This is a sad day for self-righteous politicians, religious tight-asses and conservative cultural monitors. A new study calls bullshit on the connection between video game violence and real violence. Christopher Ferguson, a professor in the Department of Behavioral, Applied Sciences and Criminal Justice at Texas A&M International University, looked at 22 years of clinical studies on the effects of video games and found them seriously flawed.

The reasoning is so obvious it’s almost dumb. Gaming is a 30-year-old, multi-billion dollar industry, and has survived for so long and accumulated so much money because video games are so popular that they're ubiquitous. Yeah, a couple of school shooters played video games. They probably watched television and ate at McDonald’s too.

The supposed proof that video games cause violence is sourced in a year 2000 study by Iowa State University researchers Karen Dill and Craig Anderson. It was the first behavioral study of the correlation between video games — Anderson referenced it as a cornerstone in the 2007 study that seems to now be the Bible for anti-video game crusaders.

The study was strikingly weird. Two hundred or so college-age students, who either identified themselves as veteran violent game players or not, were split into two groups,. One played the snooze fest, puzzle game Myst while the other group played the ancient, first person shooter Castle Wolfenstein. Afterwards, members of the two groups competed in a timed contest where the winner could hit the opponent with “noise blasts.”

The Wolfenstein crowd rocked the noise blasts longer and louder, and the researchers concluded that they were therefore more prone to violence, ignoring how, violence aside, the games require vastly different modes of thinking. Myst requires players to think carefully and analytically. A fast, first person shooter game like Wolfenstein requires much quicker, more reactive thinking.

Anyway, Ferguson says, the whole noise blast thing didn’t prove anything about video games leading to violence.

In an "Alfred Hitchcock Presents"-worthy twist for the family values crowd, families themselves were found more likely to cause violence than video games.

Despite the study, video games are likely to continue getting blamed for youth violence. This week Douglas Gentile, an Iowa state researcher who’s worked extensively with Craig Anderson, released a study that asserts a correlation between video games and violence.

But more importantly, video games are a deliciously easy target. There’s no NRA for Halo players — actually, a truly valuable study of video gamers would investigate whether or not they vote. But it’s unlikely that a gamer bloc could put numbers that match old people, the demographic most and large scared of technology and young people.

Currently, Washington politicians are riled up about the ESRB rating system. The video game rating system, Democratic and Republican legislators say, is too vague to protect our nation’s innocent little children. Not to be too much of a wise ass, but there’s still a massively unpopular, costly war going on, right?

The uproar revolves around Manhunt 2, a game that features gruesome decapitations, rape, dismemberment, and encourages violent homophobia and fratricide.

Oh, no, wait, sorry. It doesn’t. The first three things in that list are from a Shakespeare play. The last two were from the Bible.

I’m writing you this missive from a wooden bench in Tokyo’s Yoyogi Park. Today they’re running both a big Indian festival and a big vegetarian festival here. All the curry you can possibly stand all in one place. My idea of Heaven.

I’m in Tokyo because we just finished our annual Dogen Sangha Zazen retreat in Shizuoka. Which is down where Mount Fuji is, about two hours by bullet train from Tokyo. I’m also having many meetings with the company I work for who just got bought out by another company. The good news is they’re still speaking to me. The bad news is that it seems no matter how this thing works out I’ll probably end up unemployed.

So I’m walking around here today thinking how incredibly weird it is to be in this place. When I was a teenager I fantasized about Tokyo. But I knew I’d never get there. It was too far away, too expensive to travel to, I knew no one there, couldn’t speak the language, there was obviously no way I could ever reach such a place. Yet Tokyo has gone from being unimaginably far away to being a place so familiar I’ve even shown Japanese people from other cities around the town. Shee-oot, my boss (now former boss apparently) was born and raised here and still didn’t know how to get from Shinjuku to Akihabara in a sensible way till I told him.

The world continues to shrink. The events in places once unimaginably far away sometimes seem frighteningly close to home now that we can travel there in mere hours or better yet watch with rapt fascination as they unfold before us in high def right in our bedrooms. But I’ll tell you something that will probably cause every card carrying Buddhist out there to gasp. I know almost nothing about the events unfolding right now with those Buddhist monks in Myanmar or Burma or whatever it’s hip to call it. I don’t even know that much. I mean, I thought Myanmar was the name of a convenience store.

All’s I know is that some Buddhist monks are protesting against the government, who are apparently really bad people, and that their non-violent forms of protest are drawing a very violent reaction. More power to the monks, I say. I hope this does some good. But beyond that I have to say that the whole thing doesn’t hold a great deal of interest to me (insert giant gasp of Buddhist disbelief here).

It's not that I don't care. It's just not the most important thing going on right now.

I’ve been inundated with e-mails over the past week or so from Buddhists all over the place who want me to know their position on the matter and want me to join them in supporting the monks. Well, it’s not me in particular they want to join them. These are all bulk e-mails being sent out to hundreds of people. In the absence of any real concrete information, a lot of these folks turn to rumors and speculation. One guy’s been sending me a series of increasingly lurid horror film-like accounts of the supposed atrocities. These may or may not turn out to be factual. But in the absence of confirmed facts, the only real result of reading such things is precisely the same kind of deviant kick you can get watching one of those torture porn flicks they make these days. It’s very thrilling. But not very useful. Like all bulk e-mails I find them annoying as Hell and hit the delete button as soon as I see what they are.

Maybe that seems incredibly callous and lacking in compassion. But I don’t really think it is. Here’s why.

In terms of Buddhist compassionate action the most urgent problems we need to attend to are the ones right in front of us. But we get confused these days because so much stuff is put right in front of us through our ever-increasing array of amazing high-tech communications paraphernalia. Yet when things are too far away from us, there’s really not a whole lot we can do about them. Yes, you may be able to do a little to help the monks in Myanmar. Maybe you can send a donation -- though I hear they’re refusing them. Maybe you can voice your support -- as I just have (see above). You can send a petition to the Myanmar government asking them to stop busting monk heads. If you’re really gung-ho you can get on a plane and go join the fun. But apart from that, there really aren’t a whole lot of ways to get involved.

Yet our concern for these kinds of problems often seems to far outweigh both our capacity to do anything about them and our interest in dealing with stuff right under our noses. Look. There’s trouble everywhere. One of these days we’ll establish communications with creatures on other planets. Once we get over the initial Big Wow of that it won’t be too long before there are folks here on Earth who are wringing their hands over the unfair treatment of the Glophnar miners on Nebulous VII in the Zeta Reticuli system. In the same way as the events in Myanmar, once utterly unknowable to anyone living in North America, seem urgent and pressing, problems on worlds we now don’t even imagine exist will someday seem just as vital.

Were I to speak to one of the guys who keep sending me these bulk e-mails, I might say, "Turn off your TV. Close your newpaper. Disconnect your internet for a few hours." What you read in newspapers and blogs and what you see on TV is not reality. It's third hand reports of confused misunderstandings of situations you can never truly grasp because they are forever beyond your capacity to know them. A photo or video only shows you what went on in front of the camera -- if it truly shows even that -- and ignores the universe that contributes to and influences the events you're seeing. It's a lie. Those things are not real. But your reaction to them is. Be very careful.

Which is not to trivialize what’s going on right now in Myanmar or to say we shouldn’t do what we can. We should do everything we can to make this world better for everyone. We need to let the assholes beating up those monks know we're watching and we do not approve. It’s just that all but a very small amount of the concern now being lavished on the monks in Myanmar by these well-meaning Buddhists who put me on their bulk mail lists seems misplaced. Sure it’s important and sure it’s your duty as a human being to help however you can. But once you’ve done the little bit you’re able to, you’re finished.

All too often, though, I see people using their supposed humanitarian concern for people undergoing great suffering in tragic situations in far away places as a means to avoid working on much more urgent problems very, very close to home. It’s as if very big, very colorful problems in exotic and remote places are much more important than the far smaller and more mundane stuff right here. Yet dealing with the small mundane stuff right here is your real duty.

All of the problems in the world, from Myanmar to Iraq to Iran and wherever else start from exactly the same place. You. I’m not trying to be poetic here either. It’s really, literally all your fault. One of the hardest ideas in Buddhism for most folks to wrap their craniums around is the idea that even problems that seem to be absolutely positively beyond any shadow of a doubt out there -- like the nasty shit going down in Myanmar -- are, in fact, very much internal problems. The connection between you and all of humanity and the rest of the universe is incredibly intimate. It’s so close you can’t see it anymore than you can look directly into your own eyeballs. Yet it’s even more real than your own eyeballs.

When I talk about this stuff sometimes people think I’m advocating complacency. Like I’m saying, “Myanmar is way far away dude. Don’t sweat it.” But that’s not it at all. The real Myanmar is right here. You just think it’s out there. And by imagining it to be far, far away you’ve placed it in the realm of things you can’t possibly really deal with and you avoid taking the action that's truly necessary.

That may sound like a contradiction of what I said right at the outset of this piece. But it’s not. See, cuz the ways we supposedly deal with stuff far, far away is mostly kind of bullshit. It’s stuff we can hold up to our friends and say, “Look at me! I’m being like totally compassionate! I care about the problems of the world!!! Don’t you see this button I’m wearing on my shirt that says so?” But it doesn’t really help all that much. Maybe a little tiny weensy bit … maybe. But not much.

The most truly compassionate thing you can do for the world is to work on yourself. That is your interface with everything. That’s where it all begins. This is how you start to fix what’s wrong with the world. The ripples you send out never dissipate completely. They’ll be felt all the way to Nebulous VII in the Zeta Reticuli system and a zillion miles beyond.

If you’re in the Cleveland area be sure and catch my movie Cleveland’s Screaming! at the Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque on Saturday October 6th at 9:15 PM.

I’ll be speaking at the Akron Public Library on November 7th (Wednesday) at 7 PM

And if you miss Cleveland’s Screaming! in October or you just want to see it again, you can catch it on November 9th at the Beachland Tavern in Cleveland along with a live performance by the band I’m in 0DFx as well as CD Truth, Cheap Tragedies and special guests TBA!

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

While I was in Phoenix, a couple months ago Barry Graham, a Zen teacher in the Rinzai lineage out there turned me on to an article called “Spaces in the Sky” written by Stephen Batchelor in response to the events of September 11, 2001. It originally appeared in the Winter 2001 issue of Tricycle magazine and is now on-line at Batchelor’s website. Barry recalled the article as stating that our right to practice Buddhism is underwritten by violence. That’s not what the article says exactly, but it’s easy to see how he could have remembered it that way. What Batchelor actually says is, “Our freedoms and privileges in a liberal democracy are ultimately guaranteed by the willingness of the state to use violence to protect them.” Later he asks, “Is an open society that tolerates dissent even possible without its being underwritten by violence?”

Batchelor points out that the Buddhist dictum in the Dharmapada that, “Hatred will not cease by hatred but only by love alone” is often used by Buddhists to justify a complacent attitude when their freedom to practice was threatened. Batchelor gives examples of cases where Buddhists have allowed themselves to be massacred in order to uphold their commitment to non-violence. He also points out that Tibet accepted military protection from China hoping they would be allowed to continue practicing their faith without having to protect it militarily themselves. This strategy backfired big time.

Whether Batchelor actually said it in so many words or not the idea that our freedom to practice Buddhism is underwritten by violence is an important one worth looking at closely especially for practitioners in the United States today. In my travels around the country I’ve noticed that most American Buddhists are strongly opposed to President Bush and his military policies. This opposition seems to stem from their notion that, as Buddhists, we must stand opposed to all forms of violence. But I wonder if it’s realistic for Buddhists to be opposed to all forms of violence in the way that most Buddhists in the US conceive of that notion.

Yesterday I got to talk to the members of the band Millions of Dead Cops, a group that the band I was in, Zero Defex, opened up for numerous times in 1982-83. Back then the subject of anarchism used to come up a lot in our discussions of punk philosophy. The idea of anarchy sounded very cool. But, as much as we hated the cops, all of us knew that, whether we wanted to admit it or not, our ability to walk down the streets of Akron, Ohio in 1982 in our green Mohawks and leather jackets was largely underwritten by the threat of violence by the cops against the many rednecks in the area who would likely have massacred us gleefully if not for fear of reprisal by the police. The cops were there to protect our freedom of expression. Were it not for them, the less forward thinking elements of the community might not have been so tolerant of the way we flaunted their conventions. We found this out in a very concrete way when we played a show in a rural town in Southern Ohio and had to be saved by the cops from an angry mob of bearded bikers who didn’t care for the way we looked or the music we played.

In much the same way in the world at large today the freedom we have in Western countries to practice Buddhism -- or indeed many other socially deviant philosophies and practices like punk rock, tattooing, homosexuality and all the rest -- is guaranteed to a large extent by the fact that we are protected by the biggest and scariest military force the world has ever known. There are certainly plenty of folks out there who would like to see us stop practicing whatever beliefs we have and be forced to adopt theirs or die.

The world is a sandbox in back of an elementary school. The exact same dynamics that play out in the playground play out in the world of politics and nations. We need a big bully on our side. That may not be something to be proud of. But it's a fact. To deny that fact is absolutely unrealistic. Buddhism is never unrealistic.

It is true that Buddhism seeks to end the need for the use of violence. However, we can’t jump to the conclusion that if we only just all disarmed everybody would be cool. The problem is to understand why we still need violence to underwrite freedom.

We won’t stop violence by dressing up in paisley frocks and sticking daisies in the barrels of AK-47s. Such action is still motivated by ego. It is based on the idea that I, Mr. Buddhist Pacifist, am better than you, you nasty Republican warmonger. The very same force that makes violence an unavoidable part of human life is the one that tries, through a different kind of violence, to overcome violence. This is really what Buddha meant by saying that hatred is not overcome by hatred. We need to find a way to completely step out of our habitual modes of reaction in order to find the real solution to our very pressing problems.

The only way to do this is to truly understand who we are and to allow that understanding to spread gradually throughout the world. As Buddhists it may not be necessary for we, ourselves, to go out and participate in the violence perpetrated to protect our right to practice -- though there is certainly nothing at all wrong with being a practicing Buddhist and member of the military. But it also does not benefit our practice to stand in the way of the necessary steps being taken to uphold our right to practice.

War is bad. I’m going to write that again just so no one mistakenly thinks I believe otherwise. War is bad. War is very, very bad. It’s a tragedy when non-combatants are injured and killed by war. It’s also a tragedy when combatants are injured and killed by war. I want war to end just as passionately as anyone else. But unrealistic solutions only serve to delay the real solution to the problem. This is an urgent problem, one that requires serious attention. What I see in the pacifist movement more often than not these days, I’m afraid, is a lack of serious commitment to the real ending of war.

Batchelor states that, “One can imagine this verse (about hate only being overcome by love) being intoned by Indian Buddhist monks while their monasteries burned, just as now devout e-mail messages are dispatched to the White House urging restraint and compassion. And just as its sentiments were ineffective in turning back the tide of Muslim aggression in India, so they may be equally ineffective in halting the course of violent retaliation against latter-day Islamic terrorism.”

Right on, brother.

The solution to the problem of violence is complex and I’m not even going to try to outline some course of action right here on Labor Day on Suicide Girls. But I think it’s vital that we understand the way the threat of violence, as well as real violence itself, makes it possible for us to practice. Nuff said, for now.

Here’s where I’ll be in the coming weeks (please don’t get violent with me there):

Boulder & Ft. Collins, Colorado:
• Monday September 10, 2007 - 7:30 pm Boulder Bookstore 1107 Pearl Street - Author Event

• Tuesday September 11, 2007 Noon – Colorado State University Bookstore - The Lory Student Center at CSU Ft. Collins, CO

• Tuesday September 11, 2007 7 PM - CSU Anthropology Club The Lory Student Center at CSU, Ft. Collins - Author Event

• Wednesday, September 12, 2007 Interview for Elevision TV show. Be part of the live in-studio audience! Doors close at 7pm. The show will be at Trilogy, 2017 13th St. in downtown Boulder

Cleveland, Ohio
• Saturday October 6, 2007 9:15 PM, Cleveland Premier of my movie "Cleveland's Screaming!" at the Celevland Institute of Art

Akron, Ohio:
November 7,2007 at the Akron Public Library

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica. This is open to anyone who wants to show up.

I find large crowds unsettling. In every gathering of a certain size, there’s a hidden potential lurking beneath the surface; it can manifest into laughter, sorrow, outrage, physical destruction, or... nothing at all. But when something does happen, our collective actions seem to distill into sweeping gestures, granting them far more weight and power than the sum of their parts. The 1992 L.A. riots were a particularly nasty example:



The very idea that a group of free-thinking individuals can somehow tap into a collectively unintelligent subconscious is terrifying, especially if you find yourself on the receiving end of a crowd’s rage. The AP reports that just last night in Austin, Texas a crowd lashed out:

An accident happens; the fun-loving crowd transforms into a feral, bloodthirsty mob. I’m sure alcohol played a part, though details of the altercation are scarce. I wonder if race was a factor? Apparently the driver was able to escape the crowd and has been cooperating with police. The child seems to be ok too, as authorities reported the kid was taken to the hospital with “non-life threatening injuries.”

Juneteenth, also known as Emancipation Day, is the celebration of the day news of the Emancipation Proclamation arrived in Texas, effectively abolishing slavery in the state. It’s a shame to see the festivities tainted by bloodshed, but at the end of the day, as they say, the mob rules.

Has enough time passed since the shootings at Virginia Tech for a little reasoned discussion of the problem of violence?

About a week ago, there was a rather good article on the psychology of violence in the London Times. It got a lot of blog coverage, mostly because of Camille Paglia's (predictably) asinine remarks about women failing to understand male aggression and "young women" whose sexual freedom is "confusing" and "humiliating" to boys--as if sexually active single women aren't constantly told that they're sluts who are somehow asking to be raped, and aren't therefore (if anything) hyper-aware of the possibility of male violence. But okay, Paglia's got a bug up her ass about violence and feminism and everyone knows it; it's not surprising that when asked she's going to invoke the old double standard in that backlashy kind of way she does.

The article as a whole, though, is quite interesting and makes some really good points. The gist of it is a genuinely thoughtful exploration of the centrality of violence to American masculinity. It's a truism by now that these mass shooters are usually young white men (though Cho, of course, was a Korean immigrant), and that they usually feel socially isolated, picked on and marginalilzed, and want to somehow punish or get even with "society" for their sense of alienation.

The responses to this kind of thing are truisms, too: identify people who seem "weird," (over)react to stories or fantasies that involve violence (although again, in Cho's case the reactions of Nikki Giovanni and other professors and students to his writing seem, in retrospect, highly accurate), argue about security and gun control, blame video games, worry (excessively) about whether or not the mentally ill are dangerous. (Check that last link for an example of the kind of overreaction to whatever the most prominent feature of the latest killer's story seems to be.)

But all of those reactions are essentially reactionary--that is, they're after-the-fact responses to the unexamined problem of why violence is so endemic and attractive, especially to young men. Undoubtedly part of it is simple biology: men are probably more aggressive than women, especially during adolesence and early adulthood. But most guys don't shoot up schools or gangbang or get in bar fights or beat up their girlfriends or even join the military. A lot of them channel their aggression into playing WoW, or internet flamewars, or angsty rebellion, or sports, or fairly harmless occasional rowdiness. So aggression, in and of itself, is hardly an adequate explanation.

Which leads us back to Sarah Baxter's article in the Times. She interviews scientists from psychology to poli sci about the problem of (male) violence and comes up with some pretty interesting explanations, most of which amount to a combination of young male energy + a sense of social grievance + psychological isolation.

I really don't see why it would be "politically incorrect" to argue that at a time in life when they're going through (1) a lot of energy and (2) an attempt to figure out their role in society, young men who find that the roles offered to them aren't available for one reason or another would be angry and aggrieved. Hell, most of the arguments people have about culture and social problems revolve, one way or another, around what young men "need": jobs, military service, fathers, freedom, marriage, respect.

Change happens, though. And guys are gonna have to adjust when the world they live in evolves. What would really do them--and us--the most good is being able to talk about the social, physical, and emotional stresses they're under and start to recognize that there's more than one way to be a good man.

Bitch_PhD got her son an Easy-Bake oven yesterday, because his particular version of little boyness involves making stuff, feeling helpful and productive, fueling his energy with lots of carbs, and liking things that plug into the wall.