These chapters only really grabbed my attention in one area, so I'm going to skip there: forbidden/brink gaming. For one, I am curious to find brainscan images or other scientific psychological observation of what happens when an 'evil' act is performed virtually vs. performed or even contemplated physically, and this done between three groups of people: law-abiding citizens, at-risk or misdemeanor-ing people, and felons. My hypothesis, and I think Wagner's (who can really tell, though) is that the biggest difference in intensity/location of neural activity would maybe be in the law-abider's brain. My reason for this is that they are a person who is able to draw a moral line between real and illusory violence: they can slaughter Khajiit in Skyrim and still feel as though their morality is intact, but even something far less consequential than murder, in real life, would create mental/spiritual resistance (but there are so many exceptions. My parents are horrified that I would ever kill in a video game, even 'bad guys'. It causes my mom visible distress to even watch me play Skyrim, so I think that maybe the same areas of her mind are stimulated by fake and real violence...am I way off on this?).
Taking the next step: do I believe that video game violence affects real-life violence? Loaded, complicated question. "The forbidden play occurs only because of the artificiality of the game, even while it gains intensity as it both challenges and satisfies real-world desires (pg 171)." To many, games are a form of catharsis, there is no denying that. Whether that excuse can validate a 12-year-old playing GTAV because it will prevent them from acting out violently, I think is a basic misconstrual; the kid probably didn't have so intense an aggression that even needed to be catharsized and he/she is being allowed to create a space for such aggressions. There's the thing: to a criminal, criminal-to-be, or a person who for whatever reasons or because of whatever influences they've been molded by chooses to enact cruelty and harm upon others, the game is only sort of a game. Obviously they can recognize its falseness (non-actual consequences for in-game choices), but there is another element to it. It is 'practice', it is a new space in their imagination created for and filled by violent urges.
However, someone influenced in such a way that the knowledge of violence and its dire consequences precedes visually intense and casualty-free gaming can more easily distinguish where to draw the line of the magic circle. Perhaps. So yes, a video game can affect how violent a person is, just like owning a dog can affect the actions of someone who desires to be cruel to animals. The influence precedes the medium for acting upon it; without the influence, the act would not know to occur.
I am uncomfortable with the correlation Girard made between Mass and cathartic violence. I think that to an outsider, this might make sense, but to participants and believers it is absurd to think that we 'selected' a sacrificial victim and as a society "[seek] to deflect upon a relatively indifferent victim... the violence that would otherwise be vented on its own members (pg 182)." This is a tragic misinterpretation to me.
Theological time:
I think that the crowds present at the crucifixion did very much want a bloodbath. They hated Jesus and hated his innocence because of their own sinfulness and their own knowledge of its consequences. They desired to see that consequence taken out on someone else. BUT. They did not, in fact, have the final say as to who their 'sacrificial victim' was. Jesus, many times throughout the gospels and in parables, alludes to and analogizes his purpose/being as the Sacrificial Lamb (Grigsby tells it much better and more clearly). Jesus, the central figure in the ritual of Mass, chose himself to be the sacrifice for humanity's sin so as to remove the 'violence that would otherwise be vented' upon them, and I think that Girard massively missed that detail. It really changes what he's trying to say and this detail, Christ's agency, is an enormous part of what takes Christianity (as a doctrine and narrative) out of the typical sacrifice-victim-ritual mold. That and his divinity of course, but that's a few steps ahead in the deduction process.
Tune in next time for even more! I can go on.
No comments:
Post a Comment