Dear friends,

 

When Tahir Qazi initiated this discussion, the first question that occurred to me was “is violence hardwired into our brains?”. I followed the discussion hoping that someone will answer my question. That was one thing I wanted to take away from this discussion. Different friends did express their thoughts on it but none gave me enough reasons to believe one way or the other and I am still at the same place I was when the discussion began.

 

In the hope that they would trigger some thoughts in this direction, I am writing my “khayalat-e-pareshan” on this topic. These khayalat are pareshan because I am still searching for the glue to bind them all together.

 

Before I share with you my opinion in this matter, let me say that I don’t necessarily see violence as only a physical phenomenon as, to me, has been the emphasis in this discussion. I think the more prevalent types of violence are much more widespread and much less objected to in our societies. These days, you can't say the words 'physical violence' without thinking about the Iraq war. What we are seeing in Iraq is physical violence but I would submit to you that its much more than that. The war was started on the pretext of self-defense (the “mushroom cloud over New York City” syndrome) but since then, it has morphed into an entirely different thing. I don’t think there is a single American today who is still clinging on to the WMD illusion but there are many who are still supportive of this war. Their main argument has now become, “are the people in Iraq better off now or not?”. The thought behind this kind of thinking is that somehow American moral values are superior to those of Saddam regime. I am not going to argue for or against that notion, neither am I going to speculate on the “real reasons” of Bush administration behind waging this war. The fact remains that Americans do think that their morality is better than Saddam’s and Iraqi people should live by American standards of morality. A lot of eyebrows were raised in USA when they saw that the new constitution of Iraq said that no law would be drafted that are against Islam. Why was there a level of discomfort in USA over that? Theoretically, that is democracy, which is now the stated goal of this war, in action and American people should have celebrated that. They didn’t because, in fact, they don’t want democracy as a method. They are more interested in the results than the method. They want Iraq to adopt American moral standards. The burning houses and dying people, a result of physical violence, are deplorable things but much more devastating and disturbing fact is that a nation of thinking people is being asked to stop thinking and adopt the standards being shoved down their throats. I call that “moral violence” for the lack of a better term.

 

Now to my original question. In my personal opinion, humans are hardwired for violence. Let me quickly add that I don’t have hard evidence for that—there is not a part of human genome that I could point to and say, “right there is this violence gene”—if I had, we wouldn’t have been having this discussion (on second thought, who am I kidding). All I have is circumstantial evidence at best.

 

I think everyone would agree that violence is a manifestation and not an end in and of itself. Even psychopathic killers perpetrate violence to derive pleasure so the eventual motive is the pleasure and not the violence itself. I see violence in the backdrop of evolution. We as humans are a product of biological evolution and our brains, like all our other organs, are a product of the evolution as well. Lets try to think some half a million years back. Lets suppose we have two individuals that have two different genetic dispositions. One has the propensity to resort to violence and the other doesn’t. It’s not difficult to see that the one whose brain is hardwired to use violence as a means to achieve the goals has an obvious selective advantage. When and if the resources to survive become scarce, the individuals devoid of the propensity of violence will become extinct and the only surviving phenotype would be the one that can use violence. That is why, I think, violence has a definite adaptive value. But there has to be a limit to this propensity as well. A population of violent creatures cannot survive for long. Not only that there will be fighting among each other, it will have external threats to its survival as well. The thinning out of the population as a result of in-group violence will make the group vulnerable to the external threats. Those were the basis on which many biologists, like Dawkins, concluded that while on individual basis, violence has a clear adaptive value, on a group level it’s more of a disadvantage. In such a scenario, natural selection will clearly favor a genotype that can resort to violence as a means to achieve goals but also practices restrain when it comes to the interaction within the group. Theoretically, this combination of violence and restraint is the best survival recipe for a human-like species. Let me add quickly that I am not advocating a policy based on violence and restraint. Even if it is a genetic disposition, there is nothing that says that we must be slaves of our genes.

 

One of the pieces of circumstantial evidence that I have for this thesis is that chimpanzees, our closest evolutionary cousins, are the only species, beside humans, that create alliances to wage wars against another group of their own species. The institution of war is in complete agreement, in my opinion, with the hypothetical genotype model that I described earlier. All the things that are forbidden within a group (in this case a nation-state) like murder, arson, and property encroachment are totally acceptable in war because now these things are being done to people outside the group. This group mechanism leads to behavior that sometimes is logically inconsistent because the basis of such mechanism in not rooted in logic.

 

The above is, obviously, too over-simplistic a view. I am sure it is much more complex than just a genetic disposition. Beside the biological evolution, there are many other evolutions going on like cultural, social, economic and many others that are beyond my ability to see.  Also, the group dynamics have a complex hierarchy and that hierarchy is also in a state of flux.

 

If it turns out that part of the violence carried out by humans is a genetic phenomenon guided by group mechanism, I think the solution would be a change in the group dynamics. If we somehow widen the concept of group so that it encompasses all humans, or ideally all life forms, on our planet, we can have much more peace than we have now because then there won’t be any ‘them’, only ‘us’.

 

The above thought led me to a couple of questions and I would like to ask my friends one of those questions. The question is; is there such a thing out there that can be called “justifiable violence”?

 

Regards,

 

Rafi

December 01, 2005