Shed a tear.

Violence is deplorable. Yes, I know it is, and I'm not going to deny that.

I suppose I have been quite critical of my lack of response to the images that appear in the media depicting the suffering of innocent people at the hands of others. I questioned my humanity at one point, asking myself why I didn't feel as others felt. Perhaps I have been desensitized to violence because I have seen so many pictures of it. Or perhaps I have never suffered as the victims have, and so I'll never be able to relate. But when I look at the final results, my impact on the suffering is the same as the impact that others make. Others who write to the newspapers slamming the perpetrators and demanding justice. (Who is listening, I wonder) Others who look at a picture of a starving child, absentmindedly shake their heads, mutter a 'tsk,tsk' and go back to eating their double cheeseburger. Zero impact. I'm not saying that we shouldn't feel pity. I'm saying that pity that involves a sudden surge of revulsion that is quickly forgotten amidst the luxuries that surround you is quite pointless. What we need is a little of the momentum that the surge created to be sustained and turned into something positive.

I tend to view violence as part of human nature. Every civilization that has ever spawned has resorted to violence before, and that in itself is enough proof to me that violence is hardwired into the human brain. It is the most basic and instinctive of the many conflict resolution techniques that exist. To tell mankind to stop being violent is like telling man not to have sex. Its completely counter-intuitive. If violence is to be stopped, there must be a better way of solving conflicts, a way that will appeal to the self preservation instinct that ticks in every one of us. So, can violence be stopped? I think so, yes. Just not by harping on moral principles, and how we human beings should be better than that.

In an effort to win a convert, Christians have asked me if I thought that we live in violent times. I said yes. In retrospect, I would have said no. Steven Pinker's talk has given me a whole new perspective of violence in the world. He says a lot of things in that talk, some of which some people will find very hard to swallow. Especially the idea that we really are much less violent than our ancestors were, on multiple time scales. The idea of the good old days with reference to relative peace in the past is an illusion. He discussed possible reasons for the drop in violence, and those, I can extrapolate to being possible solutions to the pockets of violence that flare up in the world today.

Understanding the other person's perspective, is I think one of the most powerful deterrence to someone being violent. The rapid expansion of humanist thinking ever since the Enlightenment has discouraged people from thinking of other people as sub-human, and thus deserving of violent behaviour. He has other theories too, like the Leviathan theory that works a lot like the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction that people toss around all the time in nuclear weapon discussions. But thats irrelevant to this post because we can't put the Leviathan into action. That system calls for a single democratic entity that has the legal authority to use violence to oversee the rest of the world. (A bit like what the U.N. security council is supposed to do).

But understanding is something that we can do. See the misunderstanding from another set of eyes, and maybe, it will turn out to be less of a conflict than previously thought. Jehane Noujaim has done something about it. Full credit to her. There are examples I could use to make this clearer, but they could quite easily be misinterpreted as me implying that certain groups of people are stubborn and refuse to see other perspectives. Look around you. I'm sure you can find a few examples yourself.

Winning a million dollar TED prize and using that money to produce a film to promote understanding between the Israelis and the Palestinians is a tall order that not many have the will or the ability to achieve. But we needn't go that far. We just need to start with what we have around us.