Barry Kort (bkort@musenet.org)
Mon, 5 Jul 1999 12:18:35 -0400 (EDT)
From: Barry Kort <bkort@musenet.org> Subject: Thinking About Violence In Our Schools Date: Mon, 5 Jul 1999 12:18:35 -0400 (EDT)
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Thinking About Violence in Our Schools
The violence in the schools, like conflict and violence everywhere,
follows a model. The model presented here was developed by Stanford
University Professor Rene Girard. It applies in general to conflicts
at any levels of intensity. It has 5 stages.
1. Mimetic Desire
One party identifies an object of desire and other parties imitate
that desire. Examples of things children and adults desire: respect,
attention, money, sex, power, land, knowledge. Whatever the culture
tells us is desirable, that's what people decide is worth having.
2. Mimetic Rivalry
Now the parties begin competing for the object of desire.
Whatever good competitive strategies emerge, others copy them. Since
it's a rivalry, it's played as a win/lose game. To win, you only need
to get more of the desirable object than the rival. If the object of
desire is respect, you hit the rival with tokens of disrespect. This
is done first with verbal violence, put downs, taunts, and escalates
to shunning.
3. Skandalon
Skandalon is a Greek word that means "trap". It's the root of "slander"
and "scandal." In the rivalry for respect, if one side is "dissed" they
are caught in the temptation of Skandalon and feel compelled to retaliate.
Thus begins a "dissing" war, fought on the battlefield of the psyche.
Skandalon is what makes it so hard not to take the bait, so hard just
to walk away. It's so easy to retaliate. The give and take escalates.
4. Scapegoating
Eventually one side crosses some arbitrary threshold of concern where
the supervising authorities feel compelled to intervene. It's essentially
random which side crosses first, but often it's the weaker faction, which
uses more venomous attacks to maintain parity. Whichever side goes over
the arbitrary line becomes blameworthy, and the others who kept their
violence below threshold are the victims. They gang up on the scapegoat,
calling for the authorities to intervene and punish the scapegoat.
5. Authorized, Sanctioned and Sacred Violence
To appease the mob/majority, the authorities determine guilt and visit
sanctions and punishment on the scapegoat. This escalates the violence
to the next higher level of authority in our culture.
The 5-stage pattern repeats at all levels of power and for all rivalries
and competitions. The most virulent conflicts are over respect, attention,
money, power, sex, land, or ideology. Ethnic conflicts and school "tribes"
follow this model.
In the Balkans, centuries of low-grade ethnic conflicts bubble along until
one side gets enough power to visit depredations on another. Thus we see
genocide and ethnic cleansing. At every point in a conflict, the dynamic
is somewhere in the 5-stage model, which repeats endlessly.
The only way to stop the violence is to adopt the conscious goal of
de-escalation and run the model backward. Giving up objects of rivalrous
desire, avoiding the temptation of skandalon, avoiding scapegoating,
avoiding authorized and sanctioned violence.
Right now NATO is visiting authorized and sanctioned violence against the
Serbs. Thus NATO is running the global violence model forward toward more
future violence. In Kosovo, the mimetic object of rivalrous desire is
the right to use state-sanctioned violence to maintain the social order
desired by those in power. In Kosovo, the Albanians are the outcasts
being shunned by the Serbs. In Littleton, the outcasts are the smart
"nerdy" students, shunned by the "jocks" and "debs".
A common type of scapegoat is a person who bears witness and speaks the
truth to power. Powerful figures in human history were martyred for
bearing witness to brutality and oppression.
In Littleton, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold bore witness to the pervasive
and horrific culture of violence that children wage with cruel verbal abuse,
shunning, and other powerful tokens of disrespect.
Treating those boys as if they were "scum of the earth" was a regrettable
act of verbal violence, and -- trapped in Skandalon -- they felt compelled
to retaliate, with tragic results. Conflict left to itself tends to escalate
over time.
We need to think our way out of violence by mindfully running the model
backward, de-escalating violence and moving toward peace.
At every stage of the model, we need to be mindful of the dynamic we
are caught up in, and consciously elect to run the model in reverse.
Until now, the great theologians and peacemakers presented this as
tenets of important religions or as tenets of ethics or morality.
With Girard's Systems Theoretic Model of the dynamic structure of
conflict and violence, we can discover the optimal strategy to drive
the system in reverse toward non-violence and peace. Science and reason
arrive at the same optimal solution as that proposed historicly by
Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, King, Thich Nhat Hanh, John Dear, and thousands
of other rational thinkers who thought deeply about the problems of
violence, oppression, and injustice.
It's pure science, pure reason, and pure theology. These methods of
thought all reach the same insightful solution.
It's time we learned it so that we can discontinue the mindless
practice of killing ourselves off. It's time we learned, reviewed,
reflected, and meditated on this model. You can do that in the
context of your faith, or in the context of a quiet meditation
on a scientific model. It's the same calming mindfulness.
Reference: Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads
--Barry Kort, Ph.D.
--Nancy Williams, M.S.
This document is on the Web at:
http://www.musenet.org/orenda/violence.html
Copyright The Orenda Project, http://www.musenet.org/orenda
Copyright Barry Kort, bkort@musenet.org
Copyright Nancy Williams, moonbeam@musenet.org
This document may be circulated without permission, but we would
appreciate the favor of a note if you reuse it.
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