In the 60's a television show, Star Trek, produced its most impressive episode. Well written and thoughtful, The City at the Edge of Forever won a science fiction award for excellence. Dr. McCoy was inadvertently transported into the earth's past at the time of the Great Depression. While in the past, McCoy changed the history of the human race, and the Enterprise disappeared. The doctor had saved the life of a persuasive woman, and this woman achieved the end of human warfare in the years following the time of her original death. This change brought to a halt all of the technology that was developed for war, and consequently all of the space technology.
Man moved into the future, a peaceful and contented specie never to leave his home planet. The Captain and Spock worked to right the path of history and restore it to the original. This is and has always been one of my favorite episodes because of the fine writing and characterization within it. Only after some time did I notice within this episode a serious flaw which caused me to question my admiration for this work. The episode is based upon the assumption that aggression is the source of ambition and progress, and without it human inventiveness will languish. This assumption goes hand in hand with the assumption that violence and aggression in man are innate.
I wonder now why even the visionaries of our culture, the science fiction writers, have accepted these ideas as a part of the human condition. How is it that such an awful trait should be so complacently accepted? The news media bemoans the increasing violence in our society. The politicians preach that more punishment is the answer--in spite of statistics that show the prison system neither deters crime nor rehabilitates criminals in an effective way. Violence is seen as an increasing problem to our society and the world. Behavioral scientists worldwide work on the problem of aggression in the human species, but if violence is inherent what can their work gain us?
The concept of violence as inherent to the human condition comes from the idea that it is instinctive. Although the aggression caused by certain kinds of stimulus may indeed be beyond our control, the idea that irritation or aggression must be expressed in physical violence does not follow. Even within other animals not all aggressive urges are expressed. When tested by animal behaviorists, animals whose hypothalamus' were stimulated electrically to produce aggressive response were still governed by the social hierarchy of their group. They responded with violence only when they could target a subordinate member of their social group, and did not respond violently when the only targets were dominant members of their group. In spite of direct stimulus to the portions of the brain involved in the expression of aggression, these animals only became violent when it was contextually appropriate.
With the idea of an innate capacity for violence comes the idea that representations of violence in the media are cathartic. This idea is based on Freudian psychoanalytic thought which states that aggression must be expressed in some way. The image of catharsis--like many psychoanalytic ideas--stuck, and was accepted into the fabric of common knowledge even though these theories have in some cases been disproved, and in others still remain hypothetical. The vicarious experience of violence by an individual is seen as standing in for real violence that humans are compelled to by their nature, and is seen as being a healthy outlet for mans natural tendency to violence. Some news on this subject is in, and it's not good. Studies done by behavioral scientists point very strongly to the idea that violence can be a learned behavior in man. Children who are exposed to violence and aggression within the family are statistically much more likely to express those same things in the society. By the same token, children who witness violence on television show a greater acceptance of violence as a tool in social situations. One of the reasons for this is that violence is seen to be a good tool for getting what you want. This is a cognitive conditioning response. When violence is shown to be beneficial in acquiring real property or status it become even more than acceptable: it becomes advantageous.
Societies take advantage of violent behavior just as individuals do. The decision to make war upon another country begins with the people who hold the most power within the government. Governments also use violence against members of their own societies when they institute capital punishment. Acceptance of this kind of violent behavior requires certain types of justification. The enemy, whether he is foreign or a member of our own society, must be dehumanized in the eyes of society. The enemy must be labeled: felon, communist, murderer, drug seller. Because human suffering is so poignant this dehumanization of the victim is necessary so that empathy can be withheld. Violence against others is so obviously wrong that empathy for the victims would prevent its continuance.
With the exception of the animals that kill to eat, animals do not continue violent attacks against one another in the face of submission or the obvious suffering of their victims. Man is the only animal who behaves in this way. This behavior pattern did not come to us through our animal heritage, but even if there were some species whose behavior was like ours applying their behavior to our species would be in error. Man, of all the animals, requires the longest time to mature. Our species requires a great deal of time to mature because of the large amount of behavior that must be learned. This learning process has replaced instinctive behavior patterns in most of the functions of our species. The large brain we have evolved, and the learned behavior of language are the characteristics that most distance us from the rest of the animal kingdom. These differences allow man to think symbolically of the actions he may do and their consequences in advance of the performance of those actions. In light of these skills there is no reason for man to be chained to the expression of aggressive animal behavior even if there were a pre-existing tendency to do so. There is no way to reliably determine what portion of our behavior is genetic and what portion is learned, but studies in behavioral science do indicate a good portion of human behavior is dictated by the conditioning and learning that is experienced by the individual.
Within this information--that humans operate in part from learned behavior--is the silver lining to the dark cloud of violence that overshadows our species. All we have to do is to stop teaching violence. Violence that is rewarded with tangible or intangible gain is counterproductive to our society and should be discouraged. Aggression can and should be channeled into other forms of expression than violence, and there are existing behavioral models to help rechannel aggressive feelings.
When my daughter was three she had some serious problems with a neighbor boy in our apartment complex. He hit her, sometimes with rocks. In desperation I tried to teach her a lesson of our culture: hit him back. More than once I took her outside to face the boy and told her to hit him back. Each time she would lean over and kiss him gently on his shoulder or chest. I thought she would never learn to stick up for herself, but a funny thing happened: the boy got tired of being kissed and stopped hitting her. This incident taught her something that I had missed in my assessment of the situation: to return violence for violence is not the only choice, and there are other alternatives. After some thought I found that it was I who had learned the lesson.
This lesson needs to be learned by more than just behavioral scientists and scattered members of society. This is a lesson that must be internalized into the fabric of human culture, and familiar even to young children. After twenty years Star Trek returned to the television screen, but very little had changed. The assumption that violence is innate is still there. This assumption is so far reaching that even species from different star systems are depicted as violent. The ships on their peaceful missions are armed with photon torpedoes and phasers. As a culture we are so convinced of our violent nature that we are incapable of envisioning a future without it.
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