The two types of violence
THIRTY-THREE people in Blacksburg, 230 in one day in Baghdad. Though residents of the United States and Iraq measure hurt on different scales, last week seemed off the chart in both places.
There is neither physical nor moral equivalence between the carnage at Virginia Tech and the latest explosions in the US-sparked Sunni-Shi'ite civil war, yet such outbreaks draw attention to an underlying force that has taken both nations hostage: violence. At a time like this, it is necessary to step back from politics and grief to think about violence as such.
"Violence is by nature instrumental," the political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote. "Like all means, it always stands in need of guidance and justification through the end it pursues." By "instrumental," Arendt essentially means "aimed at accomplishing something." Clausewitz had taken such purposefulness for granted when he defined war as "an act of violence to compel the opponent to do as we wish." Such violence, however much to be regretted, or even opposed, can claim to be both rational and right.
But Arendt's assumption about violence as "by nature instrumental" seems undercut by the violence that, however differently, shook both America and Iraq last week. It was very clear that Seung-Hui Cho was not engaged in "instrumental" violence. He committed grotesque acts for the sake not of power or dominance, but of their grotesquery. His was violence for its own sake, period. In destroying innocent lives, Cho was concerned not with those lives or with any others, but only with himself.
As the video package he sent to NBC showed, Cho's was an act of what might be called "expressive" violence. Cho's murders, that is, were a form of communication, and their perversity adhered in the way in which he succeeded in conscripting the contemporary communications industry, centered on television news. He killed, and by the nation's stopping and taking note of his having killed, the purest form of expressive violence was achieved. In making accomplices not only of the broadcast media, but of all who viewed it, Cho got what he wanted.
The murdered victims of such violence are mere symbols in the killer's self-communication, and it makes no difference whether that expression is a scream of rage or a cry for help. Such violence for its own sake lands on the vulnerable like typewriter keys on paper, but persons are not to be used as ciphers in someone else's message. That conviction explains the universal repugnance felt at Cho's actions, even if repugnance comes tinged with a broad feeling of complicity. A moral principle suggests itself: Expressive violence is always wrong. A corollary follows: Responsible media should censor it.
But instrumental violence is different, and may or may not be wrong, depending on how means and ends are measured. The move to this level of abstraction prepares for the more difficult moral and political question: What about the American war in Iraq? Even those of us who opposed the war from the start must acknowledge that, in the beginning, the Bush administration's violence toward the Iraq of Saddam Hussein was instrumental. Regime change was the purpose, and whether one opposed or supported it, the war's violence could be defended as aimed at something beyond itself.
But where is the purpose now? If war is violence "to compel the opponent do as we wish," what, actually, do we wish at this point? Obviously, everyone wishes the killing to stop, the Sunnis wish to regain some measure of power over Iraq and its resources, the Shi'ites wish to assert the control proper to their superior numbers, and varied factions want the American occupiers out. But what, actually, does George W. Bush want?
Last week marked the dawning of a horrible American question: Has our once-instrumental violence become merely expressive? Since our purpose no longer has to do with Iraq (no regime change, no democracy, no connection to global terror, not even oil), does it have to do now only with ourselves (maintaining "credibility," avoiding catastrophic defeat, denying that more than 3,300 US soldiers died in vain)?
American violence is the condition within which Iraqi violence explodes. The removal of American violence may or may not dampen Iraqi violence. But Iraqi violence of various stripes still aims for power, control, or, at minimum, revenge. Iraqi violence is purposeful. Last week puts its hard question to Americans: What is the purpose of ours?
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe. 
