 When several readers suggested I read Steven Pinker's book The Blank Slate
for a different perspective on human nature and violence, I was glad to
oblige. When I discovered that Pinker is a psychology professor, I
should have realized I would find the book annoying, and I did. It's
massive and muddle-headed, and full of some truly bizarre rants. If
you're looking for a good book on 'nature versus nurture', there are
much better choices.
Hobbes made Pinker's point on human violence four centuries earlier: He
argued that humans, like one of our two closest ancestors, the
chimpanzees, are inherently violent, for three (later to be recognized
as Darwinian) reasons: competition, fear, and reputation, and that it
has always been so. The argument is that:
- Resources are always scarce, and the strongest will survive by hoarding a larger share, using violence when necessary.
- The
best Darwinian defense is a good offense, and tribes that preemptively
slaughter their neighbours will avoid being slaughtered themselves (and
get some extra land and slaves in the process).
- Females like the most successful males as mates, and violence is as good a way as any to achieve that successful 'edge'.
There
is great debate about whether prehistoric humans were violent, or
whether, as with most other animals, widespread human violence occurs
only as a response to extreme scarcity that nature's normal checks and
balances have been unable to remedy, and in rare psychopathic
individuals who (in natural environments anyway) usually eliminate each
other from the gene pool. I've said before that I find the scientific
arguments that violence is a stress-reaction quite compelling and well
supported, and the myth that early humans lived nasty, brutish and
short lives to have been convincingly refuted.
But in addition
to the Hobbesian arguments, we often hear that today's remaining
indigenous peoples live incredibly violent lives, that many aboriginal
peoples throughout history kept other humans as slaves, and that many
treated other animals, especially the large mammals hunted to
extinction, with thoughtless savagery, not reverence. And while the
bonobos, our matriarchal free-loving cousins, appear to live peaceful lives,
our other cousins, the male-bonding chimpanzees, have quite a penchant
for violence, and are likely to survive after the bonobos have been
rendered extinct by human slaughter and encroachment. My belief in the
inherent 'goodness', or at least peacefulness, of the human species is
therefore not entirely intact.
That belief is based on the
illogic of murder and violence as a means of successful survival.
Except for rare periods of climatic peace and warmth (like the last
5,000 years -- the warmest and stablest in the planet's history, to the
best of our knowledge), our often-inhospitable planet keeps throwing
curve balls at life all across its thin, fragile biosphere. We living
creatures have usually needed to focus our attention on surviving ice
ages, meteor strikes and volcanic holocausts -- the history of life on
Earth is riddled with extinction events. It therefore makes Darwinian
sense that we -- all life on Earth -- would pull together, and success
for each of us would depend on the success of the whole. We are all
biophiliacs -- we intuitively love every precious life that struggles
with us to survive. This has nothing to do with morality: The
principles of evolution would suggest that a highly diverse,
interdependent and mutually supporting biosphere would survive better
than a melee of competitive creatures constantly fighting each other to
the death. We've had hundreds of millions of years to 'learn' this.
In
periods of great stress, however, as biologists have confirmed, these
peaceful, cooperative rules give way to an often-violent culling of the
weakest members of the community to conserve resources for the
strongest to hunker down, without upsetting the balance of the rest of
the ecosystem. This, too, is a 'learned' behaviour of the global life
organism -- we behave that way because it's been proven to work best --
to optimize the health of life collectively on our planet.
One
of the arguments made for human male violence is that you don't need as
many males as females to optimize the health of a human community, and
that if strong males kill off weaker males and keep harems (as is
allegedly done in some chimp communities), that will make the community
as a whole more successful. I think this is preposterous -- if that
were so, we would have evolved to produce more female babies than
males, to make the killing unnecessary.
I don't understand why
psychologists and sociologists have this need to come up with a
complicated explanation for human violence that vindicates our pathetic
ways of dealing with it -- executing and locking up the perpetrators
and other expensive, devastating and ineffectual deterrent laws, that
no other animal species has any need to introduce, when it seems
obvious that what is driving it is our grossly excessive and
unsustainable human population and wasteful and extravagant
overconsumption of increasingly scarce resources -- billions of
needlessly struggling souls crowded into unnaturally small areas,
totally dependent on others for their survival, angry, helpless,
stressed-out, humiliated, living lives of political and wage slavery,
reduced to mere consumers of crappy, unhealthy products. Even the
students of chimpanzees have admitted that if chimps were jammed into
spaces and living conditions like those of our human civilization, they
would quickly slaughter each other to extinction.
But I guess if
we were to acknowledge this, we'd have to admit that our species isn't
really that special after all, and that we are so invested in the one,
fragile, teetering civilization culture left on this planet that we
wouldn't know where to begin to dismantle it and replace it with a
society that is workable, sustainable -- and relatively violence-free. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
