Choice or Destiny?
When is violence either?
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This essay will require your imagination at first…a lot of imagination.
Humans in any form—from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens—have been around for about two million years. Imagine a world where “technology,” which by definition includes sharpened sticks, does not exist, but humans do. Predators of all sizes faster than humans, stronger, with better teeth and claws, long tails, and on and on, have been around much longer.
Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.
Carl Sagan
We’d have never got past the Pleistocene age. OK, let’s say somehow we survived without so much as sharpened sticks. Disregarding that how, where are we? As a species, we don’t amount to much. We can’t farm, we domesticated nothing—no reason for other beasts to pay attention to us other than as food. Maybe we fish by hand, but we don’t trap because we have no tools. We survive by hand fishing (barely), gathering what plants we can and maybe stopping the odd slower and smaller creature, or feasting on the carcasses of bigger ones brought down by old age or disease or other predators.
Far-fetched? Yeah.
But because we have forebrains, we developed tools and survived most other predators. Now, what’s that got to do with my subject? Well, predators…apex predators, the eggheads call ‘em. Apex predators are at the top of the food chain/pyramid/ tetrahedron in their environments, and humans are the ultimate apex predators. We all are. We are because we make tools, domesticate and consume practically every other animal, vegetable and fungus, and there aren’t many of ‘em out there that can wipe us all out…except for some viruses should they mutate fast enough that we can’t keep up. But because we make tools, we’ve moved to the top of an enormous heap. And we can willfully wipe out all the rest of the living things on Earth.
We don’t because we don’t want to…willfully.
But we could. Howard Bloom, in his groundbreaking work The Lucifer Principle, A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History, postulated that humans are the descendents not just of the faster runners, but also of the most aggressive hunters, gatherers and farmers, and the greediest of trappers. Throwing Rousseauian pastoralism out of a window, Bloom holds it has been the human propensity for predation that has gotten us this far. And it is this propensity for predation that humans invented things like religion, conscience, shame, dread, and other mental restraints we put on ourselves, to keep from blowing everything up…or from wiping out millions before we could blow everything up. We also developed the concept of compromise, which is an extended form of sharing: you get this, we get that. It’s also a contract: offer, acceptance and consideration.
Conflict cannot survive without your participation.
Wayne Dyer
But some humans are more predacious than others. Indeed, some humans are quite out of control. Men devised laws to punish, but the law is are only as effective as the means and will to enforce it. If someone doesn’t want to compromise, just wants “it all,” then what? Not that long ago, monarchs had made war on each other for reasons that rarely made sense. Then countries came along and made war for some of the same reasons. But by that time, most of us were no longer on a first name basis with our dinners; we had “evolved” as a human society…sort of. We decided that there were better things to die for than the latest “insult” and started arbitrating, making deals. But there were always those who didn’t want to arbitrate, to compromise, to make deals.
Indecision is a virus that can run through an army and destroy its will to win or even to survive.
Wendell Mayes
Here come the fanatics, the non-state actors, and their ilk. Arbitration is a fine thing and probably saves millions of lives. But there are those with guns and agendas and even their own countries to whom arbitration and compromise are anathema. For whatever reason, they won’t do it. They have their positions and they have their demands. And, they have their means to try to get what they want and they have no compunction about using those means. What is especially frightening about these apex predators is that they do not care, apparently, if everything ends as long as they believe they get what they want, even if it’s an “honorable” death and the destruction of all they claim to hold dear. Some of these redoubtable predators command the loyalty of millions, to one degree or another, and will use their followers to achieve the ends the predators truly claim to want, even to their destruction.
There is nothing romantic, dramatic, or satisfying in modern conflict. It is all horrible, profoundly depressing; and now it carries with it a dreadful threat to civil populations.
George C. Marshall
This is a consequence of having developed tools: we prey on each other. Is it as simple as all that? Perhaps it is. I have yet to see an argument defending the idea of the “better angels of all our natures.” Note the one-word addition to the Lincoln quote. Let’s examine that bit of irony: Lincoln insisted we could compromise over the issues that tore the country apart because of the conflict that would follow if we did not. He entered that conflict with trepidation, but after that war was over and the republic survived even if the “peculiar institution” that triggered the whole mess didn’t—intact—some apex predator killed him, shouting “thus always to tyrants!”
Are we biologically engineered to violence, but socially engineered against it?
Think on that for a while. Our forebrains allow us to fight and kill better than the creatures that would wipe us out—or at least keep us marginalized. Does that same forebrain allow us to develop restraint to keep us from annihilation? If it’s biology that does the former…what about all those people who won’t compromise, who won’t stop killing and wanting to kill, who aren’t interested in sharing or making deals with those they want to destroy, subjugate, or convert to their way of thinking? Are those predators somehow biologically defective? Recent medical research points to a genetic cause for bipolar disorder, but most of the worst sufferers don’t run countries or political movements: too unstable. But further research…? Going down that road may lead us to an organic root of what we call aberrant behavior—because we have evolved so far beyond that…
Haven’t we?
Steele’s Battalion: The Great War Diaries
World War One started because these wouldn’t compromise with those, and those got all hot and bothered about it. Twenty million dead later, they still wouldn’t.
Steele’s Battalion is about just one bunch of people who had to suffer a great deal because a bunch of others wouldn’t compromise. Available from your favorite bookseller or from me after 6 April if you want an autograph.
Coming Up…
American Revolution Reconsidered
Blockade and the American Civil War
And Finally...
On 15 February:
1915: The term “shell shock” is first used in a medical context in The Lancet, London, England. Often treated as mental weakness or cowardice, the condition has had many names over the centuries, and is now gathered under the general heading of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which some think is overly broad and too simplistic.
2022: Gail S. Halvorsen, the Candy Bomber, dies in Provo, Utah. As a command pilot during the Berlin Airlift/Operation LITTLE VITTLES, Halvorsen started dropping small bags of candy to children in Berlin, lined up against the fence around Tempelhof airport, and the name was born. The practice continued for the rest of the airlift. My mother-in-law was one of those kids…
And today is GUMDROP DAY, not related to Halvorson or the Candy Bombers. Gumdrops, small hard or soft candies of varied composition, predated the Civil War, but the term first appeared in print in 1860. Why today, no one knows.
"Recent medical research points to a genetic cause for bipolar disorder, but most of the worst sufferers don’t run countries or political movements: too unstable."
From what I can tell, the most mentally unstable are most likely to rise to the top in politics. And these days, politics is government.