The Distinctiveness of Violence: From the Biological to the Social Body

Abstract

In the last chapter it became clear that violence is so difficult to talk about because we don’t want to talk about something we can’t, or don’t want to, make sense of. We have failed even to build a language for the pain it generates. Pain speaks as sounds from our bodies. There are long-lasting somatic effects of multiple kinds from the way our bodies experience and respond to violence, as perpetrators, victims, witnesses and audiences. Violence is too close to fear of death and nothingness. It has been argued by Rene Girard, that from our earliest human settlements, we have been so afraid of the destructive cycles of violence we are capable of unleashing, that myth, religion and ritual stepped in with the ‘surrogate victim’. This was a means to ‘trick’ violence through a collective act of sacrifice aimed at preventing further reciprocal violence. From sport, entertainment and the judiciary, humans over the centuries have sought varied ways to contain and convert unbearable violence and the revenge instincts it stirs. However, this has encouraged avoidance of making sense of violence and unravelling its meanings. Violence, the previous chapter concluded, against modern intuition, appears at times to be capable of generating its own meanings, i.e. beyond any clear attachment to means or ends. Many vantage points for deepening our knowledge of violence remain, however. To what extent, for instance, can individual and interpersonal violence be explained outside the social and cultural structures of human behaviour? This chapter looks at how natural scientists make sense of violence and the body. New insights from the natural sciences, suggest that we could abandon the notion of an ontological violent human nature. Rather, we can accept that our bodies have evolved to respond to fear and other emotions, which generate insecurity. Aggression is one of these responses. It is our social relationships that damage our natural survival mechanisms and, in particular, turn aggression into violence. While persistent violence in its multiple forms cannot be reduced to embodied survival mechanisms, politics cannot ignore evidence that damage to them is made by humans and can—in principle—be unmade.