What Do We Know About Violence?

Remember the starving Armenians? Back in the 1950’s, when I was a kid, my mother would exhort me to finish all the food on my dinner plate because if I left anything over, I wasn’t remembering the starving Armenians.

That was 70 years ago and in those days, there were still places in the world where starvation was a real thing.

That was then, this is now, and now according to the World Bank, we produce enough food which if divided equally, would meet the daily caloric requirements for the entire human race!

So, what’s left? We’ve conquered malnutrition, we’ve conquered disease, we’ve even conquered global warming.

I’ll tell you what we haven’t figured out yet. We haven’t figured out what occurs in Chapter 4–4 of Genesis, an event which occurs in the Koran as well, namely, the first time that violence between two human beings takes place.

There may be a difference in terms of degree between what happened in Gaza on October 7th and what happened two nights ago in Maine, but it’s a difference in degree, not in kind.

The World Health Organization defines violence as the conscious attempt by someone to injure themselves or someone else. The definition doesn’t change if the number of individuals committing the violent act is one or a thousand.