Aaron Sorkin titled an episode of The Newsroom "Tragedy Porn." School shootings are turning into that for America. I'm writing this two days after the Parkland, Florida School Shooting. I don't want to write about the politics of this phenomenon except to say that both sides are wrong and they better start compromising on something to solve this insanity. What I really want to write about is some philosophy of violence ideas, which are jumbled all together in my head, so forgive me if they're incoherent. I also want to write about a bizarre historical fact:
The Treaty of Westphalia. I don't know much about it from the seventeenth century Catholic/Protestant perspective, but I know a bunch about it from the twenty-first century Homeland Security perspective. Every homeland security class I took in graduate school started with a paragraph about the Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the religious wars in Europe back in the 1600s. According to my professors, warfare became the sole purview of nation-states as a result of the Treaty. That held true for over three hundred years, until the age of modern terrorism began. Some of my fellow Homeland Security scholars believed that 9/11 was the end of the Westphalian age, and that Osama bin Laden was the first non-state actor to really conduct full fledged warfare on a nation-state in three hundred years. Whether they are right or I am about the timeline, the fact is that now self-radicalized and lone-wolf affiliates of nefarious non-state networks can and do carry out devastating attacks inside nation-states. The example of 9/11 was inspirational to deranged people of many stripes. Mass casualty attacks are no longer the exclusive province of nation-states.
Seeing lightly armed civilians kill three thousand innocent people in one day is impressive as a military man; it is horrifyingly inspiring to dangerous lunatics. It's an example of what can be done. I think that is one component of this phenomenon. I think another component is the absence of violence in our homes. Yes, you read that correctly. The problem is not that we have too much violence, the problem is that we don't have enough of the right kind of violence. Shocked? If I failed to show a firearm the proper respect it deserved when I was a kid (who grew up around unlocked guns hanging on a rack in the hall), my step dad Ray Johnston would whip my butt. When I was eleven years old, my mom slapped me across the face for calling her a cuss word, so I slapped her back. My dad chased me with a Buick through an alfalfa field trying to run me over for hitting a woman until my mom finally convinced him that all I really needed was a good ass-whipping. That was the last spanking I ever got, because by then I had learned a very valuable lesson.
The lesson was not that violence is inherently wrong. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, that is irrelevant because human beings are an inherently violent species. We did not gain dominion over this planet by being pacifists. The lesson my Korean War Vet step dad was teaching me was that violence is never to be used on the innocent. Violence is not the enemy, violence is a tool that can be used for good or evil. Pacifists did not liberate occupied France or the concentration camps, violent men in a just cause did.
This is the second cause of this phenomenon. Young human beings are naturally, genetically programmed through evolution to be violent. But for about the last thousand years, in the West we've had control mechanisms to channel that violence to productive pursuits. Without getting into the moral arguments about whether conquering the New World was "good" or "bad," it was a channel for violent young people. National wars channeled it too. Chivalry controlled it as well. None of these were perfect, obviously, because there was still atrocious violence to anybody who wasn't a white male. I'm not saying there is a perfect solution, because there is not, because of the very nature of human violence. What I am saying is that in the post-Westphalian era, when lone-wolfs and self-radicalized lunatics see examples of mass casualty events easily achievable, the absence of controls on human children will lead them to being more savage. But since the Baby Boomer Generation in the West, we have decided to ignore our basic nature. The hippy fruitcakes of the 1960s said that the real enemy is violence itself, not evil. They surrendered any constructive violence as anathema, and thus let evil run unopposed.
What I am saying is that some of these kids probably needed to have fathers who would chase them with Buicks through hay fields. Generation X, my generation, was in general bigger pussies than our parents, and now the Milennial Generation is skinny-jeans wearing basket cases who don't even know what sex they are. Yet, inside each of them is a barbarian. But unlike those of us lucky enough to have been raised by members of The Greatest Generation (like my step dad), they have never been taught that it is okay to be violent, but you have to channel that into constructive pursuits. Like hunting. Like ranching. Like fighting terrorists. Like boxing or martial arts. We have a generation of thirty year old Americans who have--with the exception of the tiny fraction who join the military--never been punched. They are castrated socially, but biologically they are still predators. Then, when they are put under stress, they crack like eggs and unleash helacious violence on innocent people.
Knights in medeval Europe, and Samurai in Feudal Japan, were taught extreme violence. But they were also taught codes of conduct that tempered and controlled their violence. Soldiers today are extremely good at violence, but they are taught discipline in basic training courses. Professional fighters are very effective at unarmed violence, but they are taught self-restraint in the dojo. We have a parenting problem in America. Emasculated hippies and their flower-power dingbat birthing partners desperately try to ignore the fact that we clawed our way to the top of the food chain in a bloody struggle that made us the ultimate alpha predators on this planet. Now, if you ignore that nature in your children, you are raising barely tamed barbarians. But, if you nurture it and channel it into something productive, you can raise Seal Team Six members, who use violence not at random lashing out, but in precise and controlled ways to protect innocent people by annihilating evil people.
Violence is not the enemy, folks. Uncontrolled, undisciplined children who have never been taught to harness their human biological urge to be predators are the enemy. Start disciplining your future mass shooters. Make them war heroes, or astronauts seeking the next frontier, or Olympic athletes. Get them into a dojo that will teach them the philosophy of when to use the skills of fighting, not just how to use them. Teach them that violence is sometimes necessary to stop evil. Pacifists did not liberate the concentration camps in Hitler's Europe, rough, violent and brave men willing to kill to protect innocent people did.
I'm a violent person by nature. I was a very angry teenager from a dysfunctional home life and very easily could have been one of these mass shooter kids. I had very violent fantasies when I was a high school kid about things like this. But I was in a martial arts school that was teaching me self-control and self-restraint in addition to self-defense. My adopted family taught me that violence is not inherently evil and that it is usually the only way to defeat those who are truly evil.
So, having said all of that, I hope our politicians do something to help identify these mass shooters before they start pulling triggers. But since that is relying on politicians to do something sane, I would also recommend every American learn to protect themselves. Learn how to be a hard and resilient target. Accept that since 9/11 we live in a far more dangerous world than we did during the Cold War. Most importantly, please don't raise your children to be hippie pacifists, because the only hope we have of defeating terror is by having courage!
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Soule
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