Torrey Orton
August 5, 2009
What seems consistently missing from every outburst about our violent days and ways – in and at the footy, around the fastfood parlour, on the roads, down the laneways of our nights – is any integrated understanding of what breeds it and feeds it. Just how much violences of various kinds are with us I assayed by a quick count of today’s TheAGE: I totalled 43 mentions of items people might find violent, or encouraging them to do so by choice of header language. I didn’t bother with the BusinessDay. I guessed it would be around 50% violences. 43 items out of a possible 73 (total of non-advertising contents) in the front is enough.
For lack of perspective, we look to numbers of incidents of perilously violent events (street bashings, glassings…) to help adjust our fear responses. These divide roughly into two camps: the directly dangerous and the distantly dangerous. This is a continuum of course! Then there’s the collection of almost invisible and imperceptible violences which make the rest.
Domains of violence
I will try to sketch here the variety and coverage of the actions which compose the domain of violence in everyday life. It cannot be exhaustive. It cannot itemize the damages which different violations deliver for calculating the comparative villainy of perps near (thugs, etc.) and far (terrorists, plane accidents…). But, it can suggest a range of types which casts different light on the most feared violations – the personal assaults, distant or direct.
My intent is not to diminish the latter but to portray something of the encouragements to violence which abound in our culture. Without such a picture, we are left to interpret the most violent as acts of the deranged, the drunken and/or the criminal – personal failings to be stamped out. We have some inkling of the broader social support for violence in the repeated incidence of footy flair-ups and the prominence of alcohol in local incidents or gang-like forays.
Our violent times
So, perspective one: these are seriously violent times for many of us (just how many are not touched at all or very little by the fears and pressures which drive our angers?). The angers arising are expressed in a variety of recognised ways: the road, shopping, telemarketing and similar rages, rising violence to persons – numbers and intensities, public fractiousness (rudeness)…. The bio-psycho-social context is well covered. What’s not so clear is why the extremes seem to be growing, even allowing for the inflation of our perceptions of what’s happening by news media beatups (the daily front page assault above).
Here’s a take on why. Try the cumulative effects over 15-20 years of increased time ‘at work’ in a 24/7 kind of way. Try a world in peril on more dimensions than most of humanity, or any computer, can hold in mind at once. Try a world where all achievement is measured in capacity to consume, or amassing excessive consumptive capacity. And all of this is happening faster and faster…deeper and deeper, ever more extremely it seems.
Invisible stressors and the epidemic of mental illness
This is a world of high grade, largely invisible stressors. They appear in the form of media light ups, many of which are falsely inflated issues for present power scrabbling purposes by equally incompetent politicians; that they all speak with the same wedging tongues and spun language makes this outrageously clear! (Notice that nearly every public query under pressure is responded to with this spinning intro: “Look, I just want to say…”; pollies or priests do this, CEOs or cabbies do it, too.) The symptoms of long term stress can be found in AFR’s BOSS (July 09 issue, pg. 32 ff).
The one they leave out is anger, probably because their audience is commercial and that’s a world in which only the most powerful can be openly angry. Stressed workers do well to contain that part of the stress overwhelm experience, which adds to the stress of course. In the BOSS article Professor J. Toohey of RMIT is reported to say: “…we commonly medicalise issues around work stress and anxiety…psychological injury often has much more to do with the way work is organised and the way people are managed than it has to do with illness.”
Society of fear
Some have noticed that we live in a fear society – dominated by pre-emptive defences against unseen and unsubstantiated threats expressed in defensive behaviours like door-to-door school transport. Locally, Shaun Carney started from this point on the way to his interpretation of public violence phenomena. He ends up with the view that increased violence results in part from increased opportunity arising from increased public service hours and activities (“the 24/7 lifestyle”).
..and society of shame
Then there’s the approach of Dr. James Gilligan, cited in Simon Castles’ TheAGE article excoriating the Victorian Government for the advertising-led effort to restrain boffo and biffo. Having soundly trounced the media fools, fed by governing fools anyway, Castles quoted Gilligan saying: “..the purpose of violence is to diminish the intensity of shame and replace it as far as possible with its opposite, pride.” Castles summarised further: “The major causes of shame were relative poverty, downward social mobility and unemployment..” and concludes that more egalitarian policies are more likely to be useful than adverts.
While for significant numbers and segments of our most wealthy human societies ever life is good materially, an apparently irreversible divide grows between those with repeatedly too little and those with undoubtedly and unaccountably too much. There’s a middling to long argument to sustain this point, but I’ll take it as made for the moment.
A similar insight came from Guy Rundle’s second Crikey piece on local violence in late July:
"The “respect” culture, the exhausting aggressiveness is an assertion of atomised individualism, a getting the first punch in against an indifferent world. The same thing underlies opportunistic violence in the West. What’s noticeable about the kids hanging round these stations is that they’re not in gangs, so much as small packs of individuals, whose personal style — bad gangsta rapper gestures, the hoodie all the way over — is not an expression of confidence, but a perpetually threatened and hostile resentment, a desperate desire for impact."
Hard wired for fighting?
For an evolutionary take, of the sand box battlers variety, TheAGE’s Michael Coulter (Sunday AGE July 19, 2009; pg. 15) reviewed the “human animal” research showing violence for good (by goodies) is seen to be better than violence for bad (by baddies). And he concluded that“..violence still provokes an extreme emotional reaction that a lot of people experience as pleasure.” This is OK in his view if it’s addressed to or roused by make-believe (films, etc.). Unfortunately he closes, many folks, men in particular, cannot tell the difference.
Necessary violence with disregard for accountability
Here’s another brand of violence, from the top as it were. A few weeks back Lihir Gold’s Ballarat mine was consumed in a debt collapse leaving 200 jobs on the way through. TheAGE’s Matthew Murphy reported:
"Despite leading the $400 million acquisition of the project from Ballarat Goldfields in 2006, Lihir chief executive Arthur Hood chose not to tell the workers about the job cuts in person, instead leaving it to site general manager Craig Thomas.
Peter Smith, Lihir's executive general manager for Australia and Africa, said delivering the news was not a priority for Mr Hood, who yesterday was flying back from the company's more successful operations in Papua New Guinea.
"Arthur's had other priorities right now but the mine management team has taken great ownership of the people at site and I think they actually felt a responsibility to do it themselves," he said. "
This is classic accountability violence, which disrespects both the people in charge (“the management team”) and the workers. The executive general manager Australia and Africa above attributes to the management team a responsibility which wasn’t theirs by way of excusing the accountable and responsible person – Arthur Hood. This is multi-level commercial violence not often on show so clearly. For once the workers don’t get smirched with the others.
This violence was necessary in the sense that the business went under (maybe financially disputable, but within understandable limits for such things). The gratuitous violence, the unnecessary part, lies in the ethical gutlessness of the senior accountable – in this case, “Arthur”.
And this kind of violence is not thought of in the morning paper’s treatment of assault. It’s reported as fateful acts befalling the powerless with an implicit suggestion it’s their fault for being powerless. Only in the last 12 months have we seen so clearly that the powerful fail with feather landing fields and get up to play and earn as if they had never strayed from the fold of commercial productivity. Executive bonuses anyone? How many billion US$’s in New York or Sterling in London last month based on public guarantees and subventions?
Precursor spin – the Meno message?
I remember my surprise 35 years ago at discovering that Socrates was leading Meno by subtle questioning to mathematical insights which he was pretending were to be found in Meno’s natural capabilities. By chance (reading the translation with a Greek interlinear), I found that the words used to name the objects being explored were shaping the progress of the dialogue to imply / suggest the insights which were being sought. It was as if the master midwife to thinking had been caught with virtual hands in the pie.
There in the heart of the origin of dialogue was a slippery practice hidden in the authority and competence of the master. Elsewhere, we have Socrates as master of violating the pretences of public figures of his time. In both guises we have dominance of others, in both instances for their best interests (and those of society, Socrates would have us think).
The violence of Socrates demolition of various public figures is clear. He paid violently for it, hemlocked by his own hand. What of his instruction of the boy Meno? This is our task. To understand, distinguish and deploy judiciously violations of existing habits which impede growth at the personal, group and organisation levels. Growth here is change allowing better adaptation to environmental changes than would be the case if no growth occurred. This task is that of helpers of many persuasions and leaders of all organisations.
Violence - a flower of many colours
You may be wondering at some of my inclusions in the violence bestiary above. Most providers of support services to victims of family abuses recognise that the larger part of abuses and their instances are not physically violent – harassment, belittling, demeaning, withholding of resources and social connections, threats, etc. On a slightly closer look these behaviours can be found in discriminatory organisational processes, bullying in all settings and similar occurrences on the borders of reportable offenses.
The degree of actual reporting may be proportional to the power of the offenders, especially in organisational settings. This is why whistle-blowing is never met with organisational approval (when was the last time you saw it celebrated by those within the organisation whose hides were being exposed to public scrutiny by the whistler’s tune?).
So I take the position that there are many violences in our worlds, some of which are unavoidable and many of which seem endemic, even among ‘nice’ people, or our leaders, both personally and institutionally. To understand the unveiled or unavoidably visible ones we must understand the veiled and collusive ones. That’s the starting place for a deeper grip.
Again, what to do?
So what to do in thinking and talking about violences? This is really hard because so much reporting and discussing of violences occurs in seriously sub-optimal perceptual conditions. That is, we are assaulted by the assault (direct or indirect) in an assaulting (language inflation) way while reeling from an undercurrent of little violences which keep us often in a clinically stressed state. Hence, the leap in responses to the black and white; the fundamentalist reaction is automatic and intensely propelled by fear rising as anger and rage.
At least that’s what happens to me and a few other old farts I know. Judging from the personal commentariat in the virtual and hard copy letters pages, I / we are not alone in this volatility. So, again, what to do to understand And act on violence better, something that doesn’t take a book (I found 4 on my shelves with ‘fear’ in the title, none of them a work of fiction)? I propose this: That we…
• …assume it is a whole of society problem, whatever it is;
• …assume it’s a local systems problem, at whatever level of scale and diversity is appropriate to good coverage of the influencing (original sources) sustaining (currently continuing enablers, enhancers) and ameliorating (motivation reducing) factors bearing on the violence in question;
• …assume that it is multi-generational;
• …assume that the violence is multi-modal and multi-dimensional;
• …assume that it is meeting some real needs of some of the participants some of the time.
• …assume that we, too, do violences to others, and the previous assumptions apply to us.
• …and???
Over to you…
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