Still Recovering from the Sixties

A recent religious newsletter to which I subscribe bemoaned TV as the cause of the modern trend to random violence.

I beg to differ.

Violence on TV is not to blame. Mother Goose, or Grimm's Fairy Tales, are at least as violent. Kids have always loved violent stories. So this cannot account for any recent change.

Note too that the rise in violence over the past generation or two is now leveling off and declining. Whatever _was_ causing it seems to have receded. That again lets TV off the hook.

My guess is it probably had and has mostly to do with the dislocations of rapid urbanization/suburbanization. In the immediate postwar years, in North America, people suddenly no longer knew their neighbours, were far more mobile, more rootless and transient, and generally more separated from their traditions and extended families.

Societies seem to go through traumas at such dislocations: Nazism and Communism, for example, can and have been accounted for by the dislocations of rapid industrialization in Germany and Russia.

In the late 1940s and 1950s, North American life changed dramatically: suburbia was invented, and the population as a whole went from rural to urban very quickly. Kitchens became automated; for the first time, almost everyone could afford a car. From this, I believe, along with traumatic shock and culture shock from the Second World War, came the Sixties and all they entailed, including the sexual "revolution."

It all seems pretty clear to me when I read Kerouac's _On the Road_. It, along with _Dharma Bums_, includes everything we have since come to know as modern sensibility, including the random violence. But it predates TV, at least as a widespread phenomenon. It was written in 1947-49.

And the real hero of the book is the automobile.

With greater transience, random violence becomes both more possible and more thinkable. And it may respond to the trauma of dislocation.

So I blame cars more than TV.

It follows, if I am right, that this will self-correct. Things really will return to something closer, in moral terms, to what they were before, as they have in previous such upheavals. We are already seeing this, with the decline in random violence in North America and the rise of "neo-conservatism."

Of course, new shocks will come. Computerization, for example, will surely have profound social effects too, and soon. I am just hopeful these will be happier than those of the automobile.