Violence and Democracy

...We once again condemn Zionism as a racist doctrine...

...But where else is there to stand...

...I may be making the mistake in characterizing as a panhuman modality something that is indeed parochial and culturally limited, but so deeply ingrained as not to be transcendable into a new way of thinking about men...

...But that is not the issue, because I do not think we are doing anything effective to see to it that in peacetime they may have the same system of peaceful resolution of internal conflicts that we do...

...Saying these things causes me to wonder whether in fact I am so much a product of my own culture and time that I cannot really envision a world in which the resort to violence is absolutely minimal, and in which the training in childhood is such that cruelty and forceful harm to others is seen in just those terms, with all their implied condemnation...

...I am not sure at all that virtue will triumph...

...We are confronted with the fact that two violent crimes, murder and rape, are often best understood as violence among intimates...

...Violent seizure of what one wants when one cannot get it without violence seems to be now, as always in our history, a fairly normal procedure for two segments of our population...

...I do not expect my students to be any wiser than I was...

...Yet, however embarrassing it is to speak of the use of force in these diverse contexts, it is not easy to get away from the fact that the use of force, actual or threatened, to get MELVIN M. TUMIN one's own way over the will of others is a basic modality of human interaction, and nothing seems finally to be able to substitute for it, if we assume that conflict of wills is a persisting feature of human interaction...

...In those cases, maximum identification with the victim is possible, and hence maximum fear is generated for our own safety...

...We shall ruin it for sure if we start matching violence with violence...

...I have had my utopian dreams along with the best or worst of you...

...The text below, with a few minor changes, was delivered as an address to the 1970 annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society in New York City...

...The dramatic and symbolic value of violent acts of protest and demonstration cannot be denied...

...Perhaps more than any other large-scale society in the world we are nominally committed to the peaceful resolution of internal conflicts and have probably done no worse than most others in seeking peaceful means of reconciling international conflicts...

...Or, if you prefer a "drift" theory of delinquency and violence, then we shall have to provide the same kinds of blockages to drift into delinquency and violence as are present in our lives...

...T T HE AWARENESS of the extent to which all of us, as individuals and as members of organized societies, are involved in the capacity for violence is important, too, as a caution against overlooking our own frequent use of violence in legitimate and approved contexts, and hence of how much we officially sponsor violence...

...Any analysis of the causes of violence in the United States, and especially of criminal violence, has to take into account the role of social and MELVIN M. TUMIN economic inequalities (in the face of claims to equal opportunity, and the pressure to live well and ostentatiously) in the production of criminal violence, especially of such acts as robbery...

...I am sure they believe their slogans about preserving democracy and the free world...

...Maybe...

...For those very same reasons, once under way, it is far less subject to rational control and limitation than nonviolence...

...Let it be acknowledged at the outset that this society is now engaged in what many, including myself, consider to be an utterly unwarranted and murderous war...

...These actions are so diverse in their motivation and so utterly different in what they call for by way of appropriate response, that to treat them homogeneously as violence is to be absurd...

...The other Zionists in the Conspiracy 8 trial were willing and did sacrifice Bobby Seale and his role in the conspiracy trial to gain publicity...

...I do not think the other side is any better, morally or politically, and in peacetime they are politically far worse than we are as a system...

...That is a cause for despair...

...In turn, this implies outgroups that are alien, strangers and desecrators of the secular and sacred norms, whether these are kin, clan, tribes, ethnic groups, or nation-states...

...It seems equally clear that if we wish people to seek their ends with the same steady refrain from violence which we practice, we have to make it as possible for them as it is for us to achieve their life's ambitions through peaceful, noncriminal means...

...Perhaps this is because the victim's suffering is vivid testimony to his humanity...

...in the violence of their public entertainment and spectacles...

...And so we must ask our young people and our other protesters (and ourselves) not to let their despair and impatience lead them to deal lightly with democracy...

...The Zionists...

...Its roots are always shallow...

...I do not believe that President Nixon or Vice-President Agnew are capable of appreciating these distinctions, however unsubtle they are...

...This definition will cover the cases of war, police and street riots, and fist fights...

...Connie Matthews, International Coordinator, Black Panther Party in The Black Panther, April 25, 1970 Concerning this remarkable statement, a few things need to be noted: (1) It will come as a surprise to the defendants at the Chicago trial—only two of whom are Jewish, as it happens—that they are Zionists...

...We are unavoidably led by these considerations to some matters of definition...

...Nor can we afford to overlook distinctions between more and less democratic societies or mechanisms...

...Such diversity of motives and other parts of the action systems in various violent crimes is an elementary consideration for sophisticated sociologists...

...In these regards, this is a position that is substantially different from those being offered from the Right and the so-called Left...

...But then there is no alternative, because the other possible courses of action involve us in choosing whose dictatorial authority we prefer...

...In retrospect I am aware how important it was that I made it possible, by not being myself totally impossible, for them to protect me from others who did not understand...

...Those are not the same things...

...I do not for a moment deny that our so-called national leaders believe their own slogans...

...Even then, we are so lacking in the arithmetic required for moral or social balance that judgments of the net outcome are likely to be persuasive only to those who share common systems of weighting and preference...

...I was also saved by the fact that I did not have a subculture of campus violence to reinforce my own very hesitant tendencies in that direction...

...The one-eyed bandit of Tel-Aviv, Moyshe Dyan [sic], must be hunted down and killed...

...The first is that one must be prepared to lose once in a while, and to search for ways to MELVIN M. TUMIN win again within the framework of organized social life, assuming the processes of change are available...

...The same emotions that permit people in these relationships to be benignly concerned with each other provide VIOLENCE AND DEMOCRACY the psychic triggers to violence when the conditions of peaceful intimacy are betrayed or violated...

...Knowing that may help us become a bit more compassionate in our public responses, even to the kinds of violent behavior that seem most frightening, namely, those that involve one-to-one violence, in situations in which we ourselves are often involved, such as walking in the park, coming home from the theater, and the like...

...It is all too easily overcome by noxious airs and weeds...

...For after all, as a collective society, we are, in our formal operations, probably much more democratic than one would expect, given the sentiment-structure and proclivities for authoritarianism that seem to characterize so many of the increasingly less silent majority...

...But I know, too, that the most irresponsible among the students threaten that incredibly beautiful thing called the free university as much as do those many mindless educators who resist all change...

...More than half, and sometimes as many as two-thirds or three-quarters, of these two acts are committed by people against others with whom they have had some degree of previous intimacy, including husband-wife, parent-child, and brother-sister relationships...

...Our own society is surely a curious mixture of peace and force...

...in the honors they accord for violent behavior...

...First, the wealthy and the powerful who, when blocked by existing laws or rules from having their way, are capable, by stealth or force or both, of altering the rules or avoiding them, without much fear of reprisal...

...So, wounded as many of us are by that impotence induced by future-mindedness, we suffer, instead, ulcerated colons or deeplygnashed and ground-down teeth, or other psychosomatic ailments, plus endless wounded pride, as our price for keeping the peace...

...However, since our stand the White Left started floundering and became undecided...

...So, too, there is violence in all societies, for societies are the scenes in which the interaction among conflicting wills and purposes takes place...

...The same considerations, of course, apply to the fight against inequality, whether between black and white, and whether economic, social, or political...

...But that lode has already been mined to utter exhaustion, so that not even strip-mining will yield enough ore to justify any serious investment...

...For, on the balance, there is still much to cherish and cultivate and harbor and protect...

...Hence, while one cannot argue against demonstrations on the grounds that they may enrage others, one can urge that the demonstrators exercise a modicum of rational calculation in behalf of preserving the fabric of democratic processes, for them and for us...

...Under those circumstances, we are likely to react with maximum punitiveness, being unable to keep our fears and righteous indignation from shaping our public responses...

...And even if we were to let ourselves go and indulge our rage, most of us would probably find ourselves so horrified by our first acts of "self-liberation" as from then on to be permanently imprisoned by contrition and shame...

...If this is true for school children, it cannot be less true for adults...

...I beg you, however, not to tax me with a lack of imagination...

...is comprised of a large percentage of the Jewish population...

...Second, the group that, because of its deprived and degraded condition of life, acts as though it had little or nothing to lose and hence is "free" to engage in violent behavior without serious concern for the possible negative consequences if caught...

...If, then, we ask what we mean by applying the same term to those cases and to many others, such as street fights, riots, and the like, we see that the term violence is used to refer to the application of force, actual or threatened, that results or promises to result in the harm or destruction of the person or property of others, or in the deprivation of their freedom...

...But the fact of the matter is that they are not accomplishing this at all...

...The socalled Left is saying that we must have change at virtually any cost...

...I am not yet including political violence— in the ghettos and on the college campuses...

...We cannot afford to clamor for taking the whole society down because it is so rotten in so many of the things it does...

...Or, if you prefer a criminal or violent subculture theory, then we shall have to create the same kinds of noncriminal subcultures for their exposure...

...in the glory they impute to violent behavior...

...The Right is saying, in effect, that we must have order and stability at virtually any cost...

...The other rule, just as basic, is that a democracy means participation in decisionmaking at all relevant points by all persons affected by the decisions...

...Above all, unless there exists some unenvisionable form of world society, those national aggregates seem unavoidably led to mutual destruction by actions they perceive as necessary for national survival...

...It is quite evident, however, that the normally punitive and indignant responses of the public to the violence of the deprived have done little or nothing to reduce the likelihood of more violence in the future...

...If I were black and poor, I cannot guarantee that I would not be more persuaded by my despair and rage at the slow pace of change than I would be by rational calculations about possible futures, slowly eked out over a lifetime of pain and denial...

...Now it doesn't make very good sense to have a term defined in such a way as to be equally applicable to wars, riots, genocide, and to child-rearing practices and marital relations...

...I give you as a starter a dilemma to the effect that the condition necessary for making human beings out of prehuman babies is organized social life, and that organized social life always has boundaries that can be maintained only by some sense of loyalty and commitment to one's ingroups...

...We reiterate our solidarity with the Palestinian people's struggle for national liberation against Israeli imperialism and Zionism aided and abetted by U.S...

...Yet we dare not neglect these possibilities...

...there are obvious differences in the speed and frequency of resort to force...

...Violence, it is clear, means the suspension or the destruction of democracy...

...There is nothing intrinsically wrong with those either...

...This leaves us with no alternative than to believe that a large portion of these people are Zionists and are therefore racists...

...And I am aware of the supportive subcultures of violence that have sprung up on campuses and of how exhilarating they can be...

...The issues of criminal violence are not exhausted, however, by dealing only with robbery, mugging, and the like...

...Fortunately, some exemplary campuses are beginning to develop mechanisms to enforce both those rules—the rules of alternating winning and losing, without destroying the fabric of the organized life...

...The loftiness of the pacifist ideal is matched only by its utter bankruptcy as a doctrine of social or political action under most conceivable human circumstances...

...I am obviously giving top priority to the maintenance and strengthening of democracy and equality in any set of solutions offered for present-day problems...

...If the "Right" is wrong in urging forceful repression of general freedoms and the suspension of democratic governance in order to yield order and stability, the "Left" is no less wrong in urging the same things in the name of their slogans...

...Free speech in this country is so very limited and yet so far more ample and broad-reaching than any conceivable alternative system might provide today or tomorrow, that those who need free speech to live, as all of us do, cannot sanction a policy, however righteously motivated, of meeting the denial of free speech by some with a denial of free speech to others...

...So any discussion of internal violence committed by radical or other students in the name of stopping the war has to take account of the war and all it implies...

...For there is a great current threat to that unbelievable and marvelous social invention called democratic polity...

...The ancient and traditional model of the wise captor and the humble captive that has dominated campuses heretofore no longer will work...

...and, by contrast, in the extent to which they strive to produce citizens who are sufficiently compassionate and capable of identifying with others, so that they use force, if at all, only with the greatest of reluctance, the greatest of possible gentility, and the quickest possible removal of the forceful pressures...

...At least I have to weigh them in judging them...

...But that isn't necessarily the same as sound politics...

...It was, I confess, rather easy to prate Bolshevik doctrines about the "transitional dictatorship of the proletariat" so long as I did not have to face the consequences of that system in action or of the actual violent revolutionary actions that other circumstances might have called forth...

...All this is important, as I see it, so that we shall not be beguiled into accepting as legitimate the question as to why some people are violent and others are not, with its implication that we are dealing with utterly different brands and breeds of human beings...

...Moreover, as they grow larger, from clan to state to nation, they almost always involve the accumulation of superior technologies of destruction as instruments of the collectivity, and hence make possible larger-scale human killing...

...I am unwilling to dismiss such claims as total nonsense...

...It almost never does...

...Predictably, the focus of concern and indignation regarding violence is upon the second group, since the depredations of the first group, however much more injurious to the public well-being, are either concealed from the public view or are converted by semantic legerdemain into contributions to the public welfare...

...A primary reason here is the further incitement to violence that the apparent suffering of the victim seems to induce in those caught up in violent behavior...

...Rather, let us seek to discover the conditions of social organization that might minimize the use of violence...

...Moreover, it is apparent that violence per se, like conflict, or peace, or war per se, cannot be judged as valuable or worthless...

...T T HERE ARE AT LEAST two rules here that must be followed if any of us is to have a chance to survive these challenges...

...That, of course, is so painfully evident that we are restrained from tearing down prison walls with our own hands only because we wouldn't know what to substitute and because there would be many, many more opposed to us who believe in prisons and all they imply...

...h. vocate programs that one can see as more correct and promising than others, however unappealing they are to the victims of the situations one is trying to correct...

...It only makes them understandable...

...They are both antagonistic to decent civility and society...

...No—the danger of violence lies first in its self-commending character...

...It will no longer do to endorse the destruction by either side because we understand and commiserate with what led people to engage in the destruction...

...and until that evidence can be violently expunged, the man committing violence cannot continue his violence with an easy mind...

...For, there obviously are occasions when the use of VIOLENCE AND DEMOCRACY force is eminently justified, as when evil is sure to prevail unless superior counterforce is brought to bear against it, and the evil people and conditions are forcefully repressed...

...Before the Black Panther Party took its stand on the Palestinian people's struggle there were problems but the support of the White Left for the Black Panther Party was concrete...

...The fact of the matter is that there is violence in all of us, and one doesn't need any instinctual theory to account for it...

...It is not, I insist, that violence per se in these contexts is less morally worthy than nonviolence...

...But that value has to be weighed against the overall consequences, now and in the future...

...at least sufficiently simple so that we can predict how the polarization of opinion will line up...

...Those rules also tell us what is wrong with violence and what is right about nonviolence...

...Those who believe that this society is so totally bad that it must be torn down come what may and, along with it, the universities, are as cruel and vicious enemies of democracy, fair play, and equality as those who believe and act as if this society was totally good and must be preserved intact at any cost...

...Victims may speak with true, righteous indignation from their hearts...

...I am aware, as the prophet has warned, that those who stand in the middle during historical moments when everything is polarized are likely to get symmetrical bumps on both sides of their heads...

...One cannot prefer the embittered clamor by the aged for stability to the exuberance of the youth for destructiveness, or vice versa...

...The existence of these aggregates is therefore highly conducive to the use of force...

...It was a Zionist judge, Judge Friedman, who sentenced Huey P. Newton to 2-15 years in jail...

...Or, worse still, we might develop a real taste for violent indulgence, and discover ourselves in endless conflict between our former and new selves...

...The fact of the matter is that there is no conceivable decent life possible by any of the values that most of us have come to appreciate if we do not have a democratic society...

...In any event, it is important to make distinctions among the various acts all of which are classified as criminal violence, and to see how utterly different in onset, actors, consequences, motives, and the like they often are...

...But that does not make correct the policies advocated out of despair...

...By inference this tells us what is right about democracy...

...But that won't have anything to do with its need to resort to force to manage the diverse claims upon the common goods and services and to restrain the general range of deviation that is generic to all societies, but especially so in societies made up of diverse and numerous peoples...

...and, of course, there is no solution at this moment, and given these costs, except to stop the war immediately...

...A state may someday be created that does not reflect the special interests of one class over another...

...It is, after all, simply sentimental to deplore the use of force in human relations simply because it is force or because, by definition, it involves harm or injury or destruction of property or person or deprivation of freedom...

...On the one hand, we cannot urge them to withhold their demonstrations and their protests simply because they may evoke the bitter antilibertarian sentiments and approval MELVIN M. TUMIN of authoritarian power that seem to characterize many of our fellow citizens...

...Because these are mostly thoughtless, mindless, spontaneous acts, they are probably outside the reach of normal deterrence, except among those who have so very much to lose if caught that they are bereft even of the power to act out their most intense passion...

...It was a Zionist judge, Judge Homan, who allowed the other Zionists to go free but has kept Bobby Seale in jail and sentenced him to 4 years for contempt charges...

...We invite correspondence from New Left defenders of the Black Panthers explaining why such methods are any more defensible when employed by Connie Matthews than when employed by Gerald L. K. Smith...

...But how little this notion seems to have penetrated the minds of the lay public and of our government officials...

...And I prefer none...

...These are uses into which we are socialized from earliest days on, by the model of child-rearing, by the training in masculinity and standing up for one's rights, by the approval of the maleness of the contact sports, by the concepts of family, tribal, and national honor that call us to arms, with high, moral-sounding phrases and much applause for violent acts committed in good names...

...It is surely one of the gifts of life and of an advantaged position, and one of its attendant obligations, to ad VIOLENCE AND DEMOCRACY The Panthers and the "Zionists" "The white Left in the U.S.A...

...There is still a visible enough chance of slow improvement toward greater equality in this country for me, in my judgment, to insist on preserving those mechanisms over other political programs, simply because all other alternatives that I have heard are sure to take us all beyond recovery of anything decent...

...With whom did he conspire...

...They also differ in the balance between short- and long-term loss and gain...

...We have barely begun to establish democracy in this country...

...Enough of this horticultural metaphor...

...T T URNING TO POLITICAL VIOLENCE brings us to quite a different set of issues...

...Having said this, it is crucial to realize that there are vast differences among societies in the situations they legitimate as justifying the use of violence...

...We are in that ironic situation where we have to ask ourselves, and others like us, including our children and our students, to be more sensible, more wise, more restrained, more concerned for the welfare of our society and the preservation of our barely flourishing democratic processes than the elected officials who are selected and paid to do just that for us...

...Or we shall have to see to it that the same preponderance of noncriminal, nonviolent stimuli, associations, and rewards are present in their lives as in ours...

...I take it, moreover, that I don't have to spend even a moment here discussing the contribution of our prisons and our usual treatment of criminals to the furtherance of their criminal and violent careers...

...Yet, however infrequently one resorts to force (and I include the invocation of the legitimate authority of positions here, with its implied threats against the well-being of those who might defy that authority), forceful coercion is part of the human game...

...What we will surely get if either side prevails is the range of any and all, and mostly negative, costs, and that means costs to the values of democracy and equality...

...If one says petulantly, in response, that after all one has worked his way through life arduously, nonviolently, and without resort to crime, then the answer clearly is that we shall have to provide the same kinds of life histories for those whom we wish to convert to nonviolent behavior...

...In any event, given this commitment in our ideals, we are surely a sad sight in our actualities...

...Bobby Seale alone stands trial again in April on conspiracy charges...

...For it is beguiling...

...For the moment I deliberately confine myself to the more common forms of criminal violence, as defined for instance by the FBI Index...

...The implication here is that those responses should be shaped not by fear and indignation but by a realization of the circumstances that led the offender to his violent acts and what is required to reduce the likelihood that he and others will repeat those acts...

...It will also cover genocidal concentration camps and guerrilla wars and, unhappily, most of the practices followed in the rearing of children, in the conduct of classrooms, and in the establishment of durable patterns of dominance and subordination between spouses...

...How much, for example, does the value of a smashed computer weigh against the value of 180 students momentarily "radicalized" by the sight of police dragging off the peer-group computersmashers...

...Let us start with the fact that legitimized wars are violent, and that police often use violence...

...Else we shall be debating things that are quite different, all under the name of violence...

...It is a very tender and easily bruised plant...

...Note here the presumed long-term gain of violence in child-rearing, as against the short- and long-term loss implied by murder and genocide...

...Among other things, it minimizes the resort to violence...

...2) The "code" identification of Jews as Zionists is a technique that has in the past been used systematically by fascist and right-wing anti-Semites, e.g., by Gerald K. Smith...

...They differ in the intentions of the violent actors, in the degree of concern for the victim of violence, in the legitimacy of the action, and in the degree of harm done or threatened...

...and the rule of maximizing relevant participation...

...Fritz Redl has recently written a gorgeous paper on violence in the schools, in which he delineates 12 different sets of motives and reasons behind violent actions by school children...

...it is often emotionally gratifying far beyond compromise and discussion and yielding...

...I suppose I ought immediiately to say that we have done no better than others either, lest someone see evil intentions in my phrases...

...Those who are not prepared to lose cannot live in a democracy, and they are enemies of democracy...

...And that is a relatively simple case...

...Therein lies our only hope...

...The dehumanization of the victim that is required to permit the initial act of cruelty or violence seems to be furthered by the triumph of violence and the apparent suffering of the victim...

...I was saved during my youthful Bolshevism by professors who understood what was agitating me and others like me, and who were unwilling to discard me on the academic junk heap simply because I was wild and irrational in my politics...

...It needs extraordinary care and cultivation...

...imperialism...

...There is today in our society a very tenuous balance of diverse political forces, with the majority seeming inclined to advocate and applaud forceful repression of all kinds of liberties and freedoms in the name of peace and order...

...Further specifications are, obviously, always required— ends sought, values in balance, moral systems to be preserved...

...Given this condition, one has to hope and pray that our antiwar protesters will be more rational, circumspect, restrained, calculating, and knowledgeable than we or anybody has any right to expect them to be under the circumstances...

...Of course, there may be those who insist that they have never interposed their wills by force against the wills of others, not even their children's...

...F THIS WERE five or seven years ago, some intellectual profit might be derived by speaking about "Some Positive Functions of Violence...

...They would prefer to say they have reasoned, persuaded, cajoled, urged, bargained, compromised, and discussed...

...After all, rape, especially when it is postcoital regret, as it often is, is hardly the same action system as assaulting a strange woman in whose purse alone you are interested, but whom you must hurt enough to be sure she cannot identify you...

...For, however much it may be true that democratic societies have come into being only after violent overthrow of the previous societies, it is equally true that democracies could not begin to survive until they had purged their systems of the revolutionary cast of mind and of those cultivated inclinations to resort to violence...

...it produces results...

...Similarly, if we wish others to be as restrained by concern for consequences as we are by our consideration of what there is to lose for us, then we shall have to see to it that they have as much to lose and that they can perceive things this way...