Media can discourage mayhem instead of promoting it, says Sissela Bok

By Alvin Powell

They're everywhere: violent movies, violent cartoons, violent video games, and now, virtual reality games that make players feel more and more as if they're doing the killing.

Our children are nurtured on images of rape, torture, bombings, and massacre from infancy on, and while some find that "cool," others think it's downright damaging.

So says Harvard ethicist Sissela Bok, a distinguished fellow at the Center for Population and Development Studies who studied entertainment violence extensively in writing her latest book, Mayhem: Violence as Public Entertainment, due out in April.

Bok will address this subject when she delivers the annual Frederic William Atherton Lecture on Tuesday, March 10, at 7:30 p.m. in Harvard Hall 104.

Humans have always been fascinated by violence, but it was not until this century that it invaded the home on television screens and took a hand in raising the young, Bok said in a recent interview. The periodic boxing matches, public hangings, and gladiatorial contests of the past have given way to a barrage of shootings, beatings, and stabbings, sometimes just inches from the faces of impressionable children.

Entertainment violence can affect people in four different ways, Bok believes. The constant immersion in virtual violence can make people more fearful, numb to violence, hungry for more, or even more aggressive in the real world.

The barrage of artificial violence can be especially damaging to young children, particularly at ages 2 and 3, when they are developing the ability to empathize.

Bok asks about the links between media violence and the rising rates of child abuse, domestic violence, and homicides and other violent crimes by children. Even when heightened awareness and reporting of some of those crimes are accounted for, underlying rates are rising, she said.

But the new media which bring violence into people's homes can be used to fight it as well. Community cable television channels didn't exist until recently; they provide access to a powerful medium. Likewise, Web sites have sprung up that enable those opposed to this kind of violence to communicate and organize.

"There's a Web site that's an international clearinghouse on children and media violence," Bok said. "This is very new. It does empower people."

The Atherton Lecture, devoted to ethics, was established in 1966 thanks to the Frederic William Atherton Bequest. Last year's speaker was former Assistant Attorney General Deval Patrick, who led the government's investigation into black church burnings in the South. Previous lecturers include historian Barbara Tuchman (1983), Arizona Gov. Bruce Babbitt (1989), journalist Randy Shilts (1991), and legal scholar/philosopher Ronald Dworkin (1994). The lecture is hosted by a different House each year, this year by Winthrop House.

Winthrop House Master Paul Hanson said there's a lot of excitement about the lecture. For a talk on ethics, he said, one could hardly imagine a better-qualified speaker.

"It's obvious that she's a very fine ethicist," Hanson said. "She deals in a very incisive and courageous manner with specific ethical issues that lie at the heart of contemporary society."

Entertainment violence is so pervasive in our society today that it needs the thoughtful and well-rounded look that Sissela Bok takes, said Jennifer Leaning, an assistant professor of medicine and a research fellow at the Center for Population and Development Studies.

Another colleague gives Bok credit for helping create the field of practical ethics in its contemporary form. She was one of the first to apply philosophy to issues of current concern, according to Dennis Thompson, director of the Program in Ethics and the Professions and the Alfred North Whitehead Professor.

"She is a pioneer in the field of practical ethics or applied moral philosophy, as it is sometimes called," Thompson said. "She has a remarkable talent for identifying and clarifying issues that have important moral content when they need to come to public attention."

This was already evident with her doctoral dissertation, "Voluntary Euthanasia," written in 1970 -- years before this subject became the center of a national debate that continues today. Since then, Bok has written several books, including Lying and Secrets.

Her most recent volume, Common Values, was published in 1996 and deals with the most fundamental moral values that can be shared across national, ethnic, religious, and other boundaries.

Bok's husband, Derek Bok, is Harvard President Emeritus and the Three Hundredth Anniversary University Professor; he teaches at the Kennedy School of Government and the Graduate School of Education. Sissela Bok comes from a distinguished family. Her mother, Alva Myrdal, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982 for her efforts toward disarmament, and her father, Gunnar Myrdal, won a Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974.