For Bullock, the law was a binding against his impulse to violence — in particular, I suspect, against his old man.
For Charles, though, the real problem isn't effeminacy but manliness, which for him consists of the simian impulse to violence, irrationality and lust.
This urge to violence was not a wholly aberrant impulse but something that had been brewing on a national scale, however tamped down by cooler heads and political pragmatists.
Its power comes from the spectacle of a civilized, middle-class Maine doctor succumbing to the atavistic impulse to answer violence with violence.
Or we will remember it as the moment when Iraq proved it could rise above the greatest outrage, could resist the natural impulse to meet violence with greater violence, could show its resilience against those who sought to destroy it by exploiting ethnic and religious tensions".
Christianity, which tells the story of another Father's willingness to sacrifice his Son, sublimates the impulse to sacred violence still further, with the bloody sacrifice of the Lamb of God commemorated for the past 2,000 years in countless variations on crosses and altars, in liturgical practices and works of art.
Perhaps the dual impulse to creativity and violence in my own genealogy serves to illustrate the Manichean dilemmas of the African odyssey in this strange American world".
But our spiritual nature — or, to describe it again in parallel terms, our evolutionary development — has also given us a much richer heritage with which we can overcome the impulse to evil, or violence, triggered by fear of difference".
Of course wars are also sometimes fought over religious belief itself, although religious motivation is more often than not one part of a toxic cocktail of impulses that lead to violence.
He therefore suggests that the 20th century has seen a "moral Flynn effect, in which an accelerating escalator of reason carried us away from impulses that lead to violence" and that this lies behind the long peace, the new peace, and the rights revolution.
And while Kelly maintained his unequivocal innocence throughout, he offered a take on how the impulse to commit sexual acts of violence against children may come about.
