From: Bryan Moss (bryan.moss@dial.pipex.com)
Date: Tue Sep 21 1999 - 10:25:26 MDT
Michael S. Lorrey wrote:
> > Violence isn't the problem - it's just another way of conveying
> > information - our attitude towards violence is the problem.
>
> My personal take is that we are in the bread and circuses stage of our
> civilization's development, that the wrestling on TV, the violent
> movies, and the urban crime are consistent with the feeding christians
> to lions stage that Rome went through. It can't be helped.
Perhaps increased violence is directly related to better health care. Just
as promiscious sex was (no doubt) increased by the introduction of
contraceptives. However, because you don't (usually) want to get hurt
whereas you do (usually) want to get laid, we prefer to watch fictional or
consensual acts of violence.
> Man is a wild animal and must vent his need to hunt and prowl in a
> wilderness setting or he will take it out on his fellow man.
Modern society is created by wild animals for wild animals. I don't buy the
whole mans 'true nature' vs. civilisation thing. Once you've got a big
general problem solver (and I'd say the brain fits this description) it's
difficult to put specialised code into it. It's unlikely that my brain even
knows what concepts such as 'hunt' and 'prowel' are, but it probably knows
what hungry is and can figure out how to put an end to hungry. I doubt it
could care less whether this be by 'supermarket' or 'hunting'.
> This is statistically supported by studies that have shown that active
> hunters have the lowest incidence of criminal behavior of any segment of
> the population.
I bet active hunters tend to live in areas that have low incidences of
criminal behaviour to begin with.
BM
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:05:14 MST