Wedding an analysis of relevant anthropological literature and philosophical theory, this important book re-positions violence--long trivialized by philosophers as an incidental or anomalous feature of humanity--as a central concern for ethical thought. Wendy Hamblet focuses on a fundamental paradox that emerges when well-meaning communities and individuals attempt to implement their ideals in our social, or socialized, world. Very often the unintended consequences of these individual or communal ideals run headlong into the brute fact of bloody human engagement. Through her investigation of violence-legitimization in myth and ancient tales, philosophical accounts (from Plato to Nietzsche), the concept of home as 'refuge, ' and recent social scientific data, Hamblet takes up the charge that violence is steeped in our being--it pervades human history and is embedded in the ethos of our modern institutions--and gives us essential tools for better understanding how violence actually operates.
Punishment is the imposition, by a legitimate authority, of a painful consequence upon one who has offended the social order by indulging in acts contrary to the social good. Punishment is understood to serve a primary objective in any society: it rehabilitates or reforms (re-forms or shapes anew) the psyches of social offenders to bring them in line with prevailing codes of behavior. Punishment thus is a highly conservative force, affirming simultaneously the codes of conduct deemed desirable within the society and the status quo of power relations that hold sway in the society. Punishment is a form of social teaching. One of the favorite forms of didactic pain to which legitimate authorities turn, in teaching conformity to social regulations, is the psychological pain of shame. Shame is a special favorite in the penology of societies of the Western world, whose governing logic is already grounded in the shame-based religions of Judaism and Christianity. Parents, school teachers, religious leaders, and state authorities readily employ shame as an effective method for teaching social lessons. Shame is a powerful force that reaches deep into the psyche of the offender and gnaws away at her sense of self-worth and identity, with longstanding and devastating existential effects. Shame has profound and enduring effects, because it has the capacity to transform an empirical fact (of having done something unacceptable) into an ontological reality (of being unacceptable as a human being). Shame dehumanizes. Shame is a powerfully effective tool for altering behavior, but because shame dehumanizes, it often fails to have the effect that the punisher is seeking to bring about. Shame sickens souls, rather than cures them. It sickens them to such a degree that shame more often acts as a promoter of criminality than as a teacher of the social good.
Western civilization is founded upon the assumption that there exists a "natural order" to the world, an embedded principle of justice with which human reason is aligned. The imagery is seductive. However, Emil Fackenheim raises a troubling fact in his To Mend the World when he names the Holocaust the "rupture that ruptures philosophy." The Holocaust and countless other horrors over thousands of years of eager philosophical pursuit could not order the troublesome human soul to that state of justice that the Plato claims to be the most natural and happy state of human beings, if they can simply know their best interests. The philosopher, physician to the human soul, has proven impotent in healing the open ethical wound of human inhumanity; worse, the grand ontological and epistemological structures that philosophers have constructed may be linked to the ethical failures of the planet, to colonial and imperial worldviews. The work of post-Holocaust phenomenologist, Emmanuel Levinas, is written under the somber backdrop of the Holocaust. Levinas, by his own admission, stages a return to Plato. He shares Plato's sense of ethical urgency in the philosophical task, but he sets course for a new Platonism that thinks the difference separating (rather than the unity gathering) being. Levinas, more than Plato, appreciates that the exigencies and labor of everyday life can eclipse the needs of others and waylay the ethical life. Levinas too holds out more hope than Plato that the worst human beings can simply forget themselves and their self-interested projects, and become their brothers' keepers. Levinas quests for the good beyond being as he challenges the tradition of Western thought and the post-Holocaust world to a new ethos: we must decide between the starry skies above (the ordered ontologies of the Western tradition) and the moral law within. The Lesser Good represents a timely consideration of the ethical exigencies of human life, politics, and justice, demonstrating that philosophy's fa
What is it that permits us to see others as 'evil'? This book argues that it's our epistemological framework, which also resituates our own moral compass and reframes our moral world such that we can justify performing violent deeds, which we would readily demonize in others, as the heroics of eradicating evil. When conflict is understood positively as the confrontation of differences, an unavoidable and indeed desirable consequence of the rich tapestry of earthly life, then a discussion can open as to how to navigate the countless confrontations of difference in the most skillful way. Through this lens, violence comes into view as the least skillful means of responding to, and working with, difference, since violence tends to 'rebound' and leaves both victims and perpetrators worse off—shameful and vengeful. Philosopher Wendy C. Hamblet argues that the radically polarized and oversimplified worldview that sorts the phenomena of the world into 'good guys' and 'evil others' is a framework as old as human community itself, and one that undermines people's own moral infrastructure, permitting them to take up the very acts that they would readily demonize as 'evil' in others. One's own violent responses to the human condition come to be reframed from unskillful and undesirable actions to valiant heroic reactions. In short, those who see 'evil' in others are far more likely to do 'evil,' resorting to the least skillful means for navigating difference—violence. In theory, violence is demonized as 'evil' in popular and criminological discourse and calls forth 'rebounding' like responses in the form of acts of vengeance in individuals and punitive responses in state institutions. However, punishment is itself defined as an 'evil' inflicted by a legitimate authority upon a wrongdoer in compensation for a wrong done. This leads to the conundrum that the state, as much as the vigilante, must necessarily undermine its own legitimacy by taking up the very acts that it deems as evil in its enemies and punishes in its deviant citizens. By reframing conflict positively, Hamblet introduces a new way of thinking about difference that allows the reader to appreciate (rather than tolerate) difference as a desirable feature of a multicultural, multi-religioned, multi-gendered world. This resituates the discussion of conflict such that conflict response styles can be viewed as more and less skillful means of navigating impasses in a world of differences.
Savage Constructions challenges the popular Western assumption that violence is an essential quality of darker-skinned populations, arguing that Western imperialist projects are largely responsible for the current violences that 'rebound' in victim societies of the post-colonial world. 'Rebounding violence' expresses victim abjection and overly aggressive 'identity work' in survivors of repressive regimes after long-term exposure to denigrating myths that cast the victims as morally wanting and deserving of the abuse they suffered.
Punishment is the imposition, by a legitimate authority, of a painful consequence upon one who has offended the social order by indulging in acts contrary to the social good. Punishment is understood to serve a primary objective in any society: it rehabilitates or reforms (re-forms or shapes anew) the psyches of social offenders to bring them in line with prevailing codes of behavior. Punishment thus is a highly conservative force, affirming simultaneously the codes of conduct deemed desirable within the society and the status quo of power relations that hold sway in the society. Punishment is a form of social teaching. One of the favorite forms of didactic pain to which legitimate authorities turn, in teaching conformity to social regulations, is the psychological pain of shame. Shame is a special favorite in the penology of societies of the Western world, whose governing logic is already grounded in the shame-based religions of Judaism and Christianity. Parents, school teachers, religious leaders, and state authorities readily employ shame as an effective method for teaching social lessons. Shame is a powerful force that reaches deep into the psyche of the offender and gnaws away at her sense of self-worth and identity, with longstanding and devastating existential effects. Shame has profound and enduring effects, because it has the capacity to transform an empirical fact (of having done something unacceptable) into an ontological reality (of being unacceptable as a human being). Shame dehumanizes. Shame is a powerfully effective tool for altering behavior, but because shame dehumanizes, it often fails to have the effect that the punisher is seeking to bring about. Shame sickens souls, rather than cures them. It sickens them to such a degree that shame more often acts as a promoter of criminality than as a teacher of the social good.
Western civilization is founded upon the assumption that there exists a "natural order" to the world, an embedded principle of justice with which human reason is aligned. The imagery is seductive. However, Emil Fackenheim raises a troubling fact in his To Mend the World when he names the Holocaust the "rupture that ruptures philosophy." The Holocaust and countless other horrors over thousands of years of eager philosophical pursuit could not order the troublesome human soul to that state of justice that the Plato claims to be the most natural and happy state of human beings, if they can simply know their best interests. The philosopher, physician to the human soul, has proven impotent in healing the open ethical wound of human inhumanity; worse, the grand ontological and epistemological structures that philosophers have constructed may be linked to the ethical failures of the planet, to colonial and imperial worldviews. The work of post-Holocaust phenomenologist, Emmanuel Levinas, is written under the somber backdrop of the Holocaust. Levinas, by his own admission, stages a return to Plato. He shares Plato's sense of ethical urgency in the philosophical task, but he sets course for a new Platonism that thinks the difference separating (rather than the unity gathering) being. Levinas, more than Plato, appreciates that the exigencies and labor of everyday life can eclipse the needs of others and waylay the ethical life. Levinas too holds out more hope than Plato that the worst human beings can simply forget themselves and their self-interested projects, and become their brothers' keepers. Levinas quests for the good beyond being as he challenges the tradition of Western thought and the post-Holocaust world to a new ethos: we must decide between the starry skies above (the ordered ontologies of the Western tradition) and the moral law within. The Lesser Good represents a timely consideration of the ethical exigencies of human life, politics, and justice, demonstrating that philosophy's fa
Daemon in the Sanctuary"explores the uncanny contradiction between the phenomenological experience of home as a site of nurture and security and the empirical reality that people are far more likely to be hurt and even killed in their own homes by their intimates, rather than at the hands of strangers. Moving from the syrupy tributes of the god of love in Plato's "Symposium"to the subject of domestic violence appears to be a giant leap, but he author shows that embroidered romantic ideas about love prepare the initiate poorly for the reality of intimate connection. Poets and philosophers who lead us to believe that love is heaven sent can leave us craving an extreme experience. We crave an earth-shaking, life-altering intrusion on our tranquility as evidence that love is real. Thus the naive initiate can easily mistake the flutter of the pulse, the quickening of the heart rate, the flush, the confused emotions, and the painful longing as signs of the god's gift. But these are also the signs of fear! Wendy C. Hamblet, a philosopher in the phenomenological lineage, examines the truth value of phenomenological experience, through the lens of the problem of intimate violence. If Husserl is right and phenomenological method provides the ground of all empirical truth, then what is to be made of the fundamental contradiction between the lived experience of home as a site of nurture and security and of intimates as guardians and caretakers, and the empirical fact, evident in every human society, that people are far more likely to be harmed, and even killed, in their homes or in the homes of their intimates and at the hands of those charged with their care? Hamblet carefully choreographs a dance between the two opposing 'truths' to expose how the lived sense of home, colored by ideals, can tint people's expectations about intimate connection and cloud their ability to recognize the signs of intimate abuse. This book illuminates the dangers and pitfalls of unhealthy intimacy and offers a regimen for loosening the grip of a sickened love's pathological hold.
In The Sacred Monstrous author Wendy Hamblet traces the historical and social fact of violence through the work of Girard, Bloch, Lorenz and Burket. She takes up the charge advanced by social theorists, anthropologists and others that violence is steeped in our being; it pervades our generations and is imbedded in the ethos of our modern institutions. Hamblet's discussion of human history re-frames our understanding of how violence works in history and society. The Sacred Monstrous is a salient work of continentally informed philosophy that contributes significantly to any discussion of violence and conflict in the social sciences.
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