I have been gnawing at this issue for some forty years now and am no nearer to a formulation that satisfies me. I think it’s because there are no generalizations about violence and its effects that stand up to even the most cursory encounter with historical examples. I would love to believe that violence is always (in the long run) counter-productive. Certainly in any utilitarian calculus that measures whether people (in the aggregate) are better off as a result of violence, the answer most usually will be a clear-cut NO. Apart from its immediate (in the moment) victims, violence breeds violence. The definition of violence from which I work is “physical harm done to a person by another person.” To perpetuate violence is to insure that physical harm will be done—either to others or to oneself.
But before I even try to consider how violence leads to more violence, let me dwell a moment on my definition. I do not intend to deny the extended use of the term “violence” to denote psychological or material (destruction of a person’s goods or livelihood) harm done to people. And destruction of non-human entities (whether human built, like cities, or non-human built, like forests) could also be covered by the word violence. It is also the case that physical harm is done by earthquakes and the like. But, for simplicity’s sake, I want to stick with direct physical harm done by some human to another human in trying to come to grips with how violence is deployed in various cases, and what that violence causes or does not cause to happen. In other words, what motivates the action of inflicting physical harm on others? What benefits does the perpetrator of violence believe the violence will give him? What are the actual consequences of acts of violence? (This question indicates my belief that perpetrators of violence are routinely mistaken about violence’s effects.) And, finally, how does violence either underwrite or undermine power? (The relation of violence to power is an ongoing puzzle.)
Again, let’s be simple about it for starters. People deploy violence either 1) to force others to do things they would, if left to themselves, not do and 2) to eliminate people who are actual (or are perceived to be) obstacles to what the agent of violence desires. Violence as intimidation and/or coercion (1) or violence as the means to winning a competition that is understood as either/or (2). Either I win or you do—therefore, I will use whatever means necessary to assure that I win. And violence appears the most compelling strategy to assure victory. There can be no compromise. It is, as we say, a fight to the death. As long as you still are present in the field, I am threatened. You must be eliminated for me to be at peace (the term “peace” used ironically here to indicate a sense of security that is impossible as long as my opponent lives).
In short, violence is, one, the great persuader (in the coercion case) or, two, the surest means for victory in a competition. The argument against claiming violence is always counter-productive is that it can secure submissive obedience and the absence of competitors over very long stretches of time. Terror deployed by either state or non-state actors can subdue whole populations. (Definition of terror: the use of sporadic violence against one’s opponents. Many opponents can be left unharmed, but the key is that they know themselves subject to violence at all times and that acts of violence are unpredictable. When and where violence will be inflicted cannot be calculated; thus, violence is ever present as a threat that is then actuated sometimes.) Historical examples abound, including the killing and corralling of native American populations as an instance of the “elimination” path, with the reign of Jim Crow in the American South offers a case of terror’s effectiveness when deployed over a one hundred year span.
The reductionist view of the relation of violence to power is that power is, at bottom, just violence. Or, to put it differently, power’s ultimate recourse is always violence (the ability of the state—or of other actors—to physically harm with impunity). The knowledge that the powerful can harm you is what keeps those who would resist power in line. Power can inflict harms short of physical destruction to keep resistors in line (including economic destitution and incarceration), but it remains the fact that harm done to bodies is the ultimate threat—and power remains dependent on that threat. Inevitably, power will act upon that threat at times.
The problem is that the reductionist view does not work—or, at least, not in all cases. When power resorts to violence to secure obedience is precisely when it is weakest, Arendt argued. Her generalization is as false as the reductionist generalization. But she was on to something. Any law (or other device to govern behavior) is only effective if the vast majority obey it voluntarily. The power of the law resides (in this analysis) in the governed’s acceptance that the law as binding. One classic case is the American experiment with prohibition of alcohol. And history offers many examples of seemingly powerful regimes that simply collapsed without much in the way of a battle. The French and Russian revolutions are cases in point; the governments in both instances were “taken over” very quickly and with very little bloodshed. It was only after the revolution had occurred that reactionary forces gathered themselves together and instigated civil wars.
So, it would seem, power based solely on violence follows the Hemingway description of bankruptcy: the power seeps away slowly until it suddenly collapses. Again, to be clear: the seeping away period can be very long indeed, and collapse (if we take the very long view) in inevitable and multi-caused since nothing human lasts forever.
What interests me in thinking about the relation between power and violence is the extent to which power’s resorting to violence is delegitimizing. When and where power relies on violence, it admits that its edicts are not acceptable to those who can only be compelled by violence. On the one hand, that admission necessitates the creation of the category “criminal.” Power must insist that there are deviants who simply (for whatever perverse or self-interested reasons) will not obey the law. On the other hand, extensive reliance on violence will indicate the law’s unreasonableness, its inability to win voluntary consent. Violence may cow many, but it will not win their respect. (Exceptions to this assertion, of course. There will always be those who are impressed by violence, who aspire to be enlisted in the ranks of its foot soldiers. I will get back to my thoughts on this sub-section of any population.)
The “on the one hand and on the other hand” of the previous paragraph reveals how completely acts of violence are entangled in speech acts. The act of violence itself is a speech act. It can only have its effect if the act is publicly known and the message it is meant to convey is somewhat unambiguous. Thus, a Mafia killing must clearly indicate this is the result of encroaching on our territory. Revenge killings must make the fact that this “was for revenge” obvious. State violence must say “this kind of behavior/disobedience” will not be tolerated. And, in a secondary speech act, the state creates the category “criminal” to justify its violence against those who disobey. An exception to violence being public (as it must be if it is to send a message) are private murders where the perpetrator hopes to get away with the act never being ascribed to him. Such murders only make sense if there is one victim, without any future intention to deploy violence—and hence no audience to whom a message needs to be sent. Even serial killers, it seems to me, are message senders. They get off on the terror they inspire among a certain population.
Because violence is embedded in message sending, the meaning of any act of violence inevitably becomes a contested field. Violence is rhetoric. Acts of violence are intended to persuade. The regime (Romans against Christians; South Africa against black dissenters) that creates martyrs aims to dissuade others from acting as the martyr did; the martyr’s peers hold up his death as an inspiration to further acts of resistance. War aims to persuade another country to bend to my country’s will just as violence against the “criminal” aims to persuade others to follow the law. But just as violence often inspires violent resistance, the meanings attached to any act of violence will also generate resistance. There will be competing interpretations.
I think that all of this means that acts of violence always need to be justified. That is, every act of violence will be accompanied by a set of speech acts that strive to justify that act. This is hardly to say that such justifications are equally plausible. Some will be downright risible, but I daresay few acts of violence go unspoken. This, admittedly, is tricky. There are black holes, and people who are simply “disappeared.” And regimes (or the Mafia) are rarely explicit about the kinds of torture they deploy. Similarly, the Nazi concentration camps were (sort of) secret, while what was going on in those camps was even more secret. Still, in all these cases it was generally known that “enemies” (of the state, of the people, of our clan) were targets, even if the details were left to the imagination or only whispered in various quarters. And leaving things to the imagination might even be a more effective way to instigate terror.
If I am right that all acts of violence need to be justified, that suggests there is a prima facie assumption that violence is wrong. It can only be justifiable if compelling reasons as to its necessity are offered. Violence is “moralized” (made moral) when it is claimed that only its deployment can insure the health of morality against the threats posed by the immoral. Wherever an attempt to justify violence is made, the term “necessary” will almost invariably appear. The perpetrator of violence will almost always express regret that violence had to be resorted to. But his victim left him no choice. It was a species of self-defense; without the recourse to violence, some horrible consequence would have unfolded.
To appeal to self-defense is always an attractive option because self-defense is almost universally accepted as the one obvious, incontrovertible, justification for violence. No one currently thinks the Ukrainians are engaging in unjustified violence against the Russian invaders—unless they buy Russian propaganda in all its absurdity. But even here matters are not simple. Firstly, because self-defense gets entangled with questions of revenge, which may explain why the desire for revenge is so powerful. But revenge notoriously generates cycles of violence and, thus, is not (in many cases) a successful remedy to inflicted violence. It just keeps violence going.
Secondly, self-defense gets tangled up in notions of “proportionate violence.” There is some sense that violence inflicted as a response to a prior act of violence should be proportionate. To escalate the scale of violence, even in cases of self-defense, is usually seen as morally dubious. The obvious current example is Israel’s response to the attacks by Hamas on October 7, 2023. The whole notion of “proportionate violence” is bizarre. Who is doing the measuring? Yet the moral intuition underlying the notion is real and strongly felt. Even in a no holds barred war (such as World War II) some limitations on violence are still respected. The Germans did not kill downed Allied airmen wholesale, or non-Russian prisoners of war. How to understand where and how some limitations are imposed on possible acts of violence is extremely difficult. There is no formula; there is a tendency toward escalation; and yet since 1945 no belligerent with nuclear arms has used them. Whether that restraint is solely a result of a rational fear of retaliation is an open question. In any case, whether with the notion of proportion in violent responses to acts of violence or in self-imposed limitations on the means of violence deployed in conflicts, there is a shaky, unenforceable, yet real set of constraints. When those constraints are ignored, the violent actors lose any plausible grounds for justification. And it proves both difficult and rare for any person or any regime to say “fuck it” to all attempts at justification. The rule does seem to apply even in the most egregious cases: those engaged in violence will attempt to justify their actions. Violent actors will try to win the rhetorical battle in the court of public opinion. (In international affairs currently, that court is often the United Nations. Its lack of enforcement powers make it seem absurd in many cases, yet state actors still care about its verdicts.)
Because self-defense is almost always accepted as a justification, those who initiate violence have a much harder row to hoe. For that reason, peremptory violence is most often justified in the name of preventing an even greater harm than the violence itself. The speech acts here are counter-factual; if I don’t act violently, these things will happen.
Presumably, violence could be deployed to bring a better world into existence (Soviet violence was perhaps an instance), but much more usually violence is justified as overcoming the threat certain others pose to the current state of affairs. Still, preventive violence can morph into (or be merged with) creative violence. The Nazis offer an example of such intertwining. They preached (and practiced) violence against the threat posed by Jews and communists, but they also used the violence to create a whole new political order, one they claimed would be strong enough to combat those threats. In its own way, the current Trump administration is following that path. It has designated a set of enemies (including the “deep state”) fit to be punished while also attempting to create a whole new form of government (rule by executive) justified as the only means to overcome the enemies.
Since the revulsion against violence, the prima facie assumption of its being morally wrong, is so prevalent, the demonization of enemies is required. Such enemies must be deemed outside the moral pale. This gets complicated, of course, in the modern state system, with its distinction between citizens and non-citizens. Even the Nazis felt compelled to strip people of citizenship first before making them the victims of violence. It remains to be seen how much the Trump administration will refrain from violence against citizens. Or if it will begin to strip citizenship from current citizens. For now, Trump has declared open season on non-citizens, while only (?) depriving citizens of employment while not sending them off to prison. (But his “lock ’em up” fantasies might lead to that next step.)
But what about those for whom violence is not wrong, but actually to be celebrated as a sign of strength. Easy enough for Arendt to make fun of such losers for mistaking a capacity for violence with real power. Those losers still can cause severe havoc in the world. And it’s also easy to pathologize these incels, spending hours and hours “gaming,” and frustrated by their lack of access to good jobs, sexual partners, or social respect. It remains the fact that for some people (mostly men) violence is the means to self-esteem, to showing that they are here and can make a difference in (an impact on) the world. The recruits for para-military and state thuggery are standing by. And, as Christopher Browning’s work has shown, just the need to go along, to be accepted as a member of a group, can facilitate violence once someone else instigates it. Fear of ostracism from the only group that is offering one membership can be sufficient motive to participate in acts of violence in good conscience. The point: any attempt to come to grips with violence that appeals only to its rationality or to the justifications offered to render it compatible with morality will miss the non-rational and non-moral motivations that enable much violence. From sadism and crimes of unreflective passion to conformism and ecstatic participation in group actions, the sources of violence are multiple and defy calculation along cost/benefit lines, or in terms of what can be morally justified.
To be continued. These musings are, in large part, only the preliminaries to considering the use of violence as a tactic of resistance to established regimes. I will take up that question of strategy in subsequent posts.
McGowanBlog 