Jones and violence in past societies

I am really glad we are having this conversation about video game violence and its effects. It's a really important thing to prod since most people just have a sort of baseline opinion about it, but [eek, I'm sitting outside and a snake just went by me... eek and now it's going into a hole near our house!] ... but, people aren't very informed about the topic. I think, as some people have already pointed out, this relates to the fact that people are already biased in a particular direction before they go to conduct a study. For instance, I don't think it' s a coincidence that PBS' article was generally more defensive and protective of video game violence while the American Psychological Association --concerned with issues of the psyche-- pointed to problems in behavior that video games may cause. Since studies decrying and brushing off video game violence have such contradictory outcomes [I ran away from the snake], this would imply very strongly that no study is comprehensive and thus are generally unreliable. Or, at least, they should not be considered representative of the entire picture -- and they should admit to that.

This whole thing is obviously an opinion issue. Just like we generally can't tell where mental illness begins and ends (i.e., at what point am I just "un-animated" and when do I cross into "depressed"), leading a lot of doctors to overprescribe medications and such, we also can't pinpoint exactly what all the various factors of violent behavior are. I get a bit annoyed not just at people who wholeheartedly accuse video games of causing violent behavior, but also of people who wholeheartedly say they don't. How do you know? You don't know. You can't know. Nobody knows. Human minds are complex and I really hope we never get to a time when we figure them out completely. That would take all the fun out of guessing.

Out of all the readings we had I most enjoyed the passage by Gerard Jones that Carol pointed us to. It is very thought-provoking. What changed, in comparison to previous ages of humanity, times when Classical, pacifist, and other philosophical traditions developed?

Well, the whole damn world changed. We are so civilized today that we have, as many aboriginal populations continue to accuse us, completely lost our touch with the Earth, with theology, with faith, and with natural laws and behaviors. We have created a detailed, constrictive social system for ourselves, controlled by politics and markets and commerce, into which violence no longer fits. I think what Jones doesn't credit enough in his passage is that it wasn't just that children were told violent stories in older days, but also that violence itself was more common and, perhaps, even more accepted. While democracies and political order existed, still, life was not as easy and predictable in the past. Today, though, we act in line with more structures and borders that we ourselves created. And God forbid that individual human beings step out of line and commit a violent act, a fight, a murder. Our society condemns it. Our society ostracizes it. And we are frightened to hell of how that would affect our current social system.

Of course, this is generally a good thing. No one wants to be murdered. I just argue that life today is more systematized than before. And I think that has a lot to do with our anxieties about anything causing children to become violent, and perhaps translating that into having screwed up our jobs as parents and "societal role models."

I am personally a proponent of expressing human emotion rather than censoring it. Whatever that emotion may be. I don't have a clue what happens to people when their video games contain a lot of violence, but I do know that in Hungary, where boobs and penises and curse words are all over the TV for everyone to watch, people do not grow up to be exhibitionists and their mouths are no more foul than American mouths are. In fact, I think people are more comfortable with their sexuality and less anxious about it. It's just accepted, and normal. It seems to have an opposite effect than what most people would expect.