Violence

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.