Our choice then is not between violence and nonviolence. We make the choice as individuals and then, cumulatively, as cultures. We learn, in other words, the discrimination of violences. In making that choice, a further discrimination occurs. Again whether we are aware of it or not, we discriminate between natural violence and contrived violence.
Contrived violence consists of all other acts of interference.
The quality of life which an individual or a society enjoys is largely a result of the kinds of contrived violence perceived as acceptable. The positive side of historical progress consists of our increasing sensitivity to and refinement of the discrimination of violences. As that process occurs we find that those forms of violence which we think of, unconsciously or consciously, as natural diminish in number. We become aware that we have gentler choices in vast areas of our behavior where we once thought we either had no choices at all or only the choice between different kinds of more or less brutal violence. It is possible that the American experience in Vietnam represents an extension of the semantic discrimination of violences into the world of physical behavior.