I OFTEN hear about how much more violent society is becoming.

Frequently, blame is laid at the door of video games, bloodthirsty films or the proliferation of internet pornography. This is beyond absurd.

Human beings have always been violent and I suspect they will continue to be so until they are either wiped out by some natural disaster or, more likely, by a calamity of their own making.

It is not that people cannot be kind, compassionate, selfless, tender and loving – we can be all of these things and more.

Equally, we can be clannish, vicious and creatively cruel. There is a capacity for sophisticated savagery in human beings which surpasses anything found in the natural world.

Violence is less forgivable in us because we should have the intellect to rise above it – or so we tell ourselves.

Yet often our intellect merely serves to furnish us with new means to commit murder.

If anything, people in the western world are less accustomed to violence and death than our ancestors.

You only have to look at the body of the last Plantagenet king of England, Richard III, dug up from a car park in Leicester, to see how brutal and cold-blooded people can be. His skeleton bore 10 different wounds, one of them probably inflicted by a halberd. Most disturbing of all are the ritualistic ‘humiliation injuries’ inflicted after death, including a sword or dagger thrust through the buttock.

History is replete with tales of such brutality from the horrendous legacy of the Crusades to reclaim the Holy Land (still remembered with outrage across the Muslim world today) to the combats of ancient Rome when Christians were fed to wild beasts to appease the bloodlust of a baying mob.

There is not space here to enumerate the acts of industrialised genocide committed at the behest of the Nazis or more recently in places such as Bosnia and Kosovo. Violence has simply become more impersonal. As Prince Harry alluded to in his recent TV interview, death and destruction are delivered at the touch of a button.

Soldiers can kill enemies without even having to look them in the eye – or watch them die. I remember hearing on the radio about a Victorian dog fight.

The spectators, who had placed bets on the outcome, began brawling with each other while the animals lay down and went to sleep.

Animals rarely, if ever, fight or kill each other unless their survival is at stake or they are manipulated by us.

They kill for food, to secure a mate or to defend their young. They kill to live. For people across the ages bloodshed and suffering have been part of life but have also been served up as entertainment. So much for evolution.