The role of violence

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,450884,00.html
I was told about this story (the above link to Fox News is the first one that appeared on a Google search) and I mentioned that she was being rather provocative. Understandably, I got pounced on because it sounded as though I was blaming her for the assault and excusing her attackers. I didn't mean that, of course: I said what I meant and neglected to couch my speech in the necessary obeisances to my interlocutor's preconceived notions.

I agree that violence is not a nice thing. We have societies, in part, in order to curb our violent instincts and protect us from those of others. That these protesters attacked the woman was a crime and one for which they should be punished.
But we also have societies in order better to receive and mete out justice. In the U.S.A., there is a constitutional aim of allowing people to pursue life, liberty and happiness, based on the idea that if it doesn't interfere with others, it shouldn't be a problem. This arose from overcrowding and poverty in Europe, but also from religious intolerance. The 'founding fathers' regarded such persecution as evil, and went to great lengths to found a nation free from it; an aim that most people, within and without the U.S.A. will agree is laudable.
And yet here we have a little old lady who thinks it right and proper to abuse the immense power of the state to prevent innocent people from pursuing happiness without interfering in anyone else's life, based on her religious beliefs.

I grew up with other young boys and, as young boys do, we occasionally got into fights. The next day we might not all be friends, but we'd get on with our lives. A few bruises more or less didn't matter too much: it's a rough-and-tumble world.
There were also people who mercilessly persecuted certain victims by exclusion, insult, intimidation, theft and vandalism. Day in, day out these people would pursue their agenda of destroying others' lives for their own twisted personal reasons.
Can you guess which of these two types of agression the victims found more unpleasant?

I believe that some things are far worse than a bit of violence. Of course violence is a wide range of things, and murder is harder to reverse than bullying... but then extreme bullying can be felt very much like a slow death of torture, and allows little in the way of a decent life.

People have a slightly disturbing tendency to focus on violence to the exclusion of other unpleasantness. I went to a meeting last week at which the talk was entitled something like 'Why we no longer need men'. The talk started with the suggestion that pathenogenesis made sperm unnecessary (sadly this is not, to the best of my knowledge, true, because we have not yet managed to remethylate DNA appropriately) and then focussed on the idea that men are responsible for much of the evil in the world.
Men, apparently, are the perpetrators of 85% of crimes and form 90-95% of the prison population (suggesting that they are responsible for an even larger proportion of serious crime). We can also dive into the stereotypical feminist spiel about men starting wars, men competing and men lusting for and working towards power over others.
Even if I ignore the problems of generalising from a category to all its members, or of applying collective punishment (as a gradual 'phasing-out' of men could be considered to be), I think that we're missing something important, and to make my point I shall indulge in some stereotyping of my own; when I refer to women, I could perhaps be taken to be saying 'people with characteristics traditionally labelled as feminine and believed to occur more often in women'.
Women also like power. However, women chase power in a different way. They are said to be more interested in social relationships, in group dynamics (and tend to be more collectivist in general) and in emotions. Men are said to be physical creatures, keen on DIY, spatial reasoning and hand-to-eye co-ordination. Women are more spiritual (confirmed by psychology surveys, if you're interested). Given these stereotypes, which do not even begin to judge crime, we would naturally expect men to commit more violent crime.
However, there is an opposite of this conclusion: that women will commit more 'emotional violence'. A world without men might have less physical violence, but would not necessarily be a better place: a point I made at the meeting, but given the light-hearted attitude of many attendees, one that I did not need to expound apon further. Of course, the more accurate way to describe this conclusion would be 'a world without those traits traditionally called masculine would not be a better one'. The traits themselves are not bad: they merely lead to certain types of bad actions, just as 'feminine' traits lead to other actions, good and bad.
If I were given a choice between a world in which people initiated physical violence when angry or upset, or a world in which they always indulged in emotional manipulation, I would choose the former. Violence seems more honest; emotional manipulation spiteful and backhanded. Violence is open; emotional manipulation secretive and furtive. If we are to condemn the abuse of power, then the abuse of social relationships in the 'feminine' manner seems at least as bad as the overt threat of physical violence in the 'masculine' manner. It is not just the poor victims of bullying at school who might agree: more recently a friend of mine told me about his time teaching in a 'sink-school'. He encountered a fair amount of animosity, I gather, but was quite clear that the girls' calumnous rumours and mocking were much more unpleasant than the boys' knives and fists.

The final point will be extremely truncated (for now: I hope to return to the relationship between collectivism and morality at some point) might be that men tend to be more independent. Independence from social pressures inevitably leads to less obedience to social rules, and could be considered to be a firm point in favour of calling women the fairer sex. However, independence and autonomy can be considered intrinsically desirable, and can lead to great advances as well as crimes. It is similar to the question of whether we should use mind-control to prevent crime; preventing crime is a good thing for society, but if we reduce humans to controlled automatons then we have lost their (and possibly our) humanity, and forgotten the purpose of society entirely.

I could go on about the links between mind-control and religion, or forestall critical comment about how social pressure is an integral part of society, but that will have to come another time, if at all. In an era of 'soft power', when even the U.S.A. looks to be switching its means of international interaction, and in which we live in comfortable, relatively gentle societies, insulated from violence of each other and of nature, and in massive social groups, we seem to be forgetting that violence is not the worst thing that can happen, and that the threat of violence and its use, which trumps all other sources of power, is not the worst action a person, parent or government can take.
Perhaps the feminists have won more than they think in changing society to be this way. But if we insist on peddling this pernicious creed, and believe it ourselves, we will find ever more young men ready to rebel against the cloying and domineering system that makes them feel guilty for being themselves, and rather than co-operating with it to some extent, ready to remove themselves from it entirely. The use of social pressure to warp minds and to cause this guilt only leads to tension and a confused system of values, and the relief of the tension will come from throwing off the entire social system, which seems a worse outcome than creating a sensible social system in the first place.
That's enough of my Marx-style revolutionary talk. I won't make predictions, as he did, about revolutions that never occur. An increasing number of 'amoral' criminals, however, I suspect will be a better prediction. Until we solve our social problems: of emotional manipulation in personal relationships and societal ones; of peer pressure and imposition of values and expectations; of poverty and unequal opportunities; and of access to resources, rights or justice, we will not grow out of violence, and nor should we. Violence is the tool of last resort, and should our societies not mature into institutions free of these social problems, or grow into institutions that create these problems, we will need violence to change them. We should not discard it so quickly.