ABSTRACT
In 1651, English philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote with despair that most human beings had “…No arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (p. 2). A grim view of life, and not one that most of us in the First World at the turn of the 21st century share. Modern life holds many pleasures, and today the 17th-century world of Hobbes is as foreign to us as living on the moon. However, for all our progress, some social problems remain intractable. One in particular affects all human beings. Violence is a behavior that has little or no equal. Present in the caves, tens of thousands of years ago, it has survived every human society’s attempt to eradicate it. Despite its burdensome costs and its almost unique ability to promote acute human misery, violence persists, and we have not been able to solve this most basic of human problems.
