At the same time, I think that violence is massively under-rated in the modern world. What follows is a survey of places in which violence is underrated.
- I am not at all convinced that emotional pain (engendered by words) is better than physical pain (engendered by contact).
- Much conflict between people is a conflict between people with a comparative advantage physically and people with a comparative advantage verbally. Any system that prevents the person with a comparative advantage physcially advantages the person with the verbal advantage. This benefits geeks / intellectuals like me. It also benefits wives who are verbally abusive to a much-stronger husband.
- Much punishment of children now has long-lasting punishments (grounding), and emotion-/approval-based scolds. I do believe that there is good evidence that short-term immediate physical pain (spanking on the spot) is notably better at inculcating aversive learning/response. Also, I'm inclined to believe that the emotion-based scolds are worse, net, for the child. If one isn't trying to deter future behavior, why the hell are we punishing at all.
- Punishment of Criminals is currently done via long term, humane containment. This is costly to the state, and relatively pleasant for the criminals. Singapore finds Caning to be a viable option for the maintenance of public order. In many cases, I am inclined to prefer humiliation/physical (non-damaging) punishment to incarceration. Caveat: I don't trust the state to define crimes, but overall, the benefits of physical punishment over incarceration are huge.
- Discussions of the acceptability of violence are Taboo. Almost no one is willing to discuss them, except by dismissal.
- As an obvious claim...in a conflict, the side with greater willingness to use violence tends to win. Criminals win conflicts with non-criminals most of the time. Increasing a society's willingness to use violence (particularly against criminals) should decrease violent crime.
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In Catch Me If You Can, the autobiographical book, not the movie, the con-man author argues that his terrifying six months spent in a miserable French prison convinced him never to commit another crime in France.
Also, after "just" six months, he would have been able to re-enter society — if he hadn't been extradited to Sweden, where they put him up in a "humane" prison, which he considered more of a resort — and certainly not a deterrent to further fraud on Swedish soil.
Serving a dozen years in an American prison is what prevented that.
Sort of along the lines of your first point, I've seen a lot of rude and aggressive behavior result because everyone involved was under the assumption that physical violence was a much larger taboo than making an ass of one's self in public.
It seems, in civilized society right now, saying seemingly anything, no matter how rude or offensive, isn't considered as rude as smacking someone, which I think is bunk, as it results in people being a lot more aggressive verbally that has been the case throughout history.
Shockingly, as the Masters lost out to the Monks for rulership, physical coercion came to be seen as less acceptable than verbal coercion...
Very well connected.
I've often wondered what would happen if I reread what I wrote over the last year. I'll probably do that either for my blogiversary (2 years of real blogging), or for my 2k posts. You're demonstrating the value of such a connectivity-read very well.
I have my own, very similar theory, the warrior-scholar-merchant triumvirate, distinguishing between leaders who care primarily about physical domination, ideological domination, or monetary domination.
(Similar to Magic the Gathering's Timmy, Johnny, Spike, people are usually mixtures.)
I figure we should let the merchants have a go. They can't be worse than the other two.
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