We already have that, though. They’re called high school wrestling and football.
I think it would be better to find other ways - such as sports, or exercise, or even dancing - to channel the masculine physical energy. Violence is definitely not a good thing unless under moderated, safe sports or in self-defense.
If you let boys be boys, the aggressive boys will just beat on everybody else. How do you draw the line between “friendly fisticuffs” and everything else? You can’t.
Interestingly enough, it’ll just land onr in jail/mental institution if onr decides to unload all the pain done in their youth. The ones with the strength (and guts to pull it out) to beat the snot out of their weaker members walked out of the system more “stable” than the ones who got all that pent up anger waiting until adulthood.
Case example: School shootings. Both cases back in 2007 and 2008 over here in Finland indicated a rather unhealthy amount of discrimination due to not being very socially adept.
Somewhat, 984. But I don’t think this issue can be confined to violence. The same impulse that makes us aggressive or assertive is the impulse behind violence. People who are aggressive take risks to accomplish things. Violence can get you what you want, but it carries risks. What are those risks? Losing a fight. Being judged to be in the moral wrong. Punishment. So being aggressive tends to make you more violent.
Maybe that’s not always a bad thing. Fistfights are not life-threatening. The worst reasonable outcome is being put out of commission for a few days. Does it lead to emotional scarring? Sometimes. The benefits? Fistfights toughen people. Danger gives people an incentive to stay strong and healthy, and to develop tolerance for pain. Danger jolts people out of the indulgent, introspective worlds they construct for themselves over years of youthful idleness. Fistfights <i>reveal</i> who is strong and healthy, which in turn makes those people more attractive. This is good from a genetic and social perspective. Struggle and pain leave people more confident in themselves, because they no longer fear struggle and pain as “the unknown.” They’re better prepared to deal with life’s trials, and less likely to cave into a desire for pleasant, lifelong sloth.
Some will point out that aggressiveness is responsible for war, and argue that that alone is reason enough to squelch the impulse. I disagree. Alexander the Great was aggressive enough to conquer Europe and establish trade routes throughout his new Hellenistic territory. The cultural intermixture that followed led to a continental Renaissance. The American Revolutionary War only occurred because certain colonists were fiery-spirited enough to revolt against unfair taxation. That aggressiveness, plus the aggressiveness of the French against their monarchy in the 19th century, is largely responsible for the modern world. Violence brings change. Even though people die, sometimes change is good.
Let’s say we could extinguish aggressiveness, without worrying about the above consequences. How will sexual interaction work, when neither sex is aggressive enough to take the risk of being deemed offensive? It’s impossible to make even very slow and sensitive advances without some risk of offense. If eliminating aggressiveness creates a danger of stunting everyone’s sexuality, I’d prefer the dangers of aggressiveness. How will the free market work, when businesses no longer aggressively seek to destroy one another? The whole idea is that only the fittest business models survive. If businessmen are too timid to offend or harm other businessmen, the free market falls apart. Moreover, we cede a huge advantage to other countries that haven’t neutered their businessmen in this way. Finally, if we ever face an invasion, fighting it off will require enough aggressiveness to risk our lives doing so. In other words, we couldn’t squelch the impulse to violence, without crippling our ability to do other socially vital activities.
So my point is that, even if we could squelch out the impulse to violence, I think doing so would be a horrible idea. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend The Clockwork Orange for a portrayal of what that “corrected” person might look like. Curtis, you’re right that sports like football go a long way to satisfy the aggressive impulse. But the aggressive impulse will still be present whenever someone sees a risky opportunity for gain. No matter how many sports we play, people will still be violent when the stakes are promising. And I think it’d be mistaken to take drastic steps to change that.
Somewhat, 984. But I don’t think this issue can be confined to violence. The same impulse that makes us aggressive or assertive is the impulse behind violence. People who are aggressive take risks to accomplish things. Violence can get you what you want, but it carries risks. What are those risks? Losing a fight. Being judged to be in the moral wrong. Punishment. So being aggressive tends to make you more violent.
Maybe that’s not always a bad thing. Fistfights are not life-threatening. The worst reasonable outcome is being put out of commission for a few days. Does it lead to emotional scarring? Sometimes. The benefits? Fistfights toughen people. Danger gives people an incentive to stay strong and healthy, and to develop tolerance for pain. Danger jolts people out of the indulgent, introspective worlds they construct for themselves over years of youthful idleness. Fistfights reveal who is strong and healthy, which in turn makes those people more attractive. This is good from a genetic and social perspective. Struggle and pain leave people more confident in themselves, because they no longer fear struggle and pain as “the unknown.” They’re better prepared to deal with life’s trials, and less likely to cave into a desire for pleasant, lifelong sloth.
If you let kids fight each other, a small percentage - the future criminals - would end up in charge and terrorize the others. It wouldn’t evolve into some sort of mystical male-bonding fraternity ala Fight Club.
And the idea that letting kids beat on each other will make them better adults is wrong. You mean to tell me all those successful doctors, lawyers, and other professionals should be beaten on by future criminals to somehow make them better able to deal with life? I would say most of them probably avoided the rough and tumble as kids, yet it was they who evolved into the most valuable members of society. Maybe getting beat up can make you emotionally stronger, but it doesn’t translate to more successful people and a more succesful society. Plenty of people are able to become strong and effective without having to get into fights as kids.
Let’s say we could extinguish aggressiveness, without worrying about the above consequences. How will sexual interaction work, when neither sex is aggressive enough to take the risk of being deemed offensive? It’s impossible to make even very slow and sensitive advances without some risk of offense. If eliminating aggressiveness creates a danger of stunting everyone’s sexuality, I’d prefer the dangers of aggressiveness. How will the free market work, when businesses no longer aggressively seek to destroy one another? The whole idea is that only the fittest business models survive. If businessmen are too timid to offend or harm other businessmen, the free market falls apart. Moreover, we cede a huge advantage to other countries that haven’t neutered their businessmen in this way. Finally, if we ever face an invasion, fighting it off will require enough aggressiveness to risk our lives doing so. In other words, we couldn’t squelch the impulse to violence, without crippling our ability to do other socially vital activities.
So my point is that, even if we could squelch out the impulse to violence, I think doing so would be a horrible idea. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend The Clockwork Orange for a portrayal of what that “corrected” person might look like. Curtis, you’re right that sports like football go a long way to satisfy the aggressive impulse. But the aggressive impulse will still be present whenever someone sees a risky opportunity for gain. No matter how many sports we play, people will still be violent when the stakes are promising. And I think it’d be mistaken to take drastic steps to change that.
Violence and aggressiveness are not one and the same. Violence is a very specific thing that you can separate from masculinity and aggressiveness. You’re complaining there’s a deadening of masculinity in our society. Fair enough. But is allowing unmoderated violence really the answer? Don’t you think its possible for someone to have balls without being violent? You’re basicaly saying “the reason lots of men don’t have balls anymore is because they’re not allowed to beat each other up”.
A businessman(or any other executive occupation) can be super-aggressive without having experience or aptitude for personal physical violence.
I still think if you folks actually understood how this kind of thing weaves into the tapestry of how piss-poor DISD’s administration can be you’d be a lot more engaged in raging against the system than all this analysis.
And I’m going to do something I was taught I should never do; I’m going to assume something about someone. If Xwing can actually say something like this:
Maybe that’s not always a bad thing. Fistfights are not life-threatening. The worst reasonable outcome is being put out of commission for a few days. Does it lead to emotional scarring? Sometimes. The benefits? Fistfights toughen people. Danger gives people an incentive to stay strong and healthy, and to develop tolerance for pain. Danger jolts people out of the indulgent, introspective worlds they construct for themselves over years of youthful idleness. Fistfights reveal who is strong and healthy, which in turn makes those people more attractive. This is good from a genetic and social perspective. Struggle and pain leave people more confident in themselves, because they no longer fear struggle and pain as “the unknown.” They’re better prepared to deal with life’s trials, and less likely to cave into a desire for pleasant, lifelong sloth.
…and engage in a tangent about historical aspects of violence rather than what’s really going on DISD than I don’t believe he’s actually lived or truly understands the social environment at SOC or any underprivileged area. I will guarantee you that none of these fistfights were done in the aim of strengthening these kids from a social or genetic perspective. This was about teachers failing their duty and allowing a tradition of failure to be interwoven in the society of the school.
These kids were allowed to fight like this because of apathy, not interest in their genetic or social well-being. There’s no proof that these kids needed to be jolted out of some “indulgent, introspective world.” There are plenty of kids who live in Oakcliff that don’t needed to be jolted from youthful idleness. There are probably plenty of kids who probably didn’t ask to be abandoned in some locker room to get beat up on because the teacher didn’t feel like hashing out the details and doing their job. But that’s not what Xwing is noting or caring about; all we get is some high-minded rhetoric that makes the situation more abstract than is warranted by making a claim that We Must All Suffer Into Truth at some point but fails to understand that this isn’t the Orestia - these kids suffered for nothing.
So let me bring it down to earth.
The teachers are there to teach these kids how to harness their anger, their propensity for actions into constructive activities. SOC has a great basketball program I believe, and it’s ability to engage folks and get them to direct their energy towards it (even if cough the grades are faked…) is an admirable example of what these kids should be taught. Life is about taking your frustrations and your anger and directing it towards something that makes you better. Putting kids into a locker room because you’re tired of dealing with them so they can fight it out isn’t constructive. No one leaves better than they were before. No one learned anything that will change them forever.
Action must be guided by a constructive purpose in order to be worthy of merit. There is nothing constructive about what happened in this case.
And I think you’re a bit too high up your own crusade to notice that he’s speaking of an entirely different issue.
This is just naive. Emotional development doesn’t work with that kind of precision where two very close emotions can easily be separated. Even if you can analyze this on paper, the two are deeply interconnected, and you don’t get the luxury of isolating them while you are letting a boy live his life. Completely supressing and demonizing one WILL stiffle the other to a degree.
I got taught to fight by a friend/colleague of my mother, a neurosurgeon, who is incidentally a greatly recognized expert in my country. Two of my uncles are doctors. Other two older cousins are lawyers. My own father was a fairly successful architect. Their single, unanimous advice after years of putting up with bullies? “Stop being a wuss and just throw the kid a damn punch”. To this day I regret not having listened to that earlier.
As politically incorrect as it is to say it: Yes, if you avoid and run from all forms of fighting all your childhood and expect artificial and sometimes arbitrarily enforced protection laws to keep you safe from bullies forever without ever standing up yourself, you’ll probably fail to develop a backbone. Fistfights aren’t the only way to develop self confidence, but sometimes you are not given the choice. There is no perfect security system in schools and there never will be, there will always be bullies and, as controversial as it may be to say this, a punch in the face will do more for you than a hundred meetings with your parents and teachers talking about how violence is bad, while they themselves are completely powerless to do anything since these kids usually have moron permissive parents that’ll defend their stupid “angelic” kids. I’m talking from experience here, both as a student and teacher.
Wanna punish this stuff as misbehaviour? Good, you should. The message that needs to be sent is that this is not the ideal way to resolve issues, but like it or not, sometimes it’s still a viable effective option. Don’t make it a criminal issue, because all you’ll be getting is that the kids will do this somewhere else where you won’t see them and won’t be able to break them off. A fight doesn’t, and rarely needs, to reach a result for it to have an effect. The simple, short act of putting up resistance sends a very clear message. Kids aren’t hardened streetfighters, most bullies work under the assumption that they won’t be hit back ever. Just that single act changes perspective a great deal. We still mark territory: We may not piss around our area, but don’t delude yourself into thinking we’ve evolved much farther than that.
This is just naive. Emotional development doesn’t work with that kind of precision where two very close emotions can easily be separated. Even if you can analyze this on paper, the two are deeply interconnected, and you don’t get the luxury of isolating them while you are letting a boy live his life. Completely supressing and demonizing one WILL stiffle the other to a degree.
Okay, but that doesn’t mean that its impossible to be aggresive unless you experience violence as a kid. You can be aggressive without being or experiencing violence.
Furthermore, XWing isn’t just arguing that violence shouldn’t be criminalized, he’s saying it should also be removed as a misbehavior in school. We should just let kids “work it out themselves”, and that this will teach them all kinds of wonderful life lessons. And I reiterate my first point, which is that it won’t evolve into some male brotherhood of badassness, but rather the ‘bad kids’ will dominate simply because they have less compunction in hurting others.
most bullies work under the assumption that they won’t be hit back ever. Just that single act changes perspective a great deal.
This doesn’t work all the time.
We still mark territory: We may not piss around our area, but don’t delude yourself into thinking we’ve evolved much farther than that.
I haven’t, the supporters of “school roughhousing” are the ones who have. They are the ones who think that it would result in anything but primitivism and cruelty.
There is a difference between a problem child and someone who got in a fight. If someone gets in a fight once, its not a big deal. If someone consistently gets in fights, then one has to ask about what is happening with this person and his or her surroundings. The violence is therefore not a problem, but the symptom of a problem that needs to be addressed. Banning it would therefore completely ignore the problem and everyone is at a loss because of it. But that’s how our society works in many many ways.
I agree with Xwing that the a few years of liberal ideology will not change millions of years of evolution and that aggressiveness can be a good thing. This is a trait that can manifest itself in a lot of different ways, including but not limited to many different forms of competition (careers, grades, sexual partners, etc). Violence is merely 1 facade of the whole and while there are limits as to how far it should be pushed (don’t kill or permanently damage the other kids for example), sometimes, this kind of thing allows kids to blow off steam. Puberty and growing up is a pretty rough time and living to deal with it is important.
I’m also surprised no one mentioned the glorification of violence in the media, the prevalence of violence in our society, or the use of violence by the US on other nations with little justification. These all set poor examples if we want our kids to think that the use of violence is wrong. Society needs to deal with its hypocrisy if it wants to justify its point in the schoolyard.
This isn’t to say that the cage fighting we read about is excusable.
Well, Sin, if you punch somebody it’s wrong. If you bomb them that’s A-OK. Jesus says so!
Since someone mentioned school shootings: prior to the Columbine shootings, Columbine was very lenient toward violence. The school created a “jock culture” in which physical violence was overlooked and sometimes even encouraged by the administration. For instance, their star wrestler enrolled in Columbine after he got kicked out of a private school for fighting; once there, he’d do stuff like physically attack people if he saw them talking to unpopular kids. In at least one case, he tormented one student until the student’s parents pulled him from the school. Eventually, two of the kids he bullied shot up the school.
Obviously that’s an extreme example. But, Xwing, the point is that these people whom you would like to cure of their alleged “indulgence and introspection” (and I think that’s the real bugbear underlying your thought – most of your recent meditations are insistent attacks on what you varyingly call “sentimentality,” “squeamishness” and “hippies”) would be the ones who would benefit the least from your proposed cure. People withdraw into worlds of “indulgence and introspection” to begin with, precisely because they are <i>already</i> unable to respond in kind to the unbridled aggression of others. Furthermore, in such cases, the aggression against them is already being overlooked or tolerated by figures of authority – usually precisely for the reason you give, that “boys will be boys” and that bullying is not a serious matter. It may even be the case that the same school that bans trench coats may actually take a cavalier attitude toward fistfights. This “tolerance” only makes such people withdraw deeper into themselves, instead of forcing them to open up and react in a “healthy” way.
Why would some people react like that? It could just be due to their character. <i>Contra</i> your generalizations, some people just don’t <i>want</i> to hurt others for no reason. They may find “conventional” outlets like sports to be entirely adequate substitutes, or they simply might not have that impulse. You may despise them for their “squeamishness,” but theirs is a very real character type. And they won’t necessarily be inclined toward “pleasant sloth” – it’s just that their interests do not include violence. There are many useful things that society needs that don’t inherently revolve around asserting one’s primacy over others. Dislike of violence does not necessarily imply sloth any more than it necessarily implies “sensitivity” or “progress.”
At the same time, a heightened predisposition toward violence is often not even that <i>useful</i> to society. A talent for picking on other kids in high school, especially kids who can’t or don’t want to fight back, does not translate to any great ability in war. In fact, it can sometimes happen that the best soldiers are people who have strong moral compunctions against attacking others in peacetime, and do not feel a constant need to fight others, whereas the former bullies become cowards. The correlations between all these things are not simple. To adopt the goal of “revealing” the alleged “unattractiveness” of people who are not interested in violence (a fabricated unattractiveness that gives little indication of one’s rightful place in the world) is a pointless exercise in cruelty, and not really all that different from the cage fights in the article.
Sure, it is possible to think of some scenarios where it does seem like it would be best to “tolerate mutual fistfights” – for example, a case where two guys are fighting to “satisfy their honour,” where there is a deeper motivation than mere bullying. Or, perhaps, a case where two guys both want to fight, and the fight itself is half-serious, half-sporting. The latter case is what comes to mind when you paint your idealized picture of “masculinity.” But in all such cases, the participants already have the mindset that you think is “healthy,” and don’t need to be shaken from an “indulgent” state, whereas the ones who do won’t benefit from encouraging violence. Furthermore, while I agree that it’s just as important not to damage people who already do have such “healthy” impulses, it would still be better to channel these impulses into sports or other such outlets, while strongly discouraging their violent expression. And Curtis is absolutely right in the sense that even these “healthy” cases would often not be so clear-cut, and that “the ‘bad kids’” would be more likely to dominate.
And, honestly, I don’t see these dire consequences that you’re warning about. “Sexual interaction” has not only not been stifled, it’s more widespread than ever. And the laws governing it haven’t even changed that much, they’ve just been slightly disguised by “modern” and “progressive” language. Even during the early seventies, at the height of radical rhetoric on college campuses, all the anti-patriarchal ideology had very little impact on the fundamental way in which sexual interaction worked, even among the same college students who claimed to espouse that ideology. To put it in scientific terms, “the cool dudes always found a way to win over the ladies.” That may seem distasteful and hypocritical – but so is life in the “free market,” where by your logic, a truly manly man should always be able to figure out how things work and rise to the top, rather than complain about how the market isn’t to his liking.
Nobody here is supporting zero-tolerance policies, or policies that advocate putting a high school kid in prison for getting into a fight. I also oppose these things, but the reason I oppose them is that I think that such a punishment is greatly disproportionate to the infraction, and also because such policies often reflect the incompetence of the school administrators in dealing with problems that they’re supposed to be able to keep under control. (The hypocrisy that Sinistral mentions is also relevant.) The underlying infraction, however, is still unhealthy.
I agree with SK a hundred percent.
And SE, tell me exactly what Xwing is talking about; because it seems pretty clear to me that he’s trying to say that violence is a neccessary fact of life and that people need to deal with it. The problem with his vast generalization is that it was posted around an issue that can hardly be used as good foundation for his argument. As if he has any right to declare whether these kids need to be “woken up” and that a fight can bright their youthful slumber.
I’m just sick and tired of DISD’s antics. It touches me a bit more than you, so there’s a pretty good reason for my condemnation here. I bet you there was some teacher at SOC who had the same belief as Xwing here. Let’s just toughen the kids up.
It’s ridiculous. If he’s not talking about this situation, well, he should have said that. Say whatever you like but if you make a comment like that in a topic you can’t blame me for assuming you’re talking about the issue at hand.
Well, Mullenkamp, I did say that, but you were too busy assuming. Here’s my first post in this thread:
Then Curtis responded, “Violence is a healthy part of masculinity?” 984 offered an interpretation of what I meant about violence and masculinity, and my long post responded <i>to that</i>. I’m all for a reasonable assumption, but you could at least do me the courtesy of reading the thread before beginning your “crusade” against me (as Seraphim Ephyron nicely put it).
This is a gross distortion. People withdraw into “indulgent, introspective worlds they construct for themselves over years of youthful idleness” because it is pleasant. It distracts them from the dismal reality of their lives. As you say, some people withdraw to temporarily forget being picked on. Others forget that they have to do <i>hard work</i> at unfulfilling jobs; that they don’t have girlfriends or boyfriends; that they are disastrously out of shape; that they are addicted to drugs or alcohol and being destroyed; and so forth. Having been distracted from what’s wrong in their lives, they take no steps to advance themselves. This is the danger of constructed fantasy worlds.
So when I say “danger jolts people out of the indulgent, introspective worlds they construct for themselves,” I’m not just being sadistic. The key is to <i>remind</i> people of everything that’s wrong with their lives that they’ve repressed. Yes, it’s harsh. But I buy at least a little into the Nietzschean notion of a friend, that one friend seeks to better another even if makes the friendship unpleasant for both parties. As an empirical matter, I believe most people react to minor physical danger by trying harder at life. They work out, fight back at least once, and ultimately feel much better about themselves.
But I don’t deny that some people react the wrong way. Being beaten up regularly, they withdraw into themselves. They develop complexes about their own inferiority, the impossibility of trust, and their own “uniqueness” that makes it so impossible to interact pleasantly with anyone. Even if they believe they’re intrinsically normal people, they’re convinced it’s “too late” to change the path their lives have taken. These are, I suspect, the Columbine killers. To reference another Stanley Kubrick movie, this is the trainee in Full Metal Jacket who went mad and killed his instructor.
It’s a tragedy of real life that the same harshness which cures most people, harms a few. I think this is where we differ: that you would ban the cure of many for the sake of the few. I don’t think this way, at least not about human behavior that’s historically <i>normal</i>. We have to look at the net effect of fistfights (since, at this point, we are still just discussing schoolyard skirmishes). I believe the net effect is positive. I think people are healthier as a whole. And the unfortunate few? That’s the tragic part. I doubt you buy into social Darwinism. Those who do might argue that this is natural selection against those who react to deep unpleasantness by withdrawing even unto sociopathy and death, rather than develop a healthy toughness. As harsh as it sounds, I’m glad that the Columbine killers won’t have children whom they can teach to be like them.
I never said people hurt each other for no reason. I said, “No matter how many sports we play, people will still be violent <b>when the stakes are promising</b>.” I said,
The whole point is that aggressive people are violent <i>because</i> they see benefits and don’t mind risks. An “outlet” like sports may exhaust an aggressive impulse, but the impulse is still <i>there</i> (albeit weaker) when an opportunity for gain presents itself.
I don’t condone “unbridled aggression.” We can’t be too violent, or the physical and emotional trauma will start to outweigh the benefits from being jolted to awareness. In your terms, I condone a “bridled aggression”: enough to cause occasional fistfights on the school yard; enough to remind people that success in a fantasy world is not an excuse for failure at real life; but not enough to cause a destructive rampage.
In fact, the law has changed a great deal. There’s now an <i>ad hoc</i> evidentiary rule that testimony of an alleged rape victim’s past promiscuity is not allowed. This means, <i>even if the evidence is judged to be relevant and vital</i>, it’s excluded from the record. The concerning possibility is that a promiscuous woman will accuse a man of having raped her one weekend, when evidence indicates (e.g.) that every weekend she goes home with a different man and has sex with him. Rape laws have changed in other ways. Most jurisdictions now have a “no <i>at any time</i> means no” rule, versus the former “any physical resistance means no” rule. There are two problems with this. First, as one older judge pointed out, “Sometimes saying, ‘Oh, no!’ is merely a chaste way of saying, ‘Oh, yes!’” Second, and more seriously, sex has always involved an element of persuasion. It’s entirely feasible that someone would initially say “no,” but then as events carry on, change her mind, as clearly manifested by her behavior. But you could still convict that unfortunately persuasive individual. The physical resistance standard suffered none of these defects. The overall effect of these changes in law is to temper aggressiveness, even at the expense of legal accuracy.
As for how sexual interaction has changed since the 1970s, that’s a can of worms I don’t want to open here. Your point that “the cool dudes always found a way to win over the ladies” is true, but only serves to prove that masculine aggression exists (perhaps hypocritically) even among opponents of the patriarchy. I certainly wouldn’t deny it.
Curtis, I’ve responded to most of your points in the course of this very long post. But regarding this one:
I never said that. I think schools should have rules against violence, especially in the school building, and should enforce them strictly. You have to teach kids self-control, and that some places are inappropriate for physical fights. I also endorse rules against fighting outdoors on school grounds. It’s a way to prevent the escalation of minor fistfights into major altercations. The punishment wouldn’t be anything too severe. Detention, maybe. Certainly not suspension. I don’t think I’m being radical, here. Based on what I’m told by my parents, and some friends from rural school districts, this is how fistfights were historically handled.
No, in the context of high school life, it’s actually not a distortion at all. When one is in high school, one’s life is usually “dismal” because one is tormented by one’s peers. Trouble in the family would be another major reason for retreating into a fantasy world – but I think that kids who have successful social lives are considerably less likely to retreat into a fantasy world solely based on family problems. (Or, perhaps, to put it another way, their social life <i>would</i> be the fantasy that they escape to.) Not having a boyfriend or girlfriend would be another major source of depression, but as long as one is reasonably well-liked in general, it can be partially compensated by that and good academic performance. In other words, I don’t think such people would really <i>hate</i> their lives. But being humiliated every day, despite one’s best efforts to be inconspicuous, and feeling like there is nothing one can do about it? I think that’s a significant reason to really <i>hate</i> one’s life, enough to escape from it.
Columbine again provides a counter-example. It was, again, a school where physical violence was tolerated, even encouraged, as long as it was performed by people who showed the proper “school spirit,” i.e. those who participated in sports. But that criterion is, theoretically speaking, quite achievable.
Were there any formal obstacles preventing the victims of the Columbine wrestler from selling their trench coats, getting a crew cut, working out for a year, trying out for the football team, and finally punching their tormentor in the face? No, not really – if they had started on this plan during their freshman year, they could have succeeded. Were there any evil hippies around to tell them that all violence was wrong? No, on the contrary, their entire surrounding environment held the belief that violence was perfectly normal (as long as it came from the school athletes), and they themselves professed a twisted version of this philosophy. Was the school trying to eliminate all aggression and repress their natural instincts? No, on the contrary, the school was overflowing with aggression, and the teachers believed that it had a positive effect. Did they become complacent due to a lack of physical danger? No, the threat of physical danger was also constant, because the administration looked fondly upon the bullies’ antics. In fact, Columbine was a model school from the point of view of providing “incentives.” Yet, somehow, that was not enough. Their reaction to “minor physical danger” was to seethe in rage until finally two of them snapped.
It can be argued that the actual gunmen were solitary psychopaths, and that all other people would have a completely different reaction. Nonetheless, after the shooting occurred, the gunmen elicited a great deal of sympathy from many kids around the country. The vast majority of these kids would never actually go so far as to shoot up their school, and it is certainly true that much of their sympathy was intended as more of a protest than an expression of genuine admiration – but that only goes to show that many fairly normal individuals found those actions to be understandable. Actually, in Columbine, for months before the shootings took place, students would joke about how a shooting would be likely at their school. To some degree, everyone could feel the oppressive effects of the school’s bullying culture.
Furthermore, if you look at schools that have experienced shootings, you will find that most of them have a similar attitude toward violence. The killers themselves rarely follow a typical pattern – the CIA once tried and failed to come up with a profile of school shooters. The <i>schools</i>, on the other hand, can be profiled very easily, and are usually home to rampant bullying that is viewed as unimportant by teachers. And, though the shooters themselves are extreme cases, there is often very widespread dissatisfaction and misery among the student body. In every case, the mere presence of “mild danger” is somehow ineffective at making the students transcend their limitations.
In fact, it is obvious that being viciously humiliated on a regular basis is <i>not</i> sufficient to motivate someone to better themselves. Humiliation in general is the worst motivator imaginable. Mere danger might motivate someone – if it’s a “neutral,” sportsmanlike kind of danger, like that experienced during a friendly sparring match. Even in a truly dangerous situation like war, one might derive strength from the fact that one has the support of one’s comrades. But being subjected to daily humiliation, which seemingly everyone around one seems to revel in, has a crippling effect that people then struggle to overcome for many years – as can be seen from many testimonials by graduates of high schools with severe bullying problems, who became successful later in life despite the bullying rather than because of it.
Personally, I prefer not to befriend people who view the idea of friendship using highly stylized intellectual constructs.
Firstly, the people who make this argument – as with all similar arguments – would be the first to be miserable if they were made the recipients of the “harsh lessons” that they advocate. And even if they did benefit from it, I suspect they would seriously reconsider whether the benefit was worth the cost. In fact all such arguments about doing something vicious to someone else “for their own good” always have that dishonesty at their core.
Secondly, the argument makes the distinction between “healthy bullying” and cage fights rather arbitrary. Here we have engaged all this heavy intellectual machinery to show that:
§1. Fistfights are good because the loser is “revealed” to be less attractive as a mate, and this revelation is somehow accurate;
§2. Fistfights are a form of natural selection, thus everyone who does not benefit from fistfights does not belong in the gene pool anyway;
§3. “Mild physical danger” has a positive and reinvigorating effect upon everyone who deserves to live (the ones who don’t experience such an effect do not deserve to live, see point 2).
So, we’re healthy and tough; we can even acknowledge the “tragedy” for those who don’t meet the criteria; but we don’t let that get in the way of Nature’s course. But then, when it comes to cage fights – a lark which positively encourages natural selection in the most literal sense – all of a sudden we find that <i>this</i> is now bad and reprehensible. But why? What are you, squeamish or something? As long as the administrators keep an eye out so nobody gets seriously injured (got to make sure the danger is “mild,” dontcha know), all the criteria are satisfied. Once you sign on “natural selection” as your main arbiter of right and wrong, there is absolutely no reason why it shouldn’t apply beyond mere fistfights.
And thirdly, the argument is completely refuted by the fact that Columbine’s star wrestler is alive and well, and free to have children, whom he can teach to beat up anyone who talks to an unpopular kid. Not surprisingly, he did not in fact grow up to be Alexander the Great or a brilliant entrepreneur. In fact, he didn’t even achieve anything significant in wrestling. The pinnacle of natural selection, forsooth.
Of course they “see benefits,” that’s not the point. The star wrestler at Columbine clearly viewed the beating of people who spoke to unpopular kids as a “benefit” that outweighed the risks (in fact there were no apparent risks until the shooting, which was handily blamed on video games to avoid a discussion of bullying).
My point, however, is that there is any number of people who would never view such a thing as a “benefit” to begin with – they simply don’t think in such terms. From their point of view, it’s not that these particular “stakes” are or aren’t promising – it’s that they aren’t even real stakes, and never were. The idea of humiliating someone never occurs to them, even in a situation where there is no risk involved in doing so. Just as there are sadists who view everything in terms of “who gets humiliated,” there are also people in whom that impulse does not exist at all. I suppose it is futile for me to say this, because these two kinds of people are so different that one will always have trouble believing in the other’s existence. But I assure you, such people do exist.
But what do we read in your posts? “Fistfights reveal who is strong and healthy, and this makes them more attractive.” What would fistfights reveal about such people? According to the criteria of fistfights, they would be losers all around. It is likely that they would refuse to fight altogether (cowards!), or if they did, they would lose (weak and unhealthy!). Even if they were strong and healthy (for example, a good-natured athlete), their performance would be ineffectual and half-hearted, because they weren’t used to fighting. If they weren’t interested in athletics – if they were interested in something else, like math or classical history – then they wouldn’t have a prayer. If the opponent was someone who took pleasure in the suffering of others, and enjoyed every opportunity to inflict it, then Curtis is right – this opponent would have every advantage.
But are all such people really contemptible escapists, who are frightened of life’s trials and seek solace in a fantasy life? No, there is no reason why that should be true. They’re just not interested in violence. However, the best way to <i>drive</i> them to hide in a fantasy life, is to create a climate in which one’s “attractiveness” is solely determined by an arbitrary criterion having nothing to do with one’s real-life success – and then to humiliate everyone who fails this arbitrary criterion. Typically, such people seek to be left alone when they run up against such a system; they would rather make themselves inconspicuous than strive to work out and then beat up the star wrestler, because, you see, they just don’t <i>want</i> to beat up the star wrestler. Perhaps, to you, that in itself is a sign of weakness, but I think it has no bearing on such a person’s ability to succeed in life.
The question is, who is more “attractive,” the aforementioned character type, or the star wrestler? Whom would you rather have as a friend? Whom would you prefer to have children and teach his beliefs to them? If society could adjust itself to make itself more convenient for one of them, who should it be? Is it “necessary” to force the above personage to experience daily humiliation, to better prepare him for life’s trials? I would say that it is absolutely unnecessary – high school life has very little resemblance to real life, and the “trials” he’ll experience will be of a completely different nature. But then what’s the point, other than to show those squeamish hippies their true place?
It doesn’t just “exist even among” them, it never went anywhere. Opposition to the patriarchy among college students tends to be merely a fashion accessory, discarded with age, that accompanies what are largely the same rituals of romantic conquest as before. And this is in the very heart of the beast, to say nothing of society as a whole. Consequently, I don’t understand why encouraging school violence is necessary to stave off a dire future devoid of aggression, when I see no indication that such a future is imminent, and when the cure is obviously ineffective.
First off I wholeheartedly agree with SK on this point.
Second Xwing I have to ask if you’ve ever been bullied before in your life because from where I stand it sounds like you managed to live a rather sheltered life (anyone who thinks fistfight can’t turn fatal at the drop of the hat must have never seen one before).
Third I will admit that your point in your second post does have some merit, but only if one assumes that by violence you meant ambition.
Fourth Mullenkamp, while I truly lament the situation over at that particular district in question, I disagree that the afore mentioned district and other underprivileged areas are not the only places where such atrocious acts are carried out. Otherwise, I agree with you 100%.
Fourth Sin, while I totally agree with you on the part that the problems of a problem child are a symptom that should be looked at far more carefully than what people care to, I don’t think glorified violence is the entire problem.
Finally, and to get back to the subject here, to encourage any violence is just downright monstrous IMHO (not that I’m calling to ban all violence since that’s just absurd). Yeah, sure, it’s easy to call for the faculty to administer slaps on the wrist to a problem child for an infraction here or a misconduct there, but then who watches the faculty when they administer their slaps, or what they use to slap you with, or how hard do they slap you with, or how many times do they slap you, or what constitutes as a slappable offense? And what’s to say that they can’t do the same when the principal is watching? I mean what if one of your parents decides not to play his or her little political game? Who then watches the principal if he or she can’t be trusted? What if the whole school district is screwed up?
Now try to imagine that but alter it a bit with the words caged match in place of the words slap and/or wrist, and you’ll start to get the general gist of my outrage at this whole stink.
Killmore: I agree. I was making separate independent points that look at the micro and macro level of the argument. SK’s spiel about bullying, for example, describes one situation where a kid creates problems and society’s reaction with video games is one example where society turns its head away from the problem.
Xwing’s viewpoint is slightly similar to mine on people, but substantially different. Xwing believes that people can change when pressure is applied to them. My observation has been that they consistently do not, even when extreme pressure is applied. Xwing is right about bubbles; the way I describe it is that people see what they want to see and not what is in front of them. For example, in a relationship, problems arise because people want the other person to change and become as they see them and not as they are, without realizing that the reason that the other person is the way he is, is much more complex than flipping it like a switch. This trait is fundamental to how people work and does not change because pressure is applied. It changes when they develop the inner strength to overcome the uncertainty it implies. This almost never happens.
Therefore, SK is right that simply putting people in these situations is counterproductive. The only thing you’re doing is biasing a specific response for a certain subgroup to be successful over others in that specific setting. You are presenting that these people are more fit than the ones that are not. I would argue otherwise simply because you have not properly defined fitness and justified that definition. You want to be very careful talking evolutionary biology around me. I used to teach the stuff and I have friends that do research on the topic :P.
Your entire argument about social darwinism is EXTREMELY simplistic; you shouldn’t talk about things you don’t know about. According to your argument, we should all be hyper violent, ultra aggressive giant cockroaches. Cockroaches are without a doubt the most fit species on this planet in their ability to survive hardship. Roaches can live for a week without a head and die because they starve. They survive radiation like nothing else and they’re hard as hell to get rid of. But we’re not these cockroaches. Why is there diversity then? There are a lot of questions that can be spinned off this one question. Why is there diversity of behavior? Why is everyone not running around in a hockey mask and a hacksaw, raping women? The answer is very simple: because not doing so actually does confer advantages. Evolutionary stable strategies can be simplified into different models, like the hawks vs doves model. In summary, if you have a population of hawks, the doves can survive in there simply because they hawks are too busy killing each other. Your argument is that we are in a population of doves where the hawks can easily dominate. There are many other behavioral models, including dove/hawk hybrid models where populations will be as doves until they’re forced to behave as hawks. The list goes on and there are pretty good mathematical computer models that people work with to make graphs as to where you get specific thresholds for different kinds of behavior. And in the end, even these are simplifications and the extent to which they can be applied is limited.
People can’t be separated from the social structures they are in because they are almost one and the same. You need to put these things into context to understand why it happens in that context. Not being aggressive all the time allows for the development of social groups and social groups are a vital support structure for people and society as a whole. Specific phenomena, like the ones I described, exist because they are conducive for survival and reproduction and provide sufficient fitness that these have been maintained for millenia. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be around today. Fitness is extremely contextual.
As someone who used kickboxing classes to skip out on PE, the line between what is a sport and what is a fight is not an easy one to draw. If another student at my school, who had taken Wing Tsunn for about as long as I had Muay Thai, wanted to spar, would this be the sort of half-serious, half-sporting fight that should be “strongly discouraged,” or is it analogous, for us, to a pick-up game of football.
One could argue the basically violent and thus inherently harmful intent of flinging your knee into someone’s chest. One could also point out that, while sparring for practice, I haven’t ever really been seriously injured, because the person is very skilled at what they’re doing and trying specifically not to do me harm despite throwing stupidly fast punches all about my head and shoulders. Meanwhile, football players I know have broken fingers, collarbones, tailbones, fucking elbows, and one an ankle during practice. Both wrestlers I knew tore their MCL and/or ACL during practice. So, our fights were far less harmful than their practices, and practice for our own sports. Should that still be discouraged because of its violent aesthetic and, theoretically, end purpose, or is a physically healthful sport where one can control the physical danger and practically prepare for dangerous situations in real life an at least equally beneficial to the practitioner as football or baseball?
Although the discussion has turned to one effect of minor physical danger, to jolt people out of introspection, I’d like to point out that that’s only a small part of my broader point. My argument is that minor violence, like fistfights, is a healthy and natural part of young male interaction. I don’t think it can be repressed, without repressing aggression in general, and crippling sexual, business and wartime behavior. As I said in my first long post, I primarily had in mind “mutual fistfights” that result from mutual anger, not bullying. That’s my main argument: that two boys who are willingly fighting shouldn’t be subject to draconian punishment.
But there is an attendant issue of what to do when one person’s aggression meets another’s withdrawal: when one person gets angry at another and initiates a physical conflict, when the other person doesn’t want to fight. I said “most people react to minor physical danger” in a healthy way, while a few “withdraw even unto sociopathy and death.” If anything, the Columbine example weighs in favor of that. Why was it the most highly-publicized news event of the year? Because it was so strange and unfathomable and rare. Why was it horrible? Because it was so unnatural. I don’t deny that the Columbine killers were brutally mistreated, to a degree far beyond what I had in mind regarding incidental, mutual fistfights. I don’t condone that daily humiliation. But even given how terribly the Columbine killers were treated, their behavior was outlandish and reprehensible out of all proportion.
The reaction of a few malicious kids to horrible mistreatment doesn’t justify squelching out physical aggression altogether. I suggested that minor fistfights at school should be treated as minor issues. I mentioned that detention might be an appropriate punishment, not because any real harm was done, but to prevent escalation and to educate kids about the self-control needed in certain locations. I believe this world is more attractive than one where, through draconian laws, or anti-aggression medication, or even genetic modification, physical aggression is engineered out of kids.
I mentioned offhand that a Social Darwinist might argue that the suicide of the Columbine killers was fortunate, because now they won’t be spreading their views and lifestyle to others. Sinistral points out that this is an “extremely simplistic” statement of Social Darwinism. Of course it was simplistic: I only wrote a single sentence about it. Based on that one sentence, Sinistral launches into a tirade against my simplistic views that inevitably must conclude that “hyper violent, ultra aggressive giant cockroaches” are the fittest species on Earth and we should aspire to be like them. The problem with exploding my single sentence in that way is this: I indicated a principle of Social Darwinism, that people with destructive psychologies should be treated less favorably so as to deter that behavior, or make that behavior unattractive. If this were the only principle in the universe and people were simple (rather than complex and biological) beings, maybe we would end up with “giant cockroaches.”
Obviously, the world is more complex than that. Sephiroth Katana sarcastically comments on the fact that I believe “mild” violence is acceptable, but severe violence is not. He argues that, if I really believed in the principles I’m promoting, cage fights would make sense. I don’t believe that, for the very reason that Sinistral points to. It’s incredibly simplistic. There are dozens of competing principles that need to be balanced in these matters. There are all kinds of problems with severe violence. It puts too much pressure on the victims, so rather than being nudged to change, they break. They snap. Severe violence is morally reprehensible. I don’t fault people for exchanging a few punches, but brutally harming other people in a lasting fashion is a different story. I had minor fights as a kid, and I don’t fault my opponents in the slightest. I don’t think any kid should have to suffer brutal harm, especially on a regular basis. Severe violence would go beyond putting people out of commission for a day or two, to sending them to the hospital with broken limbs, major bleeding, and other significant maladies. This could reasonably lead to permanent damage, or even death. Even if it didn’t, having to regularly send average people to the hospital would be a disastrous waste of time and money. In short, severe violence is a horrible idea on every level. That’s why I’ve been careful to talk about the benefits of minor “fistfights,” and the importance of rules to prevent them from escalating. Sinistral points out that people aren’t ruthless, single-minded aggressors, that there’s diversity of behavior, because it actually confers advantages. I agree with that wholeheartedly.
In fact, that’s more or less my point. Draconian punishment for minor fistfights serves to over-deter behavior that usually is not harmful, even helpful, all to satisfy <i>one</i> principle: violence is bad. That all-consuming principle is why Sephiroth Katana can point to Columbine, and argue that that alone is reason enough to squelch out minor fistfights. That principle is why Sephiroth Katana refuses to acknowledge that even a few people might actually benefit from being jolted out of the fantasy worlds they inhabit by a minor prospect of danger. It’s a form of absolutism, and I don’t think the principle “violence is bad” deserves to be an absolute. Until we reach the point of discussing how <i>on balance</i> society will be affected by lenience toward minor fistfights, and until it’s recognized that violence is not always bad and not always good, nothing realistic and practical and productive is going to come out of this argument.
Summary of things up to now:
Xwing: mild levels of aggressiveness and violence does the world some good and trying to suppress it absolutely is like prohibition: doesn’t work. People shouldn’t snap if a couple kids get in a fight.
SK and co: that’s a slippery slope and its easy to crank up that argument to lead to something like columbine.
Something people aren’t considering in this thread is that verbal violence like bullying is violence nonetheless. So how do we define mild verbal violence? One could argue that the columbine event and the equivalent are extreme and neglected levels of violence. I think this is a key factor that’s being ignored since this is pretty much what leads to physical violence.
The Columbine shootings were only “strange” if one accepted the credulous reporting, which insistently avoided any serious analysis of the culture at Columbine, and instead grasped for any other explanation, however inane: video games, rock music, trench coats, and so on. After the initial flurry of sensationalism died down, and some people engaged in a more thoughtful analysis of the situation, it turned out that the shootings were in fact entirely fathomable and even predictable. As I mentioned, the students at Columbine themselves were given to making jokes about how “there would be a shooting soon,” even students who had nothing to do with the eventual gunmen. To be sure, only two kids were twisted enough to actually shoot people, but everyone could feel the negative effects of the bullying culture to some degree – while the only people feeling any positive effects were the bullies.
In the same way, after the Columbine shootings, the gunmen were the objects of sympathy for many high school kids, which they could express thanks to the anonymity of the Internet. The gunmen themselves were, perhaps, “unfathomable” maniacs. But these sympathizers were perfectly ordinary people, who did not really seriously intend to shoot up their school – they made a show of siding with the criminals, in order to express their defiance of their similar surroundings. This indicates that there is a much broader segment of society to whom such actions are not unfathomable in the least.
Surely, people who hold such views, even half-seriously, have serious emotional problems, but it gives rise to the question of why they came to have such emotional problems. Is it because they are all inherently “malicious,” unworthy, and should be extirpated by natural selection as soon as possible? Or, perhaps, is it because there is an unhealthy environment that drives them to despair, while providing no positive effects to compensate for it? I would say that it is the latter. First, while the <i>killers</i> who perform school shootings are impossible to profile, the <i>schools</i> in which shootings take place are all basically the same. And second, such “rage massacres” have steadily been on the rise for the past twenty years, and ten years after Columbine, school shootings are no longer unimaginable. If schools with a permissive attitude toward bullying are breeding more and more “malicious” kids, then that attitude should be re-evaluated.
You know I’ve struck a nerve when someone switches from the cordial abbreviation “SK,” to the cold, stentorian formalism of “Sephiroth Katana.” An oratory worthy of William Jennings Bryan, forsooth.
Unfortunately, this grand eloquence is wasted on a risible attempt at misdirection. It does not need to be repeated that no one here, <i>no one</i>, supports “draconian punishment” – that has been made explicitly clear by everyone from the start. In fact, your initial statement, that zero-tolerance policies are harmful because they repress typical boyish aggressiveness, is perfectly reasonable, in my own personal view.
It was only after we probed further into this statement that you began to offer justifications that went into the downright bizarre. These positions, each of which you have advanced at some point, include the following:
It is these specific statements that are objectionable, not the opposition to zero-tolerance policies, which is common sense and does not require Nietzschean references. All of these statements are false. Not to mention the strangeness of bringing these particular points up in a thread about a school where none of them apply.
Firstly, they paint “fistfights” as a sort of gentleman’s game, an honourable challenge which ennobles both participants. Reality is nothing like this. As the Columbine example illustrates, a typical “king of the hill” in schoolyard fights is not a young Alexander The Great, but rather, a spoiled and arrogant wrestler who amounted to very little in life, even in the field of wrestling, and simply enjoyed humiliating people. This, then, is the model who is supposed to be the most “attractive,” the pinnacle of the schoolyard natural selection procedure.
Secondly, the statements rely on a false dichotomy between “people who are motivated to win at fistfights” and “people who live in a fantasy world.” In other words, either one “reacts in a healthy way,” <i>or</i> one “withdraws unto sociopathy and death.” The purpose of this dichotomy is to enable you to write off everyone who is not interested in fighting as unfit, unworthy, sociopathic, or otherwise defective. Then, you can plausibly argue that the “tragedy” of such people is an acceptable cost that is worth paying for the sake of everyone else.
But I have repeatedly stated that there are many perfectly normal people whose interests don’t include fighting, and who are not interested in humiliating others. Even if they themselves are being bullied, they simply have no desire to work out and avenge themselves upon the bully. Such people are inherently inclined to avoid a “fighting culture” like the one at Columbine because they feel intuitive distaste for it. From their point of view, there is no value to beating someone in a fistfight; therefore, according to their philosophy, they will not “improve themselves” by responding in kind. I then wondered how on earth society might benefit from forcing such people to participate in such a culture.
You go to great lengths to avoid acknowledging that such people can exist. In this very post, you mention the issue of “when one person gets angry at another and initiates a physical conflict, when the other person doesn’t want to fight.” But in the very next sentence, you repeat: “I said “most people react to minor physical danger” in a healthy way, while a few “withdraw even unto sociopathy and death.”” There is no room left for healthy people, who are not “malicious” and who do not want to shoot up their school, and yet are inclined to withdraw from violence. In the previous post, also: you won’t “deny that some people react the wrong way,” but “these…are the Columbine killers,” the dregs of society. Again, no room for normal people. Finally you beg the question altogether, by insisting that everyone who points out this nuance must really oppose all violence in principle.
But I don’t believe that all such people are emotionally unbalanced, or that they all hide in fantasy worlds due to their inability of coping with reality. I think that there is absolutely no evidence that someone with this sort of character would necessarily have to lead a decadent fantasy life, as opposed to pursuing a genuine interest in a useful discipline. I also think that there is no evidence to indicate that such people are less attractive as mates, or less useful to society, than the “kings of the hill” described above. I don’t believe that they are “ill” or that they need your “cure.” On the other hand, I do believe that the “cure” itself would be damaging, as can be easily seen in any school with a “bullying culture.” Consequently, I have to seriously question any system of thought that can callously write them off as a “cost,” while the alleged “benefits” exist primarily as an intellectual construct.