Will Destroying Its Templates Stamp Violence out of Our Human Natures?

Human Aggression

  Candace Plattor's thoughtful piece Stop Pretending You Don't Know Reason Behind High School Violence lays out what we might call "the usual suspects" --  violent video games, violent movies, violence on t.v.   But the older I get, the more I see of human nature, the less sure I am of her underlying pacifist premise.  

  Off the top of my head I can think of several motives for Alex Hribal's stabbing rampage at Franklin Regional High School in Murrysville, Pennsylvania.    Schizophrenia flips the neurological switch in seemingly normal children sometime between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five.  Another possibility is that he might have been relentlessly bullied and sought revenge.   Or maybe he's a psychopath and only now got around to expressing his true character.

 But apart from mental health issues, I also find Candace Plattor's pacifist premise, to be naive, utopian and possibly even dangerous.  Wouldn't it be nice, if we could stamp out violence in human society by banning all violent depictions (movies, rap songs, video games, operas, toys, paintings)?   It is true that many pacifist communities and religious traditions exist throughout the world.  But there is a reason why every last one of them from Quakers to the Amish and Jains are nestled in the midst of well-armed societies.  Human beings are by nature, territorial, aggressive and, well. . . violent.

People do not need pornographic literature to figure out how to have sex.  And without any graphic pictures at all there would still be seven  billion humans inhabiting our planet.  Nor do young people require a template like violent video games, violent movies and violence on television in order to learn aggression.  Before such imagery existed there were, after all, gory wars, genocide, gladiatorial combat to the death. 

Just as the sexual aspect of our human natures needs to be controlled in order to foster civilization, so does our aggression and violence.  But do we accomplish that goal by pretending those elements of our humanity do not exist?  I am a gun control fanatic.  But my views reflect a realistic understanding of the dangers inherent in allowing a large segment of the population access to weapons when they lack self-discipline and have so little control over their all too human emotional impulses and aggression.