About violence we don't even seem to know the right questions, let alone the answers. Everyone is aware now of human aggression in a way we never were before. We stand aghast at ourselves, the very terms of our speech on the subject discredited. Homo homini lupus; yes, except that wolves, we now know, are not wolfish to other wolves. A fight between wolves ends when one of them, losing, offers his throat to the other; the victor is inhibited, automatically, from the death stroke. Of all animals only man, it seems, lacks some part of this instinct that protects the species from mutual slaughter. We cannot any longer call violent men “bestial” or say that an area of “unbridled” aggression is a “jungle.” A jungle is a rather peaceful place, no more red in tooth and claw than is necessary for the survival of the various species that eat members of other species and never their own. We ought to say to those who act violently, “Don't be human.” But our language has not yet accommodated itself to our new feelings.

Rats are a kind of domesticated animal and, like chickens, they may treat one another as badly as men do.

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We are shocked at the “violence” of students when they occupy college buildings for redress of their grievances. We are even more shocked when the police arrive and club the students. Actually, except at San Francisco State where President Hayakawa leaped happily into the fray, all parties on American campuses have behaved with great restraint. The students have by and large avoided fighting one another. At Columbia, the “jocks” lurked behind a crowd and darted out now and then to throw eggs at the demonstrators speaking from occupied Hamilton Hall. The constraints that forbid direct physical conflict among middle-class Americans still seem to hold. Even the demonstrators in Chicago were surprised that the police actually hurt them—some of those who sent out the innocents of course were not surprised at all.

At Tokyo University, Japan's Oxford and Cambridge, armies of students fought pitched battles on the campus until the University was closed down. It is said that American student radicals visited Tokyo to study the techniques of escalation, which had caused the fighting to progress from fists to wooden staves to metal staves, and had included the innovation of wearing ski-masks to prevent identification of the students. Those whose goal is not university reform but the destruction of American society will not find it easy to mobilize members of this student generation against one another. If they initiate physical conflict, they are more likely to lose sympathy among their own partisans than they are to evoke the retaliation they want from the other team. Each side is aware of its own restraints and still expects that the others feel them too.

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The case may seem to remain about where it was when Freud wrote the following words forty years ago, in Civilization and Its Discontents:

The fateful question of the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent the cultural process developed in it will succeed in mastering the derangements of communal life caused by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction. In this connection, perhaps the phase through which we are at this moment passing deserves special interest. Men have brought their powers of subduing the forces of nature to such a pitch that by using them they could now very easily exterminate one another to the last man. They know this—hence arises a great part of their current unrest, their dejection, their mood of apprehension. And now it may be expected that the other of the two heavenly forces, eternal Eros, will put forth his strength so as to maintain himself alongside of his equally immortal adversary.

Yet the Nazis, in the catastrophe that Freud and the world feared then, were not quite able to exterminate their enemies to the last man, as we are now able to do. The mood of unrest, dejection, and apprehension remains. Still, no one today is preaching the unlimited violence of Hitler. And even Hitler knew that there were finally some restraints. He knew the war would end when he killed himself. All wars but ours could always end in no more than a normal sort of disaster.

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Eros has certainly been called loudly and long since Freud finished that most marvelous little book, Civilization and Its Discontents, but has he come to perform his historic task? He has come for something, that we all agree. Released from the enormous chains that bound him in the dungeon of Western civilization for so long, he seems now to move among us free as a breeze. True, most of us are still a long way from Norman O. Brown's Eden of the polymorphous perverse; few of us even argue in favor of abolishing the incest taboo, in Freud's view “perhaps the most maiming wound ever inflicted throughout the ages on the erotic life of man.” This we would have to do if we truly sought to restore to Eros any really large share of the energy robbed from him by culture, by civilization. But many of the superfluous hobbles have been removed, at least, and on the surface, at least, things are very different. I imagine they are rather different below the surface, too, in our private (or semi-private or public!) erotic pursuits today.

Things can change. These changes have been brought about largely through a concerted drive by artists and intellectuals, with some practical assistance from scientists and profiteers.

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Reason fails us when we deal with the twin brother of Eros. In her brilliant discussion called “Reflections on Violence” (New York Review of Books, February 27, 1969), Hannah Arendt dissects with her customary lexical skill the distinctions between “power” and “violence,” and notes many of the manifestations of destruction which threaten the power of our government through their violence. Violence threatens, she says, when true power, the strength to be able to do things, fades away. Violence of the blacks, of the police, in crime, on highways, joins with the general breakdown of the services in our mass society. But about war, her verbal and logical analysis can lead only to tautology. “The chief reason why warfare is still with us is neither a secret death wish of the human species nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that nothing to substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene.” The question, of course, is why not.

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Sometimes when I think of aggression, when I think of what a large part of a man aggression is, and how this so large part of our humanity troubles us, I think of Odysseus. Homer created for him a Garden of Eden of aggression, and since then, for that manly instinct it has been downhill all the way. Scarcely in our dreams can we now afford that full humanity the poet gave his hero. Sneaky little dreams we have of violence against our enemies, as frivolous as a Western movie, or in war or in “civil” disturbances actually running amok against enemies—but with such bad conscience! In such agony and such remorse! Hardly a man dares prefer anger to ulcers, and even if we dared, we lack the time, the place, the implements, the freedom: even, in fact, nearly all of us, the actual necessity.

Odysseus rummaged around the known and the fabled world, sacking cities when supplies ran short, killing those who interfered with him, or having his men killed when he was less lucky, and he suffered pain from their deaths but never guilt for anything. His world was small, bright, dangerous, and beautiful, stocked everywhere with well-carved tables in marble halls and deep fleeces and hot baths; with caves full of monsters; beautiful maidens; oxen, pigs, and sheep to carve up and eat; skins full of wine. The implements of his travel, of all his daily life, were those we are able to employ only on expensive vacations: sailboats, barbecues, horseback riding, swimming. Here—and it was in the Mediterranean, our playground!—it was a man's job to take a woman, acquire property, and establish a family. Around his house was a wall, and inside it his woman, his spears, his bows, swords, and daggers. It was all his so long as he could hold it, and there was nothing to be ashamed of in success. Success went to those who were strong, handsome, and crafty, and they deserved it by winning it. This ideal, however we cringe as we regard it, is the human ideal. Other and more limited are the ideals we must seek for ourselves, but they are all distortions of the truly human. Odysseus said it all. Greeting Nausicaa, the lovely virgin, and, since he required much of her, wishing her well, he said, “May the gods accomplish your desire: a home, a husband, and harmony with him—for the best thing in the world is a strong house where man and wife agree, bringing harm to their enemies and joy to their friends!”

So, in that Garden of Eden, a man could be fully human, joining one little settlement in war against another from time to time, protecting his own walls, winning or losing, but all without guilt, all without doing any really great damage to the race itself. Good luck to the strong, and everyone played by those rules. If things seemed bad, as when Odysseus lost his cattle to the suitors, he could say to his son, “Never mind, we'll go out and steal some more.”

But those days, which never existed, are now gone forever, even in dreams. Odysseus's kingdom, just family-size, was too small to last; the unending slaughter of blood feuds was too dangerous when people lived close together in larger settlements. So the Athenians had to deal with human aggression, in that tale of the house of Atreus which is the parallel to that of Odysseus, converting the bloody furies that hounded Orestes into the Blessed Ones, guardians of the city and spirits of its fertility. Easy enough it was, to forge this power of aggression into a civic bond, uniting all within against all without. It worked beautifully, in the only real democracy the world has seen, and it allowed them to ruin themselves fighting Sparta. That is what we have been doing ever since, nothing but that, with Eros forming us into ever larger and larger units and his deadly twin patrolling the walls. And now we have come to an end of it. Everyone knows that we cannot strike at those out there without destroying ourselves.

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In addition to the fact that we are ashamed and repulsed by the sight of a huge power like ourselves crushing a tiny peasant race, our war against Vietnam repels us because we have been asked to support it without calling on the resources of our aggression. Most participants in a modern war of course do not need the ancient rage, it would only interfere with the control of their extraordinarily complicated vehicles. Those in personal combat, the infantry, will have sufficient occasion to supply their own feelings. They have always been notably uninterested in civic zeal. But how could we be expected to support the killing of strangers, and to accept the deaths of our own, without summoning up our profound urge for Death and Destruction? Could it be that it is now a monster of the deep that may be called and called but will not come?