Rousseau thought that people by
nature were peaceful unless corrupted by civilization. Hobbes thought people
were violent unless civilized by society.
Both were right. Evolutionary biologist and Harvard professor Richard
Wrangham addresses this duality in his book The
Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship between Virtue and Violence in Human
Evolution. Wrangham, who had studied in the field with Jane Goodall, is
also the author of Catching Fire: How
Cooking Made Us Human and is co-director of the Kibale Chimpanzee Project. He
sees the key to the paradox in the distinction between between proactive and
reactive aggression.
Reactive aggression is the tendency
to respond with threats (such as hisses, growls, and roars) and violence when
approached, whether by a member of another species or one’s own. Most animals
including our cousins the chimpanzees – particularly (but not exclusively) males – typically act this way not just to
strangers but to members of their own pack or social group. Humans rarely do. He notes that 300 chimpanzees never
would sit quietly side by side for hours; fights would break out and (with
nowhere to run) fatalities would be likely. Yet humans do that on planes and in
movie houses all the time. However often bar fights and physical assaults may
be on the news, the remarkable thing is how rare they are among humans. We are
more tolerant even than bonobos, the mild-tempered close relatives of
chimpanzees. We share this level of tolerance only with domestic animals, which
have been deliberately bred for this temperament.
People domesticated animals, but who
domesticated people? Wrangham argues (as others have before him) that our
ancestors did it to themselves by ganging up on any overly violent, dominant,
or annoying individual, who was then killed or ostracized and thereby removed
from the gene pool. (Remaining hunter-gatherers still do this.) Sociality
became a reproductive advantage. Bonobos, whose environmental pressures differ from
those on chimps by favoring more social tolerance, did something similar to
themselves. Not having language, the capacity of bonobos to stir up
conspiracies against bullies is much more limited and the results therefore
less extreme than among humans. This ganging up is, of course, proactive
aggression. The extensive planning permitted by language made humans’ proactive
aggression deadly on an unprecedented scale whether against actual outsiders (e.g.
World War One: see my recent review of the documentary They Shall Not Grow Old) or against undesired members of their own
social groups.
Domestic animals share a large
number of traits that are incidentally related to the primary one of social
tolerance, including neoteny, smaller teeth, and smaller brains. This is true
even of relatively smart domestic animals; dogs, for instance, have smaller
brains than their wolf ancestors of comparable size. Humans, too, have those
traits. After millions of years of growing larger, human brains shrank some 15%
from their Stone Age peak, reaching their current size many thousands of years
before farming (so the reduction was unrelated to it). Apparently, beyond a
certain level of population density (still extraordinarily sparse by modern
standards), being social conferred more reproductive benefits than being smart.
There remain people who are violent
for the fun of it (i.e. criminals), of course, but they are few by ape
standards. However, humans are unmatched (in fact, unique) in our capacity for
moralistic violence: our intelligence and our language skills let us identify
as “other” those with the wrong ideology, religion, accent, or whatever, and enable
us to whip up moral outrage against them. The most horrific mass killings are
by moralists who think that they are doing the right thing – even the
obligatory thing. They are not criminals in the usual sense, and are likely to
be kind and polite people in everyday life. As an example, Wrangham relates the
story of anthropologist Alexander Hinton who investigated the ideologically
driven Cambodian massacres of the 1970s that killed nearly 2,000,000 people. Hinton
was disconcerted by a former Khmer Rouge named Lor who openly stated he had
killed many men, women, and children: “I saw before me a poor farmer in his
late thirties, who greeted me with the broad smile and polite manner that one
so often encounters in Cambodia.” Says Wrangham, “So the definition of morality
that I will follow here is not limited to altruism or cooperation. I take moral
behavior to be behavior guided by a sense of right and wrong… We sometimes
think that cooperation is always a worthwhile goal. But just like morality, it
can be for good or bad.”
 |
| Mae West: “What is this, propaganda?” |
So, our better natures have their
roots in aggression. However, Wrangham does not suggest that we need to
continue a social strategy just because it has evolutionary roots. He opposes
capital punishment, for example, as no longer necessary even though we may well
owe our peaceful natures to it. We are big brained creatures, after all,
(despite the late Paleolithic shrinkage) and we can choose to be better. Most
of the time we do. “The one guarantee that an evolutionary analysis can offer,
however, is that it will not be easy for fairer and more peaceful societies to
emerge.” Fortunately, our harsh ancestors gave us the cooperative skills to
make that possible.
Bessie
Smith - A Good Man is Hard to Find
(1927)
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