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 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.