Violence

All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), Erich Maria Remarque
Arendt - On Violence (1970)

One of my classmates articulated exactly how I felt while reading Hannah Arendt's book. He mentioned that he lacked the context necessary to appreciate On Violence. He, like me, had no background on Arendt before starting the book and felt as though he’d jumped into a conversation that had been going on for a long while without him. This is one of Arendt’s later books so I presume she’s writing to a readership that knows where she’s coming from and has some foundation to stand on.

This book was scheduled to be read at a timely time given the uprisings happening in Northern Africa and the Middle East… this contributed to an already passionate discussion in class.

Nowadays - even compared to when On Violence was written (1969), new technologies aiding the reporting of events worldwide have brought war-ravaged areas to our living rooms in real-time: At the start of the Vietnam war, it took two days for reports to make it to newscasts. By the end of that war, a mere few hours… and in 2001, we watched the twin towers fall, live.

A topic that came up again, in class, was that of aggression and whether it is an instinct or a learned behaviour? My feeling is that if violence weren’t instinctual, then there must have been a time, pre-history, when there was no fighting between humans. Can anyone believe there was such a time??

But the book left me with more questions: Arendt never really addresses where violence comes from if not from an instinct inherent in humans. If violence is an extension of the person, like a dagger is an extension of one’s arm, how can the person and violence be separated? What is more, Arendt was a supporter of the death penalty in certain situations so this is quite a contradiction. I’d be interested in reading what she has to say about this form of punishment.

Interesting, mind-boggling facts: WWI Military deaths: 9.7 M; WWI Civilian deaths: 6.8 M.
WWII Military deaths: 22.5-25.5 M; WWII Civilian deaths: 32-50 M.

The following definitions and quotations would have been useful before probing into the book itself. They are nuggets from which she expands her ideas, sometimes in a very cerebral way.

“The end of human action, as distinct from the end products of fabrication, can never be reliably predicted. The means used to achieve political goals are more often than not of greater relevance to the future world than the intended goals.”
The notion of “luck” on the battlefield is one that has me look with wonder on human history over the 40 years after WWII (Cold War). I can’t help but be amazed that humanity survived that era without a nuclear holocaust - how many times did we come close to that?

A message repeated over by Arendt is that violence and power not only must be differentiated, but that they are polar opposites. “The only way to maintain control in the absence of power is through the continual use of violence. Protracted violence results in diminished power, making more violence necessary.”

“Loss of power leads some to try to replace it with violence. But violence is the opposite of power and cannot stand in its stead.” However, does she provide us with answers or tips as to how we should proceed? Not really, at least not as far as I could read (the reading is dense, I must say… perhaps I missed a thing or two). On p.5, she quotes a passage that is as true today as it ever has been: p.5 “Covenants, without the sword, are but words” (-Hobbes).

p.3 The technical development of the implements of violence has now reached the point where no political goal could conceivably correspond to their destructive potential or justify their actual use in armed conflict … “if either end wins it is the end of both.”

I like the following quote, as it hints toward something pathological in human thought: that of the mere expression of an hypothesis as “truth”; as if the outcome of that hypothesis is the end of a course of action, therefore leaving little or no room for maneuvering. (p.6/7) “The logical flaw in these hypothetical constructions of future events is always the same: what first appears as a hypothesis - with or without its implied alternatives, according to the level of sophistication - turns immediately, usually after a few paragraphs, into a “fact”, which then gives birth to a whole string of similar non-facts, with the result that the purely speculative character of the whole enterprise is forgotten… pseudoscience.”

p.10 …power cannot be measured in terms of wealth - an abundance of wealth may erode power, riches are particularly dangerous to the power and well-being of republics - an insight that does not lose validity because it has been forgotten.

p.17 What are “problems” to us “are built into the flesh and blood of the young.” (speaking of our attitudes… they are formed when we are still young and impressionable.)

p.18 For the future, as Spender puts it, is “like a time-bomb buried, but ticking away, in the present.” To the often-heard question Who are they, this new generation? one is tempted to answer, Those who hear the ticking. And to the other question, Who are they who utterly deny them? the answer may well be, Those who do not know, or refuse to face, things as they really are.

The denial of our death is seen (or not seen, rather!) all around us. Many are known to live their lives without recognizing their inevitable end, and even if they do, they do not change their behaviours accordingly. Could the following be some kind of desire to immortalize the self? p.27 Human development is a form of chronological unfairness, since late-comers are able to profit by the labours of their predecessors without paying the same price, or, in the words of Kant, “It will always remain bewildering … that the earlier generations seem to carry on their burdensome business only for the sake of the latter … and that only the last should have the good fortune to dwell in the [completed] building.”

p.41 “To suppose that majority rule functions only in democracy is a fantastic illusion,” as Jouvenel points out: “The king, who is but one solitary individual, stands far more in need of the general support of Society than any other form of government.”

p.42 “…power always stands in need of numbers, whereas violence up to a point can manage without them because it relies on implements.”
The extreme form of power is All against One, the extreme form of violence is One against All.

p.44-46 – definitions of power, strength, force, authority and violence:

POWER: ability to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual.

STRENGTH: designates something in an individual entity.

The strength of even the strongest individual can always be overpowered by the many, who often will combine for no other purpose than to ruin strength precisely because of its peculiar independence.
It is in the nature of a group and its power to turn against independence, the property of individual strength.

FORCE: should indicate the energy released by physical or social movements.

AUTHORITY: To remain in authority requires respect for the person or the office. The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.

p.45 – when authority leaves, power enters.

VIOLENCE: is distinguished by its instrumental character. Phenomenologically, it is close to strength, since the implements of violence, like all other tools, are designed and used for the purpose of multiplying natural strength.

p.50 Even the totalitarian ruler, whose chief instrument of rule is torture, needs a power basis – the secret police and its net of informers. Only the development of robot soldiers… Single men without others to support them never have enough power to use violence successfully.

p.52 Violence can be justifiable, but it will never be legitimate. Its justification loses in plausibility the farther its intended end recedes into the future.

p.53 Violence can always destroy power; out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience. What never can grow out of it is power.
To substitute violence for power can bring victory, but the price is very high; for it is not only paid by the vanquished, it is also paid by the victor in terms of his own power.

p.55 …effectiveness of terror depends almost entirely on the degree of social atomization. Every kind of organized opposition must disappear before full force of terror can be let lose. This atomization … is maintained and intensified through the ubiquity of the informer, who can be literally omnipresent because he no longer is merely a professional agent in the pay of the police but potentially every person one comes into contact.

The climax of terror is reached when the police state begins to devour its own children, when yesterday’s executioner becomes today’s victim.

p.56 Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules completely, the other is absent.

p.61 …lack of provocation apparently leads to instinct frustration, to “repressed” aggressiveness, which according to psychologists causes a damming up of energy whose eventual explosion will be all the more dangerous. (It is as though the sensation of hunger in man would increase with the decrease of hungry people.)

p.62 …the additional gift of reason makes man a more dangerous beast. It is the use of reason that makes us dangerously “irrational”, because this reason is the property of an “aboriginally instinctual being.” … it is man the toolmaker who has invented those long-range weapons that free him from the “natural” restraints we find in the animal kingdom, and that tool-making is a highly complex mental activity.

p.63 Only where there is reason to suspect that conditions could be changed and are not does rage arise. (injustice!)

p.64 In order to respond reasonably one must first of all be “moved,” and the opposite of emotional is not “rational”, whatever that may mean, but either the inability to be moved … which is a perversion of feeling. Rage and violence turn irrational only when they are directed against substitutes…

p.67 In military as well as revolutionary action individualism is the first value to disappear. … perform an irrevocable action in order to burn his bridges to respectable society…

p.68 …faced collectively and in action, death changes its countenance; now nothing seems more likely to intensify our vitality than its proximity …

p.69 Have not men always equated death with the “eternal rest”, and does it not follow that where we have life we have struggle and unrest? Is not quiet a clear manifestation of lifelessness or decay?

p.74 [perverse biological justification of violence, because it has an urge to grow]

p.80 The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probably change is to a more violent world.

p.83 …the present glorification of violence is caused by severe frustration of the faculty of action in the modern world. It is simply true that riots in the ghettos and rebellions on the campuses make “people feel they are acting together in a way that they rarely can.”

p.84 Bigness is afflicted with vulnerability; cracks in the power structure of all but the small countries are opening and widening.

p.86 It is as though we have fallen under a fairyland spell which permits us to do the “impossible” on the condition that we lose the capacity of doing the possible, to achieve fantastically extraordinary feats on the condition of no longer being able to attend properly to our everyday needs.