A Monday Morning Meditation on the Heart of Darkness

My wife recently read "In the Garden of Beasts" by Erik Larson ("The Devil in the White City") She said that one thing that really impressed was the fact that many, probably most, Germans knew what was going on with the the Jews. Yet with pitifully few exceptions, they allowed it to happen, remaining silent. When we hear of, or read about, genocide, it often seems to me (and many others, I think) that any group of people --- Irish, African, Cambodian, Turkish, etc.--- is capable of such atrocities, under the right set of circumstances. Violence seems to be a part of our genetic heritage.

Image: luigi diamanti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Is it true that we all harbor our own hearts of darkness? The proliferation of "commodified" violence on the internet is one indication that many, many of us do, as a 2005 article in a criminology journal suggests: http://www.internetjournalofcriminology.com/Slater%20-%20THE%20COMMODIFICATION%20OF%20VIOLENCE%20ON%20THE%20INTERNET.pdf

It's common knowledge that there is a huge amount of pornography on the internet, although just how big the business is may be a matter of contention. And how of this is violent may be even harder to pin down. Some would say that all pornography represents violence to women; others would respond that consenting adults, male and female, are free to offer their performances to the public for money, as has been the case along before there was a worldwide web. That being said, even a fairly cursory surfing of the virtual-porn world reveals much that is truly sickening and disturbing. Whether this is real abuse of the so-called "subs" or mere theater, it's the existence of a market for the stuff that troubles me the most.

Looking along the spectrum from Holocaust to internet BDSM, I'm led to conclude we see a continuum. How far each of us could be nudged along that continuum is perhaps a matter of individual characteristics, as well as shared evolutionary traits. The infamous "shock discipline" experiments of the early 1960s indicated that ordinary people could be chided into administering what they believed were painful jolts of electricity to subjects in the experiment.

And then there's my hometown: on the weekend before last, there were 22 shootings, seven of them fatal, in Philadelphia.

The heart of darkness: At a moment in history when America remains bogged down in a two-front war, when Israel and Palestine remain at odds, when terrorism remains a serious threat, when violent crime continues to plague our cities, when the fate of the "Arab Spring" is uncertain, and 7 billion of us now crowd our planet, especially our cities... quo vadis?