Our Bifurcated Nature

The late Carl Sagan wrote his last book, Billions and Billions with the knowledge that he was dying. Presumably one wants to convey what is of utmost importance under these circumstances, yet in an early chapter he is concerned with Monday night football. He asks why this rabid concern for team sports among males. He notes that it gets so heated that murder and mayhem have been the consequence of some soccer games. Sagan gives an excellent account of how this penchant for team sports finds a significant, often defining, place in almost every culture and has been taken so seriously that the penalty for losing was sometimes, as in Mayan culture, death. Why? Sagan traces it back through millions of years of pre-human and human experience of hunting upon which human survival depended and which evolved into war using the same weapons and strategies. He is very good at conveying the importance of the hunt for survival, the risk and teamwork necessary. Additionally, status was conferred on the successful hunter because he provided for group survival. Think millions of years of this and we can begin to grasp the dimension of the problem that this ancient, highly rewarded and necessary skill, has produced for our technologically evolved and overpopulated world. The acclamation given to the hunter, both individual and group for their accomplishment and the required bravery were acknowledged by all repeatedly for thousands of generations. These male hunting groups, Sagan speculates, may be the first “brotherhoods,” The result is that quite possibly the disposition to the hunt, to war and to glory is hardwired into human males. In an age of nuclear weaponry and biological warfare this predisposition is not only irrelevant; it is dangerous to the human species. It is our monumental task to find a way to overcome this primordial male propensity before it does us in.

The only chance we have is to use our unique capacity to think. Can we sublimate this male instinct in sports? William James thought this could be done; Sagan seems to doubt it, witness the mayhem sports can turn loose in men. Can sex, at least an equally potent drive in men, offset this attachment to violence? There is a thread running from ancient Greece to the 1960’s that suggests some potential. The ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes in his play Lysistrata apparently thought so, (Lysistrata literally means “"she who disbands armies") as did the make-love-not-war anti-war slogan of the 1960s. Bonobos, the chimpanzee said to be our closest primate relative, use sex to repair the disharmony of community squabbles. How this could be implemented into our society is another matter. Another possibility is to seek societal change into a matriarchy, which has much lower rates of violence. An interesting study in this regard titled Indonesia's matriarchal Minangkabau offer an alternative social system may be found at http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-05/uop-imm050902.php. As this study indicates, matriarchy is not the opposite of patriarchy in which females dominate instead of males. Rather it is a society that is a more co-equal arrangement than one of female domination.

These are but examples. What is imperative is that we understand ourselves much better, that we search our evolutionary past for possible offsets to mass violence, that we use this as evidence, not answers, because humans have never been in the situation that now faces them. Our past can provide evidence, perhaps ideas, but not answers because human beings have never before been faced with their ability to destroy our species. This is new and requires not only facts, but the understanding of the implications of those facts.

Sagan’s understanding of the roots of organized violence and their utter incompatibility with the technological world our intelligence has produced is an instance, I think, of the most profound and increasingly relevant question we can ask. Can the evolved human being, with all the instinctive, cultural and emotional baggage instilled over millions of years, deal with the consequences that evolution has produced. Put another way, can evolved human intelligence overcome human emotion as the primary determinant of human behavior. Our minds have produced a destructive capacity that can destroy the species. Our emotions and their ingrained cultural expressions, e.g. the violence of war and the wanton treatment of our planet now have at their disposal the nuclear and biological ability to destroy our species. While we can look to our past for suggestions of what might be possible, we cannot look to it for solutions. The failure to understand this is what constitutes both the gross error of the conservative traditionalists and their danger to continued human existence. Cases in point are religions bred in tribal cultures that are being promulgated, with increasing violence, as “solutions” to this modern dilemma or the notion of property that asserts that people can “own” portions of this planet and do what they will with it. This planet is briefly inhabited by each of us and is then left to future generations, far larger than ours in cumulative total, with little regard for their needs. We need to shape up. Terrorism is not the fundamental issue of our time – survival is. As a society we must start thinking instead of believing. There is no precedent for humans who are able to destroy their own species. This planet, not our nation, must be the focus of our concern. We must find our own way.

Bob Newhard