In response to criticisms of media violence, we see several threads of argument. One is that the 1st Amendment guarantees freedom of expression. This is true, but as the most articulate advocate of the freedom of speech–John Stuart Mill, in “On Liberty”–pointed out, the freedom of speech includes the freedom to condemn the “speech” of others. As long as no one is trying to ban Horror films, this argument is moot.
Let me offer a thought experiment, though. We have the technology to build virtual worlds. What if one use to which computer software is put–and I have no doubt this thought has occured to some minds, so I don’t think I’m giving anyone any ideas here, hopefully–is the creation of software in which you torture, virtually, other people? What if you could input a picture of someone you hate, say a boss or ex-lover, and put a blow torch to her, or cut her with a knife, or chainsaw?
Should such software be banned? What if you can do it in 3D, or virtual reality? One can readiliy imagine the harm that would come from this, and I can see no good.
Another argument used is “it’s not like people will watch this then go out and kill somone”. This simply isn’t true. It is not common, but it happens. In that link, you will read about a teenage boy who was a huge fan of the show Dexter, and who strangled his ten year old brother because he wanted to be like him. Ponder that for a moment.
What I think we can see there, first, is that the real message of the show is violence. Yes, it is violence against the “wicked”, but so were, ostensibly, the pogroms against the Jews. The question is “are you starting with the desire for justice, or the desire to harm others, and a need to justify it”?
Justice, so called, is in many respects a socially sanctioned expression of hatred. If someone kills someone you love, you want pain inflicted on them. If the State–which is supposed to be dispassionate, as it has not suffered directly–does not do it, then people take the law into their own hands. I think one could, with study, readily perceive the growth of vigilante films pari passu with the triumph of Leftist silliness in the court system.
Think about most action movies. Do we not have to establish the evil bona fides of the villain early on, through some horrible act of violence, and then the cowardice, incompetence, and general uselessness of the State, so that we can root for our hero? Think Dirty Harry, or Die Hard, or any Rambo movie. The pattern is formulaic, and playing in pretty much every theater in the world year round.
Do we really want to see “justice” done, or do we simply want a good excuse to see people getting blown up? Clearly, the element of the hero, who triumphs againsts all odds (generally through what the realistic of us would readily recognize as a ridiculously improbably deus ex machina miracle delivered for dramatic effect) is in many respects salutary. Americans are not physical cowards, and we have countless role models for this. Yet, in the end, is this really helpful?
As Samuel Johnson pointed out centuries ago: “God Himself, sir, does not propose to judge a man until his life is over.” The job of justice is not determining whether someone is fundamentally good or evil. In some cases, the evidence seems pretty clear, but one can never know who someone “really” is. Most all human beings are a mixture of good and evil. In my view, the BTK murderer got himself caught on purpose. He had two selves: one with a conscience, and one committed to cruelty.
I really like Spider Man 2 in this regard. The “villain” is both good and evil. [side bar, I really like it too for teaching the rejection of self pity, and doing what is right no matter what].
Cartoonish violence teaches cartoonish understandings (ironically, actually, Spider Man was not cartoonish in that regard). It teaches us us/them, good/evil dichotomies, when we really don’t see them in the world.
The inversion of this, of course, is to treat everyone as good, and ignore the reality of evil. Both approaches are wrong because they don’t conform to visible reality. Evil exists. So does good. Decisions must always be contextual, and oriented around maximizing good, and minimizing evil. Sometimes overwhelming violence is needed to, paradoxically, minimize violence. Sometimes gradualism is the only viable approach. Dialogue is always preferred, but it only works with people who are amenable to reason.
In my view, justice is a pragmatic question: how do we minimize violence, and maximize peace, consistent with all men being equal before the [God’s, if you will] law?
One final point: evidence is clear and incontrovertible that media violence has three general effects on most people and particularly children. The following points are taken from the book “Viewing Violence”, by Madeline Levine.
1) It encourages aggression. Kids watch pro wrestling, and try the moves on each other, occasionally with tragic consequences. People are more prone to the fight or flight response, to avoiding the dialogue and negotiation response. In the Dexter case, it led directly to literal murder.
2) It promotes desensitization. One cannot post long on shared message boards without noting the emotional flatness and lack of nuance from many posters, particularly young kids. In my view, by age 13 or so, if empathy has not been learned, it may never be learned. And watching death after death after death, and gruesome murder after murder (CSI, NCIS and many others) causes children to withdraw their natural sympathy to the pains of others. There is a part of your brain that processes media violence as real violence. It doesn’t distinguish. Many soldiers, after seeing combat for the first time, comment “it was just like the movies”.
And in point of fact, many video games use technology quite similar to that developed to teach soldiers to overcome their innate tendency to sympathize with the human beings they were pointing guns at. In many of our wars, men would literally be in life or death situations, and unable to bring themselves to cause the death of their enemies. Realistic simulations fixed that. They no longer thought of their enemies as human beings; they became simply targets.
In combat, you can’t think of people as people. But the reality is that if those soldiers sat down together, in many cases they would find common ground. They would find that the reasons their enemies offered for fighting made sense to them, and that given that person’s circumstances, they might well made the same decision.
Be that as it may, we are teaching children to blunt and even eradicate their natural moral restraint. For it, we all too often substitute slogans. “Tolerance” is the moral restraint of those who lack all other reference points.
3) Long term exposure to media violence causes increases in the rate of depression. I think this can easily be linked to the desensitization. When you are exposed daily, hourly to scenes of horrific betrayals of trust, how can you be open to those around you? How can you have faith in the fundamental decency of others, when you have seen what is possible?
This in turn causes social isolation, or blunted, superficial relations with others, which cause the sense of aloneness to be even more pronounced. This is the root of school shootings, which seem largely to have declined through more aggressive attention to the signs, rather than through a decrease in the desire of troubled young kids to engage in them.
Have you been that person flipping through the channels at 3 in the morning, with nothing but violence and sappy comedies to choose from? Have you not felt that sense of cardboardness, of unreality, of plastic, of detachment? This is the sentiment, too, of porn, which is related to this whole complex.
Net, net: it is abundantly clear that most of the media most of our children consume is not only not good for them, but actively working to build a society of detached emotional robots. Even if someone wants to claim that what they watch is not bad for them, should we not be asking what is good for them? Should we not be using the time people spend consuming media to build them up, to focus on a better world?
That is my opinion.