Before I address the status of words, please give me a moment to clarify my understanding of the category of violence, specifically the categories of violence that should properly be regarded as criminal, or at least immoral. I accept that common usage differs from technical usage, but we need to be careful that the common sloppy usage of the word “violence” does not contaminate the technical applications or we risk doing great harm.
Martial arts are not violent in the technical sense that I am concerned with here, even though in common usage they are. Consent is the distinguishing factor. I trained in martial arts for about five years in my youth. My training involved hitting, kicking, and otherwise doing things to other people that could, and sometimes did, result in them being injured. I was also injured from time to time by others. Injury is a central prototype of harm and the “common sense” category of violence is often applied when harm results from one person hitting or kicking another person independent of taking consent into account. However, I do not regard my martial arts training as violence in the criminal sense nor even in the milder immoral sense, even though obvious harms were done from time to time. The active decision I and my sparring partners made to participate in that type of training removed those activities from the category of violence.
Taking another example, if you accept that consent changes one of two identical sex acts from a violent criminal offense into a nonviolent, noncriminal one, I assert that consent has the same power in martial arts. This applies to any instance of an inherently dangerous nonsexual voluntary physical interaction between two people. The mutual understanding that makes consensual sexual activity nonviolent is equivalent to the mutual understanding that martial arts practitioners have with regards to those dangerous activities. What may be called “violent” in casual conversation, as martial arts and other combat sports routinely are, does not rise to the level of a crime nor does it even rise to the level of being immoral, nor should it when consent has been established. Sex and martial arts are both activities that can only be evaluated for the presence of violence through understanding the experiences of those involved; the directly observable features of neither of those activities are reliable guides to the presence nor absence of violence. Judging violence to be either criminal or immoral requires both the presence of harms and the absence of consent.
Removing the issue of consent for a moment, what harms are being done by words such that they are labelled as violence? This whole reflection on violence has arisen in the wake of the murder of the conservative firebrand Charlie Kirk. In a social media post I equated Charlie Kirk’s death with the deaths of eleven Venezuelan folks that were summarily executed by the US Navy on the orders of the President, children killed in Gaza, and children killed in school shootings. All of which reflect events that had been reported in close succession. In response to that post an acquaintance pushed back on my claim that words are NOT violence. I assume that the pushback was based on taking Charlie Kirk’s words to be violence. The logic being that if he chose to legitimate violence as a political tool, then perhaps we should be less alarmed by his being violently murdered in public.
“Stochastic terrorism” was the particular phrase that was used in the pushback to my post. I was not yet familiar with that phrase, but a trivial surface reading intuitively led me to the idea that this was probably a categorical error. It sounded to me like a term to describe the strategy of known terrorist organizations, like the now defunct Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, who would train people in the ways of terror then have them set up unremarkable lives in the capital city with orders to wait until some insult to their ideals or an assault on their organization occurs and then enact their righteous violence against the enemy. This is called a “sleeper cell.” Since there is no coordination amongst the “sleeper cells” and the main terrorist organization they usually go undetected and sometimes successfully carry out their spontaneous plans for retribution (often killing themselves in the process).
My intuition about the phrase was at least partly wrong; it turns out that it refers to rhetorical strategies attributed to political leaders who are implied to be using the sleeper cell strategy except without the step of training the terrorist. They use their rhetoric to demonize their political enemies and sometimes an ideologically aligned person perpetrates violence against that enemy. The idea is that the politicos just have to talk dirty and dirty deeds will be the result, so on the surface it seems logical and morally correct to hold the politicos responsible.
Here’s the problem. This relies on a chain of justification that falls into several of the traps of the three great untruths that were explained in the book The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukanioff. Here they are:
The Untruth of Fragility: The belief that people are fragile and that exposure to challenges makes them weaker, rather than stronger.
The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: The idea that one should always trust their feelings, even when they may be distorted or misleading.
The Untruth of Us Versus Them: The tendency to view life as a simplistic battle between good and evil, leading to polarization and a lack of nuance.
One of the key steps in the justification for taking words to be inherently violent is the second untruth. In the wake of tragic events it is easier to allow our emotionally tinged thoughts to short circuit our analysis. If we identify ourselves with the people in the events, either victims or perpetrators, we automatically, outside of conscious awareness, seek out a story of the events that will protect our identity from being associated with guilt for perpetrating the crime and/or being associated with any righteous justifications for targeting that particular victim. When Charlie Kirk died both his fans and his detractors quickly stoked the fires that would get a justification train rolling in their favored direction. They were acting in accordance with a combination of the untruth of us versus them and emotional reasoning.
Let’s be clear that I am stoking the fires of justification with this piece. Justification can be a reasonable and desirable process. But instead of taking sides for or against Charlie Kirk I am trying to stoke the fires of a justification train against perpetuating violence in and of itself. Specifically, I want to make the case that equating words with violence is actually a capitulation to the forces that favor the use of violence in all forms. In short, when you conflate words with violent acts you have surrendered the field of play to players that want violence (that is, immoral and/or criminal violence) to be an acceptable ploy in political gamesmanship.
The causal connection between the words of one person and the actions of another are extremely difficult to establish, though not impossible. Let’s suppose that we go along with the idea that words are violence. What stops our political opposition from picking out our words as being violent when they precede some act of violence? What standards of evidence or principles of reasoning do we use to make an accurate and reliable causal attribution to one set of words and not another set? If we make a passionate speech in which we use words that suggest vigorous opposition to our political enemies and in some short amount of time later one of our prominent political opponents is violently assassinated, why aren’t we guilty? Should there be a window of time in which we prosecute the speech of every public figure who opposes the dead person because they surely incited the violence against that person? Do you seriously believe that you can control which words get labeled as being violence such that your side will get the benefits without suffering oppressive drawbacks from the other side wielding the same tools?
This is a slippery slope argument. I believe that there is a slippery slope towards the perpetuation of violence if some words are taken to be violent. If you claim words are violence there is no principle to distinguish between the words you and your opposition used in the lead up to any given act of violence. If we had access to an omniscient truth teller who could accurately and reliably distinguish which words led to which acts of violence AND could discern whether or not there were violent intentions behind those words, then we would not need freedom of speech. But, in the real world we have access to neither accurate causal information nor reliable means of detecting intentions. Thus, freedom of speech is required to ensure a fair playing field (regardless of whether or not we can ultimately achieve it.) The crux of freedom of speech is that either all words can be freely spoken (within strict limitations on when words are causally implicated in violent acts) or no one is safe from being prosecuted for their words.
Harm is a necessary but not sufficient condition for something to rise into the category of violence. Even if we accept that the words incited violence that resulted in harm, that fact does not mean that the words should be included in the category of “violence.” Rape is violent not because of the physical violations of bodily integrity; it is made violent by the psychological violations of the primary human needs for relatedness, autonomy, and competence. Consent is crucial because the exact same physical “violations” of bodily integrity can become ecstatic celebrations of bodily pleasure. Consent is the transformative element.
What are the conditions of consent that are necessary for harmful words to be transformed from violent to nonviolent? Consent requires a state of mind in which the choice being made is a legitimate one. Psychological harm occurs when a perpetrator thwarts plans, blocks paths, and/or creates a situation in which the plans and paths are exclusively attainable by capitulating to the perpetrator’s demands. This is also known as coercion. My field of expertise is in psychology, specifically Self-Determination Theory (SDT). SDT has empirically demonstrated that all humans must have their primary psychological needs for relatedness, autonomy, and competence satisfied in order to have well-being. Harm results from the thwarting of those needs. This makes sense of how emotional manipulation that forces a victim to sacrifice one of their needs in order to satisfy another is harmful. The words that were used were the tools of the manipulation, but if there was no physical action against the victim there was no violence even though there was harm. If the perpetrator used only gestures without words, there is still harm and still no violence. We need to recognize that the harms are being caused by the way that the perpetrator arranged the situation, including through the use of words to manipulate the victim’s perceptions of the situation, the victim’s ability to think clearly about the situation, and their ability to act effectively on their goals and aspirations. The harms are real and reprehensible, but the words the perpetrator used do not belong in the category of violence. They are the tools of violence in this example and words are not as amenable to policing as cars, guns, and other physically manifested tools.
But are all harms inherently the result of violence? Or can some harms be the result of non-violent activities? If I flip a woman off and she takes it to be threat which causes emotional trauma, did I do violence to her? If I say, “fuck you” to a woman and she takes it to be a threat which then causes her to have an emotionally traumatizing experience, did I do violence to her? If I use my middle finger to sexually assault her and she is emotionally traumatized, did I do violence to her? I hope we agree that in every one of these cases harm was done, but in the third instance the harms were the result of violence in the criminal sense. The first and second are less clear, but, crucially, in the third case it was not the action I took that created the violence, it was the lack of consent.
The nature of the situation is important to notice. Let’s imagine that this event occurs in a public venue in which I am a performer and it is a type of theater in which bawdy dialogue and rude gestures are expected. In the first and second instances her consent was implied by her choice to participate as an audience member. It was a clearly a poor choice on her part, but I, as a performer, should not be held responsible for her reaction to a normal activity expected to happen within the context of that art form. (Sidenote: I have contempt for trigger warnings in theater because I believe it is a defining feature of theatrical performances that transgression of social norms is to be expected. If you don’t want to be triggered, either don’t patronize theatrical content or take responsibility for your fragility by actively inquiring within your community to help you make better judgments about what performances would be appropriate for you. Building a community that cares that much about your vulnerabilities will be much better for you than being anonymously “protected” by generic trigger warnings.)
If words are violence, advertising is violent. Any random communicative effort might become an instance of violence. The practical question is, how can we sensibly deploy consent as a meaningful boundary? First, there has to be a meaningful distinction between voluntarily participating in an activity or not. Public discourse must be put in the realm of implied consent. Semi-public discourse that is mediated by something akin to a social media platform should help folks discern the public from the private (though the opposite seems to be the case on most platforms today.)
In summary, words are not violence for both practical and technical reasons. Technically, there must be both the presence of harms and the absence of consent for anything to rise into the category of criminal violence. The context of public discourse implies the consent of those who are consuming it in the media or attending to it in the public square. The harms might be real, but the consent makes all the difference. We need to do better about the assessment of consent, but it does not bode well for if we abandon the standard of consent as a defining feature of the forms of risky interaction that we will judge to be either immoral or criminal.
I will specifically point out that we need to be careful not to assume that our fellow citizens are morally fragile. Utilizing government to relieve fellow citizens from the burden of making moral decisions is not realistic nor is it desirable. If anything we need to encourage more moral deliberation, not less. The champions of using the powers of our local, state, and national governments to police speech are infantilizing our citizenry, not protecting them.
Part 2: Regarding Criminal Bosses and Free Speech
Removing words from the category of violence does not mean that criminal bosses can hide behind free speech. The legal system has carved out reasonable means of prosecuting the instigators of criminal acts by others. Admittedly, it is difficult to accumulate sufficient evidence, deliver persuasive arguments, and amass the political will to prove the causal link between a crime boss and the actions of his cronies, but that difficulty is fully justified if you are morally committed to justice for all. Unfortunately, we now have a criminal head of state who has convinced his cronies on the Supreme Court to carve out an exception for him. So, in this one instance we do have a crime boss who appears to have immunity from prosecution for the crimes he is asking others to commit. He is so assured of his immunity that he does not even have to hide his murderous intentions.
That crime boss labeled a boat with eleven people on it as a “drug runner” which placed it in the category of a “terrorist threat” which is claimed to be reasonable justification for a summary execution of everyone on board. What is to stop him from labeling a man speaking Spanish as “possibly illegal” who might be a “drug mule” or a “drug dealer” therefore a “terrorist threat” who can be summarily executed by ICE agents? What about a “leftist” supporter of “Palestinians in Gaza” who must also be a “terrorist threat” that can be summarily executed by any federal officer? In principle I believe that no one is safe anywhere in the world as long as this crime boss and his Supreme Court cronies remain in positions of power. The crime boss has repeatedly stated his concern for this country’s decline and how it is failing; the longer he holds power the more it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.
My religious faith community supports me in taking the dignity and worth of every individual person to be endowed by God. The routine violation of that dignity by this administration is immoral. It does not matter what policy objective they are pursuing, the dignity and worth of each and every person is meant to be protected by the constitution and by our obligations as a member of the United Nations and other international groups.
I take the sanctity of human dignity to be a universal aspiration. Those who oppose or deny it are under the influence of nefarious forces that have confused, distracted, or emotionally manipulated them. Nefarious forces of perceptual distortion, cognitive confusion, emotional chaos, and materialist (anti-spiritual) values have achieved a level of systemic influence recently that is alarming. The people who are acting out this agenda are not evil, though all of their actions against the dignity of men, women, and children are. Some of them will be so intractably convinced of the righteousness of their cause that they may well fight to the death for their beliefs. We should not oblige them with lethal opposition because that gives them the win. It makes their prophesy of an American hellscape on earth self-fulfilling.
In any case, I regard the present federal administration of the United States of America to be criminally violent. Not because of their words, but because of their actions. They have summarily executed people against our laws and in violation of international laws and treaties as well. I regard our current Supreme Court to be complicit in those crimes because they have abandoned logic and their moral sensibilities. They have placed the President’s official acts above the law. They have supported the administration’s criminal violence against people who speak Spanish, take low paying jobs, congregate in certain areas, and on other utterly trivial pretexts. This despite saying that similar kinds of discrimination are unacceptable in college admissions. I sadly conclude that the protections of human dignity that are stated in our constitution as the freedoms protected by the Bill of Rights can no longer be expected to be upheld by any of the three branches of our federal government.
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