THE RESENSITIZATION OF AMERICA
Today I am on the road, almost 300 days a year, speaking to numerous military organizations going in and out of the combat zone. I explain to them the two dangers that they must guard against. One danger is the “Macho Man” mentality that can cause a soldier to refuse to accept vital mental health services. But the other danger is what I call the “Pity Party.” There is a powerful tendency for human beings to respond to stress in the way that they think they should. If soldiers and their spouses, parents, and others are all convinced that the returning veteran will have PTSD, then it can create a powerful self-fulfilling prophecy.
Thus, there is a careful balancing act in which our society is morally obligated to provide state-of-the-art mental health services to returning veterans and the returning soldier is obligated to partake of such care if needed. But we also must remember (and even create an expectation) that most combat veterans will be okay. For those who do have a problem, we must make it clear to them that PTSD is treatable and can be curable, and when finished with it they can potentially be stronger individuals for the experience.
Most importantly, if we do want to build a world in which killing is increasingly rare, more scientists, soldiers, and others must speak up and challenge the popular myth that human beings are “natural-born killers.” Popular culture has done much to perpetuate the myth of easy killing. Indeed, today many video games are actually replicating military training and conditioning kids to kill—but without “stimulus discriminators” to ensure that they only fire under authority. Even at elite intellectual levels, the natural-born killer myth is too often embraced uncritically and promoted aggressively, sometimes at the service of an ideological agenda.
We may never understand the nature of the force in humankind that causes us to strongly resist killing fellow human beings, but we can be thankful for it. And although military leaders responsible for winning a war may be distressed by this force, as a species we can view it with pride. It is there, it is strong, and it gives us cause to believe that there may just be hope for humankind after all.
POLITICAL PRIMATES
Christopher Boehm
RECENT AMERICAN POLITICS has been defined by a series of bitter power struggles—as when, for example, the Bush administration was accused of overstepping its authority with wiretaps and torture. In such conflicts we can see traces of countless earlier struggles, from the American Revolution to Watergate. Similar struggles for dominance and power take place in countries all over the world, and we even see them crop up in our local communities and family life.
Because they seem so universal, we have to consider that these problems might be intertwined with our genetic code, that they’re part of our evolutionary history. Indeed, if we are to fully understand why and how these conflicts arise, we must examine what comes naturally to us as a highly political species: Are humans predisposed to live freely, side by side as equals? Or are we more likely to form hierarchies where one person or group tries to dominate or subjugate another?
This question has generated long-standing philosophical disputes, but we now have enough data to propose some definite answers. Discoveries in the fields of anthropology and primatology suggest that though we may have a deeply rooted instinct to exert power over others, we also have what may be an equally strong aversion to abuses of power, along with some natural tendencies to punish people who commit those abuses.
Consider this fact: Before 10,000 years ago, only egalitarian societies existed on our planet—tiny societies with no strong leaders at all. Keeping in mind that gene selection requires at least a thousand generations to change our nature significantly, we must assume that most of our genes have evolved from the genetic makeup of people living in these small Paleolithic bands. This includes our “political genes,” if I may call them that. Yet, of course, we do not only see egalitarian societies in the world today; we also see nations ruled by fierce despots. So, somehow, prehistoric egalitarians set us up to live not only in egalitarian democracies but in these despotic nations as well.
I am careful to say “set us up,” for we are not speaking of hardwired, innately fixed patterns of action like an eyeblink or an uncontrollable scream of fear. Rather, we are talking about softwiring—behavioral propensities that make it very easy to learn certain kinds of behavior rather than others.
Over the years, researchers have tried to hypothesize what our softwired political and social propensities may be. But it was only in 1987 that Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham made a major breakthrough in his study of how human behavior relates to that of our closest primate relatives. In view of the fact that humans, gorillas, bonobos, and chimpanzees share a recent ancestor and more than 98 percent of their genes, Wrangham determined that any behaviors that all four of these species exhibit today must also have been present in their shared predecessor, which would have lived about 7 million years ago. He called this ancient ape the “common ancestor.”
Wrangham identified some social behaviors shared by all four species, including the tendency to live in groups and the willingness to attack members of the same species. But with respect to the common ancestral uses of power, he faced a problem: bonobos, chimpanzees, and gorillas were distinctly hierarchical, with aggressive alpha males; by contrast, human hunter-gatherers were egalitarian, suggesting that our species lacked both innate hierarchical tendencies and tendencies to develop leaders. This inconsistency made it impossible for Wrangham to determine how this ancestor used power, and therefore made it difficult to offer any definitive conclusions about human nature.
Puzzled by this human anomaly, I surveyed almost 50 small, nonliterate cultures, both bands and tribes—to see exactly how egalitarian they were, and why. I discovered that their egalitarian political arrangements were quite deliberate. They believed devoutly in maintaining political parity among adults. This belief was so strong that males who turned into selfish bullies or even tried to boss others around for reasons useful to the group were treated brutally, as moral deviants. The fact that on all continents, hunter-gatherers faced bullies or self-aggrandizing political upstarts—and faced them in spite of these strong egalitarian beliefs—told me that if these people had not so vigilantly worked against inequality, they would have soon turned hierarchical.