Violence

Violence is necessary even at the atomic or molecular level. There can be no transactions of energy or matter without enormous violence at the submicroscopic scale. This violence continues all the way up into biology at any scale, and thence to sociology and other more macro-level constructs.

The problem with much of the humanities is that they are elaborate narrative artifices or narrative factories designed to allow us to pretend as well as to mask such pretense or pretensions. The simpler (or earlier) the narratives, the less they mask the violence (see the Grimm brothers' fairy tales, for example; also compare Genesis to the Gospels).

The reason we tend to confuse all narratives with religion is that the whole thing is a seamless body of interwoven narratives. There is no literature or avenue of inquiry in the humanities that isn't religious in its roots.

That puts us in a parlous position when discussing violence. Everything is tainted with it, a fact which is as much acknowledged in the old stories (like Cain and Abel) as in the modern narratives.

The argument, therefore, that religious impulses are a major cause of violence (as people like Sam Harris seem to believe) is impossible to test. It is like saying, "Being human makes you prone to violence." The only way to test that is to remove what makes you human and see if you are still prone to violence; since we don't know what it is that we have to remove, and the causes of violence (in general) are too many and too different, we can't really test this assertion.

Likewise, to test the assertion that religious belief is a major cause of violence requires one to believe in turn that the human tendency to be violent is one level higher than the human tendency to have beliefs that can be considered religious. That has to be wrong; it's easier for humans to apprehend and comprehend violence than religion, and requires the use of less brain. Evolutionary biologists would have to agree — it's easier to observe violence in animals (and figure out why and whence this tendency arises) than to observe religion in animals.

Sam Harris and those of his ilk must be wrong. They have been overwhelmed by their own narrative and rhetoric, and have now turned the universe firmly on its head in order to squat in the ruins of the New Atheism.

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Note: Harris is particularly against Islam in terms of one kind of violence. He seems to say that if an increased tendency to commit acts of terrorism can be linked statistically to being Muslim, then all Muslims should submit to the indignity of their ethnicity being used as a tool for profiling. Actually, the statistics can be shown to be distorted by the unique case of the 9/11 incident, which was indeed carried out by terrorists who were Muslims.

Two Ravens (Redux)

Recently, TIME magazine called the last ten years 'The Decade From Hell'. At the end of the last millennium, the Gnome called the last century 'The Age of Violence'. By all accounts, then, what we've been living through would seem to be the worst of times. And yet, human life has never been so valued, so extended, so enriched.

It isn't a paradox. The human condition is such that when we are exposed to pain, suffering and hardship, human life becomes correspondingly more valued as long as there is a reservoir of capital (human or material) to measure that valuation against. We have become more aware of, more sensitive to suffering simply because we can be.

It's been almost a year since my last maintenance upgrade to Two Ravens. I suppose I said it all there, and there isn't much need to go on.

Gangsterism in Schools

I spent some time thinking about this topic recently. A lot of sociologists and psychologists give the standard reason that gangs and tribes are part of normal human behaviour, so it's all a question of how these groups are formed and to what ends they act. But it seems to me that, if schools are indeed agents of socialisation, they should be determining the way gangs behave.

What troubles me more is the equivalent of white-collar gangs. Intellectual gangs. Debater gangs. Children-of-privilege gangs. Scholarship-leads-to-power gangs. This kind of gangsterism is what drives the big crimes, the ones that aren't really crimes and are condoned by society. There are dark imperatives building in that area between black and white, where you can't tell which are the men in either colour.

Get your scholarship. Get an advanced degree. Become a boss. Treat people like crap and eliminate your rivals using everything they taught you at the local civil service training centre, and some things they didn't dare teach you. At any sign that an employee is unhappy, that's disloyalty, for why would he be unhappy with your regime? After all, you have the God-given wisdom to know what's best for him. Best get rid of him then, no need to find out why he is unhappy because that would surely be his lack of wisdom, not yours.

The mafia of the new academic world are not sub-educated grunts, but over-educated villains. And like the stereotypical Bond villain, they have no sense of humour but make you feel like laughing. Of course, if you do, you will suffer drastic consequences.

Mosaic

Here is an intriguing character, a choleric and cynical fellow with an uncooperative and violent attitude to life. For Act One of his life, he is brought up as a prince in a polytheistic society. He commits manslaughter and exiles himself for Act Two of his life to a nomadic pantheistic one. And for Act Three, he becomes the unwilling leader of a bunch of stiff-necked monotheists. He has three thousand of them killed on his own initiative in the early years. He dominates them ruthlessly, curses them, accuses them of making his life miserable - and he becomes an icon forever, in the hearts of these same people.

Go figure. And why do some people say I am a bit like him?