Maybe Not Everyone Does Want Peace: Violence is a Choice and a Variable

Many years ago, I was writing an paper for a graduate seminar that I hoped to submit for publication. In that paper, I had made what I thought was a clever claim about conflict resolution: "everyone wants peace, they just want it on their own terms." I thought at the time that this was a particularly insightful piece of wisdom (being a grad student, I didn't know any better).

Before I sent the paper to the journal I was targeting, I ran it by my advisor. He pointed to that sentence and said, "No they don't. Take that out, it's wrong." Lightly stung, I followed his advice - which did get me published (or, at least, it helped).

Ever since then, that question has stuck with me: is it really true that everyone wants peace, or are there people who actually prefer war? Over time, I've come to see more and more that he was right - there are clearly people in the world who prefer violence and conflict over peace.

At first, it was easy to see why this might be true for some. In any conflict (especially a widespread one), there are people who benefit from it. Leaders who amass political power because they do well in war situations, arms dealers and middlemen who make a fortune off of conflict - it's easy to see why these kinds of folks prefer war to peace. Slobodan Milosevic did much better when his country was actually fighting wars than when it stopped.

But these are rationalist arguments - people prefer conflict (especially, in the case of political leaders and arms dealers, conflicts fought by other people) because they get something out of it (money, power, etc.) But could it also be the case that some people just prefer fighting for its own sake?

There was an excellent blog post today at Political Violence @ a Glance (a collection of some of the top minds in academic conflict studies - really smart people) on just this point. You can read the full blog post here, titled "Some People Just Like to Fight". The sophisticated arguments connecting genetics to circumstances are worth the read by themselves.

For those who don't want to wade through an excellent but decidedly academic essay, here are a few take-away points:

- There are genetic variations that predispose people to be more or less prone to violence. These variations are not absolutely determining of behavior, but they do matter. Some people, in other words, are biologically more likely to be violent than others.

- People who are predisposed to be violent are often pushed to be so by their circumstances, especially when growing up. This goes a long way to explain why widespread violence (in civil wars, for example) seems to spawn further generations of violence.

- For people who like to fight, the reward is not the "spoils of victory" - money, power, what have you. The reward is internal - fighting and winning feels good.

These are really important observations for a host of reasons, but largely because most of our thinking on how to resolve conflicts ignores this reality. We assume that people fight, or engage in conflict, because they want something. That was my original, grad-student wisdom - give people what they want and they'll stop fighting. Even the Milosevics and Victor Bouts of the world can be bought - they have simply learned a way to profit from other people fighting.

But this only gets us so far. If there are people out there - schoolyard bullies, street thugs, overbearing CEOs - who get pleasure from the conflict itself, our usual tactics won't work. There is no Getting to Yes with someone who wants to fight just to fight.

Of course, this presents us with another diagnosis problem - how can we tell if someone is a "fighter, not a lover"? That's a challenge for another day. But this does suggest, at the least, that it's good to be prepared not only to seek peace where it can be had, but to defend oneself when peace is not an option.

The Thin Line of Civilization: More Evidence That the Demons Aren't Very Far from the Surface

In the spring of last year I wrote about a case at Dartmouth College in which a group of students disrupted a presentation to prospective students, in protest over incidents of homophobia, racism, and other similar social ills. 

The story became news not because of the protest itself (these things are not unheard of on college campuses), but because of the backlash that ensued and the college's decision to shut itself down for a day in response. Much of that backlash was viscously, even graphically, threatening, and closing the school seemed to me an appropriately strong response to an outbreak of barbarism online. You can read my original post here.

My conclusion in that piece was that, rather than dismissing the rash of anonymous online threats as "harmless" or "blowing off steam", they are indicative of something important. As much progress as we have made as a species towards something we collectively understand, more or less, as "civilization", we are still not as far from its opposite as we would like to think. Ideas and thoughts walk among us that are decidedly barbaric and which, when considered in the cool light of day, are contemptible. 

One of these is that it is appropriate to use violence against another person simply because you disagree with or dislike them. My conclusion: these "demons" are never very far from the surface, and they bear close watching - especially within our own thoughts, words, and actions.

Today a story came out in the news that illustrates, in a horribly tragic way, the point I was making:

Man Killed in Dispute Over Texting in Theater

Two people, the shooter and the victim, disagreed over the appropriate use of a cell phone for texting in a movie theater (according to some reports, during the previews and therefore before the "main" movie had started). This in itself is not surprising - with new technologies, there are plenty of disagreements over when it is appropriate to use them or not. Most people understand that making noise in a theater is inappropriate; sending texts is, at this point, something of a grey area and certainly something about which reasonable people could disagree.

The shooter also decided that he was sufficiently bothered that he should take steps to alter the victim's behavior - to get him to stop texting. This is somewhat less common, but also at least potentially within reason. The fact that the shooter had been a police officer and was probably used to giving direction to others may have contributed. Again, while this brings the conflict to light it's not outside the bounds of civilization.

At this point, however, things get troublesome. The shooter apparently felt it appropriate not only to try to change the other man's behavior but to escalate the conflict verbally when the victim refused to cooperate. Not getting his way, the shooter decided it was appropriate to get angry and to yell - in the middle of a public theater - at the victim for continuing to text after being told to stop. This is clearly problematic - among private citizens, if you start an angry yelling match every time someone does something that bothers you you're going to be hoarse a lot of the time. 

Once you escalate a conflict, emotion takes over - and that's where you give the demons room. Because it was at that point that the shooter - an ex-cop who presumably had scads of training in the safe and appropriate use of firearms - pulled out his gun and shot and killed the victim. What had started as a disagreement over the social rules of texting in public ended in death.

For all civilized folk, this is a drastic overreaction. Unless the victim had produced a lethal weapon of his own - and there's no indication that he had done so, or even that he was armed - the shooter's action was completely, totally, utterly barbaric. It was far beyond the pale of civilization. I assume the criminal justice system will do its work and, absent some other mitigating evidence, reach the same conclusion.

I've argued repeatedly before: ideas and thoughts are deadly and dangerous things. The presence of weapons - guns in particular - multiplies the danger a thousandfold. In this sense, both the NRA and its critics are right - the NRA because the gun alone is not enough to kill, and the critics because the gun lowers the threshold to, at least in some cases, unacceptably low levels. 

Having written extensively about guns in the past, that's not the point I want to emphasize here. The most important point, in my view, is this: here was a man, apparently living an otherwise normal life in society, harboring a set of ideas that led him in mere seconds to cross the line from civilization to barbarity. Whatever mixture of anger, frustration, and ideas about texting on cell phones had converged in his head were enough to push him over the edge to uncontrolled rage. And because of that mix of ideas, a woman is widowed and a three year old girl has lost her father.

I have seen it suggested (purely in speculation) that there must have been some mental illness involved. That may be true - time will certainly tell. But if so, that illness had apparently gone undetected long enough for the shooter to still be walking around, carrying a weapon and engaging in otherwise normal life. The first time he lashed out will certainly be his last, suggesting that this had not happened before.

The mental illness question aside, the lesson I draw is this: thoughts matter. Anger in particular is dangerous because it's contagious - spend enough time around angry people and you will become angry yourself. Watch enough anger-spewing on television and some of it is bound to rub off. This is why I so despise politicians who play on anger and fear to win votes - I don't care about the particulars of their position so much as I understand the extent to which they are poisoning the well of society. Usually, that poison doesn't lead to death - but how many yelling matches, how many fights, slaps, instances of domestic abuse, have come from that sewage?

This is the reality of our time (and of many times): that though we tout our civilization, we spend too much time polluting it, or partaking in the pollution. It is this reality that the NRA dare not confront - that perhaps we are simply not civilized enough for unfettered access to lethal weapons. If men were angels, James Madison wrote, no government would be necessary - but we clearly are not. The best we can do is to spend as much time as we can cultivating, as Steven Pinker puts it, the better angels of our nature.

Tribalism in Politics is Going Mainstream

I was going to write a blog post about the kerfuffle over the George Washington Bridge and traffic jams apparently caused as some kind of "political payback". What was kindly described as "rough-and-tumble New Jersey politics" by one news outlet is really just an example of one of my favorite themes: the Tribalism of American Politics. Political staffers willing to cause serious problems (even, by some accounts, risk lives) for other people simply to "get back at" someone on the "other team" isn't "rough-and-tumble": it's stupid and barbaric. The difference between them and the interahamwe of Rwanda is simply one of degree, not of kind. While the facts are still emerging, good for Governor Christie for at least firing a couple of them on the spot - though I wonder how damaged their careers really will be.

But just as I was getting ready to go through that scandal, I read this piece from Ezra Klein in the Washington Post:

The depressing psychological theory that explains Washington

At long last, somebody in the mainstream gets what I've been writing about for years. He even uses the term "tribalism"! Yes, the account he gives here is not especially nuanced, but hey, he's a journalist - the main points are right even if this stuff has been around for 20 years or more.

And he's right that it is depressing, at least from a certain point of view. One of our myths about ourselves and our politics is that we have somehow evolved above all of this kind of barbaric your-tribe-vs-my-tribe stuff. But in fact, we haven't. Those of us who study politics have known this for a long time. I tell my students, only half-joking: if I'm not depressing you, I'm not doing my job.

I find the tribal tendencies of politics only partly depressing, however. There is in fact an antidote - it just lies outside the political system itself. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have the answer - indeed, they don't WANT they answer because they profit from the system that tribalism builds. Asking either party to fix American politics is like asking Bernie Madoff to strengthen your finances: the result will be predictable, but it won't be what you want.

The answer, at least psychologically, is a rejection of tribal loyalty. I actually know a goodly number of people who have, without any superhuman effort, achieved this. They can evaluate the ideas and positions of both parties with equal weight, think through their logical costs and consequences, and decide which ones make sense (if any do). They don't think of this process as an explicit rejection of one party or of the system as a whole; they just think of it as thinking.

Those of us in higher education who like to talk about "teaching people how to think critically" - what we do is more important than we know. And I'm not at all convinced that we aren't reasonably good at it - as I've said before, I don't know how many non-tribalists there are in America. It may be that we're the largely silent majority. Sounds like a research project for some up-and-coming grad student.

In the meanwhile: reject the politics of tribe. Think. It's a habit that gets easier with practice.

Tribalism and Polarized Politics: Things We Know

There's an excellent article in the Washington Post's "Monkey Cage" blog that is well worth reading for anybody interested in the polarized, tribal politics of the United States. You can find it here, and I encourage you to read it in full.

Here are a few choice pieces that are worth emphasizing:

Based on both qualitative and quantitative evidence, the roots of our current polarization go back almost 40 years to the mid-1970s.

The author points out that this rules out a lot of more modern theories as to why our politics is so dysfunctional - Clinton's impeachment, the 2000 presidential election, the election of Barack Obama. This has been a long time coming, folks, and you have to go back a ways to find the "good old days".

Then there's this doozy:

The evidence points to a major partisan asymmetry in polarization.  Despite the widespread belief that both parties have moved to the extremes, the movement of the Republican Party to the right accounts for most of the divergence between the two parties.

For those that struggle (I count myself among them at times) with the attempt to be "bi-partisan" in our laying of blame, this does not come as a shock. If the question is, why is American politics so viciously polarized, it's hard not to blame the Republican party. Over the past 40 years, Democrats haven't drifted appreciably to the left (a bit, on average, mostly by replacing white Southern Democrats with African-Americans and Latinos from other parts of the country). But the Republican party has run so far to the right that at this point Ronald Reagan would likely lose the primaries for not being conservative enough. Check out the graphs in the article above - this is measurable data, not simply where-you-sit opinion.

There's more:

Features of our electoral system such as political gerrymandering and partisan primaries are not likely to be important causes of polarization.  That the House and Senate have polarized in tandem suggests that partisan districting cannot be a primary cause and researchers have failed to find much of an incremental contribution. 

Gerrymandering of House seats is a popular target. I'm not a fan by any means - I think we should reduce gerrymandering as much as possible. But it turns out not to actually cause the problem of hyper partisanship.

This comes as no surprise:

The combination of high ideological stakes and intense competition for party control of the national government has all but eliminated the incentives for significant bipartisan cooperation on important national problems.  Consequently, polarization has reduced congressional capacity to govern. Of significant concern is the extent to which this reduction in legislative capacity has contributed to a shift in the constitutional balance as it enhanced opportunities for executive and judicial encroachments on legislative prerogatives.

There is an irony here, of course. The folks most likely (at least recently) to howl about excessive executive and judicial power have been conservatives. Yet the tribal politics they have created (see above) creates this problem. They have created their own Frankenstein monster, which of course just feeds back into more take-no-prisoners ideological viewpoints.

But here, in my view, is the most important point:

Voters are primarily changing their issue positions to match the partisanship rather than switching parties. 

This is the true essence of Tribalism. We want to think that American politics is in some sense rational - that voters have ideas about policy preferences, and that they choose their party affiliation based on which party comes closest to those preferences. In fact, the hyper-partisan environment of the last two generations means that things are quite the reverse: people choose a tribe (or are born into one), and then believe what the tribe tells them to believe. Evidence is that this process is largely pushed by political elites, who have every incentive to whip up their followers into a frenzy in order to win elections.

To some, these observations will confirm what they thought was true. Some will refuse to believe any of this, and will immediately cast aspersions on me, the Washington Post, the Monkey Cage, the author of the article, or President Obama for carrying out some vast left-wing conspiracy to brainwash Americans with this thing we call "science". And hopefully, some folks who have been struggling in between the tribes will take note and evaluate. I think there may be a lot more non-tribal Americans than our current measures capture - but that's just a hunch. For those folks, there is still hope. For those who have sold their souls to the tribal system - well, this is what you wanted. Welcome to Partisan Paradise!

A Peek at the Inner World of Firearms Fanaticism

This article on this front page of this morning's New York Times caught my eye:

Banished for Questioning the Gospel of Guns

The story is of a firearms journalist who has been effectively banished from the gun-publishing world for writing a column in Guns & Ammo pointing out that all Constitutional rights are restricted under some circumstances. He wrote, classically, that free speech - the right that nearly everybody agrees on - doesn't mean you can yell "fire" in a crowded theater. For writing this he has been fired from Guns & Ammo and essentially declared persona non grata by the industry that publishes on firearms, after a 40+ year career in that business.

The story is an interesting one for what it reveals about the subculture which these publications cater to. Intermedia, the company that owns Guns & Ammo and a number of similar publications, is a private company and has every right to say who can or can't write for them. This is manifestly not a case of this fellow's First Amendment rights being violated. And I suppose the fact that hatred, vitriol, and death threats (yes, there's a deep irony there) poured into his email box after the column was published is not really that surprising.

But the worldview behind the hatred and the firing are interesting - and, from the point of view of a democratic republic built on pluralism, disturbing. The money quote on the Times article is from Richard Venola, a former Guns & Ammo editor:

"We are locked in a struggle with powerful forces in this country who will do anything to destroy the Second Amendment. The time for ceding some rational points is gone."

To borrow a phrase, them's fighin' words. More specifically, they are a declaration of a state of war - a belief that there exists some group (however nebulous) of fellow Americans with whom both compromise and coexistence are impossible. No dialogue, discussion, or illuminating debate can take place. It is simply a zero-sum power struggle. It's them or us. The fact that this is consistent with much of the "self-defense thinking" of this same subculture is no accident - this is a mentality built entirely around existential zero-sum thinking.

This is not the worldview of a citizen in a wealthy, prosperous republic. This is the worldview of a religious fanatic determined at all costs to impose their view upon the rest of the world. And it is, unfortunately, a self-sustaining system: when others point out (as the fired columnist did) that absolutism is not how our system is supposed to work, that is taken as opposition that must be eliminated and proof that they are under existential threat.

The fact that, if magazine readership is a guide, there may be some 400,000 such folks is disturbing. Likely only a fraction of those are true fanatics, the kind willing to threaten violence (or even commit it) in their cause. On the other hand, the fact that even at 400,000 strong they are a tiny minority of the population means that they will not succeed in their quest to dominate the policy landscape on firearms. So there is some comfort in that.

The folks the wrote the Constitution understood, better perhaps than we do, that there would always be fanatical factions willing to stop at nothing to impose their views on the rest of us. And while we may wish that we could all be rational citizens, there will always be those that refuse rationality in the name of dogma. At the least, we can seek to understand them and contain their influence so the rest of us can live in peace.

Better Words Than I Could Write About Nelson Mandela

Over the course of the early - mid 2000s, I took several trips to South Africa. During my travels there, and through the contacts I made, I had the opportunity to get a much deeper understanding of the transformation of that nation than many in the United States, for whom it is a very far and foreign land. I also had a glimpse of what apartheid was like, and how far the country had come since the transformation began in 1990. So I joined in heart in the celebration of Nelson Mandela's life this past week following his death at the remarkable age of 95.

I never met Mandela, but I did get the opportunity to meet two of his contemporaries who were also involved in the transformation story: Mangosuthu Buthelezi and President FW de Klerk. The stories they told me, the views they shared, and the things they have written show that the old American argument about whether Mandela was a "terrorist" (a tired argument that has, sadly, resurfaced in social media this past week) was far removed from reality. Liberals and conservatives in the US argued about South Africa from a distance of thousands of miles compounded by profound ignorance on both sides. Neither condition has changed much.

Rather than write my own essay on the greatness and meaning of Mandela, I would like to share a link to a better one. My internet friend and fellow blogger, Dan Djurdjevic of The Way of Least Resistance lived in South Africa for several years during apartheid. His essay on Mandela (linked here) is truly outstanding and I commend it to you.

The Real and Messy Costs of Widespread Gun Ownership

I have blogged before about the complex calculus surrounding gun possession as a means of self-defense (here and here, among many others). I have focused on the relationship between self-defense and firearms, because self-defense is the primary justification for gun ownership given by those who advocate for few restrictions on guns. It is the battleground (if you will) on which they have chosen to fight, and so makes for a fair starting point.

In my previous writings, I've made it clear that guns can be useful for self-defense - I am neither an advocate for trying to ban all guns (an impossible task) nor a strict nonviolence pacifist. I have tried to make it clear that guns may be a useful but not sufficient condition for self-protection - many additional skills are needed (including a number not taught in most CCW classes).

On the other side of the coin - the one gun advocates rarely want to deal with in public - are the very real costs in innocent life of widespread gun ownership. I'm not talking here only of the high-profile Newtown or Aurora cases - discussions of which have often devolved into largely useless arguments over hypothetical tactics. These cases, while big in impact, are (thankfully) rare.

More problematic are the small encounters where the presence of a gun turns a senseless but probably harmful altercation into a deadly conflict. Emblematic of this kind of situation is this tragedy:

Alabama woman charged with killing fellow 'Bama fan after Iron Bowl loss

There are obviously a lot of factors at play here, and the evidence is admittedly incomplete. It is likely that alcohol played a role, which often lowers barriers and enhances strong emotions (in this case, intense disappointment over the outcome of a football game). It seems likely as well that the American worship on the altar of sports (football in particular) was an important factor, creating both the context in which strangers would gather and the emotional source of anger and frustration. Clearly if people drank less and were less consumed by sports, the conflict in this case would have been much less likely.

But it is one thing to talk about the sources of a fight between strangers, and another to talk about its outcome. I've argued before that the trite "guns don't kill people, people kill people" bumper sticker is beside the point. The reality is messier: gun's don't kill people by themselves, but they make it much, much easier.

The fact that one woman in this case had a gun didn't cause the conflict between them. It didn't make the shooter angrier about the football game, or make her dislike a complete stranger any more or less than she would have unarmed. But the presence of the gun changed one essential thing: the outcome. Without the gun, both women would be alive - possibly angry and with minor injuries, maybe even arrested on misdemeanor charges, but alive. With the gun, one woman is dead and the other's life is now ruined.

This is the reality that gun advocates need to confront, honestly and in public, if they want anyone outside of their tribe to take them seriously. The more guns are in public circulation, and the more ill-founded and even barbaric ideas people have about guns and violence, the more likely it is that minor scuffles that used to end in scrapes and bruised egos will instead end in funerals and murder cases. This is a very real price to pay for a particular form of freedom - and I think we have both the right and the responsibility to ask whether the price is too high.