Re: the idea of violence

maria judith sucupira costa lins (costlins who-is-at ism.com.br)
Sat, 24 Apr 1999 11:37:25 -0300

to Jay Lemke,
yet about the tragedy in colorado, I think that you have touched the problem
when you write about moral. What do you expect from our children when education
is not paying attention to the construction of morality? The roots can be found
in the family which is not taking care of the children because there are a lot
of others stimuli in our society and people do not have more time to the
responsibility of being a father or a mother, I think.
maria lins

Jay Lemke escreveu:

> Of course we are all, especially perhaps Americans who feel close to the
> culture of U.S. suburban high schools and their students, trying to puzzle
> out some meaning from the tragedy in Colorado.
>
> Perhaps our greatest need in the face of such an event is to regain a sense
> of control, of explainability; to fit the event into a schema in which we
> can declare it anomalous, and already explainable by familiar theories. To
> minimize its emotional danger to the stability of our collective belief
> systems. We don't want to imagine that such an event points to phenomena we
> haven't yet recognized.
>
> And the news media respond very much to this need. Even the rumours and
> premature speculations and false information, as they later turn out to be,
> fit certain familiar patterns. They were mentally ill. They were neo-Nazis.
> They were something we already know, so we don't have to look too deep ...
> don't have to risk seeing things, or beginning perhaps to credit hypotheses
> that we very much don't want to entertain.
>
> Neither hate nor violence is abnormal or pathological in humans. The
> _degree_ to which these responses are promoted or deflected or channeled by
> a culture varies. The probability, and the frequency, of violence of
> various kinds differs radically, and systematically, among cultures,
> subcultures, classes, genders, age groups. The statistics of violence are
> fundamental data about sociocultural systems.
>
> Why do we want to insist that this event was extremely unusual? logically
> it is not simply the scale that matters so much; once such an event begins,
> it is mostly chance how many people die. What disturbs us, I think, in this
> incident is the suggestion that normal, typical, relatively privileged
> young people in OUR culture could commit these acts with no strong sense of
> moral inhibition ... and with no very difficult access to the tools that
> mediate the culture of violence.
>
> It is a truism that America is a culture that idolizes the _idea_ of
> violence. Our popular culture is dense with extremes of vicarious violence
> and has been for some time. Some point to the violence of our frontier
> culture, some to the loss of its alternative definitions of masculine
> identity, some to the glorification of war needed to recruit cannon-fodder.
> I suppose my current pet theory is that masculinity is in crisis in our
> culture, that there are fewer and fewer satisfying ways to legimitately 'be
> a man' by the standards of our traditions, and that an positive orientation
> toward the _idea of violence_ (not necessarily actual violence) is becoming
> a default necessity for adolescent and pre-adolescent masculine identities
> ... and there is not a lot to replace it until quite late (job
> responsibility, family responsibility, ... social responsibility??) in
> identity development.
>
> I am developing a professional interest in popular video arcade games and
> computer games. The most popular standard genre for males from about 12 to
> 40-something is basically shooting at human (or semiotically human)
> targets, with a premium on maximum deaths per unit time. Some games
> advertise the realism of the hits. Many games are just elaborate excuses
> for more point-and-shoot action. These games are more popular than
> television with young males in the US; movies imitate these games, not the
> other way around. They are a 'leading' phenomenon in the culture. Any
> imagination of what it would be like to make one's way around a high school
> compound, and through its corridors, and into its rooms, firing away at
> every target ... is precisely the activity type of these games, in a
> slightly different setting. I would be surprised if there is no game like
> this already; perhaps the gamemakers vetoed the idea for fear of the risk
> to profits if people should object. The 'action movie' genre is very much
> an animated version of these games; the media are converging. (There are
> also other game genres, of course.)
>
> I am not assuming any simplistic relationship between vicarious enjoyment
> of the idea of violence in games and committing real violence; most who
> play the games do not and would not massacre people they know. I do perhaps
> assume that the threshold to get many young males in Western cultures to
> the point of being willing to kill en masse is not all that high; war is
> not exactly a rare phenomenon. There are still strong visceral inhibitions
> that arise from seeing the consequences of such actions; I don't think we
> understand very well what it takes to neutralize those, or whether in
> extreme stress or killing frenzy people move ahead with massacres and only
> feel the visceral consequences too late. Of course most games, and much
> high tech warfare, very carefully delete the sounds and images and smells
> that trigger these inhibitory reactions.
>
> What I am suggesting is that adults, and particularly parents, at least in
> middle-class American culture, are unwilling to feel any real curiosity, or
> responsibility, about why their male children idolize the idea of
> committing copious lethal violence against people.
>
> The "trenchcoat mafia" adopted the symbolism, at least in part, of the
> "Gothic" youth subculture. I happen to have got to know a couple years ago
> some participants in this culture and a little about its appeal to
> 'marginalized' youth. Not necessarily economically marginalized, but pretty
> generally alienated from families, rejecting the conformist routes to
> success and popularity in school culture (in Colorado one group that _was_
> targeted were popular school "jocks"), deeply cynical about the hypocrisy
> of a dominant culture of greed that pretends to higher values, and looking
> for alternative ways to be 'cool' and attractive to their preferred sex.
> Prototypically they play at being vampires. They are very inward-oriented,
> preferring to keep to their own groups, and mock-aggressive toward others
> only to show their contempt for them. They participate in the general
> age-group fascination with violence, and some -- perhaps especially those
> who have been physically or emotionally abused -- mix the romantic violence
> of vampire clans with fantasies of revenge and mayhem. Consult your local
> comic book store racks. Goths are doing identity work (including via
> community formation), and most are pretty desperate for outside validation
> toward self-esteem.
>
> In the complex and not particularly neat world of teenage identities today
> (mostly urban, suburbanites tend to follow urban trends in this), Goth
> culture links via its musical preferences (hard rock) to a number of
> related, vaguely 'satanic' styles which may also egregiously reject adult
> hypocrisy by adopting neo-Nazi symbolism, but with transformed
> significance. A swastika can mean totally different things on a biker, a
> skinhead, and a Goth. So can celebrating Hitler's birthday. The "trenchcoat
> mafia" may have been only a partially Gothic, ad hoc hybrid of available
> identity styles, but the kind of desperate identity work it represents is
> far from unfamiliar.
>
> Do identities work through oppositions? of course they do in part, and
> especially so when there is little or no positive basis for an identity ...
> we are a society that denies opportunities to assume serious responsibility
> to its younger citizens, and with it opportunity to form independent
> positive identities ... most of what is left is identity by what-I'm-not.
>
> President Clinton said we have to teach young people to talk rather than
> kill ... but who exactly would they talk to? Even when they talk by
> killing, who really wants to hear what they are saying?
>
> JAY.
>
> ---------------------------
> JAY L. LEMKE
> PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
> CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
> JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
> <http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
> ---------------------------