Rowan Williams: Violence is an unavoidable part of being human
Violence in human beings has something to do with our sense of meaning, our sense that something is at stake in our identity or integrity.
"Violence is not a simple, self-contained phenomenon with a straightforward set of causes, and thus a common package of remedies. It is one of the things that happens to and in human beings, precisely because human beings are always “transgressing” simple states of placid self-satisfaction and passive coexistence, and discovering or generating new things to care about, to invest themselves in – people, causes, faiths (secular or otherwise). We project ourselves into the life of others and their lives are projected into ours. We live not as rational atoms, but on the edge of various sorts of “ecstasy”. When this capacity for ecstasy takes root, perhaps in damaged or weakly developed egos, it becomes a capacity for forcible and uncontrolled intrusion into the reality of what is other – because the other is felt to be intruding on the self."
Violence in human beings has something to do with our sense of meaning, our sense that something is at stake in our identity or integrity.
"Violence is not a simple, self-contained phenomenon with a straightforward set of causes, and thus a common package of remedies. It is one of the things that happens to and in human beings, precisely because human beings are always “transgressing” simple states of placid self-satisfaction and passive coexistence, and discovering or generating new things to care about, to invest themselves in – people, causes, faiths (secular or otherwise). We project ourselves into the life of others and their lives are projected into ours. We live not as rational atoms, but on the edge of various sorts of “ecstasy”. When this capacity for ecstasy takes root, perhaps in damaged or weakly developed egos, it becomes a capacity for forcible and uncontrolled intrusion into the reality of what is other – because the other is felt to be intruding on the self."
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