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Human life begins in a race of one against hundreds of millions The stampeding sperm cells are competitive from the start. But the whole point of the-rivalry is cooperation of the most intimate sort. The two cells wholly merge. They combine their genetic material. Two very different beings become one. The act of making a human being involves an almost bizarre mix of opposites—desperate competition against all odds, and cooperation so perfect that the partners’ separate identities vanish. It would be inconsistent for beings who arise out of intense rivalry and begin in perfect cooperation to decry either.
“In the ways of Nature,” said Marcus Aurelius, “there is no evil to be found”16 Animals are aggressive not because they are savage, or bestial, or evil—those are words with very little explanatory power—but because such behavior provides food and defense against predators, because it spaces out the population and avoids overcrowding, because it has adaptive value. Aggression is a survival strategy, evolved to serve life. It coexists, especially in the primates, with compassion, altruism, heroism, and tender, self-sacrificing love for the young. These are also survival strategies. Eliminating aggression would be a foolish as well as an unachievable goal—it’s built too deeply into us. The evolutionary process has worked to achieve the right level of aggression—not too much, not too little—and the right inhibitors and disinhibitors.
We emerge out of a turbulent mix of contradictory inclinations. It should be no surprise that in our psychology and our politics a similar tension of opposites should prevail.
* A very nice test of these ideas are the observations by the animal behavior expert Stephen Emlen He thought to examine jacanas, birds in which the usual sex roles are reversed: Males do all the parenting and the females compete vigorously for something like a harem of males Those females who don’t possess a harem don’t reproduce, so the dominant females are often challenged by lower-ranking females When a takeover attempt succeeds, the incoming female routinely destroys the eggs and kills the chicks She then sexually solicits the males, who now have no young to distract them—and so are able to attend to propagating the genetic sequences of the incoming female The genetic strategy of infanticide is situational, not gender-based* Another aspect of the gestural vocabulary of appeasement is infantile behavior in adults, including begging. It’s a little like human lovers using baby talk and calling each other “baby.” They’re applying a lexicon established in infancy to another purpose
Chapter 11
DOMINANCE AND SUBMISSION
When we no longer look at an organic being as
a savage looks at a ship, as something wholly
beyond his comprehension; when we regard
every production of nature as one which has
had a long history; when we contemplate every
complex structure and instinct as the summing
up of many contrivances, each useful to the
possessor, in the same way as any great
mechanical invention is the summing up of the
labour, the experience, the reason, and even
the blunders of numerous workmen; when we
thus view each organic being, how far more
interesting—I speak from experience—does the
study of natural history become!
CHARLES DARWIN,
The Origin of Species1
Order. Hierarchy. Discipline.
BENITO MUSSOLINI,
proposed national slogan2
The two pit vipers slither toward one another in silence, forked tongues flickering. Slowly they entwine in a languorous embrace. They raise themselves higher and higher off the ground. The glistening coils ebb and flow. Like some macroscopic echo of their underlying microscopic reality, they form a double helix.
Once, observers concluded that this is a reptilian courtship dance. They neglected to capture the snakes, though, and determine their sexes. When this is done, both snakes turn out to be male So what are they doing? Since homosexual embraces are known throughout the animal kingdom, it still might be a courtship dance—except that it usually ends with one snake toppling the other to the ground, no overt sexual acts having transpired. Instead, this hypnotizing serpentine ritual seems to be a competition, like arm wrestling, played by strict rules. No combatant has ever been bitten or even injured, so far as we know. When the duel ends, whoever has been forced over accepts defeat and slithers away.
Is this contest about access to females? Sometimes there’s no female in evidence, urging her champion on, or available as a reward for the victor. At the least, this is a struggle over hierarchy, over who’s the top viper—which does not exclude the possibility that the encounter is homosexual as welclass="underline" Male competition for dominance expressed in homosexual metaphor is a theme widespread among the animals.
Losing the struggle is apparently a blow to the snake’s self-confidence. He seems morose and demoralized, unable many days later to defend himself against even weakling rivals. Here’s one mechanism by which struggles for dominance later convert into mating success: A female viper, on meeting a lone male, will mimic male behavior and raise herself up as if preparing for this sportive combat. If, still despondent from his last defeat, he does not with sufficient vigor rise to the occasion, she looks elsewhere for a mate.3 Almost without exception, the females manage to mate with the winners.4
Among pit vipers,5 a male will take one or more sexually receptive females under his “protection” and do what he can to discourage the approach of other males. He will defend or compete for specific territories, especially those that contain resources important for the next generation of vipers. The most celebrated American pit viper, the prairie rattlesnake, does not mate as it comes out of hibernation in the spring, but waits until the late summer when a male must make a considerable effort to track down a female.
In contrast, the garter snakes of Manitoba hibernate in enormous dens of perhaps ten thousand individuals, the proverbial snake pit. In springtime, the females are sexually receptive as they emerge, one at a time, from the den. And a good thing, too: Waiting impatiently is a gang of several thousand males, who pounce on each female as she exits, forming a writhing, orgiastic, but largely infecund “mating ball.” Competition among the males is fierce, both pre- and post-coitus; after mating, the victor will insert a vaginal plug so no rivals can succeed if he has failed to impregnate the object of his affections. Even among snakes there is a core of basic behavior—including dominance, territoriality, and sexual jealousy—that humans have no trouble recognizing.
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With very few exceptions, animal societies are not democracies. Some are absolute monarchies, some fluid oligarchies, some—especially on the female side—hereditary aristocracies. Dominance hierarchies exist in almost all, except for the most solitary, species of birds and mammals. There’s a rank order based mainly on strength, size, coordination, courage, bellicosity, social intelligence. Sometimes you can predict, just by looking, who’s dominant: the stag with the most points on his antlers, say, or that large, spectacularly well-muscled gorilla with the silver back. In other cases it’s someone you wouldn’t have guessed, someone without imposing physical stature, someone whose leadership qualities may be apparent to the animals you’re observing but not to you.