THE ALLURE OF VIOLENCE IN LIFE AND SPORTS

Jerry Harkins

It’s the most perfect  feeling in the world to know you’ve hit a guy just right, that you’ve maximized the physical pain he can feel. . . You feel the life just go out of him. You’ve taken all this man’s energy and just dominated him.
                                         —Michael Strahan, NFL Hall of Fame Defensive End

Now a real hitter is a head-hunter who puts his head in the chest of his opponents and ain’t happy if his opponent is still breathing after the play. A real hitter doesn’t know what fear is except when he sees it in the eyes of a ball carrier he’s about to split in half. A real hitter loves pain, loves the screaming and the sweating and the brawling and the hatred of life down in the trenches. He likes to be at the spot where the blood flows and the teeth get kicked out. That’s what this sport’s about, men. It’s war, pure and simple.

— Tom Wingo in The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy, p. 384.

I firmly believe that any man's finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear, is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle - victorious.

                                                —Vince Lombardi

Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best; it removes all that is base. All men are afraid in battle. The coward is the one who lets his fear overcome his sense of duty. Duty is the essence of manhood.
                                                                                       –General George S. Patton

                                                                      

The Puritans hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.
                                                                                                 —Thomas Macaulay

W

e have long known that our species has a strange attraction to violence of all kinds.  Maybe it’s in our genes.  Maybe it is a side effect of our hormones.  Whatever it is, we find danger exciting.  When we witness it, our hearts beat faster and respiration increases.  Simply observing it triggers the “fight or flight” response which, in turn, increases the production of adrenaline.  When the danger is real and personal, the physiology also lessens or masks psychological fear.  But it is not the “real and personal” threat of violence that normal people are attracted to.  Rather, it is “sanctioned” violence, situations in which the violence is more or less controlled by agreed upon rules, rituals or traditions which may offer some degree of protection to the participants and, more importantly, release spectators to enjoy the mayhem vicariously without feeling any moral responsibility for the results.

Sanction is what makes the difference between cheering at a bullfight and being horrified by “mindless” violence.  Sanction does not mean only to permit or make legal or even to regulate but it involves granting permission to stand apart and enjoy, to see a violent act as entertainment.  When an American city builds a football stadium for a professional team with taxpayers’ money, its motive may be to stimulate the economy but its message is to grant approval to a brutal sport.  It is pretty much the same thing as the Roman Empire building coliseums to keep the population amused.

Sport hunting is another example.  About 12.5 million Americans hunt legally each year, devoting an average of 17.6 days in the field and spending an average of $1,832.  The pleasures they derive from hunting include companionship, the enjoyment of the outdoors, the satisfaction of putting food on the table, and the mastery of a complex set of skills.  Most hunters are dedicated conservationists and hunting is a socially important component of wildlife management.  But it is also undeniably a blood sport.  It inherently requires the taking of life for what amounts to the personal pleasure, recreation or enjoyment of the hunter.  In the past it was often essential to providing food but this necessity is rarely the case today.  All of the other motives can as readily be achieved with a camera as with a rifle.  The problem is hunting with a camera requires no rules, no choreography.  Go where you want, when you want. No license necessary.  No “sportsmanship” required.  If you botch a shot, no arduous tracking down of the subject to put it out of its misery.

It may help to compare hunting with bullfighting which, by any humane standard, is far worse.  In the wake of an economic downturn which has reduced the number of corridas by nearly 50%, the Spanish government is considering declaring bullfighting part of the national patrimony.  Even in Spain, it is generally not referred to as a sport but rather a performance that shares some of the same attractions as flamenco.  As a spectacle, though, it is pure violence.  The matador runs life threatening risks for as long as a fight lasts, usually about 20 minutes.  The bull, of course, is certain to be tortured and killed even in the rare case when he “wins” the contest.  But the performers are not the most interesting aspect of bullfighting.  It is the crowd of spectators:  thousands of human beings screaming their critique of the performance, chanting their encouragement of the matador’s elegance or the bull’s courage.  In short, participating vicariously in the bloodletting and enjoying the death spectacle.

There are, of course, many other violent spectator sports including boxing in which the whole object is to beat the opponent senseless in front of a crowd of cheering onlookers.  And there are sports that are not essentially violent but which are still dangerous.  But one sport is unique in that it is both violent and dangerous and has a culture of widespread approval and that, of course, is American-style football.

Each week from early September through late December, an average of 1,094,400 Americans gather to eat, drink and watch professional football games in 15 or 16 stadiums.  That’s an average of 68,000 people per game.  No one really knows how many people watch the NFL on television but, according to the Harris Poll, 73% of American men and 55% of American women watch games regularly.  In 2012, 644 NCAA college teams played 3,569 games attended by a total of 48,958,547 people, an average of 13,718.  1,134,377 boys (and nearly 6,000 girls) at 15,513 high schools (61% of all high schools) played football of one kind or another in the 2010-11 season.  And nearly 3 million children, age 6 to 14, played the game  in schools and independent leagues such as Pop Warner and Pee Wee in 2011.

The idea of football is not to kill or cripple your opponent and, in fact, sponsors have worked hard and with some success to reduce the number of catastrophic injuries at all levels of the game.  Players still get killed every year, lives are shortened and the overall injury rate is frightening.  Violence remains the heart of the game.  Every play begins with a sudden, head-on collision at the line of “scrimmage” (which comes from the Italian word scaramuccia meaning a small battle).  Typically, it ends with players knocked down, tripped up or otherwise crashed into the ground.  Plays are elaborately choreographed and, at times, gracefully executed.  But this is not ballet.  It is war waged by infantry and artillery only without deliberate bloodshed.  It is the essence of machismo and it is not surprising that there are many men who love to play it.  What is more interesting is that so many millions love to watch it.  Football is merely the preferred American version of what seems to be a universal appetite.  In Europe, the equivalent is soccer which is less violent on the field but much more so in the stands.  In ancient Rome, “circuses” were staged to entertain upwards of 60,000 spectators with chariot races, gladiatorial fights to the death, gruesome executions and even re-enactments of naval battles.  In nineteenth century America, thousands of people would bring their families and picnic baskets to witness public hangings.  In the contemporary world, graphic violence is the key attraction of many movies and computer games.

Why?  What is the attraction of violence?  Why do we encourage our 8-year old boys to expose themselves to life threatening injury in the name of sport?  Why do we encourage grown men to display the most atavistic behaviors associated with nature red in tooth and claw?  There has been no lack of research and speculation about these and similar questions.  Aristotle thought that witnessing tragedy helped people cleanse their emotions in a process he called catharsis.  Some contemporary observers think a similar phenomenon occurs when people watch violent acts thereby purging themselves of their own dangerous impulses.  Then, of course, there is sex. 

As we work toward a theory of violence, the apparent connection between sex and violence seems unavoidable.  That there is some such link seems obvious from the prevalence of sadomasochism and related practices in clinical literature, erotic literature and on internet pornography sites.  From a biological perspective, both involve the activation of the hormones adrenaline and testosterone but this does not answer the question of why they do so nor does it come to terms with the fact that any such connection is more a matter of fantasy than of actual practice.  In that respect, it is exactly analogous to football spectators.  A significant majority of both audiences are not given to participatory violence.  They are excited by watching other people engage in violent activities.  One might think this would attract the attention of psychoanalysts but generally it has not.  Freud dealt with aggression as did Karl Menninger and other pioneers of the field and there is some speculation that it is an instinctive inheritance from our primitive ancestors.  The argument from evolution is that those who enjoy violence will be better at it than others and will enjoy greater reproductive success.  But aggression is not the same thing as and does not always lead to violence.  Moreover, as is often pointed out, violent people rarely become patients of analysts or other psychotherapists.

Early in his career, Freud speculated that aggression is rooted in the subconscious struggle between life and death, Eros and Thanatos.  He abandoned this view but not before giving rise to the notion that the biblical account of the fall is a metaphor for something very similar.  In the third chapter of the Book of Genesis, God metes out penalties for the disobedience of Adam and Eve.  To punish Eve, he invents sexual pleasure which will result in the extreme pain of childbirth.  This may explain the church’s attitude toward “artificial” contraception which permits the pleasure without the ordained pain.

Religion has always been associated with this pleasure-pain theme.  Christianity sees the entire purpose of life as a struggle between eternal bliss and eternal damnation.  Its attraction to extreme violence is a matter of the historical record.  On the morning of July 22, 1209, the crusaders of Pope Innocent III slaughtered some 20,000 unarmed citizens of Beziers in what is now southern France for the crime of being Cathar heretics.  In his book, The Perfect Heresy, Stephen O’Shea remarked, “In the days before gunpowder, to kill that many people in so short a time required a savage single-mindedness that beggars the imagination.”  Between 1487 and 1600, Innocent’s successors waged the Waldensian Crusade.  According to one history, “The crusaders ripped limbs from live victims, dashed the heads of children against the rocks, marched fathers to their deaths with the heads of their sons around their necks; parents watched their children violated and murdered. Other tortures were too vile to describe.”  The Holy Inquisition often conducted mass burnings, autos–da–fé, of witches and other heretics.  Huge crowds turned out to enjoy these liturgies.  Enjoy:  certainly there is pleasure involved; no one who responded to such horrendous bloodshed with repugnance would be able to perpetrate it or even watch it.  The sanction provided by the church would trump any feeling of sympathy and pleasure could be seen as virtuous.

There are, admittedly, more questions than answers to this paradox of good and evil, pleasure and violence.  The most poignant questions relate to participation in the Holocaust.  Scholars generally believe that knowledge of the mass murders was widespread in the German population.  Hundreds of thousands had some more direct involvement and an estimated 55,000 had personal involvement in the death camps.  Even more personal was the case of several hundred executioners who machine gunned 33,771 Jewish men, women and children at Babi Yar on the night of September 29-30, 1941.  The German commander was tried and hanged for these crimes in 1951.  The soldiers who did the actual killing and who presumably enjoyed it were never held accountable.  So lines are being drawn or blurred as each community reaches something of a consensus regarding responsibility but, again, there is little consideration of the emotional lives of the killers.  What was going through their minds as the tragedy was unfolding?  What goes through the minds of suburban spectators at a high school football game as they chant:  “Hit ‘em high;  hit ‘em low;  kick ‘em in the balls and go, go go!”

To return to the massacre of the Cathars in 1209, the Pope’s plenipotentiary on the scene was the Cistercian Abbot Arnold Amaury.  When asked by the soldiers how to tell the difference between Christians and Cathars, he replied, “Kill them all.  God will know his own.”  Was he shouting in anger?  Was he smiling at his bon mot?  He certainly knew he was ordering the murder of good Christians.  What would his patron, the Pope, have thought of that?  For that matter, what did Innocent think of the slaughter of the heretics?  Did he feel justified in exterminating people whose religious views were different from his own and might become a threat to his power?  Or did the exercise of such ultimate power enhance his self-worth or maybe just hold off the dogs of doubt and depression?  It is possible that he considered it a minor matter in his otherwise extremely busy life of dealing primarily with secular matters.  However he felt, this was an act of sanctioned violence.  He and Abbot Arnold and the soldiers were all doing the work of God.  Do you think any of them ever for a moment regretted it?

It is tempting to resort to Nietzsche’s theory of the will to power (der Wille zur Macht also referred to as Machtgelüst) to explain the connection between pleasure and violence.  In his 1882 book, The Gay Science, he specifically argues that there is an intimate connection between a “desire” for cruelty and the “pleasure” derived from the feeling of power.  Nietzsche, however, was never burdened with the will to write clearly or with consistency and a conventional interpretation of the will to power is no more persuasive than Freud’s opposite idea of the pleasure principle.  There can be no doubt, however, that some people at least are driven by something quite close to Machtgelüst.  Often enough such people render great service to their societies; we call them leaders and celebrate their charisma.  One thinks of Frederick the Great or, closer to our own time, Frederick’s admirer General George S. (Old Blood and Guts) Patton.  Of course it depends on one’s point of view.  Another American General, William Tecumseh (Uncle Billy) Sherman is still thought of as either a brutal war criminal or a paragon of military strategy and ethics.  Then there are the leaders who exercise their charisma for pure evil who need not be memorialized here.

There are hints that the attraction to violence may be declining.  The number of children and adolescents playing organized football has declined significantly in recent years.  Boxing is rapidly becoming as rehearsed as wrestling.  Dog fighting and cock fighting are going the way of bear baiting and the Spanish politicians are unlikely to reverse the fortunes of the bull ring.  If this turns out to be a real trend, change could come quickly and would unleash a torrent of evolutionary discussion.  It would not take a vast number of people to change their minds about, for example, football for it to go the way of public hangings.  But if football goes, can guns be far behind?