The horrific midnight massacre in Aurora, Colorado confronts us first of all with the mystery of human evil. But it also challenges us to reflect on how violence has pervaded our culture--and even our leisure. Amid renewed calls for tighter gun controls come reports of death threats to critics making negative comments about the new Batman movie, even while the alleged killer portrayed himself as the Joker. Are we seeing something new: violence as play?
Actually, I suspect that violence has always overlapped with play, fantasy, and make believe. After all, western culture inherits a classic literature has always been shot through with violence. We cannot say Oedipal, or Achilles tendon, or Trojan horse, or Pyrrhic victory without evoking ancient images of assault, death, and treachery. Do we imagine that children in the ancient world never pretended to be the violent heroes of their epic tales?
I’m assuming, of course, that human nature was more or less unchanged by the time my peers and I donned fake armor and wielded plastic swords, or shot cap guns or air rifles or toy bows while impersonating soldiers, knights, cowboys or Indians. Over the years my own alter egos included Sir Lancelot, GI Joe, Zorro, Hopalong Cassidy - -all were on the side of good, but all were heavily armed, and all imposed their will by violence.
Such violent make-believe was reinforced by toy armies (from lead crusaders to plastic bazookamen), by cartoons and by comic books. Some of these simply portrayed the violence-without-consequences typical of Looney Tunes characters, but others showed real menace and super-heroic violence: Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, and others.
In all such make-believe, my peers and I assumed we were watching or acting out fictional events—yet the context was the real world: medieval Europe, World War II or Korea, the far west, or a modern Metropolis or Gotham. And we knew such recourse to violence was typical of the real world as well.
That’s why my father sometimes drew the line with violent movies and barred me from viewing films like “Sahara” or “Purple Hearts” or even TV shows like “Dick Tracy” on the grounds that they were “too real.”
But the days are long gone when kids can be easily isolated from such violence. Cable TV and DVDs and the Internet combined with computer generated special effects and massive advertising and products spinoffs to ensure that young people’s lives are awash in fictional villains and heroes of every violent stripe.
Nor do kids have a merely passive role. Video games have “matured” dramatically since “Super Mario” days, and now kids (of all ages) can rent or buy or download or stream games that echo their favorite violent movies, or fictional accounts of terror attacks, or even scenes from real-war situations in Iraq or Afghanistan. For some youth, such violence-saturated games are their chief recreation. And they all allow the player to participate in the carnage by killing at will with a click of a button. The active destruction on the screen takes a little effort and entails few if any consequences.
Historically, by contrast, real violence generally required physical effort (often grueling and painful) and entailed genuine risk (while killing, one might be killed). So real violence occupied a different plane of reality from play violence. In young people’s minds, the two were easily distinguished.
But not anymore.
Because while play combat has been getting more and more like a real combat, real combat has also been getting more like play. The science fiction notion of conducting war by remote control--by robots--has arrived in the form of drone aircraft.
Most people will be surprised that the first drones - -unmanned planes for military use--flew in World War I. But of course Hitler’s V-1 was a drone-like bomber: it flew like a plane with wings but lacked any remote control, and simply crashed and exploded when it ran out of fuel.
By the Vietnam War, drones were still crude and more vulnerable than piloted planes to being shot down, but they offered a decisive advantage: they did not risk American lives. By war’s end drones flew more than 3000 missions!
Since 9/11 drones have made dramatic advances, and if the Bush administration made drones a key player in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Obama Administration has made them the dominant weapon in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere.
The temptation to rely on drones is obvious. Militarily, they’re now capable of pinpointing targets small as a truck or even an individual. And drones cancel out the major downside of manned aircraft: what was once the highest-risk of all military tasks was now a “no-risk” proposition: whenever drones fly, US servicemen remain safely back on base.
But those drones are not flying blind. They are guided by military technicians. They guide the drone on its assigned route, spot the intended target, launch their attack, and bring the drone home--all while sitting at digital screens before images not unlike consumer video games. In this sense, conducting war now comes to resemble child’s play.
So if drones preserve the benefits of war while driving down its costs, where is the problem? The problem is not military or economic; it is moral, for two reasons.
First, by making war so easy, so painless, so risk-free, drones are making the moral costs of war invisible. People may argue, for example, whether the use of drones against targets in Pakistan and Yemen is justified. We may argue if the civilian deaths in those attacks should be labeled “collateral damage” or if, instead, they earn Barack Obama (who authorizes each attack) the label “child killer.”
But what is beyond debate is this: the US killing of civilians by drones has been consistently ignored by the general public. Such killing is an indisputable violation of Catholic Just War Theory, yet I am willing to wager all I own that it will never become a major campaign issue in 2012.
Second, as drones threaten to become the future of war, war itself becomes less “real.” For drone warfare is warfare waged by computer, and it makes the violence of war an increasingly “virtual” experience, and thus less “real.” In so doing, it threatens to merge the practice of war with the rest of our “virtual” lives--not only our fictions and fantasies, but the virtual worlds we all now inhabit through smart phones, social networks, streaming videos, and digital games.
Indeed, Boston Globe film critic Ty Burr brilliantly suggested that, whatever the Aurora killer’s motive, his murderous behavior not only carries terrifying echoes of the virtual violence all around us--but also reminds us that we all now hide behind the “mask” of our digital screens, just as the super heroes and villains that have become such a staple of our culture’s contemporary folklore:
It is possible for any of us, of any age or gender, to avoid reality all day in America by keeping our eyes fixed on our screens. They’re on our walls at home and in restaurants, in our living rooms and bedrooms, toted around in our knapsacks, fitting neatly into our hands. The screens sell us many things: video games both benign and ultra-violent, empty “news” about celebrities, Facebook posts from our most intimate 2,864 friends, trailers for the latest Hollywood blockbuster in which men fly through the air and blow up everything bad in their lives. The screens tell us that we matter, each and every one of us. To look away from the screens is to confront a world that says, in most cases, no, you really don’t.…The superhero movies that dominate our box offices are all about mild-mannered secret identities and the power that comes with donning a facial covering. We live each day through digital masks: screen names, online personas, Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, and on and on, each an attempt to show the world the face we want to be, rather than the face we fear we have.
As a kid, I generally could recognize the bad guys in westerns: they wore masks. Today our country kills behind the mask of computerized remote control, and most of us join in protecting our identities online while maintaining “virtual” contact with the world around us.
Then, one dark night, into this world steps a masked man with a gun who reminds us that virtual reality--especially virtual violence--is not real violence at all. And that real violence--like killing by drones--is no less real for happening beyond our digital screens.
©Bernard F. Swain PhD 2012
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