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Violence and virtue in an age of monsters

  • 22 July 2024
Last Sunday morning I was away from screens, as I usually am. Later, when I picked up the scrolling machine, my phone, and checked the news I found it plastered with images, video and words about the attempted assassination of former President Trump. It took a few moments to realise just how close he was to being fatally shot. A few more to register the different tones being utilised to describe the event and hint at theories of varying kinds.

Violence visited a man whose public language is so violent. Trump, and even more his supporter who died, is the victim of this attack. There can be no equivocation about that. Nor does Trump’s public persona provide any kind of excuse or mitigation of the horror of such violence. But the broader culture of violence is something to which one can both contribute and be victim. Trump’s declaration ‘fight’ as he was hustled from the stage, bleeding, encapsulates this.

During the week I was in a workshop with a ‘futurist’, not my usual cup of tea. The futurist described us as ‘in an age of monsters’, needing to face varying challenges with the alternative that the human race would become extinct. In some senses the language was a well-meaning attempt to draw ideas for change. But I balked at the language.

The vision of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the sense of violent political conflict that has followed, the reports of violent underworld associations within one of Australia’s biggest unions through the week, all these things make me aware of the malevolence in our world. But I think too of the people I engage with daily, through work in a school, with young adults taking up overseas service opportunities, in the ministry of communications and social services. I think of my Jesuit community, amidst friends and my family.

I don’t find monsters in these places. There are tensions and challenges in relating with others. But I don’t find violence to be the underlying means of relating. This is the essence of my privileged position in life and I recognise that in other places in the world, and for others not too far from me, violence is a much more dominant element of relating. But I am resistant to a narrative that we are ‘in an age of monsters’ when that’s so contrary to my own experience of people.

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