Violence - Predictable, Persistent, Inevitable, And An Indelible Part Of Human Nature

Violence has been a theme of literature since Ancient Greece, and in the works of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles and others, violence is bloody, savage, and brutal. 

Literary critic Bret Saunders suggests that the Iliad is the most violent, bloody, and savage work of the Greek classical period:

The Prologue announces the action of the poem to be Achilles’ “wrath” and its repercussions, which include myriad d’algea—a “myriad of pains”—heaped on the heroes. “You can be eviscerated, brained, decapitated, or crushed. You can get stabbed, sliced, shot, or rock-pounded from any angle. Your eyeball may be torn out and hoisted on a spear, your spine cleft from your back, and your hacked-off head may fall to the dust with mouth still speaking.

In Homer’s Odyssey violence is endemic – it is the way human beings act as an expression of will, determination, and defiance of fate.  In Book Nine where Odysseus and his men are facing the Cyclops, Homer writes in language very similar to Cormac McCarthy, “His hands reached out, seized two of them, and smashed them into the ground like puppies.  Their brains spattered out and oozed into the dirt.  He tore them limb from limb…”

In his description of the death of the disloyal serving women, Homer presents another simile to describe the scene:

Then, as doves or thrushes beating their spread wings against some snare rigged up in thickets – flying in for a cozy nest but a grisly bed receives them –so the women’s heads were trapped in a line, nooses yanking their necks up one by one so that all might die a pitiful, ghastly death…

In Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex violence is central, expressive of human nature, and metaphorically representing the innate, absolute self-defining power of vengeful acts; and his language is not unlike McCarthy’s. When the Second Messenger tells of how Oedipus has blinded himself, he says, “And bleeding eyeballs gushed and stained his beard – no sluggish oozing drops, but a black rain and bloody hail poured down.”

Josef Conrad was fascinated by the primitive savagery in human nature, and in telling the story of Kurtz in The Heart of Darkness he describes it.  Kurtz, who goes out to Africa as part of a civilizing mission – not only would he manage an important mining operation  but he would bring Western, enlightened civilization to the primitive tribes of Central Africa. 

The longer he lives in the jungle, the more he is attracted by the savagery of its inhabitants who participate in strange, powerful, bloody human sacrifice.  This potent religious offering, he sees, is not simply barbarity – an inchoate, violent expression of an untamed human nature – but a purposeful, spiritual act.   Savagery is not the worst part of the human soul, he concludes, but only an expression of its desire to please, honor, and respect the gods of the jungle.

At first Kurtz is in awe of the sacrifices and of the received power they conferred on the priest who performed them.  Over time he not only subscribed to the primitivism of the rituals, but saw how using and manipulating them, he could be accorded the same respect, obedience, and emotional slavery as the priests.

His vision of an ennobling, inordinately powerful, and politically conferring act goes wrong.  His Western reason, judgment, respect for process, order, and justice cannot be removed or even conveniently put aside.  The rituals he has observed in the jungle and has approved, adopted, and made his own are no more than savagery, expressions of a primitive, unschooled, superstitious existence.  

Because he has fallen so completely for this ethos, taken it as an instrument of power without reflection, he realizes that all human beings are capable of such falls from Christian rectitude and are as savage as the natives of the jungle.

“The horror, the horror’, whispered by Kurtz just before his death, was his final acceptance of his untamed, primitive soul and the inescapable barbarity of it.   The wilderness was not just an environment, but something alive, a complete, integral organism both prehistoric and terrifying in which men who, equally primeval  and uncivilized, were reminders of humanity’s savage beginnings.

As C. S. Lewis put it, there is no such thing as an ordinary person. Each person you sit next to on the bus is capable of extraordinary horrors. 

Cormac McCarthy’s vision is no different, no less gory or violent:

They found the lost scouts hanging head downward from the limbs of a fire blacked paloverde tree. They were skewered through the cords of their heels with sharpened shuttles of green wood and they hung gray and naked above the dead ashes of the coals where they'd been roasted until their heads had charred and the brains bubbled in the skulls and steam sang from their nose holes. Their tongues were drawn out and held with sharpened sticks thrust through them and they had been docked of their ears and their torsos were sliced open with flints until the entrails hung down on their chests

Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange and Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of it are both extremely violent; but both claim a philosophical perspective.  In A Clockwork Orange, Burgess reflects on human nature, morality and human freedom. Alex, the protagonist of the novel, shows the darkest side of mankind and society.

The character of Burgess’ novel, Alex, is reminiscent of Graham Greene’s Pinky (Brighton Rock) who, reflecting on his life of violence says, ‘Credo in unum Satanu’.  Sin had not only freed from any trace of guilt and remorse, but had given him license to ‘join the other side’.  He was unstoppable, defiant, remorseless, and hopelessly cruel.  He realized his Nietzschean will and the glory of his Miltonian defiance of God – a defiance which was legitimate because of its injustice. 

The most violent of Shakespeare’s plays is Titus Andronicus.  Tamora, the Amazon Queen, hates Titus so much that she encourages her sons to rape his daughter, Lavinia, and has them cut out her tongue and cut off her hands so that she will be unable to tell who did it.  Titus exacts his revenge by cutting up and baking her sons in a pie and serving it to her.  Shakespeare may have been trying to finally shed the influence of his contemporary, Marlowe whose plays, such as Tamburlaine were as violent as they come. 

In this play Shakespeare was again dealing with the nature of evil, and could only come to the conclusion that gratuitous, heinous violence was part of human nature.

Such barbaric savagery was common in early America.  Jonathan Foreman, writing in The Daily Mail, writing about the Comanches, said:

No tribe in the history of the Spanish, French, Mexican, Texan, and American occupations of this land had ever caused so much havoc and death. None was even a close second.  There was a ‘demonic immorality’ of Comanche attacks on white settlers, the way in which torture, killings and gang-rapes were routine. ‘The logic of Comanche raids was straightforward.  All the men were killed, and any men who were captured alive were tortured; the captive women were gang raped. Babies were invariably killed.

One by one, the children and young women were pegged out naked beside the camp fire, according to a contemporary account. They were skinned, sliced, and horribly mutilated, and finally burned alive by vengeful women determined to wring the last shriek and convulsion from their agonized bodies. Children died screaming under the high plains moon.’ 

Gore Vidal, writing in his memoir, Palimpsest, found amusing “the frightful fates that had to befall Williams’ protagonists…whose heroes, when not castrated, are eaten alive by small boys in my town of Amalfi”.

Literature, of course, is drawn from reality; and violence, often brutal and savage, has been perhaps the most common and typical expression of human nature and human society since the Paleolithic.  It is not so much that wars have been continually fought for petty and geopolitical conditions since societies were formed; but that pitiless violence, slaughter, rape, decapitations, and disembowelments have been common throughout history.  Authors, playwrights, and artists have sought to make sense out of such mayhem and to suggest what this says about the human condition and human nature.

Perhaps the greatest spectacle of collective and individual savagery the world has ever seen was the bloody civilian slaughter of civilian populations  by the mounted armies of Genghis Khan which burst out of the Asian steppes and conquered lands from Europe to the Far East.  

They did it through brutality and intimidation, unmitigated savagery, and universal violence.  Populations cowered at his arrival, decapitated heads of resisters were impaled on spikes, and blood and carnage fouled the streets as his armies advanced.  There was no temperance, no moral reflection, no hesitancy – just unrestrained mercilessness.

So, what then of those who claim the opposite? Territorialism, war, civil conflict, ethnic rivalry and 10,000 years of violent human history, they say, have nothing to do with a hardwired, questionable nature, but all to do with circumstance and the precarious nature of existence. 

Nothing whatsoever in human history even suggests the viability of this claim.  If anything, the Twentieth Century was one of the most violent, bloody, brutal, and unprogressive of any; and the 21st will undoubtedly follow suit. 

If the history of violence has never altered; if civil and military conflict is as much a part of human society as collaboration; and if there is a glorious and valorous aspect to war, it will never disappear.  Conrad, Shakespeare, Burgess, Williams, and Greene were as right as rain.

The unanswered question is why does random, brutal, savage, violence – unnecessary for survival – exist?  What is it in human nature that allows men to go off the evolutionary rails and to choose violence as a personal expression? These authors only tell of its immutability and its permanence, or resort to a tautology – Human violence exists because human beings are violent.

McCarthy, Burgess, and Williams conclude only confirm the innate, hardwired tendency to violence and barbarity exist in man and will always exist. The Stanley Kowalskis of the world will always exist because human nature – violent, aggressive, territorial, and self-interested – will always exist.  There is no ‘horror’ in Stanley’s sexually aggressive nature.

The Butcher, The Baker, The Candlestick Maker - A Sodom And Gomorrah Makes Sin Look Good

New Brighton, a small town in New England was pretty much like Thornton Wilder's fictional Grover's Corners.  Everything was in its place, settled, and secure. Much had changed since Wilder's time but New Brighton still was a model town where you could raise children, walk downtown, and join your neighbors at church suppers. 

 

Of course there were outliers - Norma Carlson gassed herself with the exhaust of her old Plymouth, Zoe and Doc Hansen got himself entangled in a love affair he never should have begun; but all in all people were content and happy. The town had negotiated the Sixties without too many young people going off the rails, survived civil rights (easy enough because there were no black people in New Brighton), feminism, and made it through the Vietnam War with valor and courage. 

Sinclair Lewis pilloried towns like New Brighton in his 1922 novel, Babbitt - towns of patriotism, boosterism 'and every other 'ism' a narrowminded burg like Zenith could muster'.  Lewis had no patience for the joviality, Rotary Club camaraderie, and faux jubilees of a town full of itself and men like Babbitt who thought it was the greatest place on earth.

 

Lewis was kinder in Main Street where a young woman from the big city tries to reform the town of Gopher Prairie but falls afoul of its parochialism, righteousness, and defiant cultural emptiness.  She leaves her husband, goes back to the big city, realizes the presumptuous of her ways, and returns to husband, son, and home. 

In Dodsworth, Lewis takes on the American bourgeois woman of means who thinks only of joining the swells of Europe before her youth has gone, and of living the life to which she feels entitled.  She is a caricature of wealthy disillusionment, of women who can never be satisfied, who haven't the intelligence or insight to appreciate the emerging, unique, commercial culture of America. 

Her husband is a Babbitt - a booster of Zenith, a successful businessman with a faith in America and embodying the very spirit that enabled it to grow and prosper - but he is not a pompous fool.  He is a good man without pretention, and he suffers at the hands of his vacuous wife. 

Small town America has always been the subject of abject ridicule, a dismissive slight without foundation.  Small town America was the heart and soul of the new republic - honest, hardworking, entrepreneurial, religious, and patriotic, the very values cited by Jefferson.  Yet, cities grew and along with growth and prosperity came art, literature, and a sophisticated cafe life - a natural home for an indifference to simpler, more foundational values. 

At the time of this story, New Brighton like many other small towns in America, found itself squeezed by the big cities nearby - not in terms of land development or radical urban transformation, but culture.  Young people in New Brighton wanted big city life while their parents wanted to to conserve the past, to preserve those very American values which were the foundation of America. 

Yet the allure of the big city did not just attract the young, it affected everyone.  The confines of a small town - inhibiting, cloistering, infantilizing - were seen clearly for the first time, and the town began to change from within. 

Sexual propriety, once received wisdom in the town, became a thing of derision, and before long Emma Baker, longtime dutiful wife of the town pharmacist began to take indiscriminate lovers.  Harvey Small, the town optometrist punched his ticket every Friday evening for a weekend with Fannie Mae Barker, formerly of New Orleans, now residing, thanks to Harvey, in a small condo on the Upper East Side.  Sister Mary Joseph shed her habit, her faith, and her virginity and was the talk of the town. 

Civic propriety - obeying the laws, regulations, and stipulations of society - which had long been the cornerstone of New Brighton rectitude - eroded, and the town became a mini-epicenter for money laundering and bank fraud. Harrison Plummer was as canny and deceptive as Enron's Jeffrey Skilling, and used his small independent bank as the fulcrum for much larger doings. 

Yet the town somehow maintained its Grover's Corners image.  On the surface it was still a model of rectitude, faith, and neighborliness. 

Nathaniel Hawthorne in The House of the Seven Gables wrote of the indelible influence of the past, and almost mystical presence of family and town history which influence the present; and so it seemed with New Brighton.  

The worst offenders, those who represented the polar opposite of what the town was a hundred years ago, were still intent on showing the town as it should be.  An article in the New York Times as part of a five-part series on small town America, limned the praises of New Brighton:

The smell of freshly baking bread, the cheery welcomes, the friendly, efficient, respectful service at clothiers, barbers, diners, and banks all were signs of a very American spirit that has always been at the heart of the republic.  Up and down Main Street, the town displays its pride, its patriotism, and its faith

The greatest boondoggle ever, said most residents who read the article, a masterful charade, a marvelous bit of tomfoolery.  New Brighton was indeed an American town, but not that limned by the Times reporter.  It had become simply a mini-version of American bourgeois society - rapacious, sexually indifferent, indecent, amoral, and ambitious - and, best of all, had perfected the art of deception. Image was everything.  There was enough of a centripetal social consciousness in the town for everyone to hew to its old ethical and moral center.  

The residents of New Brighton knew their Bible well.  God created Man but soon after the Creation found him wanting, and so sent the flood to destroy all but a select few. Noah and his family would repopulate the world with goodness. 

When that did not work, and Noah's descendants turned out to be just as vile, faithless, and immoral as those before him, God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah in a fiery blaze, a message to the world that order and faith would return or else. 

That too failed, the lesson was not heeded, so God sent his only begotten son, Jesus, to earth, to die on the cross for the redemption of all sins and to promise salvation for all who followed him, and that - as the residents of New Brighton and the rest of the world saw - didn't work either. 

There are still churches everywhere - a good, Hollywood display of divine mercy and salvation - but they stand alone amidst all the seedy goings-on around them. Image is everything. 

New England has never been home to religious revivals, but if it had been, fire and brimstone preachers would have taken to the pulpit to call out the moral degradation of the town and the hypocritical show of good behavior.

As it is, New Brighton remains your typical American town - butcher, baker, candlestick maker up front; Sodom and Gomorrah behind; and a Hollywood happy ending to all. 

African Dictators - Charity, Foreign Aid, And Nothing Down, The Greatest Scam Of The Century

Justin Blair had worked for Africa Development Associates, a non-profit agency funded by the US government to assist African countries on their path to economic development.  As such he was a frequent visitor to many sub-Saharan nations which after independence charted their way to full membership in the commonwealth of nations but which fell short.  Colonialism, went the current meme, was an insidious, destructive, and demeaning movement with lasting effects, so it was no surprise that African nations on every point on the compass were finding emergence into the competitive, modern world difficult. 

On that assumption, liberal Western governments decided to give them a helping hand, and millions of dollars in foreign aid and the expertise that accompanied it were handed out on trust.  Surveillance, financial vigilance, and private sector accountability would be unnecessary given the good will, spirit, and intelligence of the continent's new rulers. 

This generosity was a boon to the big men who took power after independence. No fools and anxious to repay those who helped them accede to power and to play the credulous, black-loving European nations for fools these men quickly consolidated power and authority, and ruled their fiefdoms with an iron hand. 

 

They were as canny as any modern European dictator.  In fact many African regimes with their secret police, amply and generously financed military, and brutal, intimidated, unrestrained power were as successful as Stalin.  Their gulags were as cruel and penitential, their bullying, threats, and insidious influence as universal and effective as Papa Doc Duvalier in Haiti. 

These big men had no interest in civil governance, nor any interest in any constituency except those willing to support them.  They encouraged international private contractors to mine their natural resources and took a healthy bite from each negotiated agreement.  Everyone was happy, for the oil, gas, and mineral companies made millions from African underground wealth, the big men were delighted, for their Swiss and offshore bank accounts grew, and Western governments, turning a blind eye to corruption, praised them for their important developmental advances. 

And so it was that Justin Blair was sent as special State Department, Agency for International Development envoy to a resource-rich central African country.  Wined and dined and put up at the new five-star hotel built on the banks of the river, its top floors overlooking the canopy of a thousand miles of forest, Justin was always eager to travel.  He knew that his job was not to reform the N'gomo government, but to keep the President and his associates happy and supportive of America. 

During his watch millions of unaccountable dollars were 'invested' in the country, and at each non-performing audit, loans and grants were renewed and doubled.  'We have learned from our mistakes' was the popular meme in official Washington, as Congress, anxious to keep a foothold in Africa and a bulwark against Russian and Chinese influence, and to show their African American constituents that they meant business, kept the sluice gates open. 

The World Bank's Annual Development Report was a classic of self-interest.  The Bank, sitting on trillions of dollars of reserves, was in the business of lending them, and few if any country's loans were ever cancelled.  The report was high-chicanery and obfuscation, charts, numbers, equations, and quotations all pointing to 'a better job next time'.  It was a joke. 

Everyone was in on the scam.  The Scandinavians, seeing socialist potential in the person of Tanzania's Julius Nyerere, gave him untold financial resources.  France and the UK, hoping to retain at least some presence in their old colonies were equally generous; and the big men raked it all in, siphoned it off to Aruba and Barbados, and lived like kings.

The Minister of Finance of a West African country when challenged by a US contractor for total non-performance and for the disappearance of $11.5 million in grant monies, adjusted his burnous, took a sip of tea, and stood to his full six-foot height, and replied.  'With all due respect' he began and went on to give a post-independence history lesson.  'I am in high office because of the undying support of my family, my tribe, my village, and last but not least, my government; and I will repay them in that order'. 

The political algorithm was different in Africa, Justin Blair knew.  It wasn't so much venal political corruption as it was in the West but a moral corruption - the repayment of sacred debts. The Big Men of Africa - all of them - operated under a different code of principles if not honor.  

The United States, still beholden to political exceptionalists who insisted on accountability and the proper implementation of reformist conditionalities, kept up the hypocritical drumbeat.  The State Department kept banging on about doing the right thing, but turned a blind eye when the Big Men did nothing of the sort. 

They caviled, bitched, and moaned about the Chinese who went to Africa with no agenda except national self interest.  They told Angolan dictators that they would rebuild the country's entire transport infrastructure for a guaranteed, permanent, below market price of oil.  Simple. No judicial reforms, no demands for free and fair elections, just a mutually favorable deal. 

Justin Blair was a favorite of Joshua N'gomo and his colleagues in neighboring nations all sitting on billions of underground wealth and welcoming to the invitations and support of the West.  Justin was complaisant, dutiful to his terms of reference provided by the State Department but also accepting of N'gomo's.  Justin would recite chapter and verse of America's conditionalities - reform of the judiciary, free and fair elections - and sit quietly while N'gomo nodded and looked elsewhere. 

Under the penumbra of 'moral corruption', there was no chance in hell that the United States would make any headway against the Chinese in Africa; and yet its diplomats and development specialists kept banging their heads against a wall.  'We must do right by black people' they and their Congressional supporters insisted. 

It all came to an end in President Donald Trump's second term when he abolished USAID and put an end to the scam of complicity that had persisted for so long.  Other foreign aid agencies like the development banks were still in business, and Justin had no difficulty securing consultancies.  When Justin returned to Africa under new auspices but with the same tacit understanding, he was enthusiastically welcomed by President N'gomo, put up at the five-star Independence Hotel and introduced to Fatima Diallo, a Fulani princess, who would be his companion for the duration of his visit. 

International development was still alive and well, thank God, reflected Justin.  And as long as there is credulousness, a persistent debt to the black man, and an exceptionalism that no Western nation has been able to expunge, there always will be.