Aggression, Violence and the Genetic Argument (Looking at Aggression from Felicity de Zulueta's perspective)

 

     Excerpts from Felicity de Zulueta’s book “From Pain To Violence - The Traumatic Roots Of Destructiveness”

 

      We are fed on such a regular diet of violence on our television screens, in our newspapers and books that we have come to see it as part of our way of life and, in a sense, this may well be so. Our Western culture may need violence to maintain itself and, as long as this is the case, the pressure to focus on man’s destructiveness will remain. However, people are beginning to realise that the price of violence is perhaps more than we can bear, that our survival and that of our planet are in danger. There is therefore a real need to find out if our species is capable of other forms of social interaction. What if violence is but one of our options? What if we human beings have the potential for far more co-operative forms of behaviour? What if the study of child development were to confirm our need for one another? And what if violence and hate, co-operation and love were the reciprocal aspects of the same human needs and behavioural patterns?

     The implications of such revelations could be threatening to our current view of ourselves and of our culture, but they may also be the early manifestations of a new scientific paradigm. In his study of scientific revolutions, Thomas Kuhn makes it quite clear that we may be about to witness a new approach to the study of human behaviour: ‘Today research in parts of philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and even art history, all converge to suggest that the traditional paradigm is somehow askew’ (1970, p.121). It is tempting to see in Kuhn’s observation an encouragement to explore what has hitherto been avoided by so many experts in the field of human behaviour, the links between our capacity to be violent and our need for one another. Research in this area is very difficult and requires us to establish as objectively as possible what factors are conducive to the full development of our affective and cognitive potential, even if these findings may threaten our current way of being and seeing ourselves.

     A brief survey of the writings on human aggression and violence may give the reader some insight into the difficulties involved in studying our own behaviour without subjecting our findings to our deeply held assumptions about human nature. It is important to stress that this review does not attempt in any way to sum up the arguments relating to human violence, for this has been done effectively by several authors. The reader is advised to look at Erich Fromm’s book The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1974) and Anthony Storr’s work Human Aggression (1968) to have some idea of the psychoanalytic debate in the field. Jo Groebel and Robert Hinde’s book Aggression and War (1989) and Konrad Lorenz’s best-seller On Aggression (1966) cover the ethological arguments in the debate about human destructiveness. John Gunn’s book Violence in Human Society provides a clear survey of the subject in all its complexity (1973), and James Gilligan’s book Violence, Our Deadly Epidemic and its Causes (1996) provides a very humane psychoanalytic understanding of those whose violence lands them in prison.

     What I hope to do here is to demonstrate, through examples in the literature, the possible mechanisms and pressures at work in the minds of those who, like the author, have made it their task to expound on the nature of human violence. Although it is important to have some understanding of the social and personal factors which may be involved in the literary debate about human violence, it is also essential to stress that the evidence given by the different authors taken from the fields of biology, ethology (the study of animal behaviour), anthropology and sociology will be duly addressed and discussed later in this book. What we are involved with now are the individual and social contexts in which views on human violence are being elaborated, presented and received. No scientific study of human nature can afford to ignore the psychosocial context from which it derives.

      A common finding when reading the literature on human violence is the confusion that appears to exist between words referring to aggression and words referring to concepts such as violence or cruelty. Many authors slip from one to the other without attempting to define their terms or the difference between them. I have already addressed this issue in the Introduction and will briefly re-examine the implications of this confusion. In his book, Biological Bases of Human Social Behaviour, Robert Hinde makes the point that, though he is writing about animal behaviour, he has to discuss the prevalent value judgments about human aggression because of the false arguments used in this context. He stresses that to accept them uncritically is very dangerous. Having defined aggression as behaviour directed towards causing physical injury to another individual, he writes:

     There is of course no dispute that aggressive behaviour has been selected as an adaptive characteristic in the great majority of species of higher animals, and that individuals who show it to a reasonable degree are more likely to survive and leave offspring than individuals who do not. But it is a completely different matter from the implication that aggressiveness in man may be a characteristic valuable for human society. There is no need to emphasise that aggressiveness can be a vice, and our concern must be with means to reduce it. It is sometimes argued that we do not know what repercussions a reduction in individual aggressiveness might have on the structure of human personality, but it seems unlikely that a reduced tendency to injure others could have deleterious effects. In any case the question can justifiably be postponed in the face of the urgency of the present situation. (1974, p.275)

      This quotation clearly illustrates some of the difficulties any writer has in attempting to cover this topic. The author takes a biological definition of aggression as his baseline and naturally stresses its important adaptive function in higher species. However, in man, he redefines aggression as a ‘vice’ and, in so doing, makes a value judgment about a particular form of human aggression, similar to the value judgments made in defining violence that we referred to in the Introduction. This is because the word ‘aggression’ covers all sorts of behaviours from rough-and-tumble play in toddlers to the sadistic torture of political victims. As Hinde concludes, the bases of human behaviour resemble in many ways those of aggressive behaviour in animals, but language and the human level of cognitive functioning introduce new dimensions of complexity that are only just beginning to be addressed and which will be the focus of much of this work.

     There is a need to differentiate between various forms of aggressive behaviour in human beings. Authors like Durbin and Bowlby (1939) define as ‘simple’ aggression the behaviour common to both animals and humans, and as ‘transformed’ aggression the repressed and converted feelings of aggression that are so specific to humanity. The conversion of one to the other could be assumed to have taken place in Mr Brown when he tormented and murdered his child. For the time being, suffice it to say that ‘transformed aggression’ is what is here described as violence. It can take different forms such as ‘hatred’, a mixture of aggression and revenge, or ‘cruelty’, which attends to the delight or callousness, we can feel in relation to someone else’s pain. ‘Torture’ and ‘persecution’, the wilful infliction of pain onto another, are just some of its many presentations. Humans have devised endless different ways of hurting one another, some more obvious than others.

     All these interpersonal forms of behaviour can be defined as forms of violence that, we will recall, the Oxford English Dictionary describes as ‘behaviour tending to cause bodily harm or forcibly interfering with personal freedom’. Implicit in this definition is the concept that humans are entitled to a certain degree of freedom, which is an idea intrinsic to our species, derived from our capacity to think and to speak and which is therefore linked to our cultural environment. The psychoanalyst Patrick Gallway highlighted this when speaking on human violence:

‘It is defined not so much by behaviour but by meaning’ (personal communication, April 1984). The meaning given to destructive behavior is therefore intrinsic to the study of violence, both for the victim and for the perpetrator. This important aspect is all too often ignored.

     The modern debate on human ‘aggression’ took off following Darwin’s discoveries on the nature of evolution by natural selection. Social Darwinism was born out of his ideas; it extended the concept of warfare in nature to warfare in the market place. The ‘law of battle’, a term used by Darwin to describe the rivalry between male birds and mammals in relation to their females, was used to justify the free unregulated competition of the Industrial Revolution. Human society was seen as the outcome of a violent struggle between competing males. Such concepts as the ‘warfare of nature’ or the ‘survival of the fittest’, allowed the successful to justify the highly competitive struggles of the Industrial Revolution with their resulting class divisions, poverty and exploitation. The same argument can be used to justify the consequences of economic liberalisation and globalisation with its increasing divisions between rich and poor.

     What is interesting is that in Darwin’s book, The Descent of Man, there is no reference in his index to human aggression, violence or war but there are many to the ‘social instincts’ of mankind. These, as we shall see later on, involve ‘love and the distinct emotion of sympathy’ (1871, p.610).

     Darwin’s emphasis on the importance of the social instincts and the role of upbringing in their development is rarely referred to in the literature on human violence. This culturally induced blind spot may reflect a current need to emphasise man’s cruelty at the expense of what Darwin calls his ‘sociability’. Central to the debate on human violence is the issue as to whether it is innate or not, whether it derives from an instinct such as Freud’s death instinct or whether it results from external pressures or a combination of the two.

In the field of ethology, those who believe human violence to be innate are essentially followers of Konrad Lorenz (1966). As he is an ethologist of considerable repute, his views on human aggression are still accepted by many as scientific truths. He saw aggression as an instinct that helps to ensure the survival of both the individual and the species. However, in man, this same instinct becomes destructive because our cultural evolution has, so to speak, outstripped our biological evolution. Rapid technological development, particularly in the field of weapons, has given man a destructive power that is no longer kept in check by appropriate inhibitions. Our future thus depends on

how we can channel our dangerous and redundant aggressive drives.

Interestingly, Lorenz made the point that he discovered that Freud’s theories of motivation revealed unexpected correspondences between the findings of psychoanalysis and behavioural psychology. He went on to equate his instinct of aggression with Freud’s ‘death wish’ (1966, p.210).

     Konrad Lorenz’s views were taken up by a group of scientists and popular writers such as Robert Ardrey and Desmond Morris. Their approach to the issue of human violence is interesting because it is so extreme. Robert Ardrey was a follower of Raymond Dart, a professor of anatomy and an expert on the Australasian Africans. The latter’s views regarding man’s origins are often quoted:

      The blood-bespattered, slaughter-gutted archives of human history from the earliest Egyptian and Sumerian records to the most recent atrocities of the Second World War, accord with early universal cannibalism, with animal and human sacrificial practices or their substitutes in formalised religions and with the world-wide scalping, head hunting, body mutilating and necrophiliac practices of mankind in proclaiming this common bloodlust differentiator, this predacious habit, this mark of Cain that separates man dietetically from his anthropoid relatives and allies him rather with the deadliest of Carnivora. (1954, pp.207–8)

      The trend, for those who believe in man’s innate violence, is to deride those who do not agree with their point of view. Howard Evans, an American professor of zoology, concluded that: ‘If man is basically aggressive then the continued mouthing of platitudes about brotherly love is clearly no solution’ (1966, pp.107–8). This is a clear example of what Suttie referred to as ‘the taboo on tenderness’.

     Lionel Tiger took a similar stance in relation to human violence: in his book Men in Groups (1984), he sees male bonding as the predominant instrument of organisation in aggression and violence; for him these are features of a social or group process characteristically composed of men, and maleness itself is associated with violence: ‘Typically, maleness involves physical bravery, speed, the use of violent force’ (1984, p.182). He saw these characteristics as reflecting a genetically programmed inherited disposition handed down from the days when men were involved in hunting to survive. His conclusions reflect very much the view of all those who believe mankind to be innately destructive: there is little hope for change for, as he said,

      If aggression is profoundly connected with sexuality – which is important to individuals – and also connected with social groups – which nearly all of us need and like then dealing wisely with aggression and the potential for violence is very difficult. It is just as well that this be fully realised. (1984, p.193)

    Clearly the author was referring to men rather than to women and this highlights another characteristic of those who believe in the innate origins of human violence: they tend to be men who perceive women as different in terms of their ‘brain processes’. For Tiger, this meant that women cannot participate effectively in male group activities and hence in the political and economic functions of society; they have been mothers for so long that they have been selected to be closely attuned to their young, a characteristic which could be a disadvantage for men involved with political and economic activities. Though such attitudes towards women may sound very prejudiced, they are nonetheless widespread among those writers who believe in the innateness of human violence.

     The quest for the deep-seated roots of violent behaviour has produced another school of thought called ‘human paleopsychology’ highlighted by Paul Maclean’s work (1985, 1987). He described the brain ‘as a hierarchy of three brains-in-one’ and ascribed our ‘will-to-power’ to our primitive reptilian brain. This part of our brain plays a primary role in instinctually determined functions such as establishing territory, finding shelter, hunting, homing, mating, breeding, forming social hierarchies, selecting leaders and the like. Altruism and empathy are seen as more recently acquired forms of behaviour. Thus, human violence is ascribed to a regressive expression of our reptilian brain. Hitler and Stalin are seen as ‘superreptiles’ trampling upon millions of innocent victims. This phylogenetic regression is believed by some to expose the original ‘hunter-gatherer’ within us, otherwise labeled the ‘reptilian man’. We are all ‘hunter–gatherers at heart’, since 99% of our evolution took place during that period of our evolution. This theory implies that violent acts like rape and Nazi propaganda can be explained away as being examples of such a phylogenetic regression; so is the current situation of the world, poised as it is for its own destruction.

     Although the paleopsychologists admit to man’s capacity to manufacture lofty rationalisations and justifications for every sort of inhumanity imaginable, they do not consider the possibility that this may be what they themselves are doing. Having stated that provocation and threats are bound to make us regress to some aspect of our primitive brain function, the message yet again suggests that there is little hope of change since our existence is, on the whole, fraught with such experiences.

     Their conclusions stand in stark contrast to the views outlined by Henry (1997, p.12) and Wang (1997, p.168) in Chapter 10 where they refer to the violent behaviour described above as self-preservative behaviour as opposed to the species-preservative behaviour. The first, according to Henry, is brought on by experiences of fear and helplessness in the face of adversity and results from the activation of the left hemisphere at the expense of the right hemisphere based attachment behaviour.

     Psychoanalysts have also contributed to the debate on the hereditary nature of our destructiveness. Storr is one of them. However, though Storr did agree with the innateness of human aggression, he appeared to be less certain when it comes to understanding wanton cruelty. He pointed out that man’s tendency to be cruel was rooted in his biological peculiarities, which are the human infant’s longterm dependence and helplessness, as well as his intellectual ability to project unwanted feelings onto others (1968, p.135). He concluded:

      There is little doubt that increasing the understanding of the needs of small children will in time lead to more concern about meeting these needs, and will therefore lead to some diminution of the hostility which, in adult life, derives from childhood deprivation. (1968, p.149)

     However, despite acknowledging the importance of deprivation in understanding human violence, Storr remained wedded to the instinctual theory of human destructiveness.

     Like Tiger and Darwin before him (1871, p.564), Storr saw women as inferior to men and he linked this male superiority to masculine aggression. ‘It is highly probable that the undoubted superiority of the male sex in intellectual and creative achievement is related to their greater endowment of aggression’ (1968, p.88). No wonder aggression must be preserved if it is at the core of ‘manhood’. This is a revealing association, for it shows that, for Storr and like-minded men, male social superiority is justified by innate differences in aggression between the sexes. The belief in such an association is a belief that justifies the current social supremacy of men. If the link between male aggression and male superiority is shown to be false, then these writers and their followers have to find other reasons as to why women do not have the same socio-economic status as men.

     This need to see woman as inferior is often accompanied by the belief that it is important that other ‘different’ human beings are also perceived as ‘less human’. For instance, Storr maintains that members of a pariah caste, such as the Dalit (Untouchables) of India, served a valuable function in human communities for the discharge of aggressive tension (1968, p.43).

     The latest theoreticians to support the view that our violence is innate are sociobiologists from the USA, whose premises and conclusions are very similar to those we have so far mentioned. One of their main writers, Edward Wilson, defined his specialty as: ‘the scientific study of the biological basis of all human behaviour in all kinds of organisms, including man’. In On Human Nature (1978), he examines the impact a truly evolutionary explanation must have on the social sciences and humanities. He admits in his introduction that he might easily be wrong because his book was essentially a ‘speculative essay’. However, his subsequent chapters showed no such modesty and references to this supposedly speculative text are often given as definite truths by his followers, particularly in relation to the study of human violence.

     Wilson has an effective formula for presenting his arguments: first he defines his topic, often in a very simplistic way, and then he gives ethological and anthropological evidence that supports his particular point of view. Having shown the phenomenon in question to be widespread, he infers that this can be accounted for by the fact that

      Natural selection has probably ground away along these lines for thousands of generations. . . . To put the idea in its starkest form, one that acknowledges but temporarily bypasses the intervening developmental process, human beings are guided by an instinct based on genes. (1978, p.38; my italics)

So, when it comes to looking at aggression itself, Wilson was quite clear about his beliefs. He began his chapter on the subject by asking whether we are in fact ‘innately aggressive? His answer was simply ‘Yes’. When faced with the fact that some societies do appear to be very pacific, Wilson wrote:

    Innateness refers to the measurable probability that a trait will develop in a specified set of environments, not to the certainty that the trait will develop in all environments. By this criterion human beings have a marked hereditary predisposition to aggressive behaviour. (1978, p.100)

      How Wilson measured such a probability remains a mystery. He did, however, admit that forms of human aggressive behaviour have features that distinguish them from aggression in all other species. He went on to replace Lorenz’s drive–discharge model by what he referred to as a more subtle explanation, based on the interaction of genetic potential and learning (1978, p.105). Wilson maintained that, on the one hand, the more dangerous forms of aggressive behaviour, such as military action and criminal assault, were learned, but he also believed that we have a predisposition to slide into deep, irrational violence under certain conditions:

      The particular forms of organised violence are not inherited. No genes differentiate the practice of platform torture from pole and stake torture, headhunting from cannibalism, the duel of champions from genocide. Instead there is an innate predisposition to manufacture the cultural apparatus of aggression, in a way that separates the conscious mind from the raw biological processes that the genes encode. Culture gives a particular form to the aggression . . . (1978, p.114)

      The irrational aspects of human behaviour were characteristically attributed to the genetics of these ‘raw biological processes’ and the possibility that unconscious psychological defence mechanisms might have an important role to play was denied. Wilson rejected any idea that human aggression could be the pathological symptom of an upbringing in a depriving or abusive environment. Instead, he wrote:

      Our brains do appear to be programmed to the following extent: we are inclined to partition other people into friends and aliens, in the same sense that birds are inclined to learn territorial songs. . . . We tend to fear deeply the actions of strangers and to solve conflict by aggression. These learning rules are most likely to have evolved during the past hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution and, thus to have conferred a biological advantage on those who have conformed to them with the greatest fidelity. (1978, p.119)

      None of these so-called rules have in fact proved to be inherited, as we shall see in our review on the development of attachment behaviour, but what we do know is that this inclination to partition people into ‘them’ and ‘us’ is of fundamental importance to Wilson’s theories. He believes man is innately programmed to see the ‘other’ as different, a trait he attributes to:

      the powerful urge to dichotomise, to classify other human beings into two artificially sharpened categories. We seem able to be fully comfortable only when the remainder of humanity can be labeled as members versus nonmembers, kin versus nonkin, friend versus foe. (1978, p.70)

     The psychological and cultural factors involved in this process are denied, thereby laying the foundation for a biological basis for human oppression, exploitation and abuse. Without any scientific evidence whatsoever to support this assumption, Wilson presents his observations as a scientific fact. This approach and its underlying premise are clearly illustrated when he studied the phenomenon of female infanticide. Wilson points out that in India and prerevolutionary China, female infanticide was commonly practised by many of the social classes, with the effect of promoting a

     socially upward flow of women accompanied by dowries, a concentration of both wealth and women in the hands of a small middle and upper class, and near exclusion of the poorest males from the breeding system. It remains to be seen whether this pattern is widespread in human cultures. (1978, p.40)

If it is, then infanticide and female ‘hypergamy’ (defined as the female practice of marrying men of equal or greater wealth), which as he says are not rational processes, can best be explained ‘as an inherited predisposition to maximise the number of offspring in competition with other members of society’ (1978, p.40).

     Before we consider the implications of such conclusions, it is important to note how Wilson assumes that, if behaviour is ‘both irrational and universal’, it is more resistant to the effects of cultural deprivation and also less likely to be influenced by the higher centres of the brain and, therefore, more likely to function at the level of the instinct, through the limbic system. By a clever and subtle choice of words, the author links the ‘irrational’ with the ‘instinctual’. In this way, he bypasses the possibility that both cultural and unconscious processes might be operating in the human mind and he ignores all the relevant psychological research evidence that is available to him in the field of developmental psychology.

     This approach allows Wilson to draw his personal conclusions about women, whom he sees as instinctively driven towards hypergamy. The practice of infanticide is no longer an example of deplorable human violence but more likely to be the expression of an inherited biological predisposition which makes evolutionary sense when combined with hypergamy, because it excludes poor and therefore ‘unsuccessful’ men from the breeding system.

     As Wilson himself admitted earlier on, his deductions are scientifically untenable, for nowhere in his book does he explain how a complicated series of behaviours and associated social perceptions, such as would be involved in both hypergamy and selective infanticide, are translated into our genes, let alone genetically selected for.

     However, it is not difficult to see how such conclusions could be used to justify certain coercive practices implemented by some societies to maintain power and wealth in the hands of a select few. Hitler used similar arguments to justify his ruthless quest for Aryan racial purity, with the backing of the medical and scientific opinion of the day. It is of interest to note that Lorenz himself helped to provide the Nazi regime with the scientific backing it needed to carry out its genocidal policies.

      Konrad Lorenz, then an ardent Nazi and also a recipient of a prestigious chair, was able to attack those fellow Nazis who refused to accept the Darwinian view of evolution, arguing that it should be the core of the Nazi creed. At the same time, Lorenz used his Darwinism to extend and legitimate the Nazi biomedical vision, and declared that the racial hygiene project should, in effect, take over the evolutionary process to bring about ‘a more severe elimination of morally inferior human beings’ and ‘literally replace’ the natural forces of elimination of prehistoric times. (Lifton and Markusen, 1990, p.100)

In this way, the killing of millions was made legitimate.

     Wilson also uses Darwin’s evolutionary theories on the survival of the fittest to explain social phenomena. ‘Societies that decline because of a genetic propensity of its members to generate competitively weaker cultures will be replaced by those more appropriately endowed’ (1978, pp.79–80).

     Like most believers in an instinct theory of human violence, Wilson focuses on the individual and has little time for theories that stress the importance of human relations or society.

      The psychology of individuals will form a key part of this analysis. Despite the imposing holistic traditions of Durkheim in sociology and Radcliffe-Brown in anthropology, cultures are not super organisms that evolve by their own dynamics. Rather, cultural change is the statistical product of the separate behavioural responses of large numbers of human beings who cope as best they can with social existence (1978, p.78).

      In a few lines, Wilson dismisses all the work of those who stress the importance of society for the individual, with all that this implies in terms of our understanding of group and social phenomena. Mrs Thatcher reflected a similar outlook when she said: ‘there is no such thing as society, only individuals’. By focusing on the individual, theoreticians can thus deny the importance of the ‘other’, except as an object for the satisfaction of the individual’s needs and frustrations.

   Like other believers in the primacy of the instincts, the sociobiologists attempt to validate scientifically current social inequalities between the sexes. For example, referring to reproductive strategies in the two sexes, Wilson wrote:

      It pays males to be aggressive, hasty, fickle, and undiscriminating. In theory it is more profitable for females to be coy, to hold back until they can identify males with the best genes. . . . Human beings obey this biological principle faithfully. (1978, p.125)

      Once again, as argued by Tiger and Storr, male aggressivity provides the biological basis for male dominance over females and the running of society by men. Thus the sociobiologist Richard Dawkins argued in his much-publicised book, The Selfish Gene: ‘The female sex is exploited, and the fundamental evolutionary basis for the exploitation is the fact that eggs are larger than sperm’ (1976, p.158). Such an astonishingly simplistic conclusion derives from the biological observation that since there are fewer eggs available for fertilisation than there are sperm, competition among males for females is inevitable.

     Like many other writers who believe in the instinctual origins of human violence, the sociobiologists do not only see the female ‘other’ as different, they also find genetic evidence that justifies differences between human populations. The way Wilson went about providing such evidence is quite an eye-opener. Having first agreed with most scientists that ‘it is a futile exercise to define discrete human races’, he went on to say that: ‘Almost all differences between societies are based on learning and social conditioning rather than on heredity. And yet perhaps not quite all’ (1978, p.48)! He proceeded to review the results of certain selected studies on the behaviour and temperaments of infants and children of several racial origins such as Chinese-American, white American and Navaho Indian. He concluded after only two pages of extrapolations from some very limited data that: ‘Given that humankind is a biological species, it should come as no shock to find that populations are to some extent genetically diverse in the physical and mental properties underlying social behaviour’ (1978, p.50). What is extraordinary is that Wilson did not refer at all to the enormous literature on child development that clearly shows how different cultural rearing practices influence maternal behavior and thereby affect infant behaviour.

     Once again, Wilson forgoes all scientific standards to leap to a conclusion that enables him and us to ascribe biological differences to our fellow men. The scientific sanctioning of the ‘other’ as different enough to have ‘innate’ physical and behavioural differences can be used to justify racial or sexual discrimination, with all that this may imply. By misusing his authority as a scientist, Wilson gives politicians and those whose interests they represent the backing they need to exploit and abuse foreigners and immigrants.