Visible and Invisible Violence

Grunewald’s Crucifixion

One theory of the saving power of the Cross is that the Cross makes the victim visible, thereby exposing– in the hope of ending– the cycle of scapegoating violence. The cycle of scapegoating violence is a cycle in which an innocent person, or an innocent group (generally an outsider or outsiders), is sacrificed in order to maintain group cohesion. Nothing promotes group cohesion better than identifying, pursuing, and killing an enemy. Sometimes so much underlying tension is agitating a group, that the search for an enemy to kill (in order to mask the underlying tension) supercedes rational reflection or moral consideration. This is the ugly side of our human nature, and anyone who thinks we’ve outgrown such primitive impulses is in denial, or not paying attention.

Why is some violence so visible to us, and other violence so invisible? Part of the answer is the mercy that our make-up is essentially partial and limited, saving us from the overwhelming burden of compassionately feeling each particular, individual, broken-hearted grief of losing a loved one to violence. Such a broken-hearted grief is happening inside some person today, somewhere– is happening even now. We keep some violence invisible, in order simply to survive without going mad. Thank God.

If that were the complete answer to why some violence is invisible, we could then excuse ourselves from any uncomfortable moral reckoning with violence outside of our limited sphere by invoking the self-preserving saving grace of denial: it’s too much for me to think about. That’s my defense. And yet…

Even if it is not my or your calling to take any action on this or that issue related to violence, we still do well to expand our visual field and allow previously invisible violence to impinge on our conscience. For example: 532 people were murdered in Chicago in 2012. Maybe you knew that, but I did not. I find the number stunning. That violence– and its accompanying grief– has been invisible to me. Now it is at least within my awareness. The drone war, with its significant number of invisible innocent victims (children), is another example.

We can’t take on every evil and injustice in the world; there are still only 168 hours in a week. We can, however, draw the perimeter of our range of visible violence ever more widely. The becoming-visible of some innocent victims of violence might rouse us to recognize a large gap between our ideals and our practices/policies, and that we need to change in order to be the people we say we are.

crucifixion.jpg (JPEG Image, 988 × 860 pixels) – Scaled (70%).

 

Anxiety in the System and Regression– Murray Bowen

“Dr. Bowen, a professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University, established the Georgetown Family Center in 1975. He was a pioneer in family research who developed a new theory of human behavior and a new method of family therapy based on this new theory.” (From the website “Bowen Center for the Study of the Family.”)

Murray Bowen’s theory regarding anxiety in human systems helps to explain an array of unhealthy behaviors in families, ranging from addiction to chronic conflict to delinquency. (If you don’t know Murray Bowen’s work, google “Bowen Theory” for a menu of information.) Instead of taking the individual as the basic unit of analysis (a la Freud), Bowen starts with relationships. His theory accounts for the relative closeness and distance between people in relationships, and the level of anxiety that is inevitably a part of those relationships.

Some ways of dealing with anxiety are more adaptive and more helpful than others: both at the family level, and– very interestingly, for these times we live in– at the societal level. Bowen’s theory says that as anxiety in a system rises, we are more likely to regress to more primitive “fight or flight or freeze” responses– which explains why, when I am perceiving some kind of threat (real or imagined), I am more likely to yell at the children or kick the cat.

American society is a human system; much anxiety is in the system. Bowen’s theory predicts that the society will regress to acting out of that anxiety in unhelpful and shortsighted ways, in order to relieve the anxiety. (Example: yelling at the children temporarily relieves the parent’s anxiety, but it does not lower the anxiety in the long-run).

Here are the signs of regressive responses to anxiety in our American society:

1. hyper-partisanship, as people seek security in herding together and circling the wagons.

2. scapegoating, as people seek security by blaming others.

3. anti-foreigner sentiment, as people close off from the creative possibilities of engaging differences.

Here is Bowen in his own words:

 ”There was growing evidence that the emotional problem in society was similar to the emotional problem in the family…. When a family is subjected to chronic, sustained anxiety, the family begins to lose contact with its intellectually determined principles and to resort more to emotionally determined decisions to allay the anxiety of the moment. The results of this process are symptoms and eventually regression to a lower level of functioning…. The same process is evolving in society.”

 

Shared Sacrifice in an Age of Anxiety

President Obama’s bipartisan debt commission has employed the phrase “shared sacrifice” as part of its recommendation on how to reduce the national debt.

Is shared sacrifice possible? How?

At one level, shared sacrifice might happen through governmental action. I am thinking about the rationing of gasoline during wartime, or the ban on watering lawns during a drought: in both instances, the centralized power of government organizes the shared sacrifice, and is available to compel– through sanction or force– those who do not co-operate. In these situations, the threat is broadly recognized throughout the society (the enemy is clear in wartime; the lack of rain is clear in drought), and so the social cohesion necessary for shared sacrifice is relatively high. While the power of government to coerce is present, it’s (mostly) not needed (except for your neighbor who turns on his sprinkler at 3am).

The problem with the national debt today is, the enemy is not clearly in our consciousness: the threat is not broadly recognized. Pain in our society is either blamed on someone else (scapegoating), or it is numbed (denial). In fact, in an eventually self-defeating feedback loop, the national debt serves to mask present pain, by borrowing from the future. An organism that masks pain is vulnerable to disease and injury, because pain is the signal of imbalance, and the need to adjust.