violence doesn't solve anything?

Over at the Nomad's blog a few days ago, a few of us guys gathered together in the comment threads to growl and seethe and otherwise express our outrage at something the Nomad had posted about: a man, now arrested, who had been abusing his children, ages 5 and 4, by-- get this-- beating them with an iron rod. If your blood isn't boiling already, I question your humanity. The Nomad titled his post "Five Minutes Alone," a phrase every man understands to mean, "If I had five minutes alone in a room with this fucker, I'd beat the living shit out of him for what he had done."

The Nomad wrote the following after quoting from the relevant news article:

Just five minutes is all I ask, because those five minutes, although brief, would be the most pleasurable and gratifying five minutes I've had in a long time. I'm not against corporal punishment-- as a matter of fact I believe parents refusing to whack their brats on the ass once in a while is one of the reasons kids today have so many problems... but when you cross the line like this jerk did, then all bets are off.

The Nomad doesn't strike me as a violent man by nature, but he is a man, and he reacted with the same righteous anger that most men would display after hearing about such a case. My own comment was pretty Grand Guignol. I wrote:

Tie the fucker to a chair. Get out the kalbi scissors. Start with the toes and fingers. Go for the nose. Then the earlobes. Save dick for last. Put everything but dick in a blender. Blend. Make him drink the sauce. Make him eat his dick. Put a mirror in front of him so he can see what's become of him. Then put out his eyes with the kalbi scissors so that that mutilated creature in the mirror is the last [thing] he’ll ever see.

Then slice open his thigh with a sharp knife, get out the large, long-handled pliers, dig deep into the thigh wound, and crush his femur.

Think we might need more than five minutes, Nomad.

Sure, I'm a barbarian, and I don't mind being graphic about it. I tell you now that I would have no compunction in dealing with this guy in the above-described manner. The Nomad responded (in part):

I see those types of stories get to you too. Fucking people... so many couples in this world who can't have kids and who would be good parents if given half a chance, and then you have pieces of shit like this, who are blessed with kids, yet mistreat them. Ok, now I need to go relax and do some chants to bring the blood pressure back down...

Other commenters-- all male, I assume-- grunted some form of assent to the Nomad's initial anger.

Then in walked Jodi of The Asia Pages (is her blog not currently open to the public?). Grimacing in the face of all that testerone, she wrote:

As much as I am against child abuse, I find it very disturbing that so many commenters here believe the way to solve this is to use violence against the abuser. Violence to solve violence? I hope you guys are just joking when you write about all the things you’d do to this person because it doesn't really reflect all that great on any of you if you are serious. Seems to me this guy got what he deserved when he was arrested.

Jodi's an intelligent woman and a fine writer, but the above was asinine. Her comment leaves one with three immediate impressions: (1) she has no clue how to handle actual maleness, perhaps preferring to hang around men who are effete, emasculated, bland, and otherwise milquetoasty; (2) she has little idea what function violence serves in the animal world, of which we are-- and will remain-- very much a part; and (3) she cannot distinguish between violent thoughts on behalf of helpless victims and violent personalities.

What bothers me most about Jodi's comment, aside from the hauteur, is the obvious inability to see that the typical male reaction-- not hers-- is in fact the more civilized response to such child abusers.

Violence doesn't solve anything? I offer what is now the classic reply to such nonsense:

Anyone who clings to the historically untrue-- and thoroughly immoral-- doctrine that "violence never settles anything" I would advise to conjure the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedom.

The above is spoken by a character in Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, a novel whose message has been hotly debated by some critics. Was Heinlein serious, or was he parodying a gung-ho, hawkish stance? Evidence seems to lean in favor of his having been dead serious. The school of thought which Heinlein represents scares the meek, who seem not to realize that the maxim "Violence doesn't solve anything," when taken to its logical conclusion, is ultimately an argument against such institutions as the police and the military-- institutions that are, to be sure, prone to misuse and abuse, but which nevertheless play a fundamental role in society as guarantors of security and freedom, including the freedom to contend that violence doesn't solve anything.

Some might counterargue that Jodi's comment was simply a reaction to the tone of that thread, and wasn't intended as a larger commentary. I would partially agree, but it was a thoughtless comment whose implications Jodi herself apparently did not consider, which is why I have teased those implications out here. Then again, if it turns out that Jodi truly is anti-police and anti-military, that she is an absolute pacifist, I will respect her position because such a stance is, at least, self-consistent. I might not agree with that stance, but I find it gutsy and even admirable. If Jodi turns out to support institutions like the police and the military, her comment comes off as hypocritical, because those institutions are premised on the use of force.

Others might counterargue that I shouldn't take my cue from a mere science fiction novel. This counterargument is, of course, an example of the genetic fallacy: an attempt to attack an argument by questioning its origins as opposed to addressing the argument's actual merits. As such, the counterargument is garbage.

Some people will claim, rather biblically, that violence begets violence.* It's perfectly reasonable to observe that it's possible to create and perpetuate a cycle of violence, but the people who make this observation are usually trying, fallaciously, to shoehorn it into the service of a larger argument: that violence is bad because it always leads to a cycle of violence. This argument is plainly false, as a quick survey of world history will demonstrate.

Human nature has had millennia to improve, and if people like Steven Pinker are to be believed, there has indeed been some improvement on a cultural level (see what he says here). But overall, those superficial cultural refinements notwithstanding, we remain the same brutish species we have always been, which is why we can still relate to the venal, ugly motives of the characters we read about in, say, the plays of Sophocles or the scriptures of the Old Testament. Humans are still only human.

The upshot is that rule of law comes, ultimately, from threat of force. It is only a vanishingly small percentage of the population that is born virtuous and well-behaved. I doubt any of us, including the men (and women) in that comment thread over at the Nomad's blog, are part of that elite group of the innately enlightened. In order to behave ourselves most of us require, somewhere in the back of our minds, the niggling suspicion that someone, somewhere, is watching us. The cultivation of conscience begins from outside and works its way inward into the psyche. Virtue, generally speaking, has to be taught, and once taught, certain thoughts, actions, and feelings naturally follow-- including a sudden surge of righteous anger when violence is committed against the young and helpless. Socially speaking, violence and the threat of violence are inextricably woven into the fabric of human civilization. To think otherwise, and to think that this situation will change anytime soon, is to smoke crack.

The very image of a man with an iron bar beating his tiny, frightened children is so maddening to me that, even now, I can't type straight. Make no mistake: I would be happy to remove this man's body parts myself. And any mother worth her salt who saw someone beating her children as that man did would probably feel the same as I do. This is why American audiences cheered when, in a climactic moment in the movie "Aliens," Sigourney Weaver lumbered out to meet the alien queen with her loader and shouted, "Get away from her, you bitch!" Weaver's character, Ripley, had become a mother figure to Carrie Henn's character, Newt. What we cheered was the fierceness of that maternal instinct in the face of danger.

I'm not violent by nature. If a guy slugs me in the face, it's possible I won't slug him back. But Heaven help the man I catch on the street if he's abusing someone helpless.

And that, Miss Jodi, is how most men are. Get used to it. If you think that a visceral emotional response to news of child abuse is an indication that a man is irretrievably violent by nature, or that entertaining violent thoughts somehow lowers a person, then you clearly misunderstand people, especially men.

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*Never mind that the Bible contains many scenes of violence often perpetrated by God himself on behalf of his chosen people.


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