One of my recent reads was Scars of Independence: America’s Violent
Birth by Holger Hoock. The focus of most histories of the War of
Independence is on military engagements and high level politics in Congress and
in London. But of course it also was a civil war, and a brutal one at that. Hoock's
focus is largely on the civil war. The populace was more closely divided than
is generally remembered. According to Benjamin Franklin a third of the
population was Loyalist (openly or quietly) including his own son who was Royal
Governor of New Jersey. Another third was for Independence. The remainder bent
whichever direction the wind blew in their particular locale in hopes of
avoiding targeting by either side. It didn’t always work: “You’re either with us
or against us” is a common sentiment in these situations to justify actions
against neutrals. (“Silence is violence” would be the modern counterpart.) Self-styled
Committees of Safety and their Loyalist counterparts often called at the homes
of people who seemed suspiciously neutral and demanded loyalty oaths under
threat of life and limb. Attacks on civilians with opposing views and reprisals
for them ranged from property confiscation to tar-and-feather assaults to
murder by ad hoc militias. Although a general amnesty was declared for
participants in civil violence (on either side) as part of the final peace
settlement, in practice the Loyalists who remained in the United States had a
hard time of it for years after the war.
What is it about civil wars that makes them particularly savage? Perhaps an answer can be found in the writings of Harvard
anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Richard Wrangham, in particular The Goodness Paradox: The Strange
Relationship between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution published in
2019. Humans differ from other primates in our capacities for both kindness and
violence. There is a classic dispute between followers of Rousseau and Hobbes:
the former regard people as naturally kind and generous unless corrupted by
social structures while the latter regard people as naturally rapacious unless
restrained by social structures. Both are half-right and half-wrong. We are
naturally both regardless of social structures; whether we express kindness or
aggression at any given moment depends on the circumstances. Wrangham distinguishes between reactive
violence and proactive violence. Reactive violence is spontaneous, as when
tempers flare when someone bumps into someone else at a bar. Proactive violence
is planned such as a raid against an enemy or a bank robbery. Reactive violence
does happen of course, but it is rare by the standards not only of primates but
of other mammals other than domesticated ones among which aggression has
deliberately been bred out. Most people are remarkably tolerant of minor
transgressions that would start fights even among wild herbivores. Meantime,
the capacity for proactive violence has not diminished at all. Many
anthropologists have argued that humans somehow self-domesticated; the signs of
it are not just behavioral but involve physical changes similar to those we see
in domestic animals compared to their wild ancestors. Wrangham argues that this
happened when early humans developed sufficient communication skills to form coalitions
against dominant males. In all other primates (even bonobos) a single bullying
alpha male through aggression and physical prowess dominates a group and gets
most of the mating opportunities. At some point early humans could conspire to
take this guy out by forming an alpha coalition to overwhelm him. The
unintended effect over generations was self-domestication: a reduction of personal
in-group reactive violence. These coups or revolutions (if we may
call them that) are proactive violence. It is no wonder that they are
especially vicious compared to clashes with true outsiders since the penalties
for losing a civil war to the alpha male and his allies (his communication
skills advanced too, so he probably has some) is likely to be fatal. Humans being great rationalizers, we are
likely to invent competing moralities and ideologies to justify why our
coalition should prevail against that coalition. Some of them are even
convincing. But at bottom they may be little different from the motivations of some gang that rid the
clan of a bullying jerk 200,000 years ago.
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