Violence in Western Culture

I grew up playing video games.  Several years ago, I would have vehemently resisted the notion that video games promote violence, but as I've shifted my focus to other pastimes and begun to take philosophy more seriously, I have come to seriously question the effects that playing these games has on the mind.  When my anthropology professor, Dr. Devon Peña, showed the class a decidedly shocking video game based on killing Mexican immigrants (he showed it as a demonstration of the racist tendencies of our culture), I returned to the question of why we play video games in the first place.  (If you really want to, you can see the game here: http://www.aztlan.net/racist_anti-mexican_game.htm.)

Here's my thinking on the subject: as I've discussed before, our culture is based on striking out against perceived enemies.  However, we've reached a level of education (or at least many of us have) at which we realize that our violent tendencies more often destructive than constructive.  So we play violent video games as a way to divert our violent tendencies into a channel where no one gets hurt.  However, there is significant debate as to whether playing the games actually works to expend the violence stored in our minds or it simply reinforces the violent tendencies.

In the case of Border Patrol, the violence is directed at virtual Mexicans.  And in this case, the violence is certainly not being harmlessly diverted.  In fact, I say that it's impossible to really divert the violence so that no harm is done.  That's not to say that all video games are bad--there are certainly games that focus on intellectual challenge rather than primal satisfaction, and games that stand as works of art--but we need to reexamine our value system if so much of our entertainment is based on simulated violence.

Of course, it's extremely difficult to abandon a philosophy based on violence/struggle.  It forms a positive feedback loop--when your greatest value is strict adherence to your values, it is nearly impossible to abandon that system.  However, it is possible.  The alternative philosophy is one of inhabitation--forming a mutually respectful relationship with the surroundings rather than subjugating the surroundings.  The connection between these two totally different views is that education is an aspect of both.  While inhabiting the surroundings expressly entails knowing the surroundings, though, defeating the surroundings only involves learning if the person in question is smart enough to realize his or her ignorance.  In other words, Westerners only seek to educate themselves if it is necessary to their continued sense of progress.  In any case, the pursuit of knowledge ("piercing through the veil," as Herman Melville wrote in Moby Dick) is one way that we fight against the world.  That is fortunate, because if we continue educating ourselves, then at some point we will realize the folly of our egocentric, violent worldviews.

This is evident in the fact that some of us play video games, rather than acting out our violent fantasies on our neighbors (though that activity is not yet extinct, sadly).  At least we're making an attempt to stop our violence.  I say we take this a step further, though, and shift our whole philosophies; recognize the power of cooperation, stop loving those near us more than those far from us.  Stop getting into battles of "us versus them."  Egocentric thinking is what ruins the world.

Let me know what you think.  Should we keep trying to channel our aggression, or should we try to abandon the worldview that causes these tendencies?

-Casey

Our genes, our future.

The discovery of a small group of Gambian women with an apparent immunity to HIV infection

(Related Article)

Scientists have determined that Ashkenazi (European dissent) Jewish women have an increased genetic susceptibility to breast cancer.

(Related Article)

For more on the breast cancer (BRCA I and II) patents, which gave ownership of this gene to a private corporation in Cambridge, Mass (Myriad Genetics), see:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/business/30gene.html

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Whether anyone would like to admit it or not, evolution is still happening. We are the "top dogs" or "top of the food chain" for now but everything around us and inside of us is still changing with or without our consent.

The new issue that is coming to pass is the idea of a given company OWNING these genes. Imagine for a moment that you are one of these people with a special gene, and little pieces of you technically don't belong to you. Would you feel disgusted, would you want your genes back? Especially having not given them up with any sort of consent?

Once again man shows his wish to dominate nature, though in this case the "nature" of the human body and it's jeans explicitly overlap with culture in the fact that it is the case of parts of  human beings being owned by others.

This is a topic I have just been introduced to and will be delving into further even after Anthropology is over for fall quarter. It is incredibly interesting in the world of anthropology, as well as medical ethics. I wanted to introduce it to anyone listening who maybe hasn't heard of the topic before and see what you all thought. Any input or discussion would be interesting and worthwhile as I continue to investigate further myself.

-Stephanie

Individualism in Western Society

I would like to devote a blog post to the concept of individualism as it affects Western society.  I believe that the desire to be set apart from one's surroundings is the aspect of Western culture that fundamentally differentiates it from the rest of the cultures in the world.

Evolutionarily, individualistic behavior is illogical.  If we were to perform a test in which several small human populations were put into self-contained environments with natural-style ecosystems, then only the populations who best exhibited the group mentality would survive.  Why would this happen?  Because they would respect the Common Property Resources.  No one would overfish, or overgraze their cattle, or take more than their share of any resource, knowing that the continued availability of those resources depended on responsible, respectful use.  They would see themselves as a part of a whole ecosystem.

However, groups rarely inhabit totally isolated places.  Apparently, Western culture emerged from  a situation in which a group of humans realized that they could save energy by draining their environment of its resources, using them, and then moving on to a new location to repeat the process, rather than working the land for subsistence (I'm no expert on early human behavior, so this is entirely speculative).  This type of behavior leads to a mindset in which the surroundings are the "enemy" to be bled for resources for the self.  The outside becomes "bad" and the inside becomes "good."  This mindset is extremely apparent in the Westernized world: we build cities so that we don't have to deal with nature--so that we don't have to adjust.  We say, instead, that nature must adjust to us.  We love cowboys and samurai and mavericks and astronauts.  We have sayings like "Life's a bitch."  We build skyscrapers because the ground apparently isn't good enough, so the sky must be better.  This can also be extended to much of Western religion.  We have constructed the concept of Heaven as if life on Earth were not good enough.

Why do we feel as if there is somewhere else that we ought to be?

This is the concept of individualism: I, the self, am good, and you, the outside, are bad; I am different from you and I do not belong with you.  It has become so ingrained in Westerners' brains that it is impossible to avoid.  It's part of our ancestral memory, our collective unconscious.  I am even motivated right now by a desire for individualism to seek objective understanding of the world, as if subjective understanding were inferior.  Westerners invented objectivity, which is the ideal of totally separating oneself from the observed thing, in order to understand it from an outside perspective.  It is, of course, impossible, and only reflects our strange desire to be outside of our bodies.

It is quite ironic that our rational, objectivity-seeking thought patterns have eventually led us to see that this very thought pattern causes the destruction of the natural habitat.  Western science is finally admitting that the knowledge of indigenous peoples is, in fact, often quite comprehensive and useful (see Fairhead and Leach 1995 for an interesting example of this).  We've already permanently changed our planet as a result of our hubris, however.  It's possible we will meet an untimely and uncomfortable end as a result.  In fact, it's hard to imagine any way for us to sustain the population explosion we're currently experiencing for much longer.

My uninformed, impractical and purely theoretical advice is that we need to do all we can to reverse our instinctive desire to be individuals.  There's nothing wrong with being different--in fact diversity breeds resilience--but there is no need to be different just for the sake of being different.  We need to think of how our actions affect the greater group.  This is true now more than ever, because in the globalized world, our actions (or failures to act) can affect everything.  Humanity is one big community, so we had better start acting like one.

Since I am coming from such a purely theoretical standpoint, I would love to hear other views on this.  Please, leave a comment letting me know what you think about individuality and global society.

-Casey