AGGRESSION: THE MYTH OF THE BEAST WITHIN
John Klama
New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1988
169 pp., $17.95
In our nuclear-weaponed world the threat of imminent destruction hangs over us all like an invisible darkness in the sunlight. I am reminded of the occasion when an American reporter asked Gandhi what he thought of Western civilization. Gandhi lowered his head a bit, and looking up, replied, smilingly, "You know, I don't think it would be such a bad idea."
Threats or actual violence are not unknown among uncivilized societies, or even among other animals. The evidence of a relationship between the highly advanced Western industrial societies and a high frequency of inter- and intra-group violence is indisputable.
Violence and the threat of violence have become so much a part of life in civilized societies, and have evoked so many discussions, books, monographs, and portrayals in the media, that most people seem to have become inured to it. More people prefer to read and watch murder mysteries on TV, at the movies, or in books and newspapers, than they do almost anything else. Violence and virulence seem to have a fascination all their own. And since there are many "authorities"--like Konrad Lorenz, whose book On Aggression was an international bestseller; Robert Ardrey, author of African Genesis; and Desmond Morris, author of The Naked Ape, not to mention numerous others--who tell us that aggression has a long evolutionary history and is an intrinsic part of human nature, most people feel very comfortable about their aggressive impulses. These authoritative studies relieve them of any guilt they may have harbored about their own orneriness and, deplorable as it may be, for the violence and aggressiveness of their society. How, indeed, is it possible to live in the modern world and come to any other conclusion than that the authorities are right?
In the first place, it should be pointed out that an "authority" is one who should know, which should mean that he is not necessarily right. In the second place, earlier field studies of animal behavior were carried out in an age of violence (the nineteenth century), which biased the investigators to perceive "nature, red in tooth and claw," as Tennyson sang in 1843. And as the greater part of nineteenth-century evolutionary biology, abetted by the two-thousand-year-old doctrine of "original sin," made irrefragably clear, the descendants of Adam and Eve were flawed creatures.
But again, what has been made "clear" is not necessarily true. The trouble is it is not an easy thing to determine what is due to heredity and what to environment, let alone to evolution. The egregious error into which many people, even "authorities," fall, is to plumb, for the greater part, for either the one or the other. This reductionist tendency is reminiscent of the popular high school debate "Is heredity stronger than environment?" It is a spurious question because genes and environment are not autonomous entities, but continually interact with the ever-changing matrices within which they occur, and most importantly are reorganized and redefined by the developing organism. Such codevelopment is especially true of behavior.
Genes don't
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