Violence is ever there with people so it seems. Has there ever been a time when people were less violent? Apart from the Eden folk in Star Trek TOS. But, heck they learnt that even nicey-nice plants can kill, didn't they?
The century past, 20th if you haven't been counting, was the most violent of all history and prehistory. (How do we know it was more violent than prehistory? Because more people were killed violently in the 20th century than existed on earth before history 'began' with Julius Caesar.) From The Somme, through Hitler, onto Stalin and into Pol Pot and Chairman Mao, uncounted hundreds of millions of people died at the hands of other violent people.
What were these killers like? Were they all utter nutters out of the scripts of James Bond, Arnie Schwarzenegger or suchlike movies? Willing to die a horrible death as they horribly killed others? The record says: not so. They were fairly ordinary, mainly men, who obeyed orders and killed Jews, intellectuals, dissidents and other wrong-thinkers at the drop of a hat. Ordinary bakers, train guards, office clerks and farmers.
Now, we could blame the true madmen - Hitler et al - but that would be to miss the point. It is said that in Scottish courts there are three main pleas from the accused: guilty, not guilty, and, it wisnae me a big boy did it and ran away. And of these three, the last one is the most common plea made. We cannot simply blame an obvious scapegoat like Hitler, or his Austrian nation, or his Jewish grandmother, or post-WW1 reparations to the French.
So, to today. In a US school a boy makes a video on his iPhone, posts it on Youtube, takes his father's gun collection and goes to school to kill his classmates. Do we blame Apple, Youtube, the gun lobby, the school board, etc.? As someone once said: to every difficult problem there is an easy answer, and it's wrong. Why a boy goes to school to kill his classmates is a question to be pondered, and, I would propose, one that we should never attempt to find the answer to. For, to do so would belittle the entire complexity of frail human life and the societies and world we inhabit.
History tells us that men are violent, risk-takers, competitive and short-lived. Historically males tended to die at a very young age, few lived on till later life, and most tended to marry in later life. The Dickensian tale of the forty-year old marrying the 14-year-old girl isn't perversion, it was the natural order. The Arab habit of marrying up to four women also reflects the male:female imbalance (albeit it non-mathematically) in marriageable males and females.
Who fights our official wars? Generally and historically young men. Who dies in historical wars? Generally young men. Why do young males so willing go to war to risk death, pain and disfigurement? Again, a complex question with no simple answer. But, one I ask whenever I see the Army recruitment stand in Paisley, Dundee or another poor city area attracting in post-pubescent kids with the promise of excitement. And every ordinary mum with a son in the Army is so proud to see her wee boy come home bronzed, fit and looking like a man; a man in uniform, of course.
Did you catch that word up there? Excitement. Try saying to an ordinary girl: how do you fancy going to Iraq, shooting and being shot at, drilling until you sweat and hurt, building up strength and a stronger capacity to swear, wearing khaki drill, driving a tank, etc. Most girls will be hard to convince. But, just show a big green gun to a kid in County Square and he needs to convince himself that he doesn't want to join up.
I think we have a problem today. And the problem is that we have broken the rule of Thomas Kuhn, the great (perhaps greatest) sociological philosopher. He said we must use our social models to explain the world, not to remodel the world to fit our preferred model. We have a model in the West today that says: violence is bad, boys should not be violent. To me this is too like trying to teach your cat to stop chasing songbirds. Or, to try and get men to stop looking at women. Or to try and persuade young women away from the easy delights of pregnancy. As they say in Scotland: disnae work.
The problem is the way we wish our world to be and how we wish it to be viewed. We want to have a violent army that crushes our enemies. We want to have a Police that will take violent action against those who would be violent against us. But, we also don't want there to be any violence. This is a classic late 20th century post-modern packaging fix: keep the contents the same, but try and change the wrapping.
You are as likely to remove violence from males as you are sexiness from females. Yes, in a few small cases these can be done. Nothing new here. But in the bulk of maleness the tendency to act like a drunken lout when out with the lads will remain. And for females the risk of bitchiness and the need to predate upon males until they get their own one (yes, they do that) will also remain.
Political Correctness is a nonsense; that is, it makes no sense. You are as likely to change the way males think as you are to make my petrol car run on diesel (I put petrol in my wife's diesel car once; don't do it!) Males and violence go together like love+marriage, peaches+cream, politicians+lies, porn+PCs, and guns+violence.
You see, its not video games, or guns, or hormones, or institutionalisation, or nationalism, or any other 'thing' that makes males take part in and enjoy the excitement of real or proxy violence. Its just being male.
(Question to self: is that why girls don't play or develop video games as much as boys? Answer to self: like I know - I'm just a guy!)
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