although this is again another discussion. But I do wonder: why is this? Is it purely genetical/evolutionary?
Maybe someone else has some thoughts on that.


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Why this philosophical abstract about violence?

I witnessed a big fight outside a nightclub in one of Amman’s most central locations about a week ago, where enraged young men were hitting each other in a totally non-sensical dispute that probably broke out over something as meaningful as one person’s remark about another man’s sister and then turned into a matter of honour, allegiance and revenge.
I could see them arguing near the bar with a bit of 'soft' shoving going on. A typical kind of scene. A handful of them took it outside the club, where it got more physical. Then there were shots from a gun – probably blank bullets – and soon about 25 men poured out of the club, joining in the fight. Totally non-involved guys – maybe some of whom were drunk – quickly took sides (based on WHAT decisions?) and started hitting whoever seemed guilty of they-didn’t-even-know-what. It turned nasty, there was blood in the snow sludge that still covered most of Amman, heavy bodies landing on the wet, slippery ground and being kicked with feet by aggressors, even in the face.
At first I just stood wordless with some friends at a safe distance. Within a matter of minutes, the police arrived and this was when I went a lot closer, because much to my surprise at the time: the police didn’t focus all its efforts on just stopping the violence and taking fighting parties apart, but did much of what previously non-involved civilian individuals had done: they asked somebody what hat happened, quickly made a crude estimation of who was to blame (based on an obviously biased opinion) and then joined in to attack a man that was already lying on the ground, bleeding and defenceless, surrounded by a pack of enraged men, hitting and kicking him.
They finally did try to pull people out of the fighting, but all in all the police’s behaviour was more than unacceptable and would in any European country have led to a massive scandal and public outrage. A lot of them were hitting people with fists and sticks and were quite happy to let some relentless men continue approaching and attacking the ones who they were pulling out and who they were supposed to ‘protect’.

And then there was two blond Europeans – a German (me) and a Norwegian working for his country’s embassy – who became sudden partners in what now seems a rather ridiculous undertaking: we were walking around, tapping policemen who were engaged in the fighting on the shoulders and shouting at them in English or Arabic: “Are you ‘the Police’? What are you doing? Is this what you call ‘serving the people’? Look what you’re doing!” or even “Wow. Jordan is such a beautiful country! Really, I feel so safe here, now that I know the police is on my side to help me!!”
I guess we were only causing confusion and when the Norwegian fellow tried to explain to the head of the police that he will report to his embassy that he witnessed police beating up civilians, the officer said: “If you were in this situation, maybe you would do much worse things.”

Of course we can see this sort of thing on TV every day and maybe I should not have been so surprised to see it. But to be there, right next to it happening is totally different. And this was Jordan – a ‘modern’ country with an outwardly western, even American appeal that has been a haven of peace while around it wars are raging. And also a country that is trying so hard to portray itself as a liberal, civilised and advanced country – we’re not talking about Saudi Arabia, Syria or Iran here.
The most extreme situation was standing next to a man who was kicking the bleeding face of someone else who was lying on the ground, helpless. I could literally feel this total and incomprehensible irrationality of rage and its overpowering drive to brutality. And now guess what my inert reaction was, or rather, what I had to restrain myself from doing: to beat him up.

In the end, when it was all over, the crowd had dispersed and the police had driven off, I stood under a nearby tree – still shocked – when a guy and a girl, who had also witnessed the fight, approached me and asked me what had actually happened. We talked for a little while and I expressed severe disappointment at the actions of the Jordanian police. The guy – a Jordanian cartoonist with a broad and kind American accent – said: “A donkey will only understand if you beat him.”