Terror and Other Unsustainable Violence
All violence is unsustainable, logically, even when virally ensconced in a culture. It is certainly unjustifiable. Earlier I suggested that violence is entropic, uncreative, closed, dark—erosive of self, society, culture, ecosystem.
It should, really, just self-destruct. Instead, we foster it, and through the complicity of anticipation we assure its maintenance.Insecurities breed fear, and fear can be an ingredient in violence, if not a major connective tissue (Berry 2001, Lischer 1999). Insecurities compromise futures, in this anticipatory system called culture. As suggested earlier, a contribution to compromised futures is found in inadequate and/or inconsistent feedback from the past, whether immediate and personal or extended and environmental. In numerous settings, from family to civil strife, various scholars have described McLuhan's “vacuum” seeking feedback (1968) more narrowly as “affect hunger” (Goldschmidt 2003) and “father hunger” (Herzog 2001).
If again I mention children, it is not because I seek “causes,” but rather that children are sculpted in the crucible of culture plus a wider environment and then go on to become adult actors (Kadushin and Martin 1981, Korbin 2003). Children are not passive, blank slates, or dependent variables, but instead they play creative roles at every stage of their development. No matter how dismal their chances, some individual children will not just survive but thrive. However, there are no convincing clues as to what permits such good fortune, or how the more auspicious variables somehow sort themselves out. And then, there are unexplained cases of youngsters well-endowed in every way who fail, or whom we fail.
Innocent and not so innocent children participate in the escalation of violence close to the domestic sphere, and far from it as well, while becoming victims themselves (Moffatt 2003).
Briefly, examples would be the massacres in public school settings in the U.S.—one already documentarized by Michael Moore as “Bowling for Columbine” (2002). Incidents of school massacres carried out by a child or children now occur from coast to coast and also outside the U.S., one major tragedy in Germany. On the streets, and sometimes in the schools, gangs are more commonplace, sometimes involving girls as well as boys. Another conjuncture for youth and violence points to child soldiers in the third world—or everywhere, if 18-y ear-olds are deemed children (Cohn and Goodwin-Gill 1997). There are connections between these, and primarily the connections would be weapons (Grossman 1995) and media (Grossman and DeGaetano 1999; NTVS 1996, 1997, 1998/2000). I will not externalize responsibility, except to note that we do have, individually and collectively, a say in the cultural institutions we have propagated, and evidently tolerate and thereby support (Kanner and Kasser 2003, Lasn 1999).Ink as well as blood has been spilled on the general subject of violence and the special topic of terrorism, before and since the pivotal events of “9/11” or “911” (e.g., Bennis 2003, Denzin 2003, Glanz and Lipton 2003, Kushner 2002, U.S. Department of State 2002, and four volumes of Stout 2002). For some months after that date, commentators wavered between referring to “nine-eleven” and “nine-one-one,” perhaps recalling that hundreds or thousands of victims were calling the “nine-one-one” emergency numbers as well as their loved ones from the World Trade Center.
A further tragic twist, beyond terrorism, is “suicide terrorism.” This is troubling because for some onlookers it is incomprehensible. However, as Atran (2003) points out, not even suicide terrorism is a recent innovation; he traces its discontinuous record throughout history, including Western history.
Reviewing the installation of habits and institutions of violence before 9/11 lessens the surprise of this otherwise unprecedented set of events (see Gardner 2002).
When societies tolerate and promulgate direct interpersonal strife involving different ages, sexes, and classes; and when societies export strife in the form of weapons, addictions, and inequalities: could these practices themselves approach or even constitute terrorism? To terrorize is to initiate an intransitive relation which will implode on itself. Contemporary international terrorism differs from that lamentable but more ordinary terrorism generated by the intra- and inter-cultural codes of violence exampled in the preceding chapters. Whether or not international terrorism can be tied to its own culture(s) of violence, it does contrast in ways which put those other codes into high relief. Quotidian violence exhibits some checks and balances, at least, theoretically. The targets might be able to step outside harm's way, even if it's a big order to suggest that one can step outside one's own culture, to decline to participate, to defy abusers, to keep one's head low, to flee from communities under siege.Often the potential victims of quotidian violence know they are at risk. They live in unhealthy-unto-pathological families, neighborhoods, communities, or institutions, or they are marked individuals out of place and time, as women in the marines (cf. Moore, chapter XVI). Perpetrators of violence acting more randomly outside of these cultural environments are certainly deemed terrorists, and indeed they have the capacity to psychologically terrorize an entire population, even without acting. An individual running amok or a group of bandits on the loose concentrates social awareness in two direc- tions—one direction toward the deviant body and its capture and control, and the other direction inward as the social group and its constituents realize a collective impotence. Such episodes of aberrant behavior rarely destabilize the host society, unless they are memorialized or recurrent, unless they are internalized.
Exactly that is happening in the U.S. There is a Department of War, transformed to a Department of Defense, but no Department of Peace, not even in the wings, unless HR 1673 proposing a Department of Peace should make it through the bureaucratic hoops (Department of Peace 2003), or unless the fledgling Institute of Peace would qualify (Holden 2003).
The U.S. is now staging costly Terror Drills, the first in Seattle in May 2003. Also freshly hatched is a U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and, in at least one university, a new academic department and major, similarly labeled, potentially naturalizes paranoia and gives degrees in it. When was the last time in history we encountered the term “homeland”—or the first time? The U.S. National Science Foundation solicits research grant proposals for the ACT program through NSF 03-569; ACT stands for Approaches to Combat Terrorism—note the choice of verb. The military are already engaged in literally and figuratively combating terrorism; some participants may have been recruited not centripetally on grounds of patriotism or centrifugally from unemployment, but as video game addicts. The U.S. Army recently spent $6 million to develop a video game to attract potential recruits; if expenditure be a measure, the game is probably above average sophistication, as ordinarily such a game costs but a fraction of that amount (Barron 2003).Is this altogether just one more growth industry? It does seem so.