Unfortunately this comment is based on feel-good political doctrines which happen to originate from the Far Left, not on beliefs about cause-and-effect in human psychology based on strong scientific evidence.

THE STATEMENT THAT “violence is learned behavior” is a mantra repeated by right-thinking people to show that they believe that violence should be reduced. It is not based on any sound research. The sad fact is that despite the repeated assurances that “we know the conditions that breed violence,” we barely have a clue. Wild swings in crime rates — up in the 1960s and late 1980s, down in the late 1990s — continue to defy any simple explanation. And the usual suspects for understanding violence are completely unproven and sometimes patently false. This is most blatant in the case of factors like “nutrition” and “disease” that are glibly thrown into lists of the social ills that allegedly bring on violence. There is no evidence, to put it mildly, that violence is caused by a vitamin deficiency or a bacterial infection. But the other putative causes suffer from a lack of evidence as well.

As for discrimination and poverty, again it is hard to show a direct cause-and-effect relationship. Chinese immigrants to California in the nineteenth {312} century and Japanese-Americans in World War II faced severe discrimination, but they did not react with high rates of violence. Women are poorer than men and are more likely to need money to feed children, but they are less likely to steal things by force. Different subcultures that are equally impoverished can vary radically in their rates of violence, and as we shall see, in many cultures relatively affluent men can be quick to use lethal force.26 Though no one could object to a well-designed program that was shown to reduce crime, one cannot simply blame crime rates on a lack of commitment to social programs. These programs first flourished in the 1960s, the decade in which rates of violent crime skyrocketed.

Scientifically oriented researchers on violence chant a different mantra: “Violence is a public health problem.” According to the National Institute of Mental Health, “Violent behavior can best be understood — and prevented — if it is attacked as if it were a contagious disease that flourishes in vulnerable individuals and resource-poor neighborhoods.” The public health theory has been echoed by many professional organizations, such as the American Psychological Society and the Centers for Disease Control, and by political figures as diverse as the surgeon general in the Clinton administration and the Republican senator Arlen Specter.27 The public health approach tries to identify “risk factors” that are more common in poor neighborhoods than affluent ones. They include neglect and abuse in childhood, harsh and inconsistent discipline, divorce, malnutrition, lead poisoning, head injuries, untreated attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and the use of alcohol and crack cocaine during pregnancy.

Researchers in this tradition are proud that their approach is both “biological” — they measure bodily fluids and take pictures of the brain — and “cultural” — they look for environmental causes of the brain conditions that might be ameliorated by the equivalent of public health measures. Unfortunately, there is a rather glaring flaw in the whole analogy. A good definition of a disease or disorder is that it consists of suffering experienced by an individual because of a malfunction of a mechanism in the individual's body.28 But as a writer for Science recently pointed out, “Unlike most diseases, it's usually not the perpetrator who defines aggression as a problem; it's the environment. Violent people may feel they are functioning normally, and some may even enjoy their occasional outbursts and resist treatment.”29 Other than the truism that violence is more common in some people and places than others, the public health theory has little to recommend it. As we shall see, violence is not a disease in anything like the medical sense.

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PURE ENVIRONMENTAL THEORIES of violence remain an article of faith because they embody the Blank Slate and the Noble Savage. Violence, according to these theories, isn't a natural strategy in the human repertoire; it's learned {313} behavior, or poisoning by a toxic substance, or the symptom of an infectious illness. In earlier chapters we saw the moral appeal of such doctrines: to differentiate the doctrine-holders from jingoists of earlier periods and ruffians of different classes; to reassure audiences that they do not think violence is “natural” in the sense of “good”; to express an optimism that violence can be eliminated, particularly by benign social programs rather than punitive deterrence; to stay miles away from the radioactive position that some individuals, classes, or races are innately more violent than others.

Most of all, the learned-behavior and public health theories are moral declarations, public avowals that the declarer is opposed to violence. Condemning violence is all to the good, of course, but not if it is disguised as an empirical claim about our psychological makeup.