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C00002 00002	violen[s85,jmc]		Theories of violence
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violen[s85,jmc]		Theories of violence

Thesis: Wars and other forms of violence are mainly consequences
of human nature --- ``original sin'' if one wants to make contact
with those who wrote about the problem from a religious point of
view.  How much violence actually results from these impulses
depends on the state of social institutions.  The problem is to
adjust social institutions so as to minimize violence --- among
other goals.

	There are levels of violence, from wife beating to shooting
up bars to soccer riots to three day riots to terrorism to wars.
Consider the theory that susceptibility to violence is natural to
young men.  We give the sociobiological just-so story that this
tendency made for successful tribes in competition to neighboring
tribes.  The tendencies to develop inter-tribal hostilities played
a part as did willingness to be led.

Query: Feudal literature is full of minor wars starting for reasons
quite unimportant to the peasants or even the knights recruited to
fight them.  To what extent were the fighters drafted and to what
extent did they volunteer?  Maybe the issue is more interesting
than important.

Spontaneous rioting of young men isn't more than an annoyance to
society.  It doesn't appreciably reduce the population or the GNP.
Wars and even uprisings require leadership.  Usually the leadership
is provided by somewhat older men, but some of the most successful
empire-building has occurred when a young man of aggressive
tendency and military genius finds himself in charge of military
forces --- usually created before he came along.

Query: Are demonstrations at universities a phenomenon continuous
with rioting and war?

Prosperous modern societies have a satisfactorily low level of
spontaneous violence.  It is, however, too soon to say that new
Hitlers cannot arise.

Marxist and related theories of the economic causes of war are
dubious, at least oversimplified in the sense of making universal
principles out of causes that apply in particular situations.

Nuclear weapons have achieved an important but apparently not
widely recognized favorable result.  There is no important
political, literary or scientific figure with a favorable view
of war.  Before World War II, there was a strong current of opinion
that believed that wars were desirable on the grounds that they
brought out the best in men and that they permitted the stronger
societies to grow at the expense of the weaker, thus strengthening
humanity.  Of course, this view was even stronger before World War I.