Eden Gorevoy: "Dear Caroline Yoachim: Let's Get Violent"

Dear Caroline Yoachim: Let’s Get Violent

By Eden Gorevoy

When I come back home for the summer of 2018, I’ll inevitably come home to my 13-year-old brother playing first-person shooter video games. Controller in hand, he’ll be shouting annoyedly at 2 groups of people: his teammates, for having bad aim and not picking up his slack; and my parents, for commenting off-handedly on how much more violent the world has gotten since they’d been children. He’ll then finish up his game, put down his controller, and venture outside as per the request of my dad – outside to that world which, apparently, gets more violent every day.

Juxtaposed with my brother’s gunshot noises and button-mashing, the news today is a goldmine for those parents seeking confirmation for their concerns about our “increasingly violent world.” But let’s take a step back from those assumptions. Before delving into the sf side, we can easily make some distance now by simply stepping out of our spot on the timeline of human history and looking into the past.

If you take a look at charts of violence throughout history, you’ll find that humanity’s violence has decreased significantly (The Pew Research Center has a great site for getting lost in data visualizations about random topics, by the way – you’re welcome). Crack open a history book, and that makes sense: the World Wars are behind us, and digital entertainment upstages the fun-factor of watching civilian sacrifices fight lions to the death. However, even between the 1990s and now, an average of 70% of Americans feel that violent crime has been going up nationally… although the facts show that since 1993, there’s a 74% decrease in America’s violent crime rate.

So I’ll answer this question first: why is it that we’re so pessimistic in conversations about violence?

The answer is: we’re not getting more violent, but we want to advocate against violence now more than ever. We’re getting better at recognizing violence as unnecessary, primitive, and most of all, preventable. As global communication grows, so does our tendency to approach things from a peaceful lens; we understand each other better, and we work out conflicts out through conversation rather than militarization. 

While the parents who’d comment on my brother’s video game habits would suggest that we’re really becoming desensitized, I would argue the opposite; we’re hyper-tuned to seeing violence, making its presence foremost in the media. And the fact that we see violence so clearly means we’re all the more ready to squash it with our fists into tiny little pieces (I mean, discourage it in a way that is peaceful yet assertive).

Ted Chiang’s The Story of Your Life’s novella-to-movie adaptation is a great example of humanity’s campaign against violence. Chiang’s novella explores the individual character development of a linguist whose literal perception of time changes while she studies an alien language; the movie adaptation explores the need to curb humanity’s quick turn toward violence through that linguist’s newfound change in perception. When Chiang’s story went to Hollywood with Arrival, its purpose needed to be bigger than just that linguist’s emotional journey – she became the story’s tool to protest violence. Arrival pushed its story-world toward the very edge of disaster, and it was only by doing this that it created an effective discourse against violence itself. 

To answer your question, Caroline, I think that there are issues within the highly-publicized violence we have today that could go through the same treatment Chiang’s story went through. For example – sf could explore stricter gun control as a consequence for violence in schools. It’s an issue which, at its core, should be bipartisan but is difficult to approach that way. If the guns were non-discriminatorily-licensed “proto-blasters” and our schools were “larvae incubation units,” we could talk about whether it’s fair to enforce restrictions on proto-blasters rather than on American arms. The former is an alien concept with parallels to our world, while the latter tends to have roots in politics, which can muddy the conversation.

So, while my brother’s still going to play first person shooters, my parents are still going to be talking about how our world is getting more violent. For my brother, my parents serve as the anti-violence campaign… and for my parents, my brother’s games are the necessary catalyst that brings the issue of violence to light.