Dan Carlin continues to intrigue me as I roll through his historical and 'common sense' podcasts. In one of his, he speaks of WW1 as the birth of the modern era and that all of us were, before our understanding of what a meat grinder modern warfare is, brainwashed and naive about the romance of battle. I only buy that halfway.
What I tend to believe these days is that human beings invent conflict and that we do so as a socially constructive thing. Along the lines of 'constructive chaos' and 'purification by fire' human beings naturally inject dissonance into harmonious situations. We get bored of peace. We want to advocate. We need contrast.
Nulan has found research:
New research from Vanderbilt University shows for the first time that the brain processes aggression as a reward – much like sex, food and drugs – offering insights into our propensity to fight and our fascination with violent sports like boxing and football.
Yeah football!
Fistfights
One of the fascinating things I learned from Doc as he was going through LAPD training is that men generally fight with their fists as a result of a kind of evolution. That is to say we have evolved to naturally engage in non-lethal combat. A punch in the nose stings much more than it injures. To really hurt somebody, to deliver a deadly blow or to knowingly pull the trigger, you need to be trained. Otherwise, the way men fight naturally, they will inflict pain but exhaust each other long before any permanent damage is done. As a method of conflict resolution what I will term dueling or chivalrous battle is a kind of naturally rewarded kind of thing. There is a difference.
Martial Arts
Even martial arts of the sort with which we have been entertained over the years in my generation is, upon closer inspection, nowhere near as deadly as it appears. They are, in my estimation, primarily ritualized exercises after a style of combat.
Fight Club
I won't belabor the point, but I will note that there are some indications that we've engendered a new popular wave of interest in 'fight club'. In my neighborhood and surely elsewhere, boxing gyms have become increasingly common. There are a few new films coming out this year with such brawling as their vehicle, a clear indication that more Americans are paying attention to such matters.
--
It has long been my assertion that we'd be better off in society if we were less litigious and more chivalric. There is some level of small claims court we should be able to obviate, were we to have some ritualized code of 'taking it outside'. When I grew up, conflict resolution via fisticuffs was understood and implicit. No man was a man merely through possession of the truth, he was required the courage of his convictions. Somehow I think we ingested a bit too much of MLK's highminded pacifism for our own good and now a generation of passive-aggressives have had us compartmentalize aggressive violence outside of the realm of actual personal justice. The man who throws a punch today is considered always wrong. His reasons are always considered irrational but not actually considered. He has breached the artificial line of rational conflict resolution, which is to negotiate without dignity, to connive a solution, to make whatever deal can be made. This is the sad, subversive nature of our society today.
As such it seems to me that we have the presence of injustice, and as I started writing this piece several days ago without the benefit of several books of Plato's Republic fresh in mind, I was on a tack to show how we are by nature restless with peace. But it is not so much an innate restlessness I think, but that we do not trust the conditions under which our restfulness was achieved. We perceive in the order of things a lack of controlling virtue as well as a stifling of change. This particularly in our personal lives and by extension in the life of the nation. It doesn't take much insight to perceive Obama's presidential campaign as yet another example of a populist appeal to those within our society adjudged permanently dissatisfied and ready for some sort of change-y revolution. But whether or not he or any other such candidate is prepared to offer change is beside the point. Can he offer justice? Can he or anyone undo the conditions which support those whose connivance gives us lax ease? I doubt it. I think rather that this is something which must emanate from people who are prepared to seek justice in themselves and locally in their daily affairs. The nation will be saved by righteous men punching wicked men in the nose and by judges who are inevitably buoyed by and approving of such just actions as litigations inevitably ensue.
This is the aggression of truth. The righteous man must be vigorously inspired by it and the wicked must be intimidated by its presence in righteous vigor. To abandon this passion is to prepare for the grave.
I take this evidence of natural aggression to be a sign that we must find a virtuous expression of it. If we cannot, then we are doomed to hatred of our very nature. So aggression in defense of righteousness is, to my way of thinking, the proper course.
Recent Comments