Last week, I went to Gloucestershire to watch the annual cheese rolling, an event at which people hurl themselves down a very steep hill after a wheel of double gloucester. This silly-sounding tradition began perhaps 600 years ago – a sort of Alton Towers for the 15th century – and now tends to be described in news reports as “quirky”, “quintessentially English”, or a day for “cheese lovers”. I went along expecting the atmosphere of a village fete: stalls, cheese themes, and half-interested spectators wandering about. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
What greeted us instead was a baying mob spread across six fields, a worked-up football crowd dropped into the Cotswolds. Grass all around was churned into mud, and before each race there was a full-throated chant you could hear three hamlets away. Nearest the action was a desperate struggle between neighbours to get closer still: perhaps 200 people had swarmed the steep woods on either side, clinging to branches, tramping through nettles, determinedly pushing past each other for a better view. What were they there to see? You realised straight away. They were there to see broken legs and arms.
You could tell they were there to see shattered limbs because during the gentler races, which went uphill rather than down, the crowd would turn away in boredom. No chance of injury there. At one point a woman got concussed and there was a virtual stampede forward, phones held above the crowd like periscopes. As we left, snaking downhill towards the nearest pub, the sound of an ambulance tearing through country lanes had half the queue heading back to investigate. A friend told me he finally understood public hangings.
Life doesn’t give us many outlets for expressing fury these days, so we can forget how attracted we still are to violence. The impulse is in our nature. We’re not better than the brutes in this respect but worse: humans are about six times more violent than the average mammal (hardly a surprise given we evolved from species at the violent end of the scale). We like to imagine we have left these troubling impulses behind but research tells us otherwise.
A recent study conducted on an exceptionally peaceable demographic – university students – got between 70% and 90% of the men (and 50% to 80% of the women) to admit that in the last year they had had at least one homicidal fantasy (“yeah, and the others are lying!”, one student said when the results came in). A second group of studies finds that aggressive encounters aren’t just a means to an end for us either – they are enjoyable. We crave violence, they concluded, just like food or sex. Public hangings would probably get the crowds they always used to (Europe’s last, of Arthur Greiser in Poland in 1946, had a “picnic atmosphere” and was watched in “intense silence” – tickets were sold for the front row, and people fought over pieces of the hangman’s rope).
This is a difficult part of ourselves to confront, so we tend to ignore it, instead finding ourselves “confused” over all sorts of human behaviour. We spend a great deal of time puzzling, rather sweetly, over why we all seem to consume so much violent media.
In the 1950s, psychiatrists became concerned that young people appeared to enjoy comics with violent themes – the idea that this strange obsession might cause “delinquency” took hold and strict regulations stifled the industry until the 1970s. There was a similar moral panic, when I was growing up, over video games. A violent crime would be followed by weeks of speculation about the suspect’s history of playing Mortal Kombat or Grand Theft Auto. The rather innocent train of thought seemed to go like this. How could gamers actually enjoy seeing characters blown up or run over? Wasn’t this horribly abnormal? And, if so, couldn’t it be doing psychological damage?
The alternative explanation is, of course, that people like violent video games because the capacity to enjoy violence is already within us. (Decades of research have since shown that gruesome games don’t turn you into a homicidal maniac.) But now there is a new concern, the rise of true crime.
When the podcast Serial – about tracking down a murderer – burst into the culture in 2014, it was the start of a phenomenon, and now true crime dominates streaming services. A YouGov poll found half of its American respondents enjoy true-crime content; and one in three said they consume it at least once a week. We tut-tut about this. What on earth could be the appeal? But we keep watching.
It’s perhaps to be expected that we think of ourselves as essentially non-violent, and different from our brutish ancestors. Violence has, after all, been in decline in almost every domain for the past few millennia – military conflict, homicide, genocide and criminal justice. According to the psychologist Steven Pinker, though, this isn’t the result of a fundamental change in human nature, but mere historical forces. The rise of the judiciary, with its monopoly on the use of force, defused and formalised the impulse for violent revenge, and the interlinking of various large groups through commerce, has made it less rewarding to murder them.
We have tried to stamp it out but the impulse remains, just below the surface. Learning to spot it can be useful. Cancel culture has given all sorts of psychological explanations – prudishness, sanctimony – but the joy of vicarious violence surely plays a part. “Do you want me to die?” Phillip Schofield asked his tormentors last week, as we wondered just what it was about his downfall that so fascinated the nation. His pleas only seemed to incite the rabble.
Martha Gill is an Observer columnist
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