3 Manifestations of America’s vulture of violence, a speculation

We’ve just witnessed another horrible mass shooting and we’re in Memorial Day weekend. I’m thinking about America’s pact with violence, something I’ve been thinking about a long time. As I’ve said in various posts, early in my undergraduate career I read an essay that Talcott Parsons published in 1947, “Certain Primary Sources of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western World” (reprinted in Essays in Sociological Theory), which has influenced me a great deal. Parsons argued that Western child-rearing practices generate a great deal of insecurity and anxiety at the core of personality structure. This creates an adult who has a great deal of trouble dealing with aggression and is prone to scapegoating. Inevitably, there are lots of aggressive impulses which cannot be followed out. They must be repressed. Ethnic scapegoating is one way to relieve the pressure of this repressed aggression. That, Parsons argued, is why the Western world is flush with nationalistic and ethnic antipathy.

Thus I offer one manifestation of America’s culture of violence:

A bloated defense establishment and senseless wars: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and others.

That violence is socially sanctioned. This second manifestation is not:

Domestic gun violence, including mass shootings.

There is the gun violence, on the one hand, which runs up against attempts to control the availability of guns, on the other. Both of these, I would argue (but not here and now) are manifestations of America’s pact with violence.

My third example is quite different from the first two, and is the one that prompted this post:

Fear of rogue AI among the digital intellectual elite.

In this case there is no actual violence. Rather, there is the feat that, at some time in the future, artificially intelligent machines will turn against us. As far as I know, this is a specifically American fear.

Yes, there is widespread fear that robots and artificial intelligence will take jobs from people. But that’s quite different from believing that super-intelligent machines will turn on us, as Skynet did in the Terminator series. I have pointed out, in a post about Astro Boy, that the Japanese have different ideas about robots than we do, and do not fear them. When I asked folks at Astral Codex Ten whether or not anyone knew if the Japanese feared rogue AIs, the answer was that, no, they don’t, nor it seems, does anyone else.

Now, that’s hardly proof of anything, but it is indicative. If it turns out that fear of rogue AI is concentrated in America – and in Nick Bostrom’s orbit in the UK – then that is something that needs to be explained. I’m suggesting that the explanation will take us to the same psycho-cultural mechanisms have led us into senseless foreign wars, and have led a small number of people to senseless gun violence and mass murder.

More later.