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Roots of Violence in the U.S. Culture: A Diagnosis Towards Healing

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After reading Roots of Violence in the U.S. Culture, I am moved by Alain's lament for my own people, robbed of their cultural inheritance and set adrift with no home ground for nurturance. As a sociologist and as someone who has lived several years outside my own U.S. culture, who has traveled and worked in other American countries as well as in Europe, Asia and Africa, I can concur with his diagnosis of the serious illness we are suffering here today. As a Frsnciscan Sister, I take heart in his assessment of the effectiveness of the healing power of nonviolence. Within the tangled roots of violence in the U.S. culture, Alain Richard locates and describes the particularly destructive Market Culture. This diseased root has emerged during the last half of the twentieth century, and is fed, to some extent, by other roots described in Richard's valuable diagnosis. While those other roots such as racism, individualism, manifest destiny have been increasingly the subjects of studies that point to illness in U.S. society and the possibility of healing, Market Culture is newer, and more subtle growth. I believe that Alain Richard's critique of this Culture will provoke further discussion, study, and efforts toward overcoming the debilitating effects of this malignancy. Some will argue with the idea that Market Culture has its origins in the U.S. It would be difficult, however, to deny that whatever its origins, it is now somthering authentic homegrown U.S. culture the way Kudzu is smothering U.S. woodlands. More, it is in the process of engulfing cultures across the globe with its rapacious growth. Richard shows how a market culture has actually replaced the traditional values and moral principles of the U.S. culture (it might be more helpful to speak of traditional U.S. cultures). He insists that the resulting loss of a sense of sacredness, together with a loss of mutual and reverent relationship as a basis for social life, is a key factor in the violence we are experiencing today. He speaks passionately of a people deprived of the nurturing environment that their culture once gave to them, submitter to an environment with no room for the mysterious, the Sacred, destroyed by a materialist culture that considers life from the perspective of potential profit or loss. Without the inclusion of "Some Principles of a Nonviolent Culture" at the end of this book, we might be too overwhelmed and dispirited. Instead, we are given some guideposts that resonate with deeply held longings. His "tentative" suggestions will grow more certain for us as we find our way along a healing path to our future. - Mary Litell