Nagasaki
The tendency toward violence is all too human. So is compassion and empathy, to be fair. But there is something special about aggression that I find extremely unnerving: it contains the potential for our eventual undoing, principally via war.
While I believe that sometimes war is necessary, in self-defense or in defense of others, it rarely is. Our political leaders in the US often propel us into conflict, as if there is always a just war waiting around the corner. Yes, there are oppressive regimes out there. But does the US, the largest military in the world, without a close second, engage in war because it holds principles of democracy and freedom so dear that it cannot tolerate despots? It doesn’t seem that way; we tolerate Saudi nobility just fine, despite their violence toward their own people for offenses that aren’t even crimes in most developed countries; and former President Trump, for example, was fond of Kim Jong Un, Duterte, Xi Jinping, and Putin - a dictator’s Mt. Rushmore. Instead, maintaining the global hegemony seems a key motivation: the Spanish-American War, Vietnam, Iraq, etc. These stand in stark contrast to the few, arguably, just wars, such as the American Revolution and WWII.
Personally, I wonder how much of my anxiety on this topic, and that of many others, is influenced by the media, in particular given our attention economy, which rewards yellow journalism, clickbait, and polemic content. These things are hard to avoid in modern life - that’s the point. Thanks to the writings of individuals like Tristan Harris, executive director and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology and former Google design ethicist, many people are aware of how the almighty social media algos utilize our outrage and discontent to make us use these platforms more frequently and for longer. So, yes, media does seem to add fuel to the fearful fire.
And yet real-world aggression is a real thing. Russia continues its occupation and attempted takeover of Ukraine. Recently, a drone strike, likely from Israel, destroyed an Iranian weapons factory. China is threatening invasion of Taiwan, again. For some, WW3 seems terrifyingly close. Further, a casual perusal of history reveals a consistent pattern of large-scale violence. Here’s a short list: the Crusades; the Inquisition; the Age of Colonization; all wars ever; slavery; the Holocaust; and more tyranny and genocide than anyone can ever remember.
However, somewhat paradoxically, most of history is people living their lives and working together in relative peace. This contradiction in aggression is the subject of Harvard anthropologist and author Richard Wrangham recent book: The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution. Wrangham bifurcates aggression into reactive and proactive types. The former is instant and instinctual, like punching someone in the face because they stepped on your shoe; the latter is cold and calculated, like a political assassination. His research shows that, compared to chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest living relatives, human are remarkably peaceful when it comes to reactive violence. Hence, quotidian experience in society is largely amicable. On the other hand, our propensity for proactive violence has not decreased as a result of natural selection.
It is precisely this propensity for violence that troubles me because, given recent advances in technology, most notably nuclear weapons, we stand the chance of wiping out civilization the next time we collectively fight. Einstein famously said, “"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
Why So Aggressive?
I’m a firm believer that to solve a problem one must understand its causes. So, why the sometimes pull toward violence in our species?
Sadly, in simple terms, as far as propagating one’s genes is concerned, the prime evolutionary drive, often, violence works. In animals, the advantage to violence, especially in a larger individual, minimizing risk, is often clear. The idea of the alpha male is essentially synonymous with being the biggest and baddest, and, therefore, having procreative dominion. Many species bear this out, including bears. But, especially with social animals, there is a mitigating risk. Wrangham’s research shows that, with chimps, resentful betas sometimes band together and take out an oppressive alpha when presented with the right opportunity. This backlash puts pressure on social animals to maintain group ties, which brings images of social grooming to mind. Chimps, though, lack the language necessary to plan an assassination. And this difference has proven to be quite significant in the evolution of aggression.
Humans evolved gossip. It seems innocuous. “Did you hear Bob clubbed his wife with a mammoth femur?” Killing a rival, writes Wrangham, became relatively easy; wait till he slept or outnumber him. Therefore, we had to build alliances and trust.
Further, language enabled us to create narratives. Research by the anthropologist Andrea Migliano et al. shows that tribal societies value storytellers; in fact, they’re more reproductively successful on average than their peers. The reason is that they, in a sense, show the tribe who they are, what they believe, and how to act; in my view, they are the proto-priests.
Thus, a strong individual sense of what is acceptable and what isn’t within a tribal society would have been crucial in maintaining order and unity. Rule-breakers, as evidenced in modern tribal societies, would have faced collective punishment. This type of societal control is what British sociologist Ernest Gellner calls the “tyranny of the cousins,” given the strong consanguinity (or relatedness) of tribal societies.
The effect of this control is remarkable and leads to what Wrangham calls self-domestication: a pacification process starting before some 300,000 years ago whereby reactively aggressive males were selected against via execution, exile, and other societal punishments impacting reproductive success.
At the same time, though, proactive aggression did not decrease. Wrangham writes, “Since proactive aggression is complementary to reactive aggression (rather than its opposite), proactive, planful aggression can be positively selected even while reactive, emotional aggression has been evolutionarily suppressed.” Proactive aggression, right or wrong, was the mechanism of self-domestication, helping us work together better. And it’s cooperation that Wrangham credits for our species’ usurping of Neanderthals in Europe, who, contrary to popular belief, had a similar level of intelligence, but whose high reactive aggression hindered their collaboration.
Following the Neolithic Revolution, the beginning of agriculture, our large numbers, a result of food surpluses, required complex planning and, arguably, centralization. Agriculture, also, would make little sense if one did not have some assurance, by settling down in one obvious, attackable spot, that one would not labor year-round in vain. Leaders would have made this a priority and would have helped organize what was the ancestor of an army. So, the tyranny of the cousins became what Gellner called the “tyranny of the kings,” ushering in a new era of violence.
In sum, physical power became cultural and then political power. Certain kinds of violence, such as sexual violence, became more socially acceptable, instead of going away, because one of the benefits of leadership is, simply put, to lead. You make the rules. There’s a reason we’re skeptical of those in positions of power, and why we pursue it. Hence, culture, religion, and laws have all been used as a means of making some violence acceptable some of the time.
When these attack vectors fail, despots use fear. Ancient and Medieval history is replete with tyrants that oppressed their people with fear. Fear works well because it makes people selfish. When a tiger shows up, everyone scatters. When the SS appeared, 1930s Germans snitched on their neighbors so as to not be snitched on themselves or be suspected of disloyalty. When people are afraid and paranoid, the survival instinct is triggered. Dictators have exploited our evolutionary survival instinct by using extreme cruelty. So-called democratic leadership isn’t too different. They sell us fear because we want a savior, a protector. After 9/11, for instance, the Bush Administration sold us the USA PATRIOT Act, which saw a dramatic decrease in popularity after the high emotions following the national tragedy had subsided.
There is more to say on this topic, surely. But these are the broad outlines of our problem with violence. All this suggests that the violence problem is pretty entrenched. If it’s in our genes, and evolution works, on human timescales, imperceptibly slowly, then is there any hope that we survive the worse devils of our nature in this age of easy apocalypse?
Hope against Aggression
Ok, let’s talk peace. There must be some hope. Otherwise, we all go boom. What about deterrents and broader trends in proactive violence?
The most critical deterrent we have to avoid nuclear bye-bye is mutually assured destruction, the idea that nuclear war would ensure that all the participants lose, since nuclear winter would extinguish virtually all complex life on earth. But how effective is mutually assured destruction? Well, we’ve had nukes since 1945. Since then, we’ve come close to annihilation about twice. Once during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and again in 1983 when Soviet Col. Stanislav Petrov accurately believed that a computer system had malfunctioned when it had warned that the US had launched a missile toward the USSR; he had not, as was within his duty, decide to launch a counterattack, thus avoiding radioactive oblivion. So far, so good - right?
I think mutually assured destruction, or MAD, works as long as you have three things. First, the nuclear armed participants must value life. That’s not always the case. Neuroscientist and author Sam Harris argues the deterrent would fail when dealing with a suicidal religious extremist group who somehow got their hands on nukes. This is an all too possible reality, and we should guard against it. Second, the deterrent must be mutual; if one party is not at risk, it doesn’t work. Currently, we’re all sharing one world, the Earth. In the future, a hypothetical multi-planetary civilization may not have the same assurance. Luckily, we’re far from that reality. The last requirement is rationality. Appropriately, the acronym MAD foregrounds the problem of human emotion, which, however briefly, occults rationality. Many, including Senator Ted Cruz, before he endorsed him for president, feared the possibility of Trump having access to the nuclear football. While tempers have been known to flare among world leaders, there stand various people between a world leader and a nuclear launch. Hopefully, cooler heads prevail, as they did with Col. Petrov.
There is some good news.
Steven Pinker, cognitive psychologist and author, somewhat counter-intuitively, claims that we are currently living in the least violent time ever. How can we know this? He argues: “It’s only by (1) counting the violent incidents, (2) scaling them by the number of opportunities for violence to occur, and (3) seeing how this ratio changes over time that one can get an objective sense of trends in violence.” The results? Pinker charts violence (e.g., wars, genocide, homicides, sexual violence, and so on), showing a consistent, global decline over many decades and centuries.
Unfortunately, though, progress is too slow for the amount of change that is necessary. Abuses of power continue. Yes, as we learn from Wrangham and from history, tyrants do seem, sometimes, to live on borrowed time: Hitler, Mussolini, Ceausescu, etc. But why do we have to wait for death to make progress?
No, hope is not a strategy; it’s its antecedent. We must continue to fight, to expose injustice by authorities wherever we find it. In this way, we help keep them accountable. No more “tyranny of the cousins” or “of the kings”; we need democracy, which means fighting tyranny wherever we find it. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Admittedly, it isn’t an easy fight. Around the world, large protests for political change are often met with violence. Of course, it’s easier and safer to say, “Let’s wait. Change will come, eventually.” When King was met with the same criticism for fighting injustice in Birmingham, AL, he wrote, “There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.”
To quote the rapper J. Cole: “It’s beauty in the struggle”; there’s hope there, too.