Critics and social commentators have once more identified violence in the media as one of several causes in a recent spate of violence in the United States, prompting the President to request another study from the CDC about the links between the two. While violence itself is on the decline, popularized violence is ever on the increase. Violent scenes abound in video games, in movies, in television shows and on the news. While violence is probably going to be an inescapable part of the human condition, tangible steps can nevertheless be taken to minimize the risk of encountering violence, and the possible harm that violence can cause.
On the eve of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I'm reminded of his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" and "Declaration of Independence from Vietnam." Both emphasize Dr. King's resolution toward love and non-violent demonstration, but his true focus is on identifying justice and the laws which prevent it. He sees systems of injustice in place that regularly denigrate human personality. Racism, materialism, and militarism gnaw at the soul of the United States, according to MLK, and erode the moral fabric of its people. To him, injustice is anything that degrades human beings as moral individuals. And I have to wonder if our culture of violence is itself an unjust system. Is it perhaps evil?
Certainly, people kill. Guns themselves are tools for good or evil, protection or harm; the moral evaluation of the act resides in the heart and mind of the individual pulling the trigger. But I have to wonder about the system that allows guns into the hands of those incapable of discerning right from wrong, reality from fantasy, or who are simply incapable of rendering a moral judgement either way--those who are hopelessly distanced from the society they parasite.
Those people, however, lay at the heart of the issue. Because as we increasingly glorify murder, and violence in all its guises--from the news media who inculcate hatred to the television shows that fail to address the shattering heartbreak of violence, to the video games that blur the line between what is real and what is fantasy--we've created a system that regularly denigrates human life. In a popular meme that's been floating around the internet, Samuel L. Jackson is purported to have said that growing up in the South he was surrounded by guns and no one ever shot anyone else. The real problem, he says, is not guns, but the people who no longer value human life.
So I have to wonder if representations of violence in the media have created a system whereby people are desensitized to violence in general, and acculturated to the idea that human life is expendable, cheap. If that is the case, then Dr. King's comments are valid. In perpetuating the denigration of human life, these systems are themselves unjust; they are perhaps evil.
The flip side, your immediate reaction, I'm sure, is that you played violent video games, you watch violent movies, you see shootings on the news and you turned out okay. First, I wonder if "okay" is really good enough. I wonder at the kind of person that allows himself or herself to compromise excellence for cheap entertainment. But that is beyond the scope of this post.
What I'm trying to get at is that of course you are probably not the kind of person that would commit a violent act. You're probably a very nice person. Are you willing, though, to allow the impressionable and the vulnerable access not only to images designed to excite the most violent tendencies but also give them access to weapons of increasingly deadly design? I would hardly argue that video games cause violence. But I do believe that a correlation exists between those games and the devaluation of human life.
And I believe that devaluation is a cause of violence.
So I'll let you decide if video games are a system of injustice that promotes violence; I'll let you decide what needs to be done.
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