Are humans inherently violent or peaceful?
I’ve gotten into debates about this. My readings on the topic had led me to believe that humans were quite violent in the past, that perhaps that illustrated something about our true nature. Others would argue with me that past societies were more egalitarian and necessitated such cooperation that made violence rather rare.
That’s when I came across The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship between Virtue and Violence by Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham.
The Myth
Rousseauians, named after Jean-Jacques Rousseau, believe human nature is inherently good, whereas Hobbesians, after Thomas Hobbes, believe that human nature is naturally selfish and violent. Traditionally, the Hobbesians have held sway in the evolutionary narrative of our species’ beginnings. Wrangham argues that neither side is correct. Our evolution is complex. He divides aggression into two aspects: reactive aggression, which is instantaneous and instinctive, such as punching someone who steps on your shoe, and proactive aggression, which is delayed and premeditated, such as assassinating a political rival. Humans, compared to our chimpanzee relatives, are less reactively aggressive but also equally, if not more, proactively aggressive.
Thomas Hobbes
Today, however, I find the Rousseauians gaining much, too much, traction. They tend to blame modern society for corrupting our otherwise amicable nature. To them, our pre-agricultural ancestors, represent an idyllic, peaceful past. It is correct that true tyranny arrives after agriculture, since more resources can be amassed via what Wrangham calls “coalitionary proactive aggression” (or CPA), to refer to premeditated aggression by a group that A) affords some worthwhile benefit and B) substantially limits risk of personal injury.
Further, Rousseauians are right about hunter-gatherers – when referring to hunter-gatherers who happen to live near farmers or pastoralists “herders of mobile animals such as cattle, sheep, and goats)” (236). For example, the Hadza of Tanzania live in perpetual peace and even intermarry with their pastoralist neighbors. But we must note that they do this because the latter group is militarily superior, not because their benign nature is able to shine without the corrupting influence of civilization.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
More, during the Pleistocene, an epoch marked by its ice ages, among other things, hunger-gatherers were more evenly matched, broadly speaking, since there were no farmers – or pastoralists, since domesticated animals, except for dogs, did not exist yet. Without a commanding leader, however, hunger-gatherer societies have relied on strict adherence to social norms, what social anthropologist Ernest Gellner called the “tyranny of the cousins” (149), protecting them from “challenges to social norms, and from selfish aggressors” (153). In a sense, the relative peace of hunter-gatherers has been heavily regulated; rule breakers and other conflicting groups have often been met with proactive violence.
A study cited by Wrangham sampled twelve hunter-gatherer societies and found that per capita death rates from intergroup conflict were lower (164 per 100,000 per year) than death rates from twenty small scale farming societies, at 595 deaths per 100,000. To compare, in the US, the death rate has ranged from 5.2 deaths per 100,000 per year due to homicide in recent times to 200 deaths per 100,000 per year during WWII (pp. 238-239), a period that saw the world engulfed in a military conflict. So, while hunter-gatherers have been more peaceful than agriculturalists, they pale in comparison to how we live today.
Motivations
Rousseauian’s motivations are sometimes explicitly political, affecting how the science is interpreted. “For instance, the anthropologist Douglas Fry wrote, “One important, general, contribution that anthropology holds for ending ‘the scourge of war’ lies in demonstrating that warfare is not a natural, inevitable part of human nature” (238).
They tend to believe that “if warfare and related forms of violence are found to be important evolutionary adaptations, politicians and the general public will treat them as inevitable: pessimism will reign and efforts for political improvement will be thwarted (249).”
They are implying that “biology is destiny, an idea captured in the phrase “biological determinism.” (250-251) . It’s important to note that: “Goodall, Hinde, Hamburg, and many others did not consider that, if aggression is adaptive, war must be inevitable” (253).
What I find interesting is that “Rousseauians have been relatively comfortable with the idea that tendencies for attachment, romantic feelings, or cooperation have evolved. . . . When dealing with those positive aspects of human behavior the arguments about determinism are (quite rightly!) forgotten” (254).
Takeaway
Biology is not destiny. This is illustrated well in the story of Professor James Fallon, a neuroscientist who, while studying the brains of patients with psychiatric disorders, many of them murderers, found that his brain shared many of the same traits that marked some of them as “psychopaths.” It is remarkable the different path his life took compared to those who had had a similar brain.
Our evolution shows us that, as the dharmic religions and the Stoics teach, among others, it is only through constant training and effort that we are able to resist our more primitive urges and reach a higher level, one more determined by reason than by biology.
I really enjoyed The Goodness Paradox, and highly recommend it. Read it, though, with an open mind. Science tells us many things about ourselves. To effect the best change, it is necessary to know truth. Emotion is not an enemy to truth. But it can cloud it. So it is important to control it, not through tyrannical suppression, but with understanding.