* That is, warfare within the species, as distinct from the inter-specific pursuit of the prey which belongs to a different species.
But man and rats are exceptions. As a rule, throughout the whole animal kingdom, fighting with intent to kill only occurs between predator and prey. The law of the jungle sanctions only one legitimate motive for murder, the feeding drive; but the prey must of course be of a different species. Within the same species, powerful instinctual safeguards prevent serious fighting between individuals or groups. These inhibitory mechanisms -- instinct-taboos -- against killing or seriously injuring con-specifics are as powerful in most animals as the drives of hunger, sex or fear. The unavoidable and necessary self-assertive tendencies among the higher social animals are thus compensated by inhibitory mechanisms which turn fighting between sexual competitors into a more or less symbolic duel, fought according to formal rules, but hardly ever to a lethal finish. The contest is instantly terminated by some specific gesture of surrender by the weaker contestant -- the dog rolling on its back, exposing its belly and throat; the defeated stag slinking away. Similarly, the defence of territory is assured nearly always without bloodshed, by strictly ritualised threat-behaviour, mock attacks and the like. Lastly, order of rank in wild animal societies, from birds to monkeys, is established and maintained with a minimum of bullying and fuss.
In the course of the last twenty years, field observations on the life of monkey societies in the wild have led to a complete reversal of our previous ideas about the mentality of our primate ancestors. The earlier studies -- such as Solly Zuckerman's in the late 1920s -- were based on the behaviour of monkeys confined in the unnatural, crowded conditions of the zoo. These studies yielded important psychological results, in the sense in which studies of human behaviour in prisons and concentration camps do: they reveal the picture of a neurotic society labouring under abnormal stresses, whose members are bored and irritable, constantly bickering and fighting, obsessed by sex, and exposed to the rule of tyrannical, sometimes murderous, leaders. On the strength of this picture, one could only wonder how monkey societies in the wild survived at all.
But since the Second World War a new generation of field observers, whose patient studies often extended over many years, has completely and dramatically reversed the picture. W.M.S. Russell has summed up the result as follows:
. . . After the Second World War the field study of monkeys and apes suddenly mushroomed. The reports of the field observers are virtually unanimous. Carpenter . . . reported that fighting is rare in wild gibbons and apparently absent in wild howler monkeys. Washburn and Devore saw signs of internal violence in only one in seven of their bands of wild East African baboons; and no fighting at all between bands. Southwick took over the study of wild howlers in the fifties, and never saw one fight, within or between bands. Jay gives a similar report on wild langur bands, and Imanishi on wild Japanese monkeys. Goodall saw little evidence of fighting in wild chimpanzees, nor Hall in wild bands of the very baboon species that Zuckerman had studied in the zoo. And Emlen and Schaller saw not the slightest trace of aggression within wild gorilla bands; and relations between bands were so friendly that, when two bands met, they might bed down together for the night, and individuals could come visiting for as long as they liked. These unanimous reports are even more impressive than they first appear, for many of the observers were expecting the reverse. The early zoo findings had made such a deep impression that at first each field worker assumed that his or her species must be unusual. . . . We can now see that they were wrong: all monkey and ape species are peaceful in the wild. . . . A healthy wild primate society shows no trace of serious fighting, either within or between bands. It is now undeniable that primates can live without any violence at all. . . . Putting together the field and zoo reports, we now know that aggressiveness is not an innate feature of individuals, appearing in some primate species and not in others. All primate species are peaceful in some conditions and violent in others. Violence is a property of societies exposed to stress. . . . [6]
What conclusions are we to draw from this picture of primate behaviour?
First, that primates (and all other mammals) in the wild show a complete absence of Freud's destructive instinct. In the normal baboon or rhesus monkey society, the self-assertive tendencies of the individual are counter-balanced by its integrative ties with family, leader and clan. Aggression makes its appearance only when tensions of one kind or another upset the balance.
All this is entirely in keeping with the conclusions we arrived at in earlier chapters. But it provides us with only a few limited and somewhat trivial clues to the origins of the human predicament. That stresses caused by shortage of food, overcrowding of territory, natural catastrophes, and so on, upset the social equilibrium and produce pathological behaviour -- agreed. So do the zoo-like conditions in prisons, the enforced idleness of unemployment, the boredom of the welfare state. This is the kind of stuff social psychologists like to emphasise over and again in their discussions of the perils of modern life in the crowded megalopolis -- and they are, of course, quite right. But these are modern phenomena which have little relevance to the core of the problem: the emergence of the unique, murderous, delusional streak in our prehistoric ancestors. They did not suffer from overcrowding, there was no shortage of territory, they did not lead an urban existence; in a word, we cannot lay the blame on stresses of the type to which captive monkeys, or the citizens of contemporary New York, are subjected. To become hypnotised by the specific pathology of the twentieth century narrows one's vision and blinds one to the much older, much more fundamental problem of the chronic savagery of human civilisations, ancient and modern. We are so pre-occupied with the social ravages done to the occupants of contemporary Negro ghettoes in America, that we quite forget the horrors of African history when Negroes were free -- or the horrors of European or Asian history. To lay the blame for man's pathological condition on the environment means to beg the question. Climatic changes and other environmental pressures are, of course, an immensely powerful factor in biological evolution and human history; but most wars, civil wars, and human holocausts were motivated by other reasons.
Where else, then, shall we look for the causes of the Fall -- that is to say, for the unique characteristic of our species to practise intra-specific homicide, individually or in groups?
The Harmless Hunter
It has occasionally been suggested that the Fall occurred when our ancestors turned from a vegetarian to a carnivorous diet. Both zoologists and anthropologists have a conclusive answer to this suggestion. The zoologist will point out that hunting the prey which belongs to a different species is a biological drive strictly separate from aggression against con-specifics. To quote Konrad Lorenz:
The motivation of the hunter is basically different from that of the fighter. The buffalo which the lion fells provokes his aggression as little as the appetising turkey which I have just seen hanging in the larder provokes mine. The differences in these inner drives can clearly be seen in the expressive movemenu of the animal: a dog about to catch a hunted rabbit has the same kind of excitedly happy expression as he has when he greets his master or awaits some longed-for treat. From many excellent photographs it can be seen that the lion, in the dramatic movement before he springs, is in no way angry. Growling, laying the ears back, and other well-known expression movements of fighting behaviour are seen in predatory animals only when they are very afraid of a wildly resisting prey, and even then the expressions are only suggested. [7]
The Russells arrive at the same conclusion: 'There is certainly no evidence from mammalian behaviour that social aggression is more prevalent or intense among carnivores than among herbivores.' And as for humans: 'There is certainly no evidence that social violence has been more prevalent or intense in carnivorous hunting than in vegetarian agricultural societies. Hunting people have sometimes been extremely war-like; but no human group has produced more peaceful communities than some of the Eskim
os, who have been carnivorous hunters, presumably, since the Old Stone Age.' [8] The Samurai, on the other hand, were strict vegetarians; and so were the Hindu mobs in India which massacred their Moslem brethren whenever given a chance. It was not the eating of reindeer-steaks which caused the Fall.
Lorenz, whom I have just quoted, has a more sophisticated theory. The following extract (compressed) conveys the gist of it:
The inhibitious controlling aggression in various social animals, preventing it from injuring or killing fellow members of the species, are most important and consequently most highly differentiated in those animals which are capable of killing living creatures of about their own size. A raven can peck out the eye of another with one thrust of its beak, a wolf can rip the jugular vein of another with a single bite. There would be no more ravens and no more wolves if reliable inhibitions did not prevent such actions. Neither a dove nor a hare nor even a chimpanzee is able to kill its own kind with a single peck or bite. Since there rarely is, in Nature, the possibility of such an animal seriously injuring one of its own kind, there is no selection pressure at work to breed inhibitions against killing. One can only deplore the fact that man has definitely not got a carnivorous mentality! All his trouble arises from his being a basically harmless, omnivorous creature, lacking in natural weapons with which to kill big prey, and, therefore, also devoid of the built-in safety devices which prevent 'professional' carnivores from abusing their killing power to destroy fellow-members of their own species. No selection pressure arose in the prehistory of mankind to breed inhibitory mechanisms preventing the killing of con-specifics until, all of a sudden, the invention of artificial weapons upset the equilibrium of killing potential and social inhibitions. When it did, man's position was very nearly that of a dove which, by some unnatural trick of Nature, has suddenly acquired the beak of a raven. Whatever his innate norms of social behaviour may have been, they were bound to be thrown out of gear by the invention of weapons. [9]
One could pick various holes in this argument, as the critics of Lorenz' book (myself included [10]) have done, and nevertheless concede that it contains an element of truth. Without losing ourselves in technicalities, we can reformulate Lorenz' argument by saying that, from the very beginning of the manufacture of weapons, man's instinct and intellect fill out of step. The invention of weapons and tools was an intellectual creation, the combined achievement of brain and hand -- of the marvellous powers of the neocortex to co-ordinate the manipulative skill of the fingers with the perceptions of the perfected eye, and both with memory and planning. But the use to which the weapons were put, was dependent on the motivational drives, on instinct and emotion -- on the old brain. The old brain was lacking in the necessary equipment, the inhibitory mechanisms, to deal with man's newly acquired powers; while the new brain had insufficient control over his emotions. What Lorenz' argument boils down to is once more: inadequate co-ordination between the all too rapidly grown modern, and the ancient structures of the nervous system.
However, the awareness of power, which the wielding of spear and bow lends to the hunter, need not necessarily increase aggressivity towards his fellows; it may, as the example of the Eskimos and other hunting communities show, even have the opposite effect. In so far as the purely self-assertive tendencies of individuals are concerned, there is no obvious reason why primitive man should not have learned to come to terms with the added power that weapons gave him, by developing moral responsibilities -- a super-ego as effective in its way as the instinct-taboos against the killing of con-specifics in other hunting animals. And, to judge by the anthropological evidence, such taboos did indeed develop -- but they only prevented aggression against the individual's own tribe or social group. To other members of the species the taboo did not apply. It was not individual aggression which got out of hand, but devotion to the narrow social group with which the individual identified himself to the hostile exclusion of all other groups. It is the process we have discussed before: the integrative tendency, manifested in primitive forms of identification, serving as a vehicle for the aggressive self-assertiveness of the social holon.
To put it in a different way: to man, intra-specific differences have become more vital than intra-specific affinities; and the inhibitions which in other animals prevent intra-specific killing, work only within the group. In the rat it is the smell which decides who is friend or foe. In man, there is a terrifyingly wide range of criteria, from territorial possession through ethnic, cultural, religious, ideological differences, which decide who stinks and who does not.
The Curse of Language
There are other factors which contributed to the tragedy. The first is the enormous range of intra-specific differences between human individuals, races and cultures; a diversity without parallel among other species. In Huxley's list of man's biological 'uniquenesses', this wide range of variety in physical appearance and mental attributes actually occupies the first place. How it arose does not concern us here; Huxley has some interesting things to say on the subject in the essay from which I have quoted. What matters in our context is that these differences and contrasts were a powerful factor of mutual repellence between groups; with the result that the disruptiue forces haue alwaws dominated the forces of cohesion in the species as a whole. To quote Lorenz once more:
It is no daring speculation to assume that the first human beings who really represented our own species, those of Cro Magnon, had roughly the same instincts and natural inclinations as we have ourselves. Nor is it illegitimate to assume that the structure of their societies and their tribal warfare was roughly the same as can still be found in certain tribes of Papuans and in central New Guinea. Every one of their tiny settlements is permanently at war with the neighbouring villages; their relationship is described by Margaret Mead as one of mild reciprocal head-hunting, 'mild' meaning that there are no organised raids for the purpose of removing the treasured heads of neighbouring warriors, but only the occasional taking of the heads of women and children encountered in the woods. [11]
The people of the neighbouring village were simply not considered as con-specifics; as the stammering barbarians were denied full human status by the Greeks, the pagans by the Church, the Jews by the Nazis. A priori, one would imagine that the dawn of abstract, conceptualised thought, its communication by language, and its preservation by cumulative records -- the beginning of Teilhard's Noosphere -- would have counteracted these fratricidal, species-disrupting tendencies. In actual fact, the cliché about the unifying power of verbal communication represents only half of the truth, and perhaps less than half. In the first place, there is the trivial fact that, while language facilitates communication within the group, it also crystallises cultural differences, and actually heightens the barriers between groups. The admirable field-observations of monkey societies, which I have just mentioned, have revealed that Primate groups of the same species inhabiting different localities also tend to develop different traditions and 'cultures' -- but this differentiation never goes so far as to lead to conflict: mainly, one supposes, because of the absence of separative linguistic barriers. Among humans, however, the separative, group-estranging forces of language are active on every level: nations, tribes, regional dialects, the exclusive vocabularies and accents of social classes; professional jargons. Among the two million aborigines of New Guinea, to whom Margaret Mead refers in the quotation above, seven hundred and fifty different languages are spoken. Ever since the Stone Age, the Tower of Babel has remained a valid symbol. Is it not remarkable that at a time when Hertzian waves and communication satellites have transformed the population of our whole planet into a single audience, no serious effort is being made by responsible bodies (except a few undaunted Esperantists) to propagate a universal lingua franca; yet at the same time people are killed in language riots over the primacy of Maharati or Gujurati in India, Flemish or French in Belgium, French or English in Canada. An emotionally realadjusted species, we have the uncanny power of turning every bles
sing, including language, into a curse.
The main danger of language, however, lies not in its separative, but in its magic, hypnotic, emotion-arousing powers. Words can serve to crystallise thought, to give articulateness and precision to vague images and hazy intuitions. They can also serve to rationalise irrational fears and desires, to give the semblance of logic to the wildest superstitions, to lend the vocabulary of the new brain to the phantasmagorias and delusions of the old. Lastly, words can be used as explosive charges to set off the chain-reactions of group psychology. Ali's computer is just as capable of producing Kant's Critique of Pure Reason as the screams of Hitler. Without a language to formulate religious and ideological doctrines, closed belief-systems, slogans and manifestoes, we should be as unable to fight intra-specific wars as the poor baboons. Thus the various blessings which make for the uniqueness of man form at the same time a tragic mesh with one common pattern underlying all -- schizophysiology.
The Discovery of Death
A further factor, which provides one of the main threads in the pattern, is the discovery of death -- and the refusal to accept it.