Are Humans Violent By Nature?

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 asociety that is workable, sustainable — and relatively violence-free.