Twenty Six & Twenty Nine
Mung Tonsing, M.Phil-Ph.D, Tata Institute of Social Sciences

“There are two great days in a person’s life
– the day we are born and the day we discover why”
– William Barclay

This paper is dedicated to (L). David K. Ngaihte,
Happy B’Day…!

Dear readers, please bear with me while I push this one as far as I can take it.

You will yourselves be on the alert for the places it cannot take us, and that is how it should be. That’s how we know we’re doing science, not metaphysics. One of the most common ways for a social scientists to look at human violence is to ask, what cause(s) violence?

I am going to suggest that this is perhaps the wrong way to go about things and one of the reasons we don’t seem to get to any very definite conclusions on the subject. By and large, in the social and behavioral sciences as in life, we tend only to look for the “causes” of things we dislike. Thus, we look for the causes of divorce, but never for the causes of marriage; for the causes of war, but rarely for the causes of peace; for the causes of crime, but rarely for the causes of virtue; and for the causes of violence, but never for the causes of its opposite, however we phrase it – gentleness, perhaps. This is because we see things we dislike on analogy with diseases: they are by definition abnormal states. The normal state is marriage/peace/law/gentleness (or whatever), and this gets derailed in abnormal circumstances. Thus, one of the commonest and most popular versions of the causes of violence is the so-called “frustrationaggression hypothesis,” which again assumes the “not-aggressive” state to be normal, but derailed by frustration. We might call this the “disease” approach to violence: the normal or healthy state is assumed to be non-violent, and we must therefore explain why violence occurs (I am using violence and aggression synonymously here as a shorthand). If we might use an analogy: no one looks for the “causes” of digestion. Digestion is simply there. Any organisms that ingest material and metabolize it have digestion; it is simply what they do: they digest. But when digestion goes wrong, as with, for example diarrhea, then we look for a cause of this in order to cure it.

The assumption that violence is a disease is to make it the analog of diarrhea. But, what if it is in fact an analog of digestion, or of some sub-processes like metabolisation, ingestion, or excretion? There is no future, in this case, in looking for its “causes” since it doesn’t have any. It is just what the organism does as part of its routine of living. One can examine sequences within the routine and see where it fits (what its “functions” are); or, one can ask “ethological” questions about how it came to be there in the first place – evolutionary and adaptational questions. What is it for? What are its adaptation advantages? What survival value does it give the organism? – And so on. But “causal” questions are simply inapplicable.

If we make this analytical mistake when looking at sequences of behavior involving violence at some point, then we will ask, what caused this violence to occur? And expend a lot of mental energy trying to find an answer on the analogy of, why did diarrhea occur? But if we look at the same sequence in the ethological framework – as we do in “agonistic encounters” between animals of the same species, for example – we can predict fairly accurately when, in the escalation process, violence will occur. It is a natural, expectable, predictable, inevitable part of the process. It is not diarrhea. It is metabolization, if you like. Whether we like violence or not is not the question here. We are not concerned with evaluating it but with explaining or understanding it. And the causal explanation may simply not be the appropriate one, driven as we are by dislike to look for the cause to remedy the supposed disease.

In Loving Memory of (L). David K. Ngaihte