In two
recent
posts I enquired about the cause of
human cruelty and violence. Now fellow Canadian blogger abuddhas memes
points to a possible answer in an article
by neuropsychologist James Prescott: a combination of neglect or abuse in early childhood
and pre-marital sexual repression.
The article studies many different human cultures and correlates
proclivity for violence with a host of environmental factors, and
these two seem to account overwhelmingly for the (in my view) aberrant
behaviour that perverts our whole society. It suggests that societies
that show great physical and emotional affection for their young, and
don't ban sexual expression from adolescence to young adulthood, tend
to be virtually violence-free. In the whole nature-versus-nurture
debate, Prescott seems to be suggesting that nurture is the root cause of
violence, and that we are all born innocent but can be perverted either
directly by one of these deprivations in our own childhood or
secondarily corrupted by having the violence of one of these depraved
individuals inflicted upon us. In other words, violence stems from
childhood deprivation and then begets more violence in adulthood.
I have some reservations about the study, which goes on to present some
fairly strident and unsupported conclusions, but let's assume for a
moment that the basic thesis, which seems to have some credible
empirical support, is valid. What would Darwin have to say about all
this? While the article suggests that this violence is
counter-Darwinian, I think it misses a critical point. There are, on
the surface, two Darwinian ways of looking at the above correlations,
both of them suspect:
- Ferocity increases the likelihood of survival, so our
30,000-year-old violent Western culture, perhaps rooted in salvationist
religions that (a) encourage 'eye-for-an-eye' violence, (b) prohibit
premarital sex, (c) encourage stern disciplinary treatment of children,
and (d) tolerate substantial and prolonged separation of children from
their parents as a means of 'teaching independence', is successful because it is violent.
Non-salvationist cultures, which are 'by nature' peaceful, just can't
compete. This seems to me completely counter-intuitive, since, as a
look at Western history and current events indicates, this violence
breeds war, ethnic hatred, and retaliatory violence that threatens our survival, rather than
advancing it. You might argue
that what is in our survival interest in the short term (violence) is
not in our survival interest in the longer term (self-annihilation),
and that therefore Darwinian 'rules' are imperfect. But given the
remarkable sustainability of evolution for tens of millions of years,
such a massive flaw in the rules seems highly improbable.
- Human violence is a survival response to violence in
nature. Hence survival of the fittest becomes survival of the most
violent. This frightened view of nature implies that nature is itself
violent, brutish, and destructive, and that humans had no alternative
but to fight force with force, violence with violence. The problem with
this view is that there is absolutely no empirical evidence to support
it.
However, if we reverse cause and effect, and see the violence and its
behavioural causes as a response
to critical environmental stress, the logic is more tenable and both
the end-state and some possible solutions become evident. The
prevailing view of nature is that it is profligate, wasteful, and
relies on checks and balances to counteract the 'natural' instinct to
breed and expand and eliminate other species without limit. But there
is another view that is, while more recent, more sensible and more
consistent with the geological and biological evidence. This
alternate view is called the 'Gaia
hypothesis' and posits that the Earth is, like the body of any
living creature, a single self-regulating organism, and, just as the
body's organs work to sustain the health and integrity of the whole
body, Earth's ecosystems work to sustain the health and integrity of
our planet.
Under this hypothesis, regulation of the ecosystems is not attained by
introducing counter-balancing forces (like epidemics), which would tend
to lead to wild whip-sawing changes and disequilibria of life on Earth,
but rather by self-regulation. Indeed, studies of many animals and
birds have indicated that as population in a particular community
increases, fertility drops. Perhaps this is a stress reaction, perhaps
it is an 'instinctive' reaction (analagous to the 'knowledge' of the
body's organs when to stop growing), or perhaps there is a 'program' at
work that we haven't yet learned to recognize that sends the
overpopulated species a biochemical signal to cut back procreation.
Whatever the cause, perhaps our human culture's reduction in population
growth rate in the last century in many countries is a manifestation of
the same self-regulatory impulse, rather than a conscious decision or
outcome of improved birth control. If so, it is too little, too late to
achieve anything like equilibrium.
What happens in nature when the natural checks and balances and
self-regulation fail? There must be another mechanism short of
ecological upheaval, since nature is constantly evolving new mutations
and testing their viability and hence challenging the entire Gaia
equilibrium. A student of the University of Colorado named Eli Meier cites
a study by "Hall, 1969" (if anyone can find more info on this,
please let me know) which says that in addition to reducing procreation
and fertility, overcrowded rats exhibit these six anti-social
behaviours (emphasis mine):
- a minority display aggressively dominant behavior
- passive males avoid both fighting and sex
- hyperactive subordinates rape females and eat or kill children
- pan-sexual males will have sex with both males and females
- some males withdraw from sexual and social intercourse and
are active when others sleep
- female rats generally react by acting absent minded, having
disorganized nests, and by either eating
or neglecting their children
The impact of this psychotic behaviour on young rats sounds to me
awfully similar to Prescott's 'childhood deprivation'. It's certainly
an effective way to put population control in 'overdrive' when the overcrowding is extreme.
And yes, it seems cruel, but perhaps it is less so than the suffering
that would otherwise occur through starvation, and disruption of the
entire ecosystem of which the overpopulated group is a part. And
because of the trauma inflicted on the children, this internal violence
has a 'memory': it will endure at least a generation or two, continuing
to suppress procreation, perhaps just to ensure the extreme
overpopulation doesn't recur.
At any rate, the six psychotic behaviours listed above sound
frighteningly like the human behaviours that are in evidence everywhere
on our planet, especially in areas where human overcrowding is most
extreme.
What emerges from all of this is a compound hypothesis that I'll dub
the "Self-Imposed Population Control Hypothesis". And it is:
- Communities/species that are moderately out of ecological
balance instinctively and temporarily reduce their population
- Communities/species that are severely
out of ecological balance reduce their population and also exhibit
psychotic behaviours (violence, rape, cruelty, bullying, greed,
depression, suicide, megalomania) that accelerate, and draw out the
period of, population reduction
- These two self-imposed population control
mechanisms are
Darwinian, helping to restore balance with the minimum amount of
disruption to the rest of the ecosystem, and the mimumum extent of
suffering
- A combination of human technologies
introduced in the last 30
millennia has defeated the effectiveness of these mechanisms,
perpetuating and institutionalizing the psychotic, violent behaviour
that has made modern human society dysfunctional, mentally disordered,
and brutal
|
Well, it's just a hypothesis, but it makes more sense to me than any
other explanation I've heard, rational, psychological, religious,
scientific, social or moral, for the epidemic of human violence in our
society. And the list of six anti-social behaviours above seems to
perfectly describe the actions of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Wolfowitz, Perle and
the whole psycho gang in the White House.
What's troubling is that there doesn't seem to be any human answer, now
that we've irreparably screwed up these mechanisms. I don't think we'll
be saved by gods or aliens, and I don't believe we'll wake up and find
out this is all a bad dream. Deus ex
machina, anyone?
P.S. Thanks to Rob Paterson for his advance thoughts on this article.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
