The value of violence

The blade itself incites to deeds of violence.

Odysseur to Telemachus, The Odyssey, Book XIX

Violence is such an unavoidable feature of life that it tends to appear in any conversation that starts about half a bottle in. In the news we have violence between states. We have widespread social unrest. We have violence between identity groups as a more prominent feature of discourse. We have the violence of the state against its people. We have violence in our media. Violence everywhere.

And in any given wine-fuelled conversation that broaches the subject of violence you can pick out four kinds of perspectives, whatever the specific issue at hand:

1. Violence is something instrumental. People usually quote Hobbes for this. To achieve our goals in a state of nature that’s “nasty, brutish, and short”, violence can sometimes be a means to an end. Law enforcement use it to stop us being taken advantage of. We use it to overthrow institutions we don’t like. Violence might not be nice, but it can be useful.
2. Violence is something inherent to the human condition. This is similar to the instrumental case, but here the emphasis is on the inevitability of violence. You see this in philosophers like Arendt, or Freud, or Girard. We are violent creatures, and so we beget violence.
3. Violence is something pathological. Error, incompetence, ignorance, or simply the actions of the poorly adjusted to the world are the things that spur us to violence. Stephen Pinker is the most recent proponent of this view. Violence is unavoidable, but we arc toward a world without violence as we address these kinds of issues.
4. Violence is a social construct. I’m not sure anyone applies this to all violence, but some like to wave forms of violence away as not really violence. I guess Foucault is the example that comes to mind, or Judith Butler. We define violence, through our history and culture. Some things are interpreted as violence as a result.

What these perspectives mean is that any conversation which circles the issue of violence will end in a fight between people who are for violence (or inured to it), and people who are against it (or don’t think it’s real).

This isn’t really a very interesting conversation to me. Violence might be inherent, or it might be a pathology, but I suspect we’re pretty far away from finding out.

A more interesting question to me, is when is violence actually useful? It might not be a desirable solution to problems, but that doesn’t seem to be stopping us from deploying it. So, rather than asking questions about the necessity of it, we might be better served asking questions about the utility. Because looking at utility highlights something that would probably make us think of violence a little differently.

¶Violence against children

I’ll start with violence against children, because my dev psych classes were the first time I really thought about this. It’s not very trendy to beat kids these days, but I distinctly remember Kay Bussey, who worked with Albert Bandura on the infamous bobo-doll experiments, pointing out that violent forms of discipline DO change the behaviour of the child, and this is why people do it.¹

But, she went on, it only works when the aggressor is there. If the kid knows you’re going to beat them for doing something wrong, they won’t do it when you could catch them doing it. Sensible indeed. But this learning doesn’t transfer. It’s not going to stop them doing it when you’re not around. It doesn’t teach them that the thing you’re beating them for is wrong. It just teaches them not to do it when they are likely to get beaten for it.

Whether I’ve paraphrased my 10-year old memory of her lecture correctly or not,² this is more-or-less the academic consensus. Violence as a tool to modify a child’s behaviour is effective only so far as the threat of violence is present. Outside of that, the behaviour will be unaffected.

More, almost uniformly the amount of physical punishment corresponds to the levels of aggressive behaviour we see in the kids who are punished. Do more violence, and so will they. Do less violence, and so will they. Plus, there’s an increased risk that the kid will grow up with some kind of mental health issue. There are obviously some issues with trying to measure these kinds of things, given how untrendy it is to tell people about all your child-beating. But the effects are strong enough to be worth noticing.

This makes sense. Kids are learning from you all the time. But in this case, they aren’t learning not to do the bad thing. They’re learning to hit things when things are doing bad things. And because, like any high-arousal state, rage and aggression are very moreish, it rewards them for the aggression in the process.

So this is our first lesson about the utility of violence. Instant behaviour modification when the threat of violence is present. But, no transfer of that behaviour. And you increase your total violence output as a function of the violence you put in.

This is actually the entire article. You could stop reading now if you wanted. Because when I picked this trend up, I noticed that it basically applies in any other context. But there are a few little side notes along the way, so we’ll explore those too.

¶Violence as a deterrent against crime

We, as a society, love to do violence against offenders. We love to put them in jail. We love punitive rehabilitation programmes. We love to see them punished. We love it so much we have TV shows that are just about this. We love it. But is it useful?

The role of justice isn’t just to stop crimes. Officially, we want to rehabilitate them, provide restitution to victims, deter them from doing it again, and punish them for what they’ve done wrong.

Mostly, though, we just punish them, and hope the punishments are severe enough to deter them. I don’t think anyone is confused about how ineffective current measures are at rehabilitation. Just google it. Not good. And punishment forms part of restitution, but mostly we just pay victims and I guess that is supposed to fix the problem. So we’ll ignore those two.

But do the punishments deter people from doing crimes? That is, are punishments effective? We are very lucky because the U.S. Department of Justice has already answered that question for us (pdf):

• The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment …
• Sending an individual convicted of a crime to prison isn’t a very effective way to deter crime …
• Police deter crime by increasing the perception that criminals will be caught and punished …
• Increasing the severity of punishment does little to deter crime …
• There is no proof that the death penalty deters criminals …

Some google scholaring roughly confirms this handy diagnosis, and conforms to what we learned in high school legal studies.

But this pattern is awfully familiar, right? The punishment isn’t changing the behaviour of people. As the DoJ notes:

More severe punishments do not “chasten” individuals convicted of crimes

No, it’s not the punishment. It’s the possibility of being caught that matters. And:

Research has found evidence that prison can exacerbate, not reduce, recidivism. Prisons themselves may be schools for learning to commit crimes …

Indeed, there is plenty of literature that demonstrates that prison sentences introduce the same issues as beating kids. More behavioural problems. More negative mental health outcomes.

But the main finding is that the violence does not change the behaviour. Only the threat of getting caught. That, and the fact that there is more violence out as a function of violence in.

¶Political violence

In Army, instead of reading the well thought out doctrinal texts on violence and its uses, it was much more sexy to read Carl Von Clausewitz (or pretend to). Clausewitz reckoned that war is just another domain of politics:

War is merely the continuation of policy by other means.

Clausewitz On War

This is, I think, the default view of political violence. Both inside a state and out of it, violence is a tool for furthering political aims. A variation on this view is that the threat of violence underpins civil society itself. This is the philosophy of Machiavelli or Hobbes. Even Arendt (pdf), in highlighting what she thought was the inherently dissolutionary nature of political violence, points out that violence in a revolutionary context might become necessary.

But we can see evidence that the utility of violence in the political sphere mirrors elsewhere. For a while, we tried attrition warfare, throwing bodies at a front until one side ran out. Now, we’ve pivoted to manouevre warfare—exploiting an enemy’s weaknesses as fast as possible with decisive actions to achieve decisive victories. This transition was, in part, because it’s cheaper to defeat an enemy quickly. But also, because a slow war of attrition just invites more violence. The opposing force has time to change tactics. Irregular or guerrilla forces spring up in the margins. Insurgencies have time to put themselves together. Violence is only useful at altering behaviour if it’s fast. This is so much a problem that we’re now pivoting to so-called ‘fourth-generation warfare’, because manouevre simply isn’t fast enough.

More generally, the assertion of power through state violence, or the threat of violence, only generates compliance under threat. Without complementary initiatives—what you’ll hear called ‘hearts and minds’—the violence will only manifest in deepening suspicion and resistance. You can just look to our decades-long adventures in the middle-east. All for us to simply pull out in 2023. And we weren’t the first. The Soviets tried it before us and pulled out in 1989.

More generally still, a large portion of any state’s political energy is spent on military deterrence. Deterrence theory is all about how a threat of retaliation prevents conflict. But the very premise is indicative. If the argument is that, without the deterrent threat of violence, adversaries would be spurred to act, then a strategy of deterrence just highlights that violence creates a form of stasis, not change.

Like beating children, or locking up crims, shooting at people only changes what they’re doing when you’re shooting and is more likely to result in them shooting back.

¶BDSM

BDSM covers a pretty broad range of sexual proclivities, but usually at the core there are those acting more submissively, and those acting more dominantly, and often this relationship is enacted through violence. What’s different about BDSM is that, here and unlike my other examples, the violence (where present) is something both parties want. We might imagine that here my thesis might start to fray. But actually, we see similar dynamics.

Unfortunately, the academic literature on BDSM is limited in the extreme. Fortunately, there are plenty of people writing stuff about this. So we’ll go for a more qualitative approach. I picked up the books that repeatedly came up in my first few Reddit searches for literature recommendations, and you’ll find this theme over and over again:

Active dominance … to sit back and expect me to submit while he passively accepts it without dominating would not work for me

Kacie Cunningham Conquer Me

An essential thing to understand about taking control is that if we want to keep it, we have to use it … feeling less controlled is almost certain to make them less inclined to do what I tell them

Anton Fulmen The Heart of Dominance

It’s not just about tying someone up or giving orders; it’s about establishing a rhythm of power exchange that is reassessed and reinforced each day to ensure satisfaction.

Dossie Easton and Janet W. HardyThe New Topping Book

We see the very same trend. To maintain the desired behaviour, the violence, or threat of it, should be constantly present. I’m admittedly using violence a bit loosely here, but the trend holds. It’s so pervasive that there is an entire category of people who are disobedient on purpose to engender more violence. BDSM is about feeling dominant or feeling submissive, whatever your motivation, and so for that to be true the opportunities for those feelings have to be present too.

So, just like cases where the violence is undesirable, the utility of violence when it’s wanted is still in the perceived threat of it. It does nothing to change behaviour on its own. And it encourages more violence. Here, not as a response, but as an ongoing concern.

¶Outro

Violence is inevitable. But this little adventure through the places violence rears its head shows that violence is also probably overutilised by its very nature. The utility of violence is almost never in the violence itself, but only in the threat of it. It might create immediate behaviour change, but only for so long as the threat is active, and we feel like we might get caught. And, in most cases, violence engenders more violence.

It’s not a groundbreaking idea. It’s probably not even original. But it sure beats the hell out of the old “we need violence”, “no we don’t” conversations I’m normally a part of.