Man and society are born out of both: violence and gentle cooperation." That is how Psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim defines a paradoxical but inescapable fact touching the whole history of "the children of Cain." How the two forces are balanced in an individual helps determine his behavior, even his sanity. How they are balanced in society helps determine its political organization, the degree and condition of its civilization. In the U.S. today, it seems to many that violence is in the ascendant over cooperation, disruption over order, and anger over reason.
The greatest single source of this fear lies in the Negro riots that keep tearing at American cities. What is alarming about them is not merely the frustration and bitterness they proclaim, not merely the physical and psychological damage they cause, but also the fact that a few Negro leaders are deliberately trying to justify the riots with a violent and vengeful ideology. This in turn can all too easily be seen as just one aspect of a whole American panorama of violence.
The crime rate keeps rising, or seems to, especially in senseless killings and wanton attacks. Fear of the darkened city streets has become a fact of urban life. The memories of bizarre multiple murders linger in the mind—13 people dead in Austin from a sniper's rifle, eight nurses in Chicago killed by a demented drifter. The recollection of the Kennedy assassination remains part of the scene. A burgeoning, largely uncontrolled traffic in guns has put firearms into some 50 million American homes, many of their owners insisting that the weapons are needed for self-defense. In the movies and on television, murder and torture seem to be turning Americans into parlor sadists. A recent trend on the stage is the "theater of cruelty," and a growing number of books delve into the pornography of violence.
The rest of the world is ready to adjudge America as an excessively violent country in which brutal, irrational force can erupt any minute on a massive scale. This view is reinforced by the sheer driving energy of the U.S. It seems confirmed by the American folklore of violence—the Western and the gangster saga—which audiences all over the world worship as epic entertainment and as a safe refuge for dreams of lawless freedom. In a very different way, the view of America the Violent is also reinforced by the Vietnamese war, in which critics both at home and abroad profess to see a growing strain of American brutality.
Comparative Mayhem
Violence is so universal and elusive that sociology and psychology can only approximate a complex truth. Comparisons with other countries are illuminating but hardly conclusive. The U.S. has certainly experienced nothing like the massacre of 400,000 Communists in Indonesia; nor have Watts or Newark approached the lethal fury of an Indian or an Arab mob. But these are countries at vastly different levels of civilization. In the industrialized world, the U.S. undeniably ranks high in violence. The U.S. homicide rate stands at around five deaths for 100,000 people. This compares with .7 in England, 1.4 in Canada, 1.5 in France, 1.5 in Japan (but 32 in Mexico). Within the U.S., the rate varies widely, from about 11 per 100,000 in Georgia and Alabama to 6.1 in New York and .5 in Vermont. Not that homicide or any other statistics can tell the complete story.