This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series A Runaway World, given by Edmund Leach, was originally broadcast in 1967.

Zed Cars and the Avengers on TV, film posters, stories of sudden death, fables of Hiroshima.

We are surrounded by themes of violence from the day we are born.

It is not just nature and technology that seem out of control, it is ourselves. If you measure violence by quantity,

then this is indeed an age of terror. Our weapons are more powerful than ever before.

There are more people to kill and more get killed. But attitudes to violence change very little. War reports from Vietnam gloat over the horrors in much the same tone of voice

as Icelandic sagas of the 12th century.

Official communiques count the dead as if the generals were engaged in a grouse chute.

But this sort of thing has been typical of human beings ever since the beginning of history.

Hitler tried to exterminate the Jews in gas chambers.

Sixteenth-century Englishmen tried to exterminate witches and heretics by burning them at the stake.

In modern civilized states,

the insane may be subjected to brain surgery and electric shocks

on the comfortable theory that it might do good,

and that in any case the suffering victim could hardly be worse

often than he is already. By the same principle, Vassalius and Leonardo da Vinci

advanced the understanding of human anatomy by dissecting the bodies of condemned criminals

while they were still alive. When Stokely Carmichael urges his fellow negroes to kill their white oppressors,

he is only repeating Machiavelli's blunt advice.

If you have an enemy, kill him.

But why do we have enemies?

...