The Name Should Oblige Us
The inclination to violence may be part of our inheritance, but for the first time we have the means not to act on it. A compilation of discussion comments, with the evidence behind the claim about men and organised violence.
I agree that the inclination to violence is, in a sense, our genetic inheritance (I have written about this before). Does that excuse us today, though? We call ourselves rational, Homo sapiens, and to my mind the name ought to oblige us to something. It is understandable that in the past we fought for survival as a species, including against other species. Today nothing threatens us except ourselves (I am leaving aside diseases caused by microorganisms, since that is a different case).
We murder one another with absolutely no need to do so, but for the first time in the history of humanity we could stop fighting. We have sufficient resources to do it. If we directed the means we spend on war towards development instead, we would already be reaching the stars.
I also hold to the claim that it is men who are actively destroying this world. Misogynists with overgrown egos. Psychopaths who delight in killing. Narcissists who, unable to force the world to admire them, destroy it piece by piece. I am not claiming that all men murder. Those responsible for it, however, are by some strange coincidence most often the ones in power. The vast majority of the rest do nothing to stop these madmen.
I will no doubt hear voices of protest and indignation at this, but look around you, self-satisfied men that we are. Look at all those "wonders" we are handing to this world and to our own species. I often feel deeply ashamed of humanity and of my own gender, because men are, above all, the sowers of violence.
Culture, love and empathy exist, I do not deny it, but they are simply not what drives the human world. The engine of our civilisation is greed, lust and the will to dominate. Russia produced Dostoyevsky and Pushkin and many other artists, and it is the same empire that has had absolute domination written into its code from the very beginning. You can grow roses in your garden and be a sociopathic killer at the same time. Will the roses acquit you in court?
P.S. The text above is a compilation of my comments from one of the many discussions I take part in. Those tend to dissolve into hundreds of others, so I decided not to let them go to waste and to publish them in a coherent form.
It is also worth remembering that the register is a choice of form, not the source of the claim. I derived the claim from data that are fairly unambiguous; here are two titles:
- Wrangham, R. (2019). The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution. Pantheon Books, New York. Proactive coalitionary aggression, the kind that leads to war, is carried out mainly by groups of cooperating men.
- Nivette, A., Sutherland, A., Eisner, M., & Murray, J. (2019). Sex differences in adolescent physical aggression: Evidence from sixty-three low- and middle-income countries. Aggressive Behavior, 45(1), 82-92. A sample of 247,909 adolescents in 63 low- and middle-income countries; boys report frequent fighting twice as often as girls.
The wider argument behind the first paragraph, violence as an inherited pattern that can be recognised and deactivated rather than obeyed, is developed in the Triptych and tested in War-Peace Code.