Sacrificial Violence

Violence is something with which today's society is eminently familiar. Something that has become so much a part of our everyday lives, that we no longer cringe to see it on the news. That we go to movies that valorize the violent hero. That we dismiss it as "terrorism" or "patriotism" without bothering to realize that they are often one and the same.

And yet, when we look back over the centuries, we condemn cultures who embrace their violence. The Aztecs, the ancient Celts, the Spartans... any society who understood the human impulse toward violence, we label as "barbaric."

As Rene Girard notes in Violence and the Sacred, violent sacrifice is simply an alternative outlet for natural human violent tendencies. He also notes that violence is inextricably intertwined with sanctity: "Violence and the sacred are inseparable" (19), and, further, "Violence is the heart and secret soul of the sacred" (31).

The "secret soul."

Violence, then, is the core, the essence, the fundamental root of all that we have determined to be sacred. It is the lifeblood - and the deathblood - of our society. The foundational stone for every belief system and governmental institution we have managed to construct in our time as self-aware entities on this planet. For all our claims of modernity, all that we term "civilized" is just as anchored in violence as the human sacrifice flayed on the altar of the sun-god. And all of them are designed to curb the very thing they emblematize.

The procedures that keep men's violence in bounds have one thing in common: they are no strangers to the ways of violence. There is reason to believe that they are all rooted in religion. As we have seen, the various forms of prevention go hand in hand with religious practices. The curative procedures are also imbued with religious concepts - both the rudimentary sacrificial rites and the more advanced judicial forms. Religion in its broadest sense, then, must be another term for that obscurity that surrounds men's efforts to defend himself by curative or preventative means against his own violence. It is that enigmatic quality that pervades the judicial system when that system replaces sacrifice. This obscurity coincides with the transcendental effectiveness of a violence that is holy, legal, and legitimate successfully opposed to a violence that is unjust, illegal, and illegitimate.

We are a nation, a civilization, a world, of sacrifice. Whether we view it as barbarity, symbolism, or justice, sacrifice pervades every level of our conscious and subconscious.

For example. The dominant religion in our country symbolically sacrifices human flesh and then passes it around for its worshipers to eat. Sometimes every day. They wear images of human torture - for that's what a cross was for, folks - around their necks. They worship at the nailed and bleeding feet of a man nailed to a piece of wood and left to drown in his own blood. Disgusting when you think about it that way, yes? But it's symbolic. It isn't real.

Our justice system is designed to use violence to mitigate violence. Death penalty, people. And if not that, then imprisonment, which Foucault will tell you is its own kind of violence. It doesn't much matter (for the sake of my argument, anyway) if the violence is corporeal or psychological. It's still using violence to curb violence. To - Girard argues - stifle the cyclic perpetuation of vengeance with sanctioned violence. Whatever. It's still violence.

Do I even need to say anything about our entertainment? I didn't think so.

This is not to say - at all - that I'm against violence. I'm against beating the crap out of your neighbor for no good reason, but I'm not against the symbolic, and even occasional literal, violence in which our lives are steeped. No, I don't worship a dead man on a cross. But I find the idea of lauding self-sacrifice and respecting the kind of will it takes to die in a horrible, painful way worth attention. Perhaps not to the degree it is given... but, then, what irritates me about that is that the people who hold it in the highest regard don't seem to understand precisely what it is they are doing. If they acknowledged their veneration of violence, great. But they don't. They claim for it "peace" and "mercy" and "love," all the while behaving like boorish and ignorant yahoos.

But that's a rant for another day. Or two. Or twelve.

I think violence - particularly the kind we see in video games - is good for us. Gets the blood and the juices flowing. Reminds us that we are, fundamentally, animals. Higher animals, certainly, but still animals. Predators.

We are what we are. We are violent beings. Rather than pretend that we are not, we should do as our ancestors did. No, not rip people's beating hearts out of their chests and offer them up to the parrot-god of the moon. Though that does sound like fun...

Sacrifice. Sacrifice to ourselves and for ourselves.

So go ahead. Pick up the mouse and keyboard, the controller, the wiimote. Shoot the electronic and pixelated zombies, the splicers, the vampires and ghouls and ghosties and three-legged beasties. Sacrifice the ball. Sacrifice the pain as you push yourself another mile, another foot. Commit violence, but make it constructive. Make it count. Make it sacrificial.