Eyeball to Eyeball
(posted by Jim Henley)
As the Dem presidential campaign goes into a tailspin, either by Hillary Clinton flaming out or pursuing her own “Samson Option,” I’m wondering if the worst mistake was to stop having debates. We ridiculed and reviled them, with good reason, but what the unending sequence of joint fora did was guarantee that the two candidates would have to look each other in the face every week or two.
One of the smart little touches in Iron Man comes in the scene where terrorists are massacring a village, and one of the killers frantically insists that his next prospective victim “turn around!” It’s a common trope in real execution-style murders of all kinds: keep the victim from looking you in the face. Randall Collins’s very smart new book, Violence, suggests reasons for this - violence is actually very hard for people to engage in and most people are not and never have been very good at it. The most provocative element of Collins’s thesis is that, because humans have evolved as social animals, and because violence is inevitably a social activity, since it requires at least two people, a violent situation is a dissonant one. Since it’s a social situation, there’s a “we,” and an inherent mutual identification. But now I am going to shatter that mutual identification by harming you. Thus the vast majority of violence is avoided, abortive or incompetently conducted.
Clearly violence and murder do manage to occur in this world anyway. There are ways to overcome what Collins calls the “membrane of tension and fear” inherent in confrontational situations. The massacre perpetrator who gets his victim to turn away and kneel accrues two advantages to his purpose: because he does not have to see the victim’s face, the victim’s (fellow) personhood is less obtrusive; and because he has gotten the victim to turn away, he has obtained a small measure of consent: he can believe the farcical notion that “we” have a common purpose in my death.
The point being, the face-to-face encounter can be a powerful inhibitor. Politicians still say mean things about each other, of course. But maybe, some lines that have been crossed in the last few weeks would not have been crossed if the two candidates still expected to be regularly in the same room with each other.
Or, hey, I could be overthinking this. There are unusual people - hit men; serial killers - who can kill you and look at you, and politicians are unusual people. And saying mean things about someone on the Teevee is not as bad or as hard as killing them. And your typical American President will kill plenty of people anyhow, albeit not looking them in the eye as he or she does so.
May 28th, 2008 at 9:02 pm
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