The Origins of Violence

Approaches to the Study of Conflict

Anatol Rapoport

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000679915
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this fundamental analysis, Rapoport asks: Why do we have wars? Doesn't humanity always seem on the verge of self-annihilation? Is there something in human genetic structure that makes people want to kill each other? Perhaps this impulse is a matter of good versus evil, or just plain human nature. Rapoport moves beyond cliches by claiming that the sources of modern violence reside in the imbalance between a lag in the system of values inherited from the past and the structure of science and technology that awaits no revision of values to move ahead. As a result, Rapoport argues that the study of war and peace should be considered a science, just like biology or, for that matter, political science. The same rules of empirical engagement and experimentation should apply. Before we can have a theory of peace, we need a methodology of conflict. Using the writings of thinkers who have made significant contributions to the predominant ideas and ideals of our society, Rapoport weaves together the strands of independent thought and research into a single, thought-provoking work. After investigating the whys of violence, using ideological, psychological, strategic, and systemic perspective, Rapoport moves to an in-depth analysis of possible varieties of conflict resolution. He explores such mechanisms as mediation, education, and applying the results of scientific research. He documents the impact of ideologies countervailing dominant ones that place obstacles in the way of peacemaking. Rapoport argues that conciliation and game theories can be utilized to replace the concept of winner take all or total victory. The Origins of Violence is a needed contribution to our understanding of warfare, and provides a forward-looking perspective that can be of wide use to each of the policy sciences, starting with military strategy and ending with international development.

PART
I
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH

1
On So-Called Aggression

For the first time in the history of humanity, collective violence has made us an endangered species. Perhaps it is true that every age, not just ours, has been dominated by conflict between human beings. And it is true that previous premonitions of doom did not materialize. But our age is different. The prescience conferred on human beings by science, unlike the visions of seers of earlier ages, has proved to be astonishingly reliable with regard to certain kinds of events. These are the events governed by physical laws that have become known to humanity only within the last few centuries. Predictions based on inferences derived from those laws come true. The planets move in their prescribed orbits. Their positions can be predicted centuries in advance. Chemical reactions proceed as predicted. Machines normally work as they have been designed to work, and when they don’t we know the reason why.

It is on the basis of those well-nigh perfectly reliable laws that dire predictions are made concerning the consequences of a major nuclear war—that civilization almost certainly cannot, and humanity quite probably cannot, survive such a war. This warning is not to be mistaken for just another doomsday prophecy like those common in earlier ages, but must be taken seriously.

The warning is indeed taken seriously by many who have given thought to this matter. Thus, the present observation that our age is dominated by conflict has acquired a new, unprecedented, and ominous meaning. Conflict among humans is now no longer seen as a normal aspect of the human condition, nor as a driving force improving human life through competition, but as a malady or a source of evil, in the sense of being a threat to the very existence of humanity.

So-Called Evil

The wide attention attracted by Konrad Lorenz’s book, On Aggression (Lorenz 1966) can be ascribed to the vividness with which he described a vast variety of behavior patterns observed in a vast variety of animals. In spite of their differences, they bear a striking, immediately recognizable resemblance to our own behavior in situations involving conflict. Therein lies the reason for the book’s wide readership.

The original title of Lorenz’s book, “Das sogenannte Böse,” makes the connotation of evil in conflict manifest. “Das Böse” is a German noun derived from an adjective meaning evil, wicked, mischievous, malevolent. The modifier “sogenannte” (”so-called”), unfortunately omitted in translation, also conveys something about Lorenz’s message. It cautions the reader against anthropomorphic interpretations of animal behavior.

Lorenz is a biologist. His creative life is immersed in the rich world of living nature—in particular, the world of animals, some of which resemble us in striking ways. Biologists regard man as part of that living world, unique in some ways, but on the whole sharing many features with other creatures, certainly physical features and perhaps also mental and emotional ones. It is now established as firmly as anything can be established by criteria of validity acceptable to scientists that man and many other animals share common ancestors. Some of these may be remote, others not so remote. Our common heritage includes not only limbs, stomachs, and lungs but also some mechanisms of neural activity that underlie the formation of habits. We may be justified in assuming a common ancestry of mental and emotional characteristics.

Yet Lorenz by his qualifying phrase “so-called” bids us be wary of facile anthropomorphic interpretations of animal behavior. Before the advent of modern science, philosophers ascribed wisdom to the owl, diligence to the ant and the bee, innocence to the dove, courage to the lion. These Aesopian notions obviously stemmed from certain superficial resemblances—the expression on the face of the owl, the busy scampering of the ant, the meek appearance and gentle cooing of the dove, and so forth. We can never get inside an animal and experience its “thoughts” and “feelings,” if any. We can’t even get inside the skins of our fellow human beings and directly experience their thoughts and feelings. We are, nevertheless, convinced that our fellow human beings think and feel as we do. It is our remarkable language that “binds our consciousnesses.” Because we “almost” experience the thoughts and feelings of our fellow human beings when they tell us about them, we tend to project our own thoughts and feelings on them and, by extension, on other fellow creatures. Even biologists can’t help “anthropomorphizing” whenever they try to learn something about humans by careful, thorough, and systematic study of other animals.

The layman draws parallels between nonhuman and human behavior by intuitively “recognizing” similarities. Dogs fight. Their movements, the sounds they make—even the “expressions” on their faces—lead us to believe that they feel rage as we do when we fight or want to fight. We call such behavior “aggressive.” So when two tropical fishes in an aquarium position themselves face-to-face and go through certain motions until one of them turns around and swims away, we attribute “aggressive” behavior to these fishes. From this inference it is only a step to postulating a principle governing such behavior and designating it by a name—”aggressiveness.”

Questions now arise. Is this the same principle that governs the behavior of two children when one grabs one end of a toy held by the other and pulls? Is it the same principle that is manifested when children quarrel without fighting? When one person insults another? When men shoot at each other in a duel? When nations go to war?

Single Word Explanations

We often think we understand something when it has been named. Indeed, understanding is akin to recognition, as when something apparently unfamiliar turns out to be familiar. It sometimes becomes familiar simply by being named, just as a person becomes familiar when his name becomes known. We are all too readily satisfied with explanations that amount to no more than giving a name to a presumed cause of an event to be explained. A character in a comedy by Molière “explains” why opium induces sleep: “Because it has a dormative property.”

It is commonplace to ascribe certain patterns of human behavior to “instincts.” People are assumed to like making money because of an “acquisitive instinct.” They conceal certain parts of their bodies because of the “instinct of modesty,” come together because they are instinctively gregarious or avoid each other because of a distance-keeping instinct.

Single word (or short phrase) explanations, like dormative property, instinct, human nature, or the will of God are vacuous. They are like the answer “because” that an adult, impatient with a child’s curiosity, gives to its persistent questions beginning with “why.” Answers of this sort are meant to choke off further questions, not to explain. For if to explain means anything, it means to show that something that does not seem to fit into one’s ideas of what is expected turns out to fit once attention is turned to circumstances of which one had not been aware.

As the range of observations of human behavior broadened and ideas about human nature became less parochial, more attention was devoted to environmental (cultural) determinants. At one time, psychologists denied the existence of instincts in humans. The work of ethologists (biologists studying behavior of animals) restored respectability to the concept. Instead of “instinct” being a catchall term serving as a one-word explanation, the word acquired a technical meaning with a demonstrable range of applicability. If man was to be regarded as part of the living world, kin to all life, it was difficult to keep insisting that this particular creature had been divested of instincts which his ancestors must have possessed.

In the light of Lorenz’s work, the question as to what extent man’s aggressive behavior could be regarded as a manifestation of an instinct becomes a respectable question. And it becomes all too clear why this question has come to the forefront of attention in our age of ever more destructive conflicts and threats of annihilation. Is violence in human life inevitable because an “instinct of aggression” is an immutable component of the human psyche?

Instinctive Behavior

Criteria that justify labeling a form of behavior “instinctive” are fairly clear. First, there must be good evidence that such behavior is not learned. Using the jargon of modern information technology, we would say that the organism has been “programmed” to behave as it does. Second, the behavior must be manifested by almost every member of the species. That this must be so can be seen to be a consequence of being “genetically programmed,” because all members of a species are supposed to be endowed with very similar genetic profiles. Third, because instinctive behavior is independent of the organism’s experience, it is expected to be fairly uniform throughout the species. It is allowed that some learned features could be superimposed, introducing individual differences. But we ought to be able to infer an underlying common pattern that satisfies the criterion of uniformity of instinctive behavior. The same uniformity applies to instances of the behavior observed at various times.

Organisms of limited learning capacity exhibit the clearest forms of instinctive behavior—apparently unlearned, uniform throughout the species, and remarkably rigid, even though often exceedingly complex. The behavior of the digger wasp providing for her brood is a striking example. First she digs a hole. Then she looks for a species-characteristic prey, for instance, a tarantula of a certain species. (No other species will do.) She stings the tarantula in a certain spot, paralyzing it, and drags it to the edge of the hole. Leaving her prey on the edge, she enters the hole as if to see that everything is as it should be, emerges, and drags the tarantula in. Then she lays her eggs on the body of the victim. The still-living body will serve as food for the offspring when they hatch.

This pattern seems to satisfy all the criteria of instinctive behavior. The rigidity of the pattern is especially impressive. If, during the time the wasp inspects the hole, the tarantula is removed some inches away, the wasp will drag it back to the edge, then enter the hole again as if to inspect it, in spite of the fact that she has done this just a few moments before. Evidently the sequence “drag, leave on edge, inspect, drag into hole, lay eggs” must be preserved just so. The components of the sequence cannot be separated from each other. If during the inspection the tarantula is again moved, the whole process will be repeated no matter how many times the chain is broken.

Drives

In animals with capacity to learn, such rigidity is seldom observed. Therefore if we wish to speak of instinctive behavior of such animals, we must loosen our definition. We may want to include forms of behavior that vary from individual to individual, provided we can assume a genetically determined basic pattern underlying the variations. We know, for example, that all living creatures ingest nutrients and eliminate wastes, and that all perform actions to insure reproduction of their kind. Since these actions are performed in a vast variety of ways and yet all living beings, not just members of some species, do them, we are justified in postulating something that underlies these forms of behavior. The usual name for this “something” is “drive.”

In a way, drive can be regarded as a one-word explanation, like instinct. Psychologists of certain schools of thought, in the first instance behaviorists, keep warning of the delusions that are easily induced by the habit of proposing explanations that verge on tautologies (like appealing to the dormative property of opium). Nevertheless the concept of drive has its uses. Reference to it need not be taken as attempted explanation of why organisms behave as they do. The reference can be understood simply as calling attention to the generality of a certain form of behavior. To say that there is a hunger drive is simply to say that all animals eat. To say that there is a reproductive drive is to call attention to the fact that all living things reproduce.

The term “drive” can be imbued with somewhat stronger theoretical significance. One can understand drive as something that induces an animal to behave in a certain way independent of the presence of particular external stimuli to induce the behavior. A drive can be understood as that which underlies spontaneous behavior motivated from the inside. Take hunger. Hungry animals can be observed actively searching for food. This is not the same as reacting to the presence of food by eating it. Also, an animal can be observed becoming restless and actively searching for a mate, not just reacting to the presence of one. It is this apparent spontaneity of some forms of behavior, i.e., independence from external stimuli, that has led some psychologists and ethologists to postulate the existence of drives.

In his book On Aggression, Konrad Lorenz suggests that underlying the behavior of at least the vertebrates are four great drives: hunger, sex, fear, and aggression. We have mentioned hunger and sex. That activities presumably instigated by these drives are necessary for continued survival of any species cannot be denied. A case can also be made for fear. This drive can be assumed to instigate various forms of escape behavior, which removes the animal from the vicinity of danger. Thus, fear is conducive to survival. However, spontaneity of behavior instigated by fear is difficult to establish. Escape behavior seems invariably to be triggered by some external stimuli.

Is Aggression Part of Being Human?

It is the last postulated drive—aggression—that is most directly related to the theme of this book. Of the greatest interest is the question whether aggression is a basic drive in human beings and, if so, whether, like the need to eat or the need to mate, a need to “aggress” is present in human beings regardless of the presence of appropriate stimuli.

Lorenz offered evidence of the spontaneity of aggression in coral fishes. He observed a population of some 100 tropical fish represented by some 25 species. As expected, fights began to occur soon after this colony was established. It is generally known that such fights take place predominantly between members of the same species (intra-specific aggression) rather than between members of different species (inter-specific aggression). This was fully corroborated in Lorenz’s fish population. On the basis of chance alone only about 3% of the bites were expected to be inflicted on members of own species. Actually about 85% of the bites were so inflicted.

The spontaneity of aggression hypothesis was supported by the observation that the bites inflicted on members of other species came predominantly from fish that were the only representatives of their species. It appeared as if their aggression, seeking an outlet, was directed against otherwise inappropriate targets for lack of appropriate ones.

Other observations on cichlids (a species of tropical fish) yielded even more dramatic results. These fish were observed to kill even their mates when other targets of aggression were not available. Let us see the implications of the idea that the aggressive drive resides in human beings, that is, seeks an outlet even in the absence of stimuli that might elicit aggression.

It is almost a folk saying that there will always be wars because human beings are aggressive by nature. There is no lack of evidence of “man’s inhumanity to man.” Reading some accounts of human events, we can easily get the impression that murder and massacre, torture and enslavement, robbery and rape are the principal activi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I. The Psychological Approach
• Part II. The Ideological Approach
• Part III. The Strategic Approach
• Part IV. The Systemic Approach
• Part V. In Quest of Peace
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index