Whence violence?

And so the impulsion to violence cannot be effaced from our genes or our hormones or what have you.

But for Taylor, “this seems radically insufficient. It’s not that body chemistry is not a crucial factor, but that it never operates alone in human life, but only through the meanings that things have for us. The hormonal explanation doesn’t tell us why people are susceptible to certain meanings” (p. 659, emphasis added). So the merely biological account is insufficient; we need a “meta-biological” account, a cultural account that explains how violence means in our secular age. If a purely biological account is what’s left to us in a “closed” take, then Taylor is scoring an apologetic point: maybe a “closed” take doesn’t really have the resources to make sense of our secular age; and maybe that opens the door for a closer consideration of an “open” take.—James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 118 (all emphasis by Smith)