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
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?
