Man and society are born out of both: violence and gentle
cooperation.” That is how Psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim defines a
paradoxical but inescapable fact touching the whole history of
“the children of Cain.” How the two forces are balanced in an
individual helps determine his behavior, even his sanity. How they are
balanced in society helps determine its political organization, the
degree and condition of its civilization. In the U.S. today, it seems
to many that violence is in the ascendant over cooperation, disruption
over order, and anger over reason. The greatest single source of this fear lies in the Negro riots that
keep tearing at American cities. What is alarming about them is not
merely the frustration and bitterness they proclaim, not merely the
physical and psychological damage they cause, but also the fact that a
few Negro leaders are deliberately trying to justify the riots with a
violent and vengeful ideology. This in turn can all too easily be seen
as just one aspect of a whole American panorama of violence. The crime rate keeps rising, or seems to, especially in senseless
killings and wanton attacks. Fear of the darkened city streets has
become a fact of urban life. The memories of bizarre multiple murders
linger in the mind—13 people dead in Austin from a sniper's rifle,
eight nurses in Chicago killed by a demented drifter. The recollection
of the Kennedy assassination remains part of the scene. A burgeoning,
largely uncontrolled traffic in guns has put firearms into some 50
million American homes, many of their owners insisting that the weapons
are needed for self-defense. In the movies and on television, murder
and torture seem to be turning Americans into parlor sadists. A recent
trend on the stage is the “theater of cruelty,” and a growing
number of books delve into the pornography of violence. The rest of the world is ready to adjudge America as an excessively
violent country in which brutal, irrational force can erupt any minute
on a massive scale. This view is reinforced by the sheer driving energy
of the U.S. It seems confirmed by the American folklore of
violence—the Western and the gangster saga—which audiences all over
the world worship as epic entertainment and as a safe refuge for dreams
of lawless freedom. In a very different way, the view of America the
Violent is also reinforced by the Vietnamese war, in which critics both
at home and abroad profess to see a growing strain of American
brutality. Comparative Mayhem Violence is so universal and elusive that sociology and psychology can
only approximate a complex truth. Comparisons with other countries are
illuminating but hardly conclusive. The U.S. has certainly experienced
nothing like the massacre of 400,000 Communists in Indonesia; nor have
Watts or Newark approached the lethal fury of an Indian or an Arab mob.
But these are countries at vastly different levels of civilization. In
the industrialized world, the U.S. undeniably ranks high in violence.
The U.S. homicide rate stands at around five deaths for 100,000 people.
This compares with .7 in England, 1.4 in Canada, 1.5 in France, 1.5 in
Japan . Within the U.S., the rate varies widely, from
about 11 per 100,000 in Georgia and Alabama to 6.1 in New York and .5
in Vermont. Not that homicide or any other statistics can tell the
complete story.
