In the early 1930s, with political unrest in Europe and war on the horizon, Albert Einstein wrote to Sigmund Freud asking: “Why war?” Einstein sought an answer to a simple and fundamental question that has been on the minds of scholars and practitioners throughout history. Freud’s response was that war was the result of an impulse, a destructive instinct found in many humans.
For many students of conflict, little has changed in the eighty years since—whatever the political or historical context, war seems to have something to do with human nature. Indeed, this notion has deep and illustrious roots. Most explanations of the causes of war are rooted in two philosophical camps. For followers of Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, war is a tragic result of misunderstandings and the negative influences of our society. For English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, war is likewise tragic, but rooted in a metaphysical spirit that causes people to endlessly attempt to dominate others. With the end of the Cold War, there were high hopes that both of these pessimistic outlooks could be consigned to history and the millennium would bring forth a radically different world—a new world order. Yet, despite signs of many types of violence falling in western societies (a point recently championed by Steven Pinker), war continues unabated in the new century.
The 21st century does, however, promise new hope—at least in our ability to understand it. Terrific advances in the life sciences equip us with novel tools and insights to help us get to the bottom of Einstein’s question. While these insights draw on a range of scientific disciplines including genetics, physiology, psychology and neuroscience, the unifying framework to understand human nature as a whole is evolution. With a clearer picture of where we came from, we may find a better understanding of who we are and where we are going. As a primate, key to this objective is understanding human evolutionary history and the behavior of our closest relatives. The results are surprising and significant for Einstein’s query.
Primatologists who have studied our closest relative of all, chimpanzees, have depressing news. Chimpanzee behavior is “bad.” They form coalitions to wage lethal violence against rival groups, ambushing individuals of other groups to maim and kill them. Jane Goodall, the foremost student of their behavior, wrote in her classic The Chimpanzees of Gombe: “as a result of a unique combination of strong affiliative bonds between adult males on the one hand and an unusually hostile and violently aggressive attitude toward nongroup individuals on the other,” the chimpanzee “has clearly reached a stage where he stands at the very threshold of human achievement in destruction, cruelty, and planned intergroup conflict.” Other primatologists since have verified these conclusions, in different locales and settings, with detailed descriptions of systematic and lethal inter-group violence. Hobbes seems to have described chimpanzee behavior very accurately, reinvigorating the question of how much it applies to humans as well.
The example of the bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees in central Africa) is often raised in contrast to chimpanzee behavior, and by implication, an alternative perspective on human behavior as well. Bonobos are seen as the “good” ape because they seem to be the antithesis of the chimpanzee. Although not as well studied as chimpanzees, enough is known about them to recognize that bonobos are different, including exhibiting less aggression than chimpanzees. They still experience significant conflict, at least within groups, but it is manifested and resolved in different ways. Indeed, sex appears to replace war as their distinguishing characteristic. Their sexual activity, both heterosexual and homosexual, appears to be used for stress reduction, conciliatory purposes and resource competition. Given what seems to be a lifestyle straight out of San Francisco’s bohemian Haight-Ashbury district, people could be forgiven for wishing humans were related to bonobos, inferring that they prove Rousseau right rather than Hobbes, and that they serve as a better model for humans than chimpanzees.
However, there are three very important qualifications in drawing inferences from our primate ancestry. First, the two species of chimpanzee are much more closely related to one another than either is to us. Chimpanzees and bonobos separated perhaps 0.86–0.89 million years ago (mya) and perhaps as long ago as between 1.5–2.5 mya. By contrast, we all shared a common ancestor long before, about 5–6 mya. This common ancestor is likely to have been different from all of us—different from humans, chimps, and bonobos. Understanding this phylogeny is important because it means there is little reason to believe that bonobos are the best model of human behavior. Chimpanzees are not a perfect model either, but they are likely to be a better one because they share more social and ecological similarities with humans than bonobos do.
Comments
The authors wrote:
Recognizing that this has become the staple understanding/explanation that behaviorists have now, I still wonder: What's the evidence for this? And, after all, the one thing that distingushes the human ape from the chimps is that we didn't stay in Africa; indeed most of our time since we split with them seems to have been spent expanding. So you have the millions and millions of years of humans with wide-open empty vistas before them, and yet somehow they were constantly plagued by resource competition? And what about those humans (at least since the Clovis peoples) who expanded all the way into the North American West with its vast vast herds of mammoths and then buffalo eventually which could *never* be depleted with the technology of the day. Not even dented. How come our Plains "indians" never became bonobo-like, with only a few million people at most, in all the vast West, amidst all that vast plenty? It's ego. Do enough research on bonobos and I'll be you find them less self-aware than chimps. The more self-aware, the more individualistic, the more the drive to distinguish, to get acclaim.... I'd say the "true source of the human tragedy" is that we are caught half-way between the ants and the wolverine. Between the totally social and the (almost totally) isolated individual.
Further to Sin Nombre, could it be that it is not resource competition but sexual competition that drives war (organised aggression)? Almost all lifeforms exhibit sexual competition in some form, humans may just engage in a more oragnised form of violance that we term "war" because they are (as a result of natural selection or some other mechanism) more "intelligent" (i.e. capable of tool-use and organization). It is hard to marry up resource competition with some wars of the modern era, but not the impulse underlying sexual competition (impulse because it isn't suggested that a modern President or Prime Minister would seek or expect to mate with the females of the attacked populace or those of his domestic constituency but it could be the remnant of the primitive consciousness which nonetheless underlies the behaviour). The implications of this on the gender of our leaders..
mrajanov wrote:
I think that's very close if not exactly what I was suggesting by talking about "ego" being at the root of the human propensity for violence. Those of our ancestors with the bigger egos fought the harder to distinguish themselves, to be more successful mating. And thus the competition ensued, except that the attributes of our nature are not like tools, limited in what they do. So ego proved invaluable for sex competition but ego doesn't know it should be limited to same: it just drives and drives us for ever more recognition, acclaim, "greatness," domination ... you name it. And then I think our brains, eventually after realizing that a Gengis Khan world is nuts, nevertheless very easily rationalized continued conflict under the perceived heading of "defense." It's a startling thing to note that probably the great mass of people in every country involved in WWI and WWII thought they were fighting "defensive" wars in some way. Even the Germans in WWII, seeing themselves fighting against the Bolsheviks (which, to be fair, was not an entirely unrealistic fear); the Japanese against resource strangulation.... Our brains are the unconscious slaves of our nature I fear.
Agree, in my view that would seem a much more plausible explanation than the conclusion in the article.