The Savagery Within - Our Hardwired Violent Nature And The Fairy Tale Dreams That Deny It

Violence is a feature of the human condition; and given this 10,000 year history of murder, slaughter, and mayhem, we are unlikely to change. Despite hopeful  claims to the contrary, violence is a permanent, ineluctable, predictable expression of human nature

The same genes that gave us Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot; the same savagery that Mungo Park witnessed in tribal forests of Africa, the same headhunters of Melanesia, and the same absolute terror of White Wolf, the Comanche chief who to send a message to Union troops invading sacred Indian ground, raped, mutilated, and defiled white men, women, and children are within us. 

Professor Steven Pinker has argued that the world is indeed progressing toward a more peaceful, collegial and less contentious place.  However most reviewers conclude that  there is  no evidence that violence – or the proclivity for it – has decreased. 

In fact, the 21st Century seems a far more dangerous and potentially violent place than the one that preceded it, one of the most violent in history. Pinker’s vision of coming world peace is fancy.  Opinion is divided on questions of human nature and history.  There are many who still put great faith in the civilizing nature of Man, his ultimate goodness, and his ability – through the State – to accomplish civilized ends. 

There are just as many others who believe that we are still (until truly radical changes in our DNA are made) like Shakespeare’s kings – aggressive, acquisitive, self-interested, and capable of anything to achieve our ends.  Society and its institutions have provided us with an architecture within which we are reasonably and temporarily safe; but that architecture is only as strong as those human beings who built it…..And that is why it seems that it will fall and rise again in recurring cycles of violence.

Josef Conrad was always concerned about the nature of violence.  In The Heart of Darkness Kurtz's dying words are 'the horror...the horror...'. a realization that he and all humanity were like the tribal savages around him - violent, inconscient, brutal, murderous, and pagan.  It is Kurtz's dalliance with tribal power that leads to his undoing, and at the moment of death realizes the true nature of the life he is leaving. 

 

Joseph Conrad in Victory created Ricardo a man of ‘feral’ violence, a man whose every instinct propels him to rape and murder.  He is a man without a moral compass, without reflection, and without a scintilla of humanity.  He is brutal, without contrition, and as willful as a savage, hungry animal.

Cormac McCarthy, perhaps the modern writer most attuned to the nature of violence writes about it consistently. In the case of the Trilogy as well as No Country for Old Men, McCarthy answers his own urgent question. Violence is primal.  It may be repressed and hidden from view, but it is prone to spasm from time to time and will torment our illusions.

So what to make of the One Worlders, the unreconstructed pacifists who see hope for the human race, a decrease even elimination of violence, and the coming of a verdant, collaborative, congenial utopia? There have always been such idealists, but the belief in such progress is remarkable, almost impossible to understand.  Wars have been a feature of society since the first human settlements. 

Genghis Khan and his Turkic-Mongol army swept out of the steppes and slaughtered tens of millions from Japan to Europe. The Hundred Year War and the War of the Roses were but two of the more well known; but there were over 100 major world conflicts in the 16th century alone including among others the Portuguese-Mamluk, Friulan Muscovite-Lithuanian, Polish-Teutonic wars.   

There were no fewer in the 18th century, and the Age of Enlightenment did nothing to prevent or deter violence. The 20th century had fewer wars but more devastating and comprehensive ones. 

In World War II  there were 70–85 million fatalities  In World War I, 20 million.  In the Russian Civil War, 7–10 million; the Chinese Civil War, 4–9 million; the Second Congo War, 2.5–5.4 million; the Crusades, 1–9 million; the Vietnam War, 1.3–3.9 million; the Korean War, 1.2–3 million and in the American Civil War, 600,000–1 million. 

So what to make of the pacifists, the One Worlders who believe that with faith, hope, charity and an undeterred progressivism, violence can be overcome and that a peaceful, verdant, compassionate, and harmonious world can be in our future?

It is remarkable if not impossible that faced with this recorded history, there are those who still believe that violence and the tendency to war is not innate in human nature.  That the survival instinct has not changed in millennia, and that there has been no progress, not even a tentative movement towards world peace since the first human settlements.

It is equally surprising that people choose to ignore childhood - the aggressive, territorial, self-defensive and self-promoting instincts of children. Cooperation, consideration and collaboration have to be beaten into the two-year old, and even with consistent training and education, fights over property, women, causes resurface and persist. 

Bob Muzelle was one of these heady idealists.  He was first converted back in college where the Reverend William Bard Coughlin, chaplain at his Ivy League university, and leader of the campus peace movement of the Sixties, took him in.  What changed him from a patrician, Boston Brahmin, steeped in Revolutionary War pride and a lineage that went back to George Washington and the knights of England to an advocate for nuclear disarmament, world peace, and communal harmony was a mystery. 

All agreed that Rev. Coughlin was a charismatic leader, a man with passion, a soaring oratory, and the weight of Christian tradition behind him; but still, there must have been something in Bob's past that flipped the switch - perhaps his cousin Tom's torturing of the frogs he caught in their summer home on the Vineyard. 

Tom had an electric Lionel railroad set and realized that if he hooked the transformer to frogs' legs he could electrocute them.  'Watch this!', said Tommy as a pinioned frog convulsed as the volts and amps surged through him. 

Or the Wild West shoot-'em-ups on early television and at Saturday matinees; or his grandfather's tales of The Great War, the barbed wire, the Gatling guns, and the trenches.  Something did it, and Bob went from a descendant of Lexington and Concord, Gettysburg, the Marne, and Iwo Jima to a peacenik and defiant advocate for disarmament. 

Nothing deterred him.  Even the drumbeat of war and its constant presence - Vietnam, Central America, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East, and minor wars of his generation - could not disabuse him of the notion of human kindess. 

The election of Donald Trump, especially in his second term, threw Bob into a renewed frenzy of protest.  When most of his colleagues had retired to Florida and were spending time with their grandchildren, Bob was still at the barricades when Trump and Israel took it upon themselves to bomb Gaza to smithereens, denying the Palestinian people their right of return; or when Trump and Israel invaded Iran, killing thousands in a so-called war for freedom and justice; or when the US marines and Special Forces invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its president. 

Once again and true to his progressive roots, Bob discounted the innate, inherent, ineluctable violent human acquisitiveness ever since Neanderthalic tribes bashed each other with rocks and jawbones and rather than promote mitigation - or even the policies of countervailing force that at least gave the world a tentative peace during the Cold War - he shouted 'Stop this war...Stop the killing...Stop the murder...'. 

Of course the world was on tenterhooks because never before - even in the Soviet period - had there been two such balanced, equal, and determined adversaries, America and China.  As long as parity remained and as long there was mutual economic benefit to peace, the missiles would remain in their silos, but eventually they would be fired. 

The American defense budget - or rather, as Bob liked to put it, the offense budget given America's first-strike ambitions - was staggering, eating up trillions in revenue that could be used to house the homeless, help the poor, and stop global warming.  China and Russia were no different, and what was the point of a huge armory if you don't use the weapons therein housed?

'Please, Bob, relax', said his wife Corinne herself a committed liberal but with some give in her, an occasional piece of foie gras, a glass of Moet & Chandon, or smelling the roses.  Her pleas went nowhere.  Bob would die in his traces, topple over at a protest, or pass away during one of his famous incendiary calls to action.  There was no way to stop him. As former National Rifle Association President Charlton Heston famously said when asked if he would give up his right to bear arms, 'I'll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands'.

Bob was as defiant.  From Corinne's point of view Bob was not showing his best - his inner compassion for the world's victims of violence.  He was becoming a sour, nasty old man who wouldn't shut up. 'There, I've said it', said Corinne to no one in particular.  It was a marital betrayal, but God help her, it was true.  Her beloved, admired husband was going off the rails. 

There are two givens in life - one, idealists never give up, and two, there will always be wars.  Of course most of us live within the bookends, reasonably happy, taking what comes and tending to the burgers on the grill, nothing wrong in that, stoicism has never gone entirely out of favor.