by Howard Zinn
president), and soon the country had thousands of tons of chemical warfare material stored
in various places around the country. Three times there was a tie vote in the Senate on the
resumption of production of chemical weapons, and each time Vice President Bush, as
president of the Senate, cast the deciding vote in favor of resumption. The Nation, Jan. 23, 1989.
24
49 Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, 720-721.
50 Ibid., 452. Rabi did, however, come to Los Alamos occasional y as a consultant.
51 Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists (Random House, 1979), 334.
52 Martin Sherwin, A World Destroyed (Vintage, 1977), 210-213.
53 Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, 749.
54 Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II, No High Ground (Bantam, 1960), 84.
55 Interview of November 11, 1963, quoted by Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb,
688.
56 Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, 252.
57 James Thomson, "How Could Vietnam Happen: An Autopsy," Atlantic Monthly (April 1968).
58 Marvin Kalb and Bernard Kalb, Kissinger, 161-162.
25
Three
Violence and Human Nature
I remember three different incidents of violence in three different parts of my life. In two of
them I was an observer, in one a perpetrator.
In the fal of 1963 I was in Selma, Alabama, and saw two young black civil rights workers
clubbed to the ground by state troopers and then attacked with electric prods, because they
tried to bring food and water to black people standing in line waiting to register to vote.
As a twenty-two-year-old Air Force bombardier, I flew a bombing mission in the last weeks
of World War II, which can only be considered an atrocity. It was the napalm bombing of a
smal French vil age, for purposes that had nothing to do with winning the war, leaving a
wasteland of death and destruction five miles below our planes.
Years before that, while a teenager on the streets of Brooklyn, I watched a black man in an
argument with an old Jewish man, a pushcart peddler who seemed to be his employer. It
was an argument over money the black man claimed he was owed, and he seemed
desperate, by turns pleading and threatening, but the older man remained adamant.
Suddenly the black man picked up a board and hit the other over the head. The older man,
blood trickling down his face, just kept pushing his cart down the street.
I have never been persuaded that such violence, whether of an angry black man or a hate-
fil ed trooper or of a dutiful Air Force officer, was the result of some natural instinct. Al of
those incidents, as I thought about them later, were explainable by social circumstances. I
am in total agreement with the statement of the nineteenth-century English philosopher
John Stuart Mil : "Of al the vulgar modes of escaping from the consideration of the effect of social and moral influences upon the human mind, the most vulgar is that of attributing the
diversities of conduct and character to inherent natural differences."1
Yet, at an early point in any discussion of human violence, especial y a discussion of the
causes of war, someone wil say, "It's human nature."2 There is ancient, weighty intel ectual support for that common argument. Machiavel i, in The Prince, expresses confidently his
own view of human nature, that human beings tend to be bad. This gives him a good
reason, being "realistic," to urge laying aside moral scruples in dealing with people: "A man who wishes to make a profession of goodness in everything must necessarily come to grief
among so many who are not good. Therefore it is necessary for a prince, who wishes to
maintain himself, to learn how not to be good."3
The seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes said, "I put forth a general inclination
of al mankind, a perpetual and restless desire for power after power, that ceaseth only in
death." This view of human nature led Hobbes to favor any kind of government, however
authoritarian, that would keep the peace by blocking what he thought was the natural
inclination of people to do violence to one another. He talked about "the dissolute condition
of masterless men" that required "a coercive power to tie their hands from rapine and
revenge."4
Beliefs about human nature thus become self-fulfil ing prophecies. If you believe human
beings are natural y violent and bad, you may be persuaded to think (although not required
to think) that it is "realistic" to be that way yourself. But is it indeed realistic (meaning, "I regret this, but it's a fact…") to blame war on human nature?
27
In 1932, Albert Einstein, already world famous for his work in physics and mathematics, wrote a letter to another distinguished thinker, Sigmund Freud. Einstein was deeply
troubled by the memory of World War I, which had ended only fourteen years before. Ten
mil ion men had died on the battlefields of Europe, for reasons that no one could logical y
explain. Like many others who had lived through that war, Einstein was horrified by the
thought that human life could be destroyed on such a massive scale and worried that there
might be another war. He considered that Freud, the world's leading psychologist, might
throw light on the question Why do men make war?
"Dear Professor Freud," he wrote. "Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?" Einstein spoke of "that smal but determined group, active in every nation,
composed of individuals who … regard warfare, the manufacture and sale of arms, simply as
an occasion to advance their personal interests and enlarge their personal authority." And
then he asked, "How is it possible for this smal clique to bend the wil of the majority, who stand to lose and suffer by a state of war, to the service of their ambitions?"
Einstein volunteered an answer, "Because man has within him a lust for hatred and
destruction." And then he put his final question to Freud, "Is it possible to control man's mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychoses of hate and
destructiveness?"
Freud responded, "You surmise that man has in him an active instinct for hatred and
destruction, amenable to such stimulations. I entirely agree with you… . The most casual
glance at world-history wil show an unending series of conflicts between one community
and another." Freud pointed to two fundamental instincts in human beings: the erotic, or
love, instinct and its opposite, the destructive instinct. But the only hope he could hold for
the erotic triumphing over the destructive was in the cultural development of the human
race, including "a strengthening of the intel ect, which tends to master our instinctive life."5
Einstein had a different view of the value of intel ect in mastering the instincts. After
pointing to "the psychoses of hate and destructiveness," Einstein concluded, "Experience proves that it is rather the so-cal ed 'Intel igentsia' that is most apt to yield to these
disastrous col ective suggestions."
Here are two of the greatest minds of the century, helpless and frustrated before the
persistence of war. Einstein, venturing that aggressive instincts are at the root of war, asks
Freud, the expert on instincts, for help in coming to a solution. Note, however, that Einstein
has jumped from "man has within him a lust" to "disastrous col ective suggestions." Freud ignores this leap from instinct to culture and affirms that the "destructive instinct" is the crucial cause of war.
But what is Freud's evidence for the existence of such an instinct? There is something
curious in his argument. He offers no proof from the field of his expertise, psychology. His
evidence is in "the most casual glance at world-history."
Let's move the discussion forward, fifty years later, to a school of thought that did not exist
in Freud's time, sociobiology. The leading spokesperson in this group is E. O. Wilson, a
Harvard University professor and distinguished scientist. His book Sociobiology is an
impressive treatise on the behavior of various species in the biological world that have social
inclinations, like ants and bees.6
28
In the last chapter of Sociobiology, Wilson turned to human beings, and this drew so much attention that he decided to write a whole book dealing with this subject: On Human Nature.
In it there is a chapter on aggression. It starts off with the question: "Are human beings
innately aggressive?" Two sentences later: "The answer to it is yes." (No hesitation here.) And the next sentence explains why: "Throughout history, warfare, representing only the
most organized technique of aggression, has been endemic to every form of society, from
hunter-gatherer bands to industrial states."7
Here is a peculiar situation. The psychologist (Freud) finds his evidence for the aggressive
instinct not in psychology but in history. The biologist (Wilson) finds his evidence not in
biology but in history.
This suggests that the evidence from neither psychology nor biology is sufficient to back up
the claim for an aggressive instinct, and so these important thinkers turn to history. In this
respect, they are no different from the ordinary person, whose thinking fol ows the same
logic: history is ful of warfare; one cannot find an era free of it; this must mean that it
comes out of something deep in human nature, something biological, a drive, an instinct for
violent aggression.8
This logic is widespread in modern thought, in al classes of people, whether highly educated
or uneducated. And yet, it is almost certainly wrong. And furthermore, it's dangerous.
Wrong, because there is no real evidence for it. Not in genetics, not in zoology, not in
psychology, not in anthropology, not in history, not even in the ordinary experience of
soldiers in war. Dangerous because it deflects attention from the nonbiological causes of
violence and war.
It turns out, however, that Wilson's firm assent to the idea that human beings are "innately
aggressive" depends on his redefinitions of innately and aggressive. In On Human Nature he says, "Innateness refers to the measurable probability that a trait wil develop in a specified set of environments … . By this criterion human beings have a marked hereditary
predisposition to aggressive behavior." And the word aggression takes in a variety of human actions, only some of which are violent.
In other words, when Wilson speaks of people being "innately aggressive" he does not mean that we are al born with an irresistible drive to become violent—it depends on our
environment. And even if we become aggressive, that need not take the form of violence.
Indeed, Wilson says that "the more violent forms of human aggression are not the
manifestations of inborn drives." We now have, he says, "a more subtle explanation based
on the interaction of genetic potential and learning."
The phrase genetic potential gets us closer to a common ground between Wilson and his
radical critics, who have attributed to him sometimes more extreme views about innate
aggression than he real y holds. That is, human beings certainly have, from the start
(genetical y) a potential for violence, but also a potential for peacefulness. That leaves us open to al sorts of possibilities, depending on the circumstances we find ourselves in and
the circumstances we create for ourselves.
There is no known gene for aggression. Indeed, there is no known gene for any of the
common forms of human behavior (I am al owing the possibility that a genetic defect of the
brain might make a person violent, but the very fact that it is a defect means it is not a
normal trait). The science of genetics, the study of that hereditary material carried in the
forty-odd chromosomes in every human cel and transmitted from one generation to the
next, knows a good deal about genes for physical characteristics, very little about genes for
mental ability, and virtual y nothing about genes for personality traits (violence,
competitiveness, kindness, surliness, a sense of humor, etc.).
29
Wilson's col eague at Harvard, scientist Stephen Jay Gould, a specialist in evolution, says very flatly (in Natural History Magazine, 1976): "What is the direct evidence for genetic control of specific human social behavior? At the moment, the answer, is none whatever."
The distinguished biologist P. W. Medawar puts it this way, "By far the most important
characteristic of human beings is that we have and exercise moral judgment and are not at
the mercy of our hormones and genes."9
In the spring of 1986 an international conference of scientists in Sevil e, Spain, issued a
statement on the question of human nature and violent aggression, concluding, "It is
scientifical y incorrect to say that war is caused by 'instinct' or any single motivation… .
Modern war involves institutional use of personal characteristics such as obedience,
suggestibility, and idealism… . We conclude that biology does not condemn humanity to
war."
What about the evidence of psychology? This is not as "hard" a science as genetics.
Geneticists can examine genes, even "splice" them into new forms. What psychologists do is look at the way people behave and think, test them, psychoanalyze them, conduct
experiments to see how people react to different experiences, and try to come to
reasonable conclusions about why people behave the way they do. There is nothing in the
findings of psychologists to make any convincing argument for an instinct for the violent
aggressiveness of war. That's why Freud, the founder of modern psychology, had to look for
evidence of the destructive instinct in history.10
There was a famous "Milgram experiment" at Yale in the 1960s, named after the
psychologist who supervised it.11 A group of paid volunteers were told they were helping
with an experiment dealing with the effects of punishment on learning. Each volunteer was
seated in a position to observe someone taking a test, wearing electrodes connected to a
control panel operated by the volunteer. The volunteer was told to monitor the test and,
whenever a wrong answer was given, to pul a switch that would give a painful electrical jolt
to the person taking the test, each wrong answer leading to a greater and greater electrical
charge. There were thirty switches, with labels ranging from "Slight Shock" to "Danger—
Severe Shock."
The volunteer was not told, however, that the person taking the test was an actor and that
no real jolt was given. The actor would pretend to be in pain when the volunteer pul ed the
switch. When a volunteer became reluctant to continue causing pain, the experimenter in
charge would say something like "The experiment requires that you continue." Under these
conditions, two-thirds of the volunteers continued to pul the electrical switches on wrong
answers, even when the subjects showed agonizing pain. One-third refused.
The experiment was tried wit
h the volunteers at different distances from the subjects. When
they were not physical y close to the subject, about 35 percent of the volunteers defied
authority even when they could not see or talk with the subject. But when they were right
next to the subject, 70 percent refused the order.
The behavior of the people who were wil ing to inflict maximum pain can certainly be
explained without recourse to "human nature." Their behavior was learned, not inborn.
What they learned is what most people learn in modern culture, to fol ow orders, to do the
job you are hired to do, to obey the experts in charge. In the experiment the supervisors,
who had a certain standing and a certain legitimacy as directors of a "scientific" experiment, kept assuring the volunteers that they should go ahead, even if the subjects showed pain.
When they were distant from the subjects, it was easier to obey the experimenters. But
seeing or hearing the pain close up brought out some strong natural feeling of empathy,
enough to disobey even the legitimate, confident, scientific supervisors of the experiment.
30
Some people interpreted the results of the experiment as showing an innate cruelty in human beings, but this was not the conclusion of Stanley Milgram, who directed the study.
Milgram sums up his own views, "It is the extreme wil ingness of adults to go to almost any
lengths on the command of an authority that constitutes the chief finding of the study… .
This is, perhaps, the most fundamental lesson of our study: ordinary people, simply doing
their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible
destructive process.
So it is a learned response—"always obey," "do your job"—and not a natural drive, that caused so many of the people to keep pul ing the pain switches. What is remarkable in the
Milgram experiment, given the power of "duty … obedience" taught to us from childhood, is not that so many obeyed, but that so many refused.
C. P. Snow, a British novelist and scientist, wrote in 1961,
When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you wil find more
hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have
ever been committed in the name of rebel ion. The German Officer Corps
