On the nature of violence

New Indian Express

25-04-2025

Nuclear sabre-rattling is back after a peaceful intermission. Following a serious attack on Ukraine, Russia's Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu said that, if threatened, his country reserves the right to nuke. The same day, in response to India unilaterally threatening to hold the Indus Waters Treaty 'in abeyance' following the Pahalgam shootings, Pakistan made a barely-veiled reference to the nuclear option.
Coincidentally, new research shows that violence usually flows from the motive of revenge. Which is another way of saying that, as in Europe and South Asia, violence tends to be an endless cycle, and Francis Fukuyama's 'end of history' was always a mirage.
Is the human race fundamentally violent, as the news and pop culture suggest, or is violence created by a small minority of sociopaths who are present in all societies? If it's the latter, did law and government evolve to protect the peaceful majority?
Until the late 20th century, these basic questions were addressed mainly through the lens of ideals and ideology the 'noble savage' attributed to Jean-Jaqcues Rousseau versus the 'nasty, brutish and short' lives bereft of central authority, which Thomas Hobbes wrote of in Leviathan.
Now, data analysis offers new insights. Steven Pinker's
The Better Angels of Our Nature
(2011) showed that while the incidence of violent death peaked in prehistoric societies, hunter-gatherers were more peaceful than the first farmers. That supported the educated guess that settled life created immovable property and fights over ownership. In an article published this month in
Works in Progress
, Phil Thomson and John Halstead used new data to elaborate on Pinker's discoveries. They say the human race has been farming and urbanising for only 4 percent of its history. Everyone was a hunter-gatherer for 96 percent of our past, when differences were less likely to be settled by force. Violence is not really in our heritage.
Thomson and Halstead reported an unexpected finding: prehistoric subsistence farmers exhibited more violence than mature agricultural societies, which seems counterintuitive. They suggest modern humans look violent because of the scale of damage we can inflict, rather than the number of outbreaks. They found that revenge is the most frequent motive, not competition. Perhaps that's why cycles of violence persist, like the bad blood between India and Pakistan. The most intractable revenge tragedies concern imaginary or fictitious historical wrongs, which fuel the careers of demagogues, who perpetuate violence.
The authors note 'our fear of violence, heightened abilities for empathy and communication, squeamishness about blood and guts, and innate dislike of bullies are, in part, solutions to the problem of violence', Indeed, hunter-gatherers ganged up against bullies who tried to gain absolute authority. But paradoxically, absolute authority has been a feature from the dawn of civilisation, and extreme inequality is visible in archaeological records.
So, some analysts have focused on the enabling conditions for violence, like gross inequality, which are embedded in the substrate of society. In the introduction to
Violence
, his 2008 collection of 'six sideways reflections' on the most disturbing trait of the human race, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek made a distinction between 'subjective' violence, whose perpetrator is clearly identified and which is amplified in culture, and 'objective' violence, the enabling conditions which lie beneath but go unnoticed because they are all too familiar.
The first is 'symbolic' violence implicit in language. Hate speech, which engages our attention, is only the tip of the iceberg. It is built on racist, casteist and classist ideas embedded in everyday language. And underlying everything is the vast substratum of 'systemic' violence, the product of the everyday functioning of politics and the economy, a vast machine which churns out inequality on a global production line.
The working of this machine has been drawing adverse attention from well before the age of production lines. William Blake wrote of 'dark satanic mills' in the 18th century. Caliban, the wild man in Shakespeare's
The Tempest
, was a product of colonialism, which in turn was a product of mass production and global commerce. Today, international differences might invite a trade war, rather than violent conflict. While it is not as sudden as a nuclear holocaust, it does serious damage to the well-being of populations.
Žižek's introduction to
Violence
closes with a retelling of an old Soviet joke that reflects mid-20th century politics and Lenin's advice to young people to never stop learning: Marx, Engels and Lenin are asked, by the god they all scorned, if they would prefer a wife or a mistress. Marx conservatively chooses a wife, the friskier Engels wants a mistress, and the tactically prudent Lenin wants both. He wants to be able to tell each woman that he must be with the other, and escape both to 'a solitary place to learn, learn and learn'.
The paradox of the present is that while mortality due to violence has plummeted, threat perceptions have soared so high they constitute the most valuable feedstock of politics and geopolitics. Conservatives and liberals, or India and Pakistan, spend more time stoking public anxieties about the other side's ambitions. Even as the number of violent incidents falls, violence is assuming a more central role in our lives. It is more important than ever to study its causes and effects—to 'learn, learn and learn'.
Pratik Kanjilal | Fellow, Henry J Leir Institute of Migration and Human Security, Fletcher School, Tufts University
(Views are personal)
(Tweets @pratik_k)