Man is the Cruel Animal. He is alone in that distinction.… Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, war. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out … and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel.… And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands, and works for “the universal brotherhood of man” with his mouth.3
Although Twain’s essay wasn’t intended as a scientific or philosophical treatise, it makes a number of points that merit serious attention. The passage that I’ve just quoted makes two important claims about human uniqueness. The first one is that humans are the only animals that are cruel. The point isn’t that all humans are cruel (i.e., that a person who isn’t cruel isn’t human). Rather it’s that humans are the only animals that have it in them to be cruel. In other words, Twain hinted at the idea that there is something about the way that human nature is configured that makes it possible for us to be cruel. Twain’s second claim, which is closely bound up the first, is that humans are the only animals that wage war on one another.
Notice that Twain didn’t propose humans are the only animals that kill members of their own species, or kill them en masse, but he implies mass killing is war only if certain conditions are fulfilled: war is calculated slaughter (“cold blood and calm pulse”) that’s not motivated by a personal desire for retribution (“slaughter strangers … who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel”) and is undertaken for personal gain at the behest of a third party (“for sordid wages”). This comes pretty close to how many present-day anthropologists define war.
In this chapter, I’m going to defend the proposition that Homo sapiens are the only animals capable of cruelty and war. I’m going to explore where this leads, and use it to develop a more detailed explanation of why dehumanization causes moral disengagement.
IS WAR UNIQUELY HUMAN?
There are plenty of intelligent, scientifically literate people who reject the idea that humans are the only animals that go to war. Their response to Twain’s essay might be to claim that, although Mark Twain was a brilliant man and a great writer, he was inevitably a prisoner of his time, and couldn’t have anticipated the major discoveries about animal behavior that would be made over the next century or so—discoveries that prove him wrong. What discoveries? Our interlocutor would cite two, involving ants and chimpanzees.
Let’s begin with ants.
Ant colonies sometimes attack other colonies of the same species. These attacks are sometimes described as wars. That’s why Edward O. Wilson and Bert Hölldobler have a chapter entitled “War and Foreign Policy” in their book Journey to the Ants. Here’s how the chapter begins.
The spectacle of the weaver ants, their colonies locked in chronic border skirmishes like so many Italian city-states, exemplifies a condition found throughout the social insects. Ants in particular are the most aggressive and warlike of all animals. They far exceed human beings in organized nastiness; our species is by comparison gentle and sweet-tempered. The foreign policy aim of ants can be summed up as follows: restless aggression, territorial conquest, and genocidal annihilation of neighboring colonies whenever possible. If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week.4
Wilson and Hölldobler are two of the world’s leading authorities on ants, so we can trust that they’ve got their facts straight. But it’s important to bear in mind that they are using a colorful idiom for the purpose of engaging a popular readership. They know better than anyone that ant “war” is instinctual behavior mainly controlled by hard-wired responses to chemical signals, that ants don’t really have foreign policy, and that their “genocidal annihilation of neighboring colonies” bears little relation to Auschwitz or Rwanda. Obviously, if ants had nuclear weapons they’d crawl on them rather than use them to end the world in a week! The “wars” waged by ants are metaphorical wars, not real ones.
A stronger and more compelling case can be made for chimpanzee war. Chimpanzees live in communities called “troops” that have what is called a fission-fusion organization. Each day, subgroups and lone individuals wander off into the forest to forage for fruit or hunt for small animals (fission), and at the end of the day they come back together and reconstitute the group (fusion). They are fiercely xenophobic animals with large, overlapping ranges, so there’s always a chance that a foraging party will encounter chimps from a neighboring community. These meetings spark hostility. When two groups meet, nothing more serious occurs than noisy threat displays, but if a party of males happens upon a solitary stranger, they are likely to kill him.
These chance encounters aren’t the only form of intergroup violence. Sometimes parties of six or so males make deep incursions into their neighbors’ territory, apparently searching for individuals to kill. If they spot a lone male, a lone older female, or a male-female pair, they will ferociously attack and kill it. Young females are usually spared, and are incorporated into the attackers’ troop.
These attacks are known as raids. When Jane Goodall and her team first began to study the chimpanzees of Tanzania’s Gombe National Park, they were all members of a single troop, which the scientists called Kasekela. In 1971, they noticed that a subgroup of seven adult males, three adult females, and their offspring had begun to split off to form a second troop. A year later they were completely separate from the Kasekela community and had established their own independent territory. The scientists called them the Kahama group. Kahama now occupied part of Kasekela’s old range, leading to tensions between the two communities. Over the next couple of years, aggressive confrontations became more and more frequent. Then, in 1974, a party of six Kasekela males traveled south to Kahama territory and killed an adult male, and over the next four years, all of the Kahama adults, and five Kasekela females, were either killed or had disappeared. The juvenile Kahama females were absorbed into the Kasekela community.
Chimpanzees aren’t vegetarians. They supplement a diet of fruit with the raw flesh of other mammals. They’re especially fond of red colobus monkeys. They hunt monkeys in groups, and almost all the hunting is done by males. Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson explain that monkey hunts are occasions of frenzied excitement.
The forest comes alive with the barks and hoots and cries of the apes, and aroused chimpanzees race in from several directions. The monkey may be eaten alive, shrieking as it is torn apart. Dominant males try to seize the prey, leading to fights and charges and screams of rage. For one or two hours or more, the thrilled apes tear apart and devour the monkey. This is blood lust in its rawest form.5
When chimpanzees embark on a raid, their behavior resembles a monkey hunt. They’re out for blood—but this time it’s the blood of a member of their own species.
Based on chimpanzees’ alert, enthusiastic behavior, these raids are exciting events for them.… During these raids on other communities the attackers do as they do while hunting monkeys, except that the target “prey” is a member of their own species.
When a chimpanzee captures a colobus monkey, the monkey is immediately killed—usually by flailing it against a tree—and eaten. Raiding chimpanzees don’t eat their quarry, but they attack it with utmost ferocity. It’s not just killing—it’s overkill. Wrangham and Peterson report that “their assaults … are marked by a gratuitous cruelty—tearing off pieces of skin, for example, twisting limbs until they break, or drinking a victim’s blood—reminiscent of acts that among humans are unspeakable crimes during peacetime and atrocities during war.”6
These attacks (as well as observations of female chimpanzees devouring infants) were first observed by Jane Goodall’s team in Gombe National Park. Goodall was horrified by what she saw, which, she reports, “changed forever my view of chimpanzee nature.…”
For several years I struggled to come to terms with this new
knowledge. Often when I woke in the night, horrific pictures sprung unbidden to my mind—Satan, cupping his hand below Sniff’s chin to drink the blood that welled from a great wound on his face; old Rodolph, usually so benign, standing upright to hurl a four-pound rock at Godi’s prostrate body; Jomeo, tearing a strip of skin from Dé’s thigh; Figan, charging and hitting, again and again, the stricken, quivering body of Goliath, one of his childhood heroes; and, perhaps worst of all, Passion gorging on the flesh of Gilka’s baby, her mouth smeared with blood, like some grotesque vampire from the legends of childhood.7
The “war” between the Gombe chimps was the first time that this sort of behavior was observed. But it wasn’t the last. Subsequent observations of interactions between troops of chimpanzees in at least seven other African regions have demonstrated that lethal violence isn’t an isolated or freakish occurrence, but a normal albeit infrequent aspect of chimpanzee life.8
These facts about chimpanzees invite a comparison with human societies. Many human societies also conduct raids against their neighbors—in fact, it’s the most common form of intercommunity violence between tribal groups. The Yanomamö of northern Brazil and Venezuela are especially well known for their raiding, largely through the work of social anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, who studied the Yanomamö for more than thirty years. According to Chagnon, when Yanomamö warriors launch a raid, they first develop a plan of attack. Next they split into small groups of four to six men, so that each group can cover the other when making a retreat. The raiders approach the village before daybreak and hide in the bush near paths that lead to sources of drinking water. Their goal is to ambush a single person, and then leave the area before the body is discovered. They also abduct young women whenever possible. The fate of captured women isn’t pretty. First, they are raped by all the men in the raiding party, and then, when the raiding party gets back to their village, other men rape her as well. At the end of this ordeal, she’s awarded to one of the men as a wife.
Yanomamö raiding has some striking similarities to the raiding behavior of chimpanzees. In both cases a group of males stealthily enter enemy territory to ambush an individual or small group and, if possible, abduct fertile females. Once the job is done, they quickly return to their base. This similarity may reflect the biological relationship between humans and chimpanzees. Chimpanzees are our closest living relatives. Around six and a half million years ago both species had an ancestor in common, and since that time the two lineages have gone their separate ways. Chimpanzees seem to have evolved more slowly than humans, so they’re more similar to the common ancestor than we are. Because of this, we can use chimpanzees as a model for some of our earliest ancestors. Of course, chimps aren’t exactly like our earliest ancestors, but they’re probably close enough to allow us to draw some tentative conclusions about our past. Although we can’t be certain, it’s reasonable to suppose that the social behavior of chimpanzees mirrors the social behavior of our common ancestor, which suggests that the ancestral ape lived in communities with a fission-fusion structure, was territorial, and was hostile toward neighbors of the same species.
Chimpanzee raids sometimes promise immediate rewards, such as food or mating opportunities. But that’s not always the case. Chimpanzees often attack their neighbors when food is abundant in their own territory, and there are no females around for them to abduct, and it would be absurd to think that killing is part of a long-term strategic plan. So, this sort of killing must be instinctive. It must be that male chimpanzees simply have the urge to eradicate outsiders when they can do so without putting themselves at risk (chimps will only attack if they outnumber the opponent by a factor of at least three to one). Wrangham calls this the dominance drive hypothesis. The idea is that evolution installed this drive in male chimpanzees because killing outsiders puts the neighboring group at a disadvantage in competition for resources. This is precisely what happened in the conflict between the Kasekela and Kahama communities; the Kasekela group incrementally weakened the Kahama group by picking them off over a period of four years. In the end, Kahama was destroyed, their territory was annexed, and the Kasekela males got access to young Kahama females.
Wrangham goes on to suggest that the same approach may explain the evolution of lethal violence between human communities, culminating in war. There are two steps to his argument. The first is to make a connection between the xenophobic tendencies and intergroup hostility that are so evident among human beings, and the rampant xenophobia and intergroup hostility of nonhuman primates. Given that we Homo sapiens are primates, the obvious conclusion to draw is that our unlovely tendencies are biologically rooted, and that we inherited them from our common ancestor with the chimpanzees. The next step is to argue that evolution fashioned primates—including human ones—to behave in this way because picking off members of neighboring communities gives one’s own community a competitive advantage. This, in turn, has important implications for understanding the male psyche. Men have, by nature, a “demonic” side. As Wrangham remarks, “there has been selection for a male psyche that, in certain circumstances, seeks opportunities to carry out low-cost attacks on unsuspecting neighbors.”
The psychological mechanisms that would make such a complex function possible have not been studied, but a partial list might include: the experience of a victory thrill, an enjoyment of the chase, a tendency for easy dehumanization [or “dechimpization”… i.e., treating nongroup members as equivalent to prey], and deindividuation (subordination of own goals to the group, ready coalition formation, and sophisticated assessment of power differentials).9
I’ve juxtaposed chimpanzee raiding with Yanomamö raiding to bring out their similarities. But we shouldn’t let these blind us to their differences. So, let’s consider the differences.
One significant difference has to do with forethought. Chimpanzees’ behavior suggests that they plan, but only in the sense of adjusting their attack behavior to suit the circumstances. This is moment-to-moment planning involving little forethought. In contrast, the Yanomamö make elaborate preparations long before embarking on a raid. This goes hand in hand with another sort of difference. Yanomamö raiding is embedded in an intricate network of traditional norms, beliefs, and customs. As Rutgers University anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson remarks:
Yanomami conceptualize, and so act out, war through complex cultural constructions involving classifications of social and moral distance, ideas about physical and supernatural aggression, and a pattern of symbolic and ritual exchanges. These are “essential constitutive dimensions of warfare as a social institution” and any analysis that leaves them out is incomplete, impoverished.10
The rich cultural dimension of Yanomamö raiding has no echo in chimpanzee society. The cultural dimension is especially evident in the ways that the Yanomamö prepare for their raids. Chimpanzee raids are instigated on the spur of the moment. Wrangham and Peterson tell us that:
A raid could begin deep in the home area, with several small parties and individuals of the community calling to each other. Sometimes the most dominant male—the alpha male—charged between the small parties dragging branches, clearly excited. Others would watch and soon catch his mood. After a few minutes they would join him. The alpha male would only have to check back over his shoulder a few times.11
In contrast, Yanomamö preparations are quite elaborate. In one example described by Chagnon, the festivities began the day before with a ceremonial feast. Then, after the feast, a grass dummy representing the enemy was set up in the village center. The men ritually attacked it, killing their enemy in effigy. The man painted themselves black and crept stealthily around their own village, pretending to search for the enemy’s tracks, and then after firing a volley of arrows, screamed and ran out of the village in a feigned retreat. After this, the warriors retired to their hammocks, and resumed the ceremony after darkness fell. One by one, they marched to the center of the village, clacking their arrows against their bows and making animalistic sounds
. This lasted about twenty minutes. Once it was finished, the fifty-man raiding party assembled at the village center.
When the last one was in line, the murmurs among the women and children died down and all was quiet in the village once again.… Then the silence was broken when a single man began singing in a deep baritone voice: “I am meat hungry! I am meat hungry! Like the carrion-eating buzzard I hunger for flesh!” When he completed the last line, the rest of the raiders repeated his song, ending in an ear-piercing, high-pitched scream.… A second chorus led by the same man followed the scream.
After several more choruses, during which the warriors worked themselves into a rage, they moved into a tight formation with their weapons held aloft.
They shouted three times, beginning modestly and then increasing their volume until they reached a climax at the end of the third shout: “Whaaa! Whaaa! WHAAA!” They listened as the jungle echoed back their last shout, identified by them as the spirit of the enemy. They noted the direction from which the echo came. On hearing it, they pranced about frantically, hissed and groaned, waving their weapons … and the shouting was repeated three more times. At the end of the third shout of the third repetition, the formation broke, and the men ran back to their respective houses, each making a noise—” Bubububububububu!”—as he ran. When they reached their hammocks, they all simulated vomiting, passing out of their mouths the rotten flesh of the enemy they had symbolically devoured in the line-up.
Less Than Human Page 23
