Global Issues in Liberal arts
A class in liberal arts gives students a good foundation for understanding complex global issues. A Liberal Arts class can take advantage of any disciplines and type of knowledge necessary on a given subject. This paper presents the subject of violence as an example of how many disciplines are necessary to evaluate and learn about violence in American cultural. It also looks at the view from outside the United States and how people view American from so many violent events that take place in the country. The recent mass murder in a movie cinema in Aurora, Colorado is discussed. The tragic event and the way guns are used in the U.S.A. compared to other countries are also discussed. The main finding is that violence gets reinforced in our national media with language and images.
(violence, liberal arts, guns, mass murder, peace, peace language)
Table of Contents
Violence as a Cultural Characteristic.4
Violent culture
4
Non-violent culture
5
Positive and Negative Peace
5
Mass Murder
7
Movies and Images of Violent Culture
8
A Global View of American Violence
10
Conclusion.11
Violence as a Cultural Characteristic
A Liberal arts class is a good way to give students a basic foundation for understanding global issues. One of the reasons it is so successful in reaching this goal is because a student may learn as much about themselves as they do about how to evaluate the issues in their environment. Another important reason is because a Liberal arts class offers a multidisciplinary strategy for understanding global issues. It is good for anyone to find practical and positive ways of working in the world while still respecting their core values. Growing up and living in the USA gives a person a special responsibility in learning how to deal with global issues. That is because culturally, the US has so much influence all over the world. Unfortunately one of the ways that the US impacts global culture via American culture is because of the prevalence of violence in our movies and on our streets.
A liberal arts class helps students learn how to perceive issues from many different disciplines. Violence is both a local and global issue that has a big impact on our culture. It is an example of how a problem can be better understood from a liberal arts perspectives. The subject of how violence in the U.S. defines our American culture and how others in the world understand the USA through a veil of violence is discussed in this paper. The Liberal arts tools referenced in the paper are based on aspects of Communications, Ethics, Geography, Economics and other disciplines. Also events will be discussed from social and political perspectives.
Studying Violence with Liberal arts
Jackall (2000) wrote a detailed syllabus for teaching violence from a liberal arts perspective. Just by reading the syllabus one can understand how complex the issue is in all aspects of our lives. To understand all the impacts and characteristics of violence each discipline has its own questions to ask and they each come at the subject from a different direction.
Violent culture
Jackall (2000) started with learning the history of violence in animals and the human biology of violence. For example one of the books for the class is research about how the primate species, chimpanzees, make peace. A big question about violence is whether or not humans are wired genetically to be violent or if there is some other influence that initiates violence. Another perspective of violence is from the point of view of the social sciences. Sociologists for instance might ask whether there are any ethical reasons to use violence to reach a goal. Psychologists ask if war is somehow closely linked to the male identity. The different types of violence reflect different disciplines that try to explain the phenomena: religious/religion, ethnic/cultural ethnicity and racial/socioculture are only three general examples. There are also the economic reasons that violence occurs such as those due to injustice, inequality between classes or war over natural resources like water or gold. Often when people think of violence they only think of war which is usually considered organized violence between two nations. There are also political assassinations, the use of torture, and leaders that use fear to control their citizens. Domestic violence may be caused by social economic reasons for example lack of job opportunities, poor education, lack of health care or even not enough food. Suicide is a type of violence too that can be studied from the type of social structures, mental illness or psychological impacts such as bullying. From the short discussion above it is clear that violence is not a subject that can be analyzed strictly by one discipline. It is a problem that is integrated throughout the whole fabric of the modern world.
Non-violent culture
There is another way to study violence that must be done to give the whole picture on the subject. That way is to study the opposite of violence or in other words non-violent cultures. The Civil Rights movement and the peace (anti-war) protests are two examples of cultures within our society that support peace and justice as opposed to war and injustice. Their stance is based on a belief or reasoning that with justice in a country then peace will automatically be a part of the country’s culture. “Belief and reasoning’ are examples of using the disciplines of religion and philosophy to promote peaceful relationships and cooperation.
Positive and Negative Peace
Potter (2004) has edited a book which describes Putting Peace into Practice: Evaluating Policy on Local Global Levels Positive Peace Talk. The authors that have essays in the book explain the importance of positive peace talk instead of negative peace talk. This type of duality in communication occurs in groups of people who want reform but some want to use peaceful means (like Martin Luther King, Jr.) and others want to use violence. There is a way that Americans use the English language that catches on in different parts of the world. For example many linguists and communication researchers have studied the American use of violence in language. Elias (1994) wrote that much of this type of language is misleading though.
Police routinely bear the title of peace officers even as they become progressively more violent. Judging just from the language, much less our attendant behavior, what kind of lessons are we teaching about violence? When the media reproduce our warlike language, they reflect the violence of official strategies and behavior; but they also invent and embellish that language, searching for new ways to represent the violence upon which we so routinely rely. Given this cultural bombardment, it is not surprising that opinion polls repeatedly show the general public calling for blood. (Elias, 1994, 1)
Continuing with the same theme of communication, American films and music have made a cultural impact around the world. Marilyn Monroe is an example of a Hollywood actress that is well-known all over the world. In the music scene Michael Jackson is probably even better known than any actor or actress. These two icons are an example of how popular American celebrities can be globally because of Internet and Information Technologies that connect everyone. A parallel path is traversed by violent messages that have been created in the U.S. Global communications are made through advertising, the news media, popular music, computer games and perhaps more than any other way through the movies.
Mass Murder
Mass murders do not take place in many countries but approximately twenty occur every year in the US. (CNN, 2012) Mass murder is different from war because it occurs when a person armed with weapons makes a surprise attack on a group of innocent people. The attack at the movie in Aurora, Colorado on July 20, 2012 has influenced the choice of this research paper. The deaths and injuries from guns each year is higher in the United States than any other country where records are kept and any other country that is not at war. Daniel W. Webster wrote about the large amount of guns (many sources explained that there are more guns than the number of people living in the USA). He is the co-director at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health at the Center for Gun Policy and Research. He described that consequences of making available assault weapons that do not have to be reloaded but shoot 10 or more rounds of ammunition. He also noted that gun violence is not uncommon (“between 9,000 and 10,000 people are murdered each year with guns” although not much attention is paid to these murders.
More than 30,000 people die every year from guns in the U.S., and more than 400,000 are victims of nonfatal crime committed with guns. The economic costs are staggering -- an estimated $100 billion annually. (Webster, 2012, CNN.com)
The above quote from Webster shows that there is not only a lot of tragedy associated with gun violence but that it is also an economic issue.
Potter (2004) has reminded her readers of some of the statistics of violence in the USA as compare to Canada and Japan. These statistics were discussed in a documentary by Michael Moore called Bowling for Columbine (2002) which is about a mass murder and double suicide that took place in Colorado.
Canadian citizens possess guns but do not use them as a primary means for self-defense. They do not kill one another at anywhere near the rate that U.S. citizens kill others. Moore tells us there were only 165 killings within Canada for an entire year. That figure compares with 11,127 killings in the United States; in the same year Japan had only 39 killings. (Potter, 2002, xi)
Movies and Images of Violent Culture
Brouchard notes that the stories of a culture are important to understand the order of the society and a person’s role in the society. Now visual media “are the primary storytellers in contemporary U.S. culture” (3). Goldberg (1998) has discussed how protected from real deaths people were when print media first began. Then gothic horror stories became popular but after the 1820s the ongoing murder trials became part of the culture not just through the news media but also from theater plays that were performed, sometimes even during the trial.
Lawrence Friedman (1993) wrote
. . . The story of crime and punishment over the years is a story of social changes, character changes, personality changes; changes in culture; changes in the structure of society; and, ultimately, changes in the economic, technological, and social order . . . (11)
He gives the example of how adulterers were punished in the first northeastern colonies of America in ways which would shame them or they might even be hanged to death. Now adultery is the subject of a lot of comedies in the movies. The Puritan witch hunts are still visually common in the horror movie genre. Many movies deal with witches such as Witchville, The Blair Witch Project, Witch Hunt and the Mists of Avalon. There are women who come back as ghosts to gain revenge such as in the “The Woman in Black” and battles between good and evil witches such as in Snow White. Many of them although they may be based on European fairy tales are too gruesome for children to watch. On the other hand parents are allowing their children to watch more violence such as The Dark Night Rises.
Goldberg commented that “The passion for crime that gripped the public in the last century is astonishing” (40). She has also explained how violence that used to be thought to be entertaining to the lower or uneducated classes is now enjoyed by all types in the whole population. In 2012 violence as entertainment has reached a whole new level in a genre removed from horror and that is the genre of Action Thrillers. These movies are based on many of the current wars. The heroes are sometimes women but usually they are men. They save the day by making snap decisions based on killing someone to solve a problem rather than going through the justice system. There is a template of motion picture making that does not allow time for thought or time to avoid mistakes. Weapons of mass destruction are the necessary tools for these Hollywood heroes that are seen in movies around the world. The names of a few of the movies are Predator, Armageddon, Independence Day, Executive Decision and The Dark Knight Rises (this last film was the movie showing at the Aurora theater that was the site of the recent mass murder in Colorado). The number of Muslims and Arabic roles that are made for terrorists is staggering. For instance a movie which depicts U.S. marines killing even Arab women and children is titled Rules of Engagement. It was shown at theaters in 2000. The killing of non-combatants was depicted as being justified by the way the plot was written.
A Global View of American Violence
Richard Falk works as the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights. According to the online Merriam-Webster dictionary the job of a rapporteur is to give a report to organizations such “as at a meeting of a learned society.” His job is very serious as some world leaders believe that solving the Palestinian issues with the Israeli occupation would bring peace to the Middle East. He has written an essay on the shooting at the Colorado cinema which invites every single person to do some soul searching.
Falk (2012) points out that President Obama followed a “mini” template that mirrored the speech former President George W. Bush made after the attacks on the East coast on September 11, 2001. He suggests that an American president is expected to follow a specific script but Falk asks everyone to think carefully about what the script includes. Here are the steps in the template. (a) The President presides over the national grieving. (b) The President has a formula to acknowledge, validate and Mr. Falk says “avoid . . . of individual and collective soul searching” (Falk aje.net), (c) Genuine compassion is felt for the families and the victims while the perpetrator is demonized as evil. This is the point where a person able to think about problems from different perspectives should sit up and take note that blaming evil is a really easy answer to a complicated problem.
There is a poster of the young man who did the Aurora, Colorado murders making the rounds on some social networks like Facebook. The words on the poster read “If I were an Arab, the shooting would be TERRORISM. If I were Black, I’d be a THUG. But I’m White so it’s MENTAL ILLNESS.” This strikes many of the people both from America and around the world as being realistic interpretation of the differences in perpetrators of crime are . Not necessarily how most individuals in the US think but how the mass media presents these tragic cases on the news.
Conclusion
Violence is only one issue that can be understood better in a liberal arts class but it is a good example about how multi-disciplinary studies are important in understanding issues that are both local and global. Violence not only gets reinforced in our national media it also influences the way that other global cultures view the U.S.A.
References
Brouchard, Melissa. (2004). The Power of Entertainment: Violence in the Stories of our Times. Chapter 3. In. N. N. Potter (Ed.). (2004), Putting Peace into Practice: Evaluating Policy on Local Global Levels (Value Inquiry Book Series 164) (pp. 29-50). New York, NY: Rodopi.
Donovan, Barna William. (2010). Guns and Testosterone: Action Films, Audiences, and a Thirst for Violence. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.
Friedman, Lawrence M. (1993). Crime and Punishment in American History. New York, NY: Basic Books.
http://hectorvila.com/2012/05/03/defining-the-liberal-arts-in-america-in-3-parts
Goldberg, Vicki. (1998) Death Takes a Holiday, Sort of. Chapter 2. In J. Goldstein (Ed.). (1998). Why We Watch: The Attractions of Violent Entertainment. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. pp. 27-53.
Jackall, Robert. (2000). Teaching about violence. The Harry Frank Guggenheim (HFG) Foundation Review of Research. Spring: 4(1). Retrieved from http://www.hfg.org/hfg_review/4/jackall.htm
Jahn-Sudmann, A. & Stockmann, R. (2008) Computer Games as a Sociocultural Phenomenon Games without Frontiers: War without Tears. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.
Falk, Richard. (2012 July 25). “Aurora, American violence, and amnesia.” Al Jazeera English. Retrieved from http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/07/2012724825295834.html
Potter, Nancy Nyquist.(Ed.). (2004) Putting Peace into Practice: Evaluating Policy on Local Global Levels (Value Inquiry Book Series 164) New York, NY: Rodopi.
Rapporteur. (2012). Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. Accessed from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rapporteur
Webster, Daniel W. (2012) “Mass murder and powerful firearms.” CNN.com. Accessed from http://edition.cnn.com/2012/07/23/opinion/webster-aurora-shooter/index.html
