Greetings from Asia - 4 October 2010

The subject of safety is a complicated one here in Taiwan... On the one hand, this is one of the most dangerous places you could imagine... that is, in terms of traffic. Drivers here are, for the most part, impatient and reckless. This is odd in that it runs counter to the generally low-key attitude of the people here. But there are cultural reasons why the driving here and in places like Cairo, and so on is like this, and I can provide that explanation if readers are interested.

In Taiwan, although the driving habits present significant danger, this is one of the safest places in the world, with very little street crime. It is a particularly safe place in terms of the kind of crime one finds in the U.S.: gun crime. It disturbs me that in the U.S., we have become inured almost to the point of ignorance about how unusual our situation is in terms of shootings and violent crime. In Philadelphia, there is some kind of gun crime virtually every single day of the year. When you live in a place like Taiwan, you suddenly see how aberrant this is. My favorite such story is how, a few weeks ago, after I had dropped our child at preschool, I came home and saw this news report from my hometown:

One could not even imagine such an incident here. But even back in Philadelphia, for the most part we don't even really care — after all, the shooting wasn't in OUR neighborhood...

People in the U.S. have questioned my critique of the violence in the U.S., noting that place like Brazil have much higher crime rates. But this misses the point in several respects; for one, another country having a higher crime rate does not somehow "forgive" us for being so prone to violence in our country. But more profoundly, it is interesting to look at the nature of crime and violence in a place like Brazil versus a place like the U.S. In Brazil, much of the violence can be directly tied to enormous class tensions in the society. There is violent crime connected to the drug trade (as in the U.S.), but also propensities to violence from an underclass which is clearly marginalized in the society. By contrast, in the U.S., although one could argue that the same dynamic exists, one also finds very bizarre crimes, violence that seems to spring from nowhere, or from some kind of "mass psychosis". As violent as Brazil is, one does not find so often what one finds more and more frequently in the U.S.: reports of shootings on university campuses, shootings in the workplace, and so on.

Finally, it should be noted that all societies have to reckon with violence, but it is worth comparing where the violence springs from in each culture. Resorting to violence because of social class or political frustration may be repugnant, but at least it fits in the framework of human nature. Shootings in the workplace in the U.S. may fit into that category, but the figures involved are usually quickly marginalized as unrepresentative of anything but a personality disorder.