War
and human suffering have always been a very significant factor in life since
the beginning of time. Individuals and groups who challenge authority, abuse
power, and oppress others are always here to stay. Countering violence demands
sustained intellectual engagement. We are all watchmen and watchwomen, guided
by the lessons and cautions of centuries of unnecessary devastation.
No
viable critique of violence can deduce its justification from any singular,
sovereign academic who might offer reductive explanations of its causes and
propose orthodox solutions. Such a stance leads to the domestication of
thought, often in the politicized service of a select few. Instead, we need to
have a serious conversation among thinkers, advocates, artists and others that
leads to a new textual borderland of open inquiry, where poetry slips into the
demands for human dignity and the importance of trans disciplinary
conversations are not simply focused on revealing the crises of contemporary
political thought but encourage a rethinking of what it might mean to be human
in the 21st century.
Facts
worth considering are:
1. All violence has a
history. Understanding the cyclical nature of violence is crucial if we
are to gain a tangible grip on its contemporary manifestations and look to
engage in the difficult and fraught process of breaking the cycle.
2. Violence is all
about the violation of bodies and the destruction of human lives. For that
reason, violence should never be studied in an objective and unimpassioned way.
It points to a politics of the visceral that cannot be divorced from our
ethical and political concerns.
3. For violence to
take hold there is a need to suppress the memory of historical persecution. This
weaponization of ignorance points to the violence of organized forgetfulness.
4. Violence includes
the destruction of the customs, spaces and rhythms that constitute a person’s
life. Nowhere is this more evident than with the plight of millions of refugees
who are fleeing unimaginable devastation — often the destruction of all they
could wish to return to.
5. The overt
politicization of violence can render certain forms of it rational and
tolerable for public consumption. Violence, in fact, can consist of demeaning
processes intended to disqualify lives and ways of living from deserving safety
and rights. It marks out some as being naturally inferior, disposable and
expendable.
6. Addressing
violence requires rethinking what constitutes a crime against humanity. Since
the human is necessarily dependent upon thriving environmental conditions for a
sustainable existence, the problem of violence also points us toward an entire
ecology of thought.
7. Violence is not
simply carried out by irrational monsters. Sadly, most violence is not
exceptional or deviant. It has proved, time and time again, to be integral to
civilizations’ conceptual claims to truth, harnessing the discursive power of
human progress, while appealing to security and order and even taking place in the
name of freedom and justice.
8. Violence brings us
directly into ethical relations. The key here is to identify and disrupt forms
of ethical hierarchy, which allow violence to be committed upon a given animal,
human or otherwise, as it is naturalized by authenticating frameworks of
biological designation.
9. Violence begins in
the minds of people, and mostly men. As such, the problem will remain poorly
understood if it is accounted for only in terms of how and what it kills, the
scale of its destructiveness or any other quantitative measure.
10. Despite the tragic
nature of the human condition, there is resistance to violence everywhere. The
problem, however, is to convey the power of that resistance, or the barbarity
of the violence it faces, in a way that galvanizes action rather than abets the
status quo.
Humanity
is undoubtedly at a dangerous crossroad. We are being forced to ask whether we
have the ethical fortitude to save ourselves from our own veritable extinction.
The previous years have certainly been challenging in the search for answers.
As the world said goodbye to some of the best of us, it also witnessed the
resurgence from the shadows of new forces of hatred and repressed anger and
rage. But let us not forget, the future is yet to be decided. Now more than
ever, we need to find reasons to believe in this world, for it is the only
world we have. So as we look toward the future, let’s acknowledge the downtrodden
who refuse to accept the oppressive weight of history, the writers who bring
tears to our eyes, the artists who resist the graying of existence, the poets
who dare to write about a love that cannot be put into words, the musicians who
rock our souls and the children who are never defeated by the limits of
present.
