Historically, there has been a debate among intellectuals about the source of violence in humans. Some have believed that humans are animals, “red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson put it; or as Thomas Hobbes had it, life outside civilization was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Others have believed that civilization, especially individual ownership of property, made humans more violent, following Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s views. One side saw violence as inherent in human nature; the other saw the noble savage living in Eden. One side thought we could find salvation only in an afterlife; the other thought we could “get ourselves back to the garden.”
The Rousseauian view is still alive and well in politics
and the culture, but in the sciences specifically dealing with the problem, the
natural violence of humans is largely accepted. The debate has moved on to the
question of “What sparks human violence: tangible resources, such as food; or
intangible things, such as jealousy, cultural differences, and revenge?” And
conversely, if humans have a latent violence that can be elicited by some things
to create inhumane terrorism but that can be moderated by other things to
create peaceful order, what are the things that create peace and order?
The partial answer is that it is not all a matter of food
and shelter. Humans are more often drawn to violence by abstract ideas and
perceived deprivation. This is obvious when you look at war between Western
states in the past few centuries, but it is surprisingly the case when
anthropologists study primitive tribes. Food is not the driving factor; stealing
women, and revenge, is.
Starvation will eventually lead an individual or group to
violence, but under normal circumstances humans don’t wait until starvation is
on them to kill. We seem to have an imaginative brain that has evolved to rely
on violence when we think our options are shrinking.
This argument over the sources of human violence goes
back to the dawn of history, but its more recent incarnation is as a war of
statistics. Rates of violent death are marshaled
to prove or disprove each side’s case. I’m not a statistician, but several
articles and books have tumbled over my desk recently, and I want to post them
if only to have a record of the information they contain.
Ape ancestors…
In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal (pay wall unfortunately), Jane Goodall, Richard Wrangham, and Dale
Peterson wrote that the average “conservatively estimated risk of violent
death” among chimpanzee populations in Africa was 271 per 100,000 individuals
per year (though not all chimpanzees are so aggressive. And bonobos do not hunt
in groups and have a very low rate of violent death).
Primitive tribes…
There are many early societies that academics believe may
have been peaceful (the Tiwanaku, a precursor of the Inca in South America, for
instance).
Steven LeBlanc, in Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage, makes a thorough case for
the natural violence of animals and humans, specifically noting that the
highland New Guinea tribes, before
contact with civilized humans, had a violent-death rate of 25 percent among
their men.
War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, by
Lawrence H. Keeley (1996), uses archaeological evidence to argue that
prehistoric societies were generally more violent than modern societies. He
also cites anthropological data on existing tribal societies.
Steven Pinker referred to this graph in The Blank Slate. The tribal statistics
range from 8,000 per 100,000 individuals per year to 60,000 per 100,000
individuals per year. That is massively more than the rate among the chimpanzee
population, but also much more than deaths caused by warfare in the 20th
century in the United States and Europe (World War I and World War II).
Modern warfare at its worst (Paraguayan War of 1864-70) killed
at an average rate of 14,000 per 100,000 individuals per year, or toward the
low end of the tribal-society range. But wars in tribal societies occur
regularly, while wars in the modern world are rather rare, although much more
lethal. The wartime violent-death rate during WWII for Europe was roughly 500
per 100,000 per year for seven years in a row. For the United States it was only
80, and for only four years. This beats the chimps. Moreover, the peacetime
violent-death rate for the United States and Europe is closer to six per
100,000 per year, and that rate has held throughout my lifetime.
The most violent “peacetime” country today is Guatemala,
which has a rate of 75 per 100,000 per year--
considerably lower than the chimpanzees in Africa.
It looks as though we have not eliminated violence but,
rather, channeled it into short periods, interspersed with longer periods of
relative peace. Between wars we have gotten more and more peaceful over the
centuries…
In The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011), Pinker writes that
“Violent deaths of all kinds have declined, from around 500 per 100,000 people
per year in prestate societies to around 50 in the Middle Ages, to around six
to eight today worldwide, and fewer than one in most of Europe.”
When I was researching Native American tribes back in
college, I found only one that seemed to have discovered the way to have a
civilized culture and no war: the Hopi Indians. But pushed to the limit by
Spanish oppression and attempts to convert them to Catholicism, the Hopi and
Pueblo groups united to massacre the Spanish, killing the converted Hopi men,
removing the women and children, and completely destroying the pueblo of
Awatovi, where the conversions had occurred. Apparently there are limits to
“turning the other cheek.”
There it is. I have no resolution to the debate, but I
would say this: My opinion is that humans are naturally aggressive, and will
tend to expand and dominate the world around them until something serious stops
them. A tribe or civilization that is deeply dedicated to peace and sacrifice
will probably be conquered or destroyed by their more aggressive neighbors.
We in the West seem to be of two minds about our own
civilization. At times we think we are the
civilization, embodying rationality, beauty, technology, and life. At other
times we think we are the source of all evil, embodying madness, ugliness,
brutality, and death.
Of course, we are correct. We embody all of that, in all
its glorious complexity and gory madness. We are the killer ape, with the
biggest killer brain; but we are also the organizing ape, with the biggest
contemplative, compromising brain. The way we balance, channel, and rationalize
these opposing drives is what makes us the complicated, charming, and dangerous
animal that we are.
We
are stardust.
Billon
year old carbon.
We
are golden.
Caught
in the devil’s bargain.
And
we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.
-
Joni Mitchell
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