Response to the Peace and Justice Education Conference, By Liane Carlson

Posted on August 2nd, 2010 | Filed under InterViews

I have to admit, at first I was confused by the question posed by coordinators of the Peace and Justice Education Conference, “Do we teach violence?”  Limiting my understanding of violence to physical aggression for the moment, the most obvious example/ initial response was, “no, probably not.”  Are tigers taught to hunt, or bucks to fight during mating season?  Some sort of instinct for aggression is almost undoubtedly part of our animal nature.

Yet I’m not sure that’s really the question being asked.  Rather, I think there’s a more specific understanding of violence at stake, with some notion of intentionality behind it.  It’s less whether we teach violence than whether we teach hatred or sadism.  It’s common to claim that animals don’t enjoy watching each other suffer.  We undoubtedly do.  Does that mean we have an instinct for sadism?   Are specific national or gender or racial hatreds exploiting that peculiarly human instinct for cruelty, or do they cause it? Does it even make sense to talk of species-specific instincts?  But if it’s not an instinct, where or how did it ever develop?

I don’t have an answer for this, but the question is a good one.  This much seems clear: if we have to ask this question, we don’t know whether or not we’re doing it.  If we don’t know if we’re doing it, we don’t know how we’re doing it.  And if we don’t know how we’re doing it, then we certainly don’t know how to stop doing it.  The difference between an impulse we can’t master and one we don’t know how to master is negligible.  In practice, it’s only the difference between living as if we might be capable of doing otherwise, and living resigned to our current inability to see the problem with proper clarity.  It’s, in short, a question of orientation toward the future; it’s the question of what we can hope for.