Beyond Violence: Religious Sources of Social Transformation in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

Notes on the Sources of Violence: Perennial and Modern

1 Notes on the Sources of Violence: Perennial and Modern Charles Taylor THE ENIGMA OF VIOLENCE What I want to focus on here is not violence in all its aspects, which includes domestic violence, criminal violence, and the like. What concerns me is categorial violence, exercised against whole categories of others, people therefore that one may never have known or been in contact with. I'm thinking ofthe violence wrought against a scapegoat minority or phenomena such as ethnic cleansing or genocide . And, needless to say, the events of September 11, 2001, come very much to mind. The fact that these events recur so frequently in our "civilized" century is deeply troubling. How can we explain this recurrence? Is it a mere survival, a throwback to earlier times? What is deeply disturbing about this violence is not just that it occurs at all, that people can be motivated to kill whole categories of others, often on patently irrational grounds, but also (1) that this violence is frequently excessive, spreading beyond its original target to englobe more victims or involving atrocities and mutilations; (2) that it can involve some language of purification, as one sees with a term such as ethnic cleansing)· and (3) that it can also include a ritual element. These latter two features remind us sometimes of modes of violence that belong to sacrifice in primitive religions, and this can enhance the sense of a throwback. One way of explaining the recurrence of violence would be to offer an explanation on the biological level, since this presumably 16 CHARLES TAYLOR remains the same in human life, even as culture "advances." We note that men, even more frequently young men, are usually the perpetrators , and that can point us to a hormonal explanation. Does it all come down to testosterone? But this seems radically insufficient. It is not that body chemistry is not a crucial factor; however, it never operates alone in human life, but only through the meanings things have for us. The hormonal explanation does not tell us why people are susceptible to certain meanings. It could at best explain the brute fact of violence, for instance, whenever we're crossed. Thus, men are more violent in relationships than women. But even that is questionable considering the findings, such as those ofJames Gilligan, that humiliation is an important causal factor in individual violence. 1 Now forms ofgroup violence seem to have very complex meanings , which often have to be understood on the level of the whole culture.There is the business of designating the enemy; not to speak of the phenomena of excess, purification, and ritual, as mentioned above. These seem to demand understanding in cultural terms, and indeed, their forms differ from culture to culture. This is what makes the sociobiological explanations, which attempt to account for the continuing recurrence of these patterns, so unsatisfactory. They offer an account in quite general, acultural terms: positing, for instance, that people have learned to be aggressive to outsiders and to bond with insiders.We can see how such behavior might have had an evolutionary payoff. But this kind of account makes the "meaning" here irrelevant, unless it be simply an instrumental-rational reflection. But, quite the contrary, the meanings invoked are not only crucial, but they tend to be metaphysical ; that is, they raise questions, or are answers to questions, about such concepts as the meaningfulness of life, good and evil, and moral integrity. My aim is to identify some of these meanings. Excess, purification , and ritual seem to point back to "primitive" history, religious history, and indeed, "primitive" religion. Are these phenomena mere throwbacks?Yes and no. There is a continuity with this history, but it is more like a new edition of an old story or the transfer of old melodies to a new register. THE SOURCES OF VIOLENCE THE METAPHYSICAL MEANINGS OF VIOLENCE 17 How should we understand the higher significance, the metaphysical meanings of violence? As far back as we can look, we see that religion often involves sacrifice in some fashion or other.We need to give up something; it can be to placate God or to feed God or to get His favor. But this demand can also be spiritualized or moralized: we are radically imperfect , below what God wants. So we need to sacrifice the bad parts, or sacrifice something in punishment for the bad parts. The sense of...