Violence: A Species Trait or a Behavior Emerging from Socio-Historical Conditions

Abstract

This paper presents one of the advances of the research project “Violence: Scenarios and Processes of Identification”, carried out by the teaching team of the Social Psychology courses at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences of the National University of Jujuy, with evaluation and funding from SeCTeR.

Its main objective is to analyze two antagonistic theoretical perspectives on the origins of violence and, ultimately, on the very conception of the human psyche.

It is a commonplace to point out that, in recent years, violent events have multiplied in the most diverse spheres of everyday life in Argentina. In addition to the increase in violence associated with common crime, or its sporadic reappearance in certain expressions of social conflict, the last two decades have seen the emergence of phenomena that were more atypical in other historical moments of our country. We refer to the increasing frequency of suicide cases, especially among young people; various forms of aggression among members of the educational community, among neighborhood residents, football spectators, and even in the many traffic disputes. These are only some examples of how violence has come to practically “envelop” our everyday life, since the vast majority of us have been victims, protagonists, or more or less direct witnesses of different forms of violence.

What is especially significant, however, is that, at the same time as extraordinary advances have been made in the fields of genetics and neurobiology, various expressions of conservative thought—taking advantage of the rise they have experienced since the 1980s—have attempted to force deductions that interpret every phenomenon of violence as deriving from aggressive behaviors inherent to the species or from inherited organic diseases.

All these fashionable interpretations, which among other practical expressions lead to the reinforcement of the repressive apparatus, the expansion of sentences, or the lowering of the minimum age of criminal responsibility, share as a common denominator the denial or fragmentation of the role of historical-social determinations in violent behaviors.