What Is Leading To The Growing Political Violence In Our Nation?

The pipe bombs and the horrific shooting at the Tree Of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh are logical results of certain processes that have been occurring in our naton for a while. The same could be said of the violence that occurred last year in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The processes that are removing some of the self-restraints that have helped hold our society together start with tribalism. Tribalism has several working definitions in the field of sociology. One of those definitions includes a high degree of loyalty to a group regardless of the basis for identification of a group. Tribalism occurs when loyalty to a group trumps commitment to principle so that what is right and wrong depends on who does what to whom. Thus, it should be easy to see that tribalism produces a moral relativity in its members. Of course that is the polite way of stating that fact. A more streetwise way of saying the same thing is to say that tribalism produces a gang mentality where what is right and wrong depends on who does what to whom. And what tribalism starts to eliminate is the ability of people to judge their own groups in terms of doing what is wrong.

But before that tribalism became entrenched, we had conservative pop commentators like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Mark Levin who portrayed Liberals and Leftists, despite the fact that they could not tell the difference between the two groups, as enemies of America. Not long afterwards, Liberals and Leftists responded in kind. And so now we also have Liberals demonizing Conservatives with Leftists demonizing all Capitalists.

When groups are continually painted as nothing but threats to one's nation and its way of life, it is only logical that violence follows especially as political parties gain and lose support. And that tribalism extends beyond political ideologies to other bases for identification such as ethnicity and religion.

While some will proudly point to their opposition to anti-Semitism, they might hold to other racially, ethnically, or religiously based prejudices. Thus they will promote practices and policies that exhibit those prejudcies while remaining oblivious to the reasons for the fallout of those same practices and policies.

While this nation proudly pays homage to Martin Luther King Jr and his work against prejudice and discrimination, it is only the image many of us want to have of him which we honor. And thus we ignore what he saw what was involved with racism. In his speech against the Vietnam War, he said the following (click here for the source):

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

At this point, it is important to observe a couple of points about his quote. The first observation we should make is that by calling racism, materialism, and militarism triplets, he is stating that we can't eliminate racism without ridding ourselves of materialism and militarism at the same time. He makes that claim in other speeches as well.

In addition, what produces racism and the other plagues is when society puts a higher value on things more than people. And living in America where the values of the Free Market have more influenced our sense of Democracy than Democracy has influenced the workings of the Free Market, it is only logical that our society remain a thing-oriented society rather than a person-oriented society.

Do we really want to reduce the violence that is practiced against groups in our nation? If King's claim is right, it means that our society will change the priority it has placed on the newest gadgets, the maximization of profits, and the hyper-individualized protection of property rights so that people, regardless of the racial, ethnic, religious, ideological, or economic class groups they belong to, will be counted as being more important. The question then becomes this: Does America have the ability to do what is needed to combat our prejudices or will we slip deeper and deeper into division and tribal violence?