8. The Violent Way

Britain's Guardian -- formerly the Manchester Guardian -- is not only the best-written newspaper in the English-speaking world but is generally accepted as our most steadfast spokesman for the liberal conscience. That conscience was given new voice in the summer of 1969 when, like a verdant volcano, Northern Ireland erupted in a flame of religious hatreds. A pungent odor of lunacy pervaded the smoky scene, for issues seemed irrelevant, even old-lace. The Guardian pondered the Laocoon intricacies of grievances involved, accepted all, but concluded that Ulster was showing itself to be "a profoundly neurotic society," more the problem of the psychologist than the soldier or politician. A leading editorial titled "Man an Aggressive Animal" referred to the "paranoid minorities" that appear so commonly in conflicts throughout all the world:

In recent years the study of human aggression, and of aggression in society, has attracted growing interest. . . .

To know how the trigger mechanisms work in human society will not by itself avert explosions. But at least there is a better chance of avoiding conflict if we know what brings conflict about. In fact we have all been too casual about the hazards of our innate aggressiveness. It is something the United Nations could very well take up as a major international research project.

Neither the population explosion nor the density of urban populations, neither nuclear catastrophe nor the devious adventures of youth, represents a threat to our civilized future quite so perplexing as man's propensity for the violent way. Yet no aspect of human behavior is so confused by misunderstandings or so subject in discussion to bitterness and prejudice. The courage of the Guardian was to reassert the free mind's venerated liberal tradition of open investigation, and to confess that we truly do not know what violence is. Just what are the ingredients of human belligerence? We may have our hunches, but we must inspect them. We may hold to dogmas, but either we can reinforce them with evidence or we must deny them. If we are to have any success at penetrating our history's terror-strewn trails, then our one clear area of agreement must be that even as we cannot know where these trails will lead us, we cannot even be sure where they started.

The task of penetration is compulsory. If the social contract represents a delicate balance between a degree of order that the individual must have to survive and a degree of disorder which society must have to ensure fulfillment of its diverse members, then a significant ascendancy of violence from any quarter tends radically to revise the contract. The balance then will and must be maintained by force. No triumph of disorder can be other than temporary. When order has been destroyed by one force, so will it be restored by another.

A few years ago our eminent journalist and historian of the making of presidents, Theodore H. White, published a play called Caesar at the Rubicon. While Rome sank deeply into anarchy, Julius Caesar by agreement stayed with his powerful army beyond the river. The play of course concerns his final reluctant decision to break the agreement, proceed to Rome, and assume power. And it closes with a simple comment worthy of being stamped on the coin of every democracy: "If men cannot agree on how to rule themselves, someone else must rule them."

White's statement hangs like an ancient sword over the heads of all free peoples. Violence -- to paraphrase Wynne-Edwards -- is the pursuit of conventional prizes by unconventional means. When social partners can no longer accept the same rules and regulations, then violence becomes the normal pathway of departure. And it is a paradox that the more successful the violation, the more certain will be its ultimate failure. Order must prevail if men themselves are not to perish. But in the course of such reconstruction of the social contract, many a man has seen freedom perish.

We shall be wise to inspect violence now while our social contract yet permits diversity of opinions. Or we shall wait too long, and our contract will be lost, and we, the violators and the violated, will in silent agreement bow to a higher, invulnerable force. Then order will be all.

Since Konrad Lorenz and I, though scarcely the sole proponents of the view that aggressiveness is a quality innate in all living beings, have been the principal targets of environmentalism's aggressive attacks, it seems appropriate that one of us define a few terms. Although I cannot speak for the great Austrian scientist, I regard it as unlikely that he has concluded that war, piracy, murder, mayhem, blackmail, burglary and the clobbering of strangers are either essential or commendable activities in the human species. Neither can I believe that all of our distinguished opponents have cynically made use of that proven trick, the twisting of meanings, to discredit a witness. Instead it would seem to me that an honest confusion takes place in many a mind between what is aggressive and what is violent.

Recourse to Webster's Dictionary I normally regard as that dullest of devices occurring only when debate has exhausted all more stimulating plays and the players themselves are exhausted. Yet perhaps with a sigh we should begin with the dictionary and get done with it. In its distinction of meanings, Webster testifies that "aggressive implies the disposition to dominate, sometimes by indifference to others' rights, but now, more often, by determined, forceful prosecution of one's ends." And if we turn to "violent" we shall find: "Moving, acting, or characterized by physical force, especially by extreme and sudden or by unjust or improper force." With a shade more ambiguity, Webster offers for the noun "aggression" the definition: "A first or unprovoked attack, or act of hostility; also the practice of attack or encroachment."

Aggression, then, places emphasis on primary, unprovoked impulse, but leaves the question of force open. What is aggressive is the disposition to dominate, to seek one's ends whether or not by forceful means; what is violent consists exclusively of those actions characterized by physical force. When Lorenz writes of aggression, he considers the innate (unprovoked) drive to dominate. When in this chapter I discuss the violent way, I confine my objective to those actions implemented by physical force. But just how far confusion can be pressed may be read in a quotation from Leonard Berkowitz, one of our foremost American psychologists:

Since "spontaneous" animal aggression is a relatively rare occurrence in nature (and there is a possibility that even these infrequent cases may be accounted for by frustrations or prior learning of the utility of hostile behavior) many ethologists and experimental biologists rule out the possibility of a self-stimulating aggressive system in animals. One important lesson to be derived from these studies is that there is no instinctive drive toward war within man.

Berkowitz within an admirably short span of words succeeds in misusing almost the whole of aggression's vocabulary, misleading the reader as to ethology's conclusions, and capping it with a reference to that special category of violence, war, which appears as a sequitur to virtually nothing. In his Human Aggression Anthony Storr comments on the passage that "such a point of view can only be sustained if a vast amount of evidence from ethological and anthropological studies is neglected." We may note that it cannot even be sustained by the dictionary.

In this inquiry I shall attempt to discriminate as clearly as possible among three categories of conflict: There is aggressiveness, arising from the competition of beings without which natural selection could not take place. There is violence, that form of aggressiveness which employs or effectively threatens the use of physical force. And there is war, that particular form of organized violence taking place between groups.

Not for money and not for space, neither for women nor a table in heaven do men seek to best one another. We obey a law that, for all we know, may be as ancient as life on this planet. We seek self-fulfillment. Within the limits and the directions of our individual genetic endowment we seek such a state of satisfaction as will inform us as to why we were born. We have no true choice. The force that presses on us is as large as all vital processes, and were it not so, then life would return to the swamp. If there is hope for men, it is because we are animals.

This is the aggressiveness that many would deny. It is the inborn force that stimulates the hickory tree, searching for the sun, to rise above its fellows. It is the inborn force that presses the rosebush to provide us with blossoms. It is the force, brooking no contradiction, directing the elephant calf to grow up, the baby starfish to grow out, the infant mamba to grow long. It is the implacable force which commands the normal human child to abandon its mother's protective shadow and to join the human adventure.

The aggressiveness that commands us all, hickory trees or human beings, must from the moment of bursting seed or bursting fetal sac direct us to overcome obstacles. The gasp for air, the grasp for the nipple, or if we are a newly dropped wildebeest calf, then the shaky following of our mother, represents for all of us the first commandment of independent life: that we come to terms with our environment. And so, as our bodies are born, our drive to dominate comes into overt being. But the obstacles need not be physical. Whether lions or lemmings, should we be of the sort who arrive in litters, then we shall find ourselves from birth in competition with our fellows. Natural selection will begin. And in moderate probability the least aggressive among our litter mates will be selected out. If we are of the sort that comes one by one, as do normally monkeys and people, then severe competition will arrive more slowly. Undivided maternal attention will protect us for a while. But competition and conflict will come, whether with our siblings, with our parents, or most certainly with our peers.

We seek the sun. We pursue the wind. We attain the mountaintop and there, dusted with stars, we say to ourselves, Now I know why I was born. We win a Grand Prix or a Little League ballgame. Or we achieve a transcendent vision of heaven and earth and God. We find a scarred desk high-piled with old books and, enraptured, we discover in the musty past our shining selves. All is aggression. We live for, search for, spy, covet, connive for that thing sometimes inexplicable to others but of utmost meaning to ourselves. Some portion of space, real or symbolic, small or large, glorious or inconspicuous, we besiege, we assault, we capture and make our own: and in that conquest -- or even in that flashing glimpse of an unconquerable peak -- we fulfill whatever it is we are. Rarely, however, do we take what others do not seek.

Competition may be denied as a common event in the vertebrate world by as elegant a zoologist as Harvard's E. O. Wilson; but he refers only to competition for food or scarce resources. As sensitive a naturalist as Sally Carrighar may write that "nothing could so prolong man's fighting behavior than a belief that aggression is in our genes." But she is simply falling into the vocabulary trap of confusing the violent and the aggressive. An ethologist for whom I have the greatest respect, Britain's John Hurrell Crook, does little better. Doubting its innateness, he writes that "aggressive behavior occurs normally as a response to particular aversive stimuli and ceases upon their removal." If he refers to violent behavior, then he has a point worth inspection; but if he means what he says, then he reduces the processes of evolution to the circumstantial.

Aggressiveness is the principal guarantor of survival. Although like any other genetically determined trait such as mental or physical potential, individual aggressiveness must in degree suffer random diversity, still normal incidence should be sufficient to ensure the survival of populations and species. We may even accept Crook's reference to "aversive stimuli." It is the innateness of the aggressive potential which guarantees that obstacles will be attacked, the young defended, new feeding grounds found when old lie waste, that orthodoxies give way to innovation when environment so demands, that when social traditions rot in obsolete alleys social change will come about. It is the heart of the Lorenzian principle that without aggression as an inborn force, survival would be impossible.

But it is likewise at the heart of the Lorenzian principle that survival dictates aggression's limits. Without traffic laws, aggression is a drunken driver in a lethal midnight. As no population could survive without sufficient numbers sufficiently aggressive, so no population could survive were competitions customarily carried to deadly decision. And so has evolved throughout the species that body of rules and regulations of infinite variety which, while encouraging the aggressive, discourages the violent. The problem of man is not that we are aggressive but that we break the rules.

Any species must risk extinction when aggressiveness finds its fences in ruin and violence an ever available entertainment. But social species risk most. When beings become biologically dependent on the group and existence is impossible without the cooperation of one's fellows, then the violent solution of natural disagreement becomes a form of suicide as emphatic as the migration of lemmings. That the human being exhibits a propensity for violence beyond any other vertebrate species is a proposition that none with a reading of human history will dispute. But that propensity must be inspected with care.

I have been discussing thus far aggression in Lorenzian terms and its compulsory appearance in the genetic endowment of any species with prospect of survival. When competent authority fails to distinguish between the aggressive and the violent, then constructive dehate hprnmes a wasteland of words. But having made the distinction, we court further failure if we do not distinguish between two sorts of violence, since one is subject to the command of evolutionary inhibition. The other is not.

Civil disorder -- the use of physical force as the final arbiter in the disagreements of social partners -- has been the subject of evolutionary disapproval so long as social groups have existed. An environmentalist as confirmed as Britain's cultural anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer has written: "All known societies make a distinction between murder -- the killing of a member of one's own group -- and the killing of outsiders." Gorer speaks of human societies. But unwittingly he reveals the evolutionary continuity of animal and human morals, for there is no animal society that does not make the same distinction.

An abused cliche is the proposition that only men and rats kill their own kind. We have witnessed in the Indian langur what happens when the social order becomes incapable of restraining primate aggressiveness. The young, for reasons quite unapparent, get systematically bitten to death. We have witnessed, in the questionable conditions of captivity, what happened in the Bloemfontein zoo when two strange baboons were introduced into a stable baboon society and all wound up dead. Southwick, in his great Calcutta experiment, saved the lives of strange rhesus monkeys from the antagonisms of a stable society only by withdrawing them.

An illustration presenting us with an answer to why, in a natural state, non-men and non-rats do not normally kill one another came to me through a friend in Kenya, David Hop craft, who on his farm has for many years explored the possibilities of raising indigenous African ungulates as a meat crop superior to cattle. There is a problem of fencing, since most antelopes can jump over anything. Granted the aid of a benevolent foundation or two Hopcraft enclosed a ninety-acre field with a fence of which any concentration camp would be proud. He then began his experiments with the most innocuous little animal on the African savanna, the Thomson's gazelle.

Hopcraft today, as a result of his many experiments, is a wiser man concerning animal behavior than when in relative innocence he began. The Tommie, weighing only about forty-five pounds, is an animal so small that the new but normal technique of capture by means of a dart injecting a tranquilizer is dangerous. The dart, fired with considerable force, may enter the chest cavity. And so Hopcraft, to begin the stocking of his enclosure, captured half a dozen or so Tommies by netting. Introduced to their new home, a male killed two females within ten minutes. Shortly not one remained alive. He had taken his animals from two different herds.

It may be argued that an enclosure is still an enclosure, whether a ninety-acre field or a laboratory cage. Yet today one may watch the peaceful field from a tall observation tower in its center. Almost a hundred gazelles share it without problem. But Hopcraft did not repeat his error. Furthermore, he introduced his males slowly so that each could establish a territory the defense of which would absorb his animosities.

It is the effect of natural arrangements, not the inoffensiveness of natural dispositions, that minimizes violent behavior in a natural world. Territory is perhaps the supreme peacemaker. Tinbergen records that herring-gull chicks, straying outside the family territory, will certainly be pecked and frequently killed by territorial neighbors. Latent violence is there. Antarctic skuas prey on their neighbors' eggs and young, resulting in powerful territorial defense on the part of parents. The effective spatial distribution and separation of animals, whether individuals or groups, may be just one of the mechanisms reducing the opportunity for violence in the natural world. But that men and rats are the only creatures who will kill their own kind is a statement of dubious validity in any consideration of the violent way.

Another cliche accepted too often even by continental ethology is the proposition that the more dangerous the animal, the more harmlessly will he ritualize and contain his aggressions. Impressive observations point to the conclusion. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, for example, has shown that poisonous snakes in combat will never use their fangs. A study of captive wolves demonstrated that the defeated wolf has only to bare its belly to the victor to inhibit further attack. But one may doubt.

Those ancient animals, snakes, have had eons in which to perfect their ritualized relations. Yet I recall the stunned observation made in Florida by Arthur Loveridge, of Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, regarding the behavior of two coral snakes, the most lethal of American species. A triumphant friend there captured a twenty-nine-inch male coral snake and placed him in a vivarium with a twenty-three-inch male which he already possessed. They made a beautiful if deadly pair. Taking Loveridge to view his new prize, the friend found his triumph replaced by mystification. Only one snake remained, the twenty-nine-inch. Reluctantly it disgorged the twenty-three-inch, which it had swallowed entire. The victim was in perfect condition, beyond being dead.

Of wolves in the wild we know far too little, and one cannot doubt that ritualization within the pack represents normal behavior. Students from Purdue University, however, have winter after winter observed from light aircraft a wolf pack on Lake Superior's Isle Royale. Constant observation made the observers familiar with every individual, including the leader over several seasons. Then one day he was spotted with a limp, and shortly thereafter he vanished. They landed, searched the area where the pack had been, found a bloody stretch of snow. A few bits of fur remained, and there were broken bushes testifying to a struggle. The pack had not only killed but eaten him. And times were not hard.

I carried my doubts to Africa when in the summer of 1968 I made a general survey of predatory communities. Hunting dogs will kill and eat any member of their pack disabled in combat, and this perhaps was the explanation for the Isle Royale wolves. But Hans Kruuk and George Schaller, our foremost authorities on major African predators, both dismissed as imaginary any proposition that the more dangerous the animal, the more will he ritualize his aggressions. Kruuk, in the Ngoro-ngoro crater, had witnessed territorial wars between adjacent hyena clans involving large numbers of animals in which no least restraint separated the aggressive from the violent. Since hyenas eat anything, those killed in combat present a certain problem to the survivors. Hyenas do not enjoy hyena flavor. The problem was solved by allowing the carcass to lie in the sun for a few days. By then, presumably, it no longer tasted like hyena.

Schaller regarded violent outcome within a lion pride to be an unlikely resolution of debate not because of ritual, but simply because members are too familiar with each other's capacities to test them. The relation between members of different prides, however, is a quite different matter. Strict territoriality normally prevents contact. But should contact take place, then the weaker's only dependable ritual is how fast he can run. Schaller's most sobering experience throughout three years in the Serengeti concerned such a contact.

Not very far from Seronera, the Serengeti's lodge, are two famous lion prides much admired by visitors. Each has a territory of fifty or so square miles. One boasts -- or boasted -- two large males and nine mature lionesses, the other three males and seven lionesses. Both have cubs and juveniles in plenty, adding up to impressive lion societies. In Schaller's first year, however, there was a stretch of dubious territorial boundary. And in the disputed area a lioness from the two-male pride one day killed a zebra.

One of her lords came along and, following lion propriety, took over the kill while she retired to await his appetite's satiation. But then two males from the three-male pride appeared. She wisely fled. Unwisely, he fought. They killed him. Not content, they returned later and found the three cubs of another lioness. These they bit to death. One male ate a cub on the spot. The other carried his away, in Schaller's phrase, "like a trophy." The third dead cub was abandoned. Schaller waited. The mother finally returned, found it, ate it.

I followed the story of lion violence, that season, around all of Africa and found not a major game reserve without a valid record. While Schaller's observation might be regarded as one of intertribal war, a recent Nairobi incident was one of murder, since it involved members of the same pride. Here a male with a magnificent mane was for long the park's hero. Then, for reasons quite unknown, he killed a lioness. The park authorities were shocked. He was their principal tourist attraction. They decided against prosecution, and put him on what might be called probation. Before long he killed another lioness. And the decision was made to castrate him.

It was then that my friend Anthony Harthoorn, professor of physiology at the University of East Africa, was called in. As the developer of the process of tranquilizing animals through injection by a propelled dart, Harthoorn is famous throughout the world of animal conservation and his authority can scarcely be questioned. He supervised the operation. The great lion, sad to say, ceased to be a tourist attraction, for his mane promptly fell out. And sad to say, too, a year later he killed another lioness and so was destroyed.

Any inspection of human violence must recognize that in dangerous predators other than ourselves lethal propensities may appear. What motivated the Nairobi lion? I do not know. As bewildering a question was presented in South West Africa's Etosha Pan, perhaps the world's largest game reserve and certainly the least visited. Here lion violence could by most unlikely logic be attributed to overcrowding, for lions are relatively few.

Etosha itself is a giant pan, half filled with water in the average wet season, that resembles in size and shape the Lake of Geneva. Spreading around it is the park, adjoining the homeland of the Ovambo tribe just south of the Angola border. The park is precisely the same size as Switzerland itself. Though no Alps break its monotony of endless horizons, Etosha is a tourist's collector's piece. At countless waterholes one may watch rare species difficult to find elsewhere -- the gemsbok, the dik-dik, the greater kudu in number. Even the lodge where visitors first normally arrive is a collector's piece, for it is an old fort straight out of Beau Geste, a relic of the times of German occupation.

An ecological setting so immense and so sparse cannot support the massive herds of prey animals that one finds in a Serengeti. And so lions are less numerous and their prides are smaller. Nevertheless, for several years Etosha had its attraction to reward any visitor's hopes. It was a pride dominated by two enormous males, and it could almost always be spotted, since they kept almost always together. Inevitably, I suppose, they became known as Castor and Pollux, and the stars they were of this African stage. Who took the greater pleasure in them, wardens or guests, would be hard to say. When South West Africa's chief of conservation. Bernabe de la Bat -- who described the incident to me -- visited Etosha from Windhoek, the distant capital, he invariably paid his respects to the two great lions as he might to two great friends. Then one day Castor killed Pollux. Why? None of Etosha's staff has ever come on a clue. I am assured by Schaller that sexual jealousy could not cause conflict between males, in a pride. And, in any case, I am assured by De la Bat that no lioness was in heat.

As mysterious as the violence of men is the violence of lions. Having completed my season's visit to the animals, I stopped in Pretoria for a night before returning to Europe. And there authorities of the Kruger Park informed me of a lion fight the previous day. It had involved solely lionesses and occurred just outside the gates of a park camp before dozens of awed witnesses. Eight or nine lionesses had taken part. One was dead, several were seriously mauled. What the fight had been about no one knew.

Since lionesses defend territory against lionesses, never against males, one might guess that the Kruger incident was territorial. But I have learned my lesson about guessing. In African Genesis I described a well-witnessed fight which had occurred three years earlier between two giant male gorillas on the high slopes of Mount Muhavuru in western Uganda. (The ape, we are assured, is never aggressive, let alone violent.) The fight lasted for twelve days until one of the monsters died. Not badly injured, he died apparently, like the Glasgow rat, of defeat. No sexual motive for the fight was possible. I ascribed the fight, dubiously, to territorial conflict since there seemed no other cause. But then later Schaller's studies of the mountain gorilla in the same chain of volcanoes revealed no tendency toward territorial defense. And so I do not know why the gorillas fought, as I cannot be sure why the Kruger's lionesses fought, and I have no inkling why Castor killed Pollux or why the Serengeti males killed the cubs or why the lion in Nairobi Park developed Jack the Ripper tendencies. All may be understandable to lions, but not, as a human being, to me.

It may be argued that such evidences of violent behavior in dangerous animals are isolated and of small significance. But the evidences have been gathered from a relatively small number of animals regularly observed. I should suggest that the incidence of violent solutions among observed lions compares excellently with the murder rate in our most lethal and highly publicized cities.

By no means does such a suggestion return us to the nineteenth century's "nature red in tooth and claw." But neither should we accept the nice-kitty fallacy that today is becoming all too fashionable. Dangerous animals are so described because they are dangerous. And if we are to inspect the propensity for violence in the most dangerous of all species, our own, then we cannot -- through a reverse interpretation of human uniqueness -- pretend that we alone in all nature sometimes fail to resist the temptations of the violent way. Such a procedure replaces the over-simplifications of the nineteenth century with the over-simplifications of the twentieth.

Having presented what evidence I have for deadly quarrels among species boasting reputations better than ours, I find it time to turn to those two quite different expressions of human violence, the struggles among groups of social partners and the struggles between organized societies. And since I regard war as the least of the threats to the human future, may I be permitted to turn to it first?

In the summer of 1945, shortly before our present generation of students was born, American warplanes deposited nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities. The shock that leveled the cities spread its emotional shatter around the world. But following the first horror and the first awful guilt, many an imaginative mind began to ponder. The destruction of life and property had been of little greater order than that of the Americans' earlier and terrible fire raid on Tokyo, or the inexcusable destruction of Dresden by combined Allied air forces. Yet neither had ended a war nor afflicted a world's conscience. Not the act but the idea of Hiroshima was what rocked us. No imaginable action of whatever horror could shake us that deeply, since human history from its early beginnings had habituated us to the worst. What shook us was the unimaginable. The idea of Hiroshima was too new to behold.

In the year following, as some imaginations came slowly to comprehend the idea itself, I listened to many a speculation that the terrifying instant in Japan had indeed marked the end of general warfare. The struggles of armies which from civilization's earliest moments had provided mankind with its principal stimulation could play no part in a future world. The destruction of a Dresden, the burning of a Tokyo, had brought to history no prize beyond misery. But the incineration of two Japanese cities, terrible though the deed, had provided an idea that must wake from his dreams any future conqueror: neither victor nor vanquished could survive a weapon of such order. The Japanese price had been worth the purchase.

Such speculations went shortly out of fashion. Perhaps that unreliable figure, world conscience, condemned meditations so coarse. Or perhaps the cold war with its confrontations of superpowers and the growing balance of terror frightened us out of what wits we had. Not until fifteen years after Hiroshima, when I was concluding the writing of African Genesis, did I again confront the problem. By then, however, a different question had emerged in my mind: "How can we get along without war?" And I wrote: "It is the only question pertaining to the future that bears the faintest reality in our times; for if we fail to get along without war, then the future will be as remarkably lacking in human problems as it will be remarkably lacking in men."

I considered the possibilities of nuclear cataclysm and dismissed them as either unlikely or of merely academic interest. Cataclysm is not warfare, since among the dead one finds no differences; whereas warfare and the triumph of arms has through all our history been the final arbiter of the arguments of peoples. I wrote:

No man can regard the way of war as good. It has simply been our way. No man can evaluate the eternal contest of weapons as anything but the sheerest waste and the sheerest folly. It has been simply our only means of final arbitration. Any man can suggest reasonable alternatives to the judgment of arms. But we are not creatures of reason except in our own eyes.

I concluded that in far highest probability the easy answer of cataclysm would not be ours, that existence without warfare must somehow become our way. I compared man to the gorilla who in the heart of the Pliocene drought lost his forests and the boughs that had been the focus of his existence and descended to those bamboo thickets to which he was so ill-adapted. Could man, without his wars and weapons, survive?

Deprived of the contest of weapons that was the only bough he knew, man must descend to the cane-brakes of a new mode of existence. There he must find new dreams, new dynamics, new experiences to absorb him, new means of resolving his issues and of protecting whatever he regards as good. And he will find them; or he will find himself lost. Slowly his governments will lose their force and his societies their integration. Moral order, sheltered throughout all history by the judgment of arms, will fall away in rot and erosion. Insoluble quarrels will rend peoples once united by territorial purpose. Insoluble conflicts will split nations once allied by a common dream. Anarchy, ultimate enemy of social man, will spread its grey, cancerous tissues through the social corpus of our kind. Bandit nations will hold the human will a hostage, in perfect confidence that no superior force can protect the victim. Bandit gangs will have their way along the social thoroughfare, in perfect confidence that the declining' order will find no means to protect itself. Every night we shall build our nostalgic family nest in tribute to ancestral memories. Every day we shall pursue through the fearful cane-brakes our unequal struggle with extinction. It is the hard way, ending with a whimper.

So I wrote in African Genesis, And a decade later I find no persuasive evidence that my view was incorrect. A decade of declining fear of general warfare and consequent cataclysm has offered evidence, I believe, for another hypothesis of predictive value: Human violence, once fulfilled on the battlefield, is today being fulfilled in the city's streets.

There is a paradox involved. Organized warfare, although an exercise exclusively human in the vertebrate world, received in truth reinforcement from natural law, whereas social violence, the human expression replacing it, breaks every rule of social species. Intolerable though the damage of warfare might be, still it united societies, strengthened social contracts, and gave outlet for animal xenophobia. And if we are to prepare ourselves for any profound understanding of sabotage, rioty political kidnappings and assassination, then we should inspect carefully the concept of the stranger.

I have referred to the universality of animal xenophobia. The stranger is driven out of a group's social space and is physically attacked if his attentions persist. The howling monkey roars, alerting his fellows in the clan; the spider monkey barks; the lion, without ceremony, attacks. However the animosity for strangers is expressed, whether through attack or avoidance, xenophobia is there, and it is as if throughout the animal world invisible curtains hang between the familiar and the strange.

What constitutes a stranger? Observers in California once experimented with valley quail who live in coveys without territorial attachment. Coveys tolerate each other within the same feeding range, provided that strict social space is respected. Alien intrusion on that space will immediately be resisted. The observers found that if a bird is taken from a group and returned within a week he will be accepted as a familiar. But kept away for five weeks, on his return he will be greeted as an alien. He has been forgotten. Similarly, they found that an alien who lingers about the periphery of a covey's space for about the same length of time will come to be accepted as a familiar.

One would expect that primates with sharper perceptions than valley quail would come to know and accept a persistent recruit more quickly. But it is not so. In his early observations of the howling monkey Carpenter watched the efforts of a solitary male to join a group. He was of course greeted with roars and pursuit upon first sighting. The performance was repeated day after day. But how long would it last? Sometimes for days he would disappear, or Carpenter would lose track of him and believe he had given up. But then again he would appear, and once he bore a fresh vivid wound as a reward for his persistence. Then slowly antagonism lessened. When the study was suspended, four months after the original contact, the immigrant was being permitted to remain on the periphery of the group. He was becoming a familiar, although he had not yet attained the status of naturalized citizen.

In his recent study of vervet monkeys in Kenya's Amboseli, Struhsaker kept careful notes on a parallel situation. For reasons unknown, an adult male left one group under observation in an effort to join another. It was November when he made his first foray and in uproar was put to flight. By the end of December, however, his presence was being tolerated, though ignored. Then within another month he was helping to defend his new group's territory. His success came more quickly than Carpenter's howler, but still the process was a slow one.

Most observers agree that in a successful group all members must know one another as individuals. Xenophobia, as I suggested earlier, becomes a force assuring that social partners will be familiars. Even when immigration is permitted, it is only after a long process of familiarization. Predictability of behavior makes group life possible. And when the unpredictable occurs in a familiar, the response may be as violent as to a stranger.

In the course of his long studies of the herring gull Niko Tinbergen used a net to capture gulls for marking. Netting, however, presented problems, since his approach to a colony would raise the alarm call and set the birds to flight. And so he devised a trap. First he disarranged the eggs in a nest while the parents were away. Then he retreated about twenty yards to a blind from which with a string he could spring his net trap. A parent, returning, would immediately lean over the nest to straighten out the eggs, and the net would be sprung. But an odd event followed. The gull, struggling under the net, would immediately be attacked and pecked by swarming fellow gulls. He was behaving strangely.

In The Herring Gull's World Tinbergen regrets that concern for the survival of his netted victim prevented his ever making detailed study of the attackers. To him the social attack on the strangely behaving seemed of broad significance:

In human society, "primitive" as well as "civilized," a similar instinctive reaction is very strongly developed. It is perhaps possible to distinguish three steps or gradations of rising intensity in the social-defense attitude of the crowd. The first is laughing at an individual who behaves in an abnormal way. This serves the function of forcing the individual back into normal, that is to say conventional behavior. The next and higher intensity reaction is withdrawal; the individual has made himself "impossible" and his companions ignore him. This, viewed from the aspect of biological significance, is a still stronger stimulus to the abnormal person to behave normally. The highest intensity reaction is one of definite hostility, resulting in making the individual an outcast, and, in primitive societies, even of killing him. In my opinion it is of great importance for human sociology to recognize the instinctive basis of such reactions, and to study them comparatively in other social species.

We should recall that the herring gull, living and breeding in its noisy, crowded colonies, is a species in which restraints on aggressive behavior reach something near perfection. Through territory, through postures of submission, through such a spectacular displacement activity as madly pulling up grass when frustrated angers boil over, actual fighting is virtually eliminated. But in response to the strange, all rules are off. Aggressive behavior in an instant becomes violent.

The rejection of the strange, whether the strangely behaving or the actual stranger, combines with Hediger's social distance -- the maximum distance that a social member will stray from his familiar fellows -- to effect social integrity in animal groups. As we have seen elsewhere, rejection need not be accomplished by such forceful means as the defense of territory, or by the emotional assertions of antagonism such as demonstrated by the rhesus monkey. Xenophobia between groups may very well be expressed by simple avoidance, as do the langurs in central India's spacious forests, or as do those exotic creatures in Borneo's mangrove swamps, the great-nosed proboscis monkeys. Here space is not so great. In seven square miles along a river eight troops, each of about twenty individuals, were kept under observation. There was never conflict. On one occasion two troops slept in a single area, separating in the morning. But passive xenophobia ensured that there was no contact at all.

Even physical avoidance and the maintenance by one means or another of exclusive social space may be unnecessary in some species to express xenophobia. Aloofness may do. Phyllis Jay's langurs sometimes met at waterholes. They ignored each other. Psychological space prevailed. Baboons do the same. Family parties of zebra may seem to combine in single, endless herds on an African savanna, but each keeps to its own. So do African buffalo. And although a single alpha male exerts a sexual monopoly within a sexually mixed group, and although groups are so closely associated as to seem one herd to the unpracticed eye, still almost never does a male buffalo leave his group in an attempt to join another. The powerful lure of the familiar combines with the uneasy fear of the strange.

That animal societies are closed, and kept separated by distrust and antagonism, has been a worry to all Utopians devoted to an ultimate brotherhood of man. For those so worried, a paper that appeared in 1966 was like a tranquilizer prescribed by a most respected doctor. The paper was called "Open Groups in Hominid Evolution," and it was written by a British primatologist, Vernon Reynolds, who with his wife had made an excellent study of the chimpanzee in the Budongo forest of western Uganda. In his paper Reynolds ably summarized known evidences of human evolution back to the separation of the hominid from the ape lines certainly twenty million years ago. His description of contemporary human societies could scarcely be bettered:

Modern man is territorial and aggressive, hostile to and intolerant of strangers, and lives within an authoritarian social structure in which self-assertiveness and competition for dominance characterizes the successful male.

Reynolds then presents an argument that we must recognize: that such societies are of recent origin and culturally determined. For evidence supporting his conclusion, he looks to the social organizations of the great apes, our nearest relatives. The chimpanzee exhibits, in Reynolds' opinion, neither the xenophobia which I have been describing nor the social ranks which we have earlier considered. It is a loose society, an open society, in which strangers are greeted amiably, even with excitement. Chimpanzee life comes closer than the life of any other primate to the arcadian existence which we once attributed to the human ancestor. But the chimpanzee is not our ancestor.

The thesis presented by Vernon Reynolds has been acclaimed widely if uncritically, since it shores up the tenet of cultural anthropology that, since human fault has been culturally determined, it may be culturally corrected. The thesis offends no follower of Jean-Jacques Rousseau -- another distinct advantage. But gremlins haunt the machinery of its logic.

The gorilla is as closely related to man as the chimpanzee. His society is as authoritarian as any in the primate world. While exchanges between groups take place more frequently than in monkeys, still Schaller's long study of the mountain gorilla revealed small change in nuclear arrangements. Gorilla society cannot be described as open.

About the orang we know little. They seem virtual solitaries, avoiding everybody. The male even avoids his wife.

Our knowledge of the chimpanzee is today based on three studies, all excellent, by Jane van Lawick Goodall, by Adriaan Kortlandt, and by the Reynoldses themselves. None confirms the open society. That Goodall was able to identify two thirds of the chimps that came her way in the many years of her famous study suggests -- ^as it has suggested to Washburn and others -- that what she was observing was a single society divided into shifting sub-groups. All were familiars. Kortlandt's observations were made in a banana plantation verging on a Congo forest. His was an undoubtedly discrete society divided into a nursery group of mothers and young, and shifting subgroups of males, sub-adults, and childless females. On one occasion he watched forty, all surely familiars, raiding the banana plantation at once. The Reynoldses themselves, in their earlier paper recording their direct observations in a forest environment resembling Kortlandt's, guessed at a home range of six to eight square miles with only all-male bands venturing farther. In each region of three they estimated a population of about seventy. It would accord perfectly with the observations of Goodall and Kortlandt.

What the evidences suggest is that social distance in the great ape is fairly large. One may wander far from one's familiars. But there exists at some point a borderline, turning them back to their familiars, and that separates whole bands one from another. Perhaps memory in the great ape, superior to that of the monkey, does not require continual reinforcement. But there are other considerations denigrating parallels between ape and man.

The ape is powerful. His dependence on society for protection is so minimal that Schaller could not believe that the last male gorillas had been killed, as reported, by leopards on Mount Muhavuru. Yet the hominid, our evolutionary ancestor, weighed rarely over eighty pounds.

The ape's relations are amiable, it is true, and if not egalitarian in the gorilla, certainly approximating the relationship in the chimp. But Goodall observed that when meat was at stake -- when a chimp, for example, had caught and killed a monkey or a bushbuck -- the dominance of the killer was total. All others sat about with supplicating hands, and while he dispensed a favor or two, he munched his meat in the alpha role, ignoring his inferiors. But the chimp kills infrequently. Our ancestors killed for a living.

And we come to the final consideration of Reynolds' thesis. Terrestrial man and arboreal ape have been environmentally separated for a good twenty million years, in terms of the challenge of natural selection. The chimpanzee is the product of one road, we are the product of another. It is a long time, even in terms of evolution, and to equate the end-products is a wishful indulgence. But beyond all such criticism must remain a final roadblock in romanticism's way. Among almost two hundred species of the primate family, few evolutionary failures can be compared with the gorilla, the chimp, the orang. Limited in adaptability, they are confined to small provinces of the earth's terrain. Powerful though they may be in terms of muscular advantage, intelligent though they may be in terms of laboratory tests, the great apes all approach extinction. The Age of the Alibi tells us that this failure is due only to man's incursions. Yet here is the baboon thriving beyond human enmity such as the great ape has never known. His brain is smaller. But the integration of all baboon minds into a social mind has been an accomplishment that the ape has never approached. As one cannot equate the life of the baboon with the lives of the great apes, so even less can one equate the history of Homo sapiens, the most successful of primate species, with the history of the apes, our most astounding failures.

Superior survival has been in baboon terms, just as in ours, a condition of a superior social contract. Were Reynolds correct in his description of the unique open society of the ape, he would still be describing a character of evolutionary failure opposed to a character of evolutionary success. But one must not neglect his "Open Groups" paper, since, whatever future research may confirm or deny, it represents the most informed support for an argument quite opposite to my own. If I dismiss it, I do not ignore it.

General evidence, I believe, supports the conclusion that xenophobia is a factor in the life of all organized societies, and that certainly in the primate family the open society does not exist. The stranger is necessary, and antagonism directed against him has a biological basis beyond wishful denial. The hostility assures that the group will consist of familiars. It unites the group through the process which I describe as the amity-enmity complex. If an animal society is based on a territory, then joint defense of the territory against an intruding stranger not only enhances energy but enjoins mutual trust and sacrifice, just as a human group defending its homeland must seldom have problems with the social contract.

Can we wonder that warfare, satisfying such natural demands, has flourished throughout human history? Can we wonder that man, like other social animals, carries within him a dual code of behavior? As Gorer suggested, there must be few human groups that do not distinguish between the killing of an insider and the killing of an outsider. The one is murder, and for it we may be hanged; the other carries a variety of distinctions the best of which is a medal. Washburn has presented a similar estimate: "Whatever the origin of this behavior it has had profound effects on human evolution, and almost certainly every human society has regarded the killing of members of certain other human societies as desirable."

Neither Gorer nor Washburn was referring specifically to organized warfare, but rather to the social tolerance of violent behavior so long as it is directed outward. Warfare as we have known it is no more than a cultural institution, like the home or the market place, providing multiple satisfactions for a variety of biological demands characteristic of social species. I find it unlikely that any institution so efficient in its satisfaction of a natural demand could ever have been abolished except by the character of warfare itself. But that is what has been happening in our time. That war has become impractical and therefore unfashionable is evidence that as an institution it is not in itself a genetic expression.

What we have in our genetic endowment is the rejection of strangers and probably the propensity for violence. These have not been abolished. All that is vanishing from the human scene is the institution that once provided satisfaction for both without damage to social integrity. And so, subconsciously, we provide an answer to the question "How do we get along without war?" We transfer energies once directed outward to the inward expression known as social violence. But such an expression presents an intriguing problem, for now we must invent strangers.

The future of violence is immense beyond conception, the richest crop today ripening in human fields. The old-fashioned patriot may sigh for days when national honor, or sometimes national survival, compelled young men to go forth and somewhere beyond the horizon sink battleships, return or fail to return from bombing raids, perform daring landings on unpronounceable islands, ravage somebody else's countryside with massive mobile armor, slug it out bayonet to bayonet in fanatically defended piles of rubble which had once been cities, maim or preferably kill an absolute maximum of strange less-than-human-beings whom one had never met anyhow, and, above all, to bring a little excitement into this normally boring world. But the old-fashioned patriot is in a rut; he fails to use his imagination.

I have paid, I believe, sufficient tribute to war as an outlet for violent enthusiasms. It has been civilized man's most popular entertainment, but it was never perfect. War had two grave defects: For one thing, it was invisible, and, for another, it was undemocratic. War was invisible in that for the vast majority of the peoples involved the action was somewhere else. I cannot deny that during the Second World War the mass bombing of cities corrected this defect to a degree. The British citizen, for example, may recall such affronts as among the best days of his life. Even with such minor advances, however, war remained to its last days in great part invisible.

But war also throughout history has been undemocratic. In earlier days it was the privilege of a small professional class. In later times, as warfare expanded in scope, such professionals were no longer enough and so selected civilians were extended the privilege of participation. Still, however, there was discrimination. An aging general sporting ivory-handled pistols might occasionally appear where the action was, but the privilege of getting one's brains blown out was extended, by and large, only to that elite class, the young males. It may be true that the violent enthusiasms of the young exceed that of any other of society's sub-groups. Yet the propensity for violence, whether or not it is of genetic origin, exists like a layer of buried molten magma underlying all human topography, seeking unceasingly some unimportant fissure to become the most magnificent of volcanoes. Individuals may vary widely in their taste for violence, as they vary widely in their taste for avocados. Yet to deny its incidence in all human groups -- male, female, old, young, the immature -- is the most flagrant of discriminatory attitudes. Warfare's tendency to remain invisible was bad enough; but the restriction of its pleasures to a single human class was an oversight of undemocratic, even unforgivable, proportions.

That leftover wars of recent years such as that in Vietnam are unpopular, unreal, purposeless and, above all, unwinnable need cause small regret; the new expressions of the violent way will be neither invisible nor undemocratic. Violence will take place on your doorstep. Old, young, male, female -- whoever you are, the equalitarian dispensation of civil disorder will present you with equal opportunity to enjoy the excitement of violent dispositions. No longer need you experience such pleasures vicariously. No longer need you resent the monopoly of youth over violent outlets. You yourself may participate in those elegant confrontations of life and death which formal warfare normally denied you. You yourself, whoever you are, may enjoy that most delectable of human tantalizations, the possibility when you get up in the morning that you will not be alive at bedtime. For all -- not just for the elite young -- boredom will be extinguished.

In any consideration of such a human future, you and I must make our approaches methodically. And since the most effective displays of civil violence rest on the antagonisms of subgroups, let us first give thought to their arrangements.

In any animal society, unless it is very small, the phenomenon of sub-groups is present. In an earlier chapter I gave lengthy attention to the peer group, the young-of-an-age, which as it approaches maturity must challenge or find other means of assimilation into the ranks of established males. I indicated my belief that in today's human society the peer group is replacing the family as a fundamental unit of social structure. We are returning to the typical arrangements of almost all primate societies, whether as common as the baboon or as uncommon as the colobus.

The family sub-group, centered on the parents, has had an honored place in traceable human history. Within the primate line, however, its incidence is rare, and even in earlier pro-simians such as lemur species one finds only occasional expression. The family, normally polygamous, seems a standard grouping only in more distantly related mammals such as the horse and the zebra, certain rodents, certain predators like the lion. Birds seem most faithful to the monogamous expression but they are far away from our evolutionary line. In the human emergence any sensible guess would be that the family has been a latecomer.

Far more powerful throughout the species has been the all-male band such as one finds in elephants and most antelopes, in most deer, and, as we have just seen, in the chimpanzee. In his Men in Groups Lionel Tiger has stressed its significance despite the disruptive influence of the family throughout human history and almost all human cultures. The all-male band is a natural sub-group not to be neglected as we explore civil violence.

Frequently overlooked is the grouping of females, sometimes of strong if subtle influence, as in the howling monkey or the patas. The nursery group, whether in the elk or the topi herd or the chimp, may be of no more significance than what is left when the males decide they want no part of domestic responsibility. Yet in large primate societies like the baboon and rhesus a most definite tendency appears for certain females to form preference groups among themselves, even though the whole society be sexually mixed. Concerted female action -- if we are to read as seriously as we should such a book as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique -- may provide an unexpected source of violent behavior in the human future.

What is demonstrated by animal societies is the structural necessity for sub-groups. If a society is to fulfill its obligation to members, if it is to provide education for the young, protection from external enemies, orderly relations among members, and psychological satisfaction for certain innate needs, then, like any organization, it develops a degree of departmentalization. And integration of sub-groups is facilitated not only by such factors as xenophobia and social distance, but by perfect communication. Everyone understands what anybody else says.

Animal signals, whether vocal or visual, are largely innate, and so there can be no misunderstanding their meaning. Some birdsong is learned. But if a gelada monkey lifts its eyebrows, revealing a yellow stripe, there is a threat. No one can misunderstand. If a wolf or a rhesus monkey carries his tail high, all know: he is an alpha. If a samango monkey in his treetop home chirps like a bird, then all become alert, for there is possible danger. Animal signals may be limited and inflexible, but they are precise and incapable of misconstruction. The enormous potentialities of human language, counted by many as the foundation of human success, carry with them no such integrating command.

It is a truism that the diversity of human languages and dialects offers more barriers to common understanding than all the diversity of human gene pools that heredity can provide. We may praise communication, but in the human species noncommunication might seem to a baboon anthropologist a more striking feature of our way. By no more instant means do we identify the stranger than by his alien language, his alien dialect, or his alien accent. Within a human society the speaking of a single language serves, as in any animal society, to integrate sub-groups. Yet so subtle is a single human tongue that differences of inflection, of connotation, of construction, of even vocabulary serve as well to separate sub-groups as to integrate them.

The prime foundation for the future of civil violence must be the invention of strangers. And the prime ingredient for the invention of strangers must be non-communication between those who speak the same language.

That strangers must somehow be created in our midst is a need so drastic that without accomplishment civil violence might well fail. The dual code that acts upon us is not of human origin and lies probably beyond human veto. Charity for a social partner might in the end so undermine our merciless determinations that social chaos would prove just as impossible as social utopianism itself. To succeed we must have strangers among us. We must have those sub-groups so targeted by dependable xenophobia that sympathy becomes impossible and only contempt and contusion will do. But to create strangers we must have non-communication.

For the moment I pass over those fortunate societies like the Canadian or the Belgian, divided already by differing languages. Their future, at least for a simple start, is assured. The challenge to human ingenuity, as I see it, is to create non-communication between sub-groups of a single society speaking a single tongue. And we must bow to the never ceasing resourcefulness of that triumphant creature, man. Already, without knowing what is happening to him or in any sense knowing what he is doing, man is exploring the new way.

Students and faculty, for example, could never have accomplished in our universities even their tentative scuffles of violence and destruction if either group had not been richly provided with non-comprehension concerning the other. The universities present an excellent example indeed, since here presumably the same language is spoken with fluency, authority and precision. Yet on many a campus the handicap has been overcome so overwhelmingly that non-communication flourishes and the supply of strangers becomes as bountiful as the enticements of violence may demand.

The achievement of the universities admittedly has been nourished by the achievements of the floundering home. A few old-fashioned families may still cling to a degree of affection, love and toleration but, as we all know, understanding between parents and children has been for long on the way out. What goes on in the parent becomes as mysterious to the young as what the young are up to remains a mystery to the parent. The peer group claims its own, shares its secrets, compares its miseries, extends its compassions, enthrones its ignorances, amalgamates its hostilities. The parent is a stranger. He shares his guilts and his angers with his kind, yet has no true sub-group to turn to. It is a lonely sort of fate.

One of the few flaws that I can see in the crystalline future of civil disorder is the improbability of organized violence between parents and young. While mutual non-comprehension may reach the most perfect level, while the creation of strangers has already attained conspicuous success, while hostility flourishes and conditions of downright enmity sometimes prevail, still something is lacking. And I believe it is because the young, organized into a legion by the peer group, face in that stranger, the parent, too contemptible, too pathetic, too bewildered an object for worthy attack. Whether mother or father, they are fading, relics of another time when the reign of the family prohibited strong ties with others. Friends they might have had, or brothers, sisters, cousins. But the biological role of the independent family effectively prevented the encouragement of a parent class. And so today, understanding nothing of their children and almost as little of each other, parents present a woebegone face. Old battered shipwrecks floating on new seas, they tempt few guns.

I may of course be lacking foresight. The formidable all-male band may find itself reinvigorated by family disintegration and present the young with something to get violent about. For the immediate future, however, the significant contribution of the parent is to generate animosities which, consolidated by the peer group, may be redirected at policemen, university faculties, or other more satisfying targets. It is a contribution to be respected, even by the young themselves.

I am inclined to agree with those who ascribe to our capacity for communication a significant foundation for human triumph and the clearest distinction between human and other species. But I believe that one can demonstrate that our capacity for non-communication is quite as remarkable, and quite as essential if through violence we are to approach that final achievement, social destruction. There is another ingredient, however, without which we should probably fail.

The intricacy of sub-groups in human societies lies of course beyond the grasp of other species. Religious differences can play no part in animal life, just as racial divisions are denied by geographical separation. More elaborate by far, however, are the sub-groupings that have come about through division of labor. They are infinite: longshoremen and cattle ranchers, truck drivers and schoolteachers, firemen and fishermen, doctors, soldiers, priests, carpenters, actors, postmen, criminals: there is no end. And in every such group, just as in the peer group or the all-male band, members have more in common with one another than with the community at large.

The spectacular divisions of human society, together with the developing arts of non-communication, lend spectacular hope to the future of social violence. We may throughout the 1960's have watched with awe the latent violence released by religious differences in an Ulster or an India. We may with even greater intensity have watched the hostilities of white and black in America, or with lesser attention the animosities of black and Indian in East Africa, the little-reported struggle of black and Arab in the southern Sudan, the overwhelming massacre of Chinese in Indonesia. Religious or racial hostilities come easily to man. Such non-communication is a quality virtually built into our relationships, and the stranger is identifiable from birth. I suspect that it will be the conflicts of quite different groups that will provide us with the furniture of future dismay.

Let us remind ourselves that aggressiveness, natural to all living beings, is the determined pursuit of one's interests. And aggressiveness becomes violence only with physical threat or assault. Let us also reflect that civil violence (I do not enter into such personal expressions as wife-beating or house-breaking) involves always a minority, a sub-group by definition. Either a minority like the black in America resorts to violence to gain its ends, or a majority like the Indonesians confronting their Chinese crushes a sub-group to prevent the gaining of such ends. A sub-group may live in peace with its fellows; but ideal indeed is the society in which conflicts of interest do not exist. And I do not believe that the final vulnerability of human society looks to such major sub-groups as are formed by race or religion. Rebellions will be crushed, or accommodations will be found. The insoluble conflicts rest on division of labor.

In America blacks and whites, parents and young, students and faculties have demonstrated the workability of non-communication and the creation of strangers. But as the baboon learns quickly what a troop is eating, so we learn quickly arts pioneered by friends or enemies. And I find it difficult to believe that among those countless sub-groups created by division of labor there are not some rapidly learning their lessons. While the strike is an action of aggressiveness on the part of a sub-group pursuing its interests, it is not, as such, an action of violence. Yet borderline cases become more and more frequent. When firemen or policemen or doctors strike, the action leaves the whole society as vulnerable to physical damage as if assault had been staged. When in Britain a few hundred factory workers stage a wildcat strike without union consent, throwing tens of thousands of their fellows out of work, the suffering of workers exceeds the suffering of management. Can one doubt that non-communication is making its inroads, and that even the fellow worker is becoming a stranger in the eyes of the small sub-group?

We have had countless opportunities in the past, when communication, if not perfect, still existed, to set up such institutions as the labor court for the adjustment of undoubted grievances without recourse to the strike. With the exception of a very few smaller societies, we failed. Now the large society finds itself more and more at the mercy of an infinite number of sub-groups without whose services it cannot survive. The days are passing when there still existed sufficient compassion on the part of the sub-group to restrain actions too damaging. These were the days, also, when the threat of external enemies united us, and the exercise of general warfare provided outlet for violent disposition. Now violence turns inward. Now the art of non-communication inhibits compassion for our social partner. And it is unreasonable to believe that social inhibition will long restrain the violent ripping of our social fabric.

The ultimate vulnerability of every society -- the more advanced, the more vulnerable -- is division of labor. It is a sense in which the under-developed country, not yet committed to a course of extreme specialization, grasps at least for the present a lively advantage. Though many may die in conflicts of tribe or religion, yet the more primitive society survives as a whole. It is the industrial society, irreversibly committed to human interdependence, that must react as a single organism to the dagger of civil violence.

The Guardian, in its admirable editorial, referred to Ulster as a neurotic society and to raging minorities elsewhere as paranoid. I am not sure that I agree. A touch of paranoia is inevitable if members of a sub-group are to test their strength against the weight of a majority, and to risk life and certainly comfort against odds. Any sense of injustice must be aggrandized to a point where risk becomes acceptable. Yet I find myself doubtful that such social scenes should be characterized as neurotic, since we neglect a prime fact that the youth with a paving-stone in his hand is enjoying himself.

We enjoy the violent. We hurry to an accident not to help, we run to a fire not to put it out, we crowd about a schoolyard fight not to stop it. For all the Negro's profound and unarguable grievances, there has not been a racial outbreak in America since the days of Watts in which a degree of carnival atmosphere has not prevailed. I myself may have no great taste for Molotov cocktails; it is because I am timid, not because I am good. Suttles, in his work with juvenile gangs in the Chicago slum, found that an expectation that gang members would join in an action could be analyzed: stealing might attract a fair number, but the prospect of a fight would enlist almost all. Few studies of violent crime or violent gangs show neurosis as significant motivation. Were we truly sick societies, then I suggest that the violent way might be more easily containable; it is because we are healthy that we are in trouble.

Action and destruction are fun. The concerned observer who will not grant it indulges in an hypocrisy that we cannot afford. And unlikely it is that an attitude regarding a taste for violent action as a human perversion will make any great contribution to the containment of our violent way. Similarly, the observer who seeks nothing but earnest motivation in riot and arson, who looks only to environmental deprivation, neglect, or injustice to explain it -- who, in other words, seeks wholly in the actions of the majority the motivations of the minority -- may flatter himself one day that he was violence's most dependable ally.

The Age of the Alibi, presenting greater sympathy for the violator than the violated, has with elegance prepared us for maximum damage as we face a future of maximum civil disorder. A philosophy which for decades has induced us to believe that human fault must rest always on somebody else's shoulders; that responsibility for behavior damaging to society must invariably be attributed to society itself; that human beings are born not only perfectible but identical, so that any unpleasant divergences must be the product of unpleasant environments; that the suggestion of individual responsibility on the part of the social member or the sub-group for which he bears accountability is retrogressive, reactionary, Calvinistic: such a philosophy has prepared in all splendor the righteous self-justifications of violent minorities, and has likewise prepared with delicate hand the guilts and the bewilderments of the violated.

As one views the vistas of violent behavior rising before contemporary man like the swelling foothills confronting the traveler as he approaches the Rocky Mountains, a conclusion comes with too great ease that we are finished. Men can live neither with one another nor without. Extinction is on the cards. But any such conclusion is superficial. The social contract is an arrangement of biological validity. Like the sexual impulse or human diversity, it acts, in its balancing of order and disorder, to preserve the species with a power far beyond human predilection. What is at stake in our times is not the survival of man, but the survival of man's most rewarding of all inventions, democracy. Again I recall White's comment, after Caesar had passed beyond the Rubicon, that when a people cannot agree on how to rule themselves, someone else will do it for them.

There is visible throughout all nature a bias in favor of order. We have no means to explain it, and perhaps never shall. But the bias is there. A prejudice governs the movement of stars within galaxies, galaxies in their relations with others. Order commands the orbits of planets about their sun, moons about their planet. Order invests all living processes, and while hindsight may sanctify it, still order is there. Evolution and natural selection are no more than names for those processions which any may observe in the history of species. That animal treaties are honored; that baboons do not commit suicide in wars of troop against troop; that kittiwakes successfully defend their cliff-hung properties and raise their young; that lions and elephants restrict their numbers so that a habitat will not be exhausted by too numerous offspring; that lemmings embaTk on suicidal marches when there are too many lemmings, and snowshoe hares drop dead; that when species can no longer meet the challenge of environment, they must quietly expire: all such transactions of animals furnish simple testimony to the prejudices of order in natural ways.

Our recent investigations of democracy have been experiments, no more. And if human temptation to do violence, whatever its origin, lies in our social arrangements beyond voluntary control, then we may be well assured that anarchy will not be the winner. Order will be imposed upon disorder. And we shall return to more primitive political dispensations in which the citizen submits to violent impositions beyond his power to challenge, and keeps the peace because he must.

If an evolutionary approach to our various human dilemmas advances not at all a capacity to solve or ameliorate them, then it becomes an exercise in systematic pessimism. But if the I acceptance of man as an evolved animal leads to hypotheses of a predictive value superior to those that have formerly guided us, then we may be permitted to hope that some doors at least which previously blocked our way may at last stand open. And even though the evolutionist's hypotheses may shock us, still we cannot apply to them the pain-pleasure principle: that if they give us pain, we shun them; if they give us pleasure, we J embrace them. Painfully though an hypothesis may penetrate j our habituated acceptances, still one legitimate question may be asked, Is it of value or is it not? Does it reveal or conceal?

I can find nothing shocking in the hypothesis that within a democratic society any tolerance of violence, whatever its original justification, that leads to the proliferation of violence leads in all likelihood to the death of democracy. It is a proposition that scarcely demands evolutionary materials to sustain. Anyone, for example, who survived the strikes of 1969 in Italy experienced not only the apprehensions of anarchy but its unworkability as a mode of human life. Then when in early 1970 the keepers of the Rome zoo went on strike for a single day -- in Italy the children's holiday that in the Protestant world is known as Epiphany -- and again at Easter, the observer must wonder. Just what are the final limits of non-communication? Here is a people that above all others worships the bambino -- whether your own or the next family's or the Son of Mary -- yet among them are those who will strike against children.

The Italians will, of course, develop a measure of self-restraint for which history exhibits no precedent: they will surrender certain freedoms of action, a step for which the future shows small promise; or another Caesar must and will someday cross another Rubicon. The predictive value of the hypothesis lies in the certainty of the final step and the encouragement of more moderate steps to prevent it.

I have suggested that the hypothesis demands no evolutionary confirmation. It was available to Plato. It is available to any sane observer of contemporary events. Yet, oddly enough, it is the honest environmentalist who must be most deeply stricken by gloom. Since no improvement of environment has thus far been accompanied by other than increasing incidence of violence both criminal and civil, any future projection must be one of helplessness and total despair. Only if one approaches the hypothesis from the viewpoint of evolutionary psychology does one begin to see light.

To speak of evolutionary psychology is to christen the baby before it is born. A principal contribution of my own investigations, however, falls somewhere within its unspecified dimensions. In The Territorial Imperative I introduced the hypothesis of innate needs common to men and all higher animals, and twice in this present inquiry I have made use of it. I believe it to be of diagnostic value if we apply it to the problem of violence.

I repeat briefly: There are three innate needs which demand satisfaction. The first is identity, the opposite of anonymity, and it is highest. The second is stimulation, the opposite of boredom. The lowest is security, the opposite of anxiety. Our innate needs form a dynamic triad. Achievement of security and release from anxiety present us with boredom. It is the psychological process least appreciated by our social planners, producing the bored society described by Desmond Morris in The Human Zoo. The bored society could not be a reality, however, were we other than the anonymous society stripped in large part of our opportunity to search for identity. Egalitari-anism, that most admired of human possibilities by the unsophisticated young, and the shrinking establishments of enlarging organizations, despised by the young, in equal measure contribute to the defeat of identity's satisfaction. And so the frustration of the search for identity just as much as the achievement of security forces the member of a contemporary society into the unendurable area of boredom. We are pressed as in a vise between the achievements of security and the denials of anonymity. No way presents itself but stimulation.

Pornography and riot are of a piece. They are means of stimulation from which varied appetites may seek stimulation. By no coincidence at all have waves of shock and sensation arrived simultaneously on the scene of a bored society. The exhibitions of demonstrators raising the blood pressure of their close-packed groups and the exhibitions by fashion of the female body hopefully raising the blood-pressure of the passing male -- their appeal is the same. The private titillations of the voyeur with his photographs from Denmark and the private hallucinations of the sense-stretching trip with its weeds from Mexico -- these too are the same. Sexual adventures among adolescents, casual adultery among their jaded elders, the display of nudity and intercourse on the screen or stage, the robbing of houses by affluent burglars, the sense-assaulting decibels of electronic music paralyzing the brains of its listeners, the baring of waitresses' breasts for the excitement of timid gentlemen who would collapse in terror if further were expected of them, the public display of illegitimacy in the obstetrical arrangements of the famous, the public display of dirty feet by oddly dressed young men who can find little else of stimulation to offer, the public display in a literary context of ancient, commonplace terms of the street by authors with larger vocabularies available -- all provide stimulation for shocker and shocked alike in bored societies with nowhere else to go.

The silent, weed-grown palaces of ancient stimulation provide evidence for its final futility, yet violence is of the same piece. It is exciting. It carries stimulation to both violator and violated, whether through the joyful hatreds of the one or the fearful rages of the other. A riot in Chicago is worth all the circuses that old-time emperors could provide. And like any other form of sensual shock, violence to retain its stimulation must proceed ever to stronger or more novel levels of expression. That adaptable animal, the human being, habituates himself too easily to any present situation. The film-goer, this year excited by normal intercourse on the screen, must next year be provided with fellatio. The demonstrator, in one year exalted by his mass marches, must in another incite police to violent confrontation. The postal striker, content in one season to paralyze business and domestic communication, must move on to staging massed demands at street intersections which hopefully will reduce all traffic to chaos.

Stimulation's progress rests not alone on the shocker, but also on the shocked, on the ease with which we get used to things. The peaceful march no longer excites us, the simple nude no longer attracts notice, the empty mailbox becomes accepted with a resentful sigh. The progress of stimulation requires in a sense cooperation of all parties. But the outcome of that progress separates in drastic fashion the sensualist and the violent. It is the weakness of sensualist shock that at some point it must cease to stimulate. Violence owns no such limitation.

I believe that as we refer to the triad of innate needs we shall glimpse more clearly the difference in actions seemingly so much of a piece. We are pressed into stimulation by the flight from boredom which itself has been induced by both security and denial of identity. But novel sensory experiences satisfy only our need for stimulation. Violent experiences tend to satisfy not only stimulation but identity as well. The participant in some new sensuous adventure may obtain a fleeting sense of uniqueness, of being different; the young explorer of drugs may feel himself superior to more conservative fellows and, without doubt, to disapproving elders. But the acquisition of identity can last only so long as the stimulus remains unique. When drugs become commonplace, he is just another hooked young person. In his own fogged vision he may retain an identity; it will be apparent to none other.

But the violent are applauded. Whether the applause be the praise of their collaborators or the condemnation of their antagonists, they are recognized, identified, released from anonymity. Whereas the sensualist achieves identity only in a private world, the violent achieve it in a public world or the stimulation is not worth the seeking. Excitement and recognition become one. Even though that world may have its mysteries, its secrets hidden like the privacy of a Mafia or an underground political conspiracy, still the whole threat is recognized and feared by the larger society, and within the dark principality of violence -- united, one may note, by the amity-enmity force -- individuals are dreaded, admired, hated, loved, ranked. Identity is achieved.

I do not discuss the violent solutions of individual disagreement. Although two thirds of all murders coming to the attention of Scotland Yard involve members of the same family, still the butchering of a husband by a wife, while a domestic indelicacy, is neither something new under the sun nor an eloquent harbinger of social catastrophe. That most peaceful of people, the Kalahari Bushmen, who regard violent dispute between members of a band as the coarsest of manners, accept the beating up of a wife by a husband or of a husband by a wife (whichever is the larger) as a normal episode in existence not unlike the rising of the moon. Individual disarrangements may be a product of our human disposition for violence. Like suicide, they may very well in their incidence be a symptom of social disintegration, of declining inhibition against the violent way, a reflection, indeed, of despair. But they are consequences at best certainly not causes, of the social phenomenon we are investigating.

The violent way that I discuss here is the creation, by means of physical threat or assault, of dark little worlds in the image of the society of which they are a part and against which they transgress. Such a world upholds its own values, defends its own territory, establishes its own rules, praises its own alphas, scorns or ignores its own omegas, punishes its own traitors. Whatever the nature of this little world of criminal or political conspirators, of juvenile gangsters, of grim old dedicated members of the establishment of power, of rebellious militants whatever their grievances or purposes, still much the same processes of the sub-group prevail: There is non-communication, eliminating social compassion. There is xenophobia, released by noncommunication to identify the majority of our social partners as the enemy. There is an illusion of central position, justifying one's own purposes as right and everybody else's as wrong, and providing a proper degree of paranoia. Righteous ends, thus proved, absolve of guilt the most violent means. And within this little world of lunacy a new fellowship blooms, a new communication flourishes, anonymity vanishes, identity again becomes possible.

That openly or secretly, consciously or unconsciously, we applaud violence's success can be inspected only in terms of human unreason and humanity's original sin. Yet we do. And as if subconsciously aware of our weakness, we find the principality of violent demand becoming a striking invention, still another tribute to the ingenuity of man in fulfilling his innate, seldom-recognized animal needs. The sub-group has transferred the attractions of old-time warfare to a contemporary social scene where the nuclear veto is impossible. But impossible likewise is the invention. We know that Rousseau's vision of a primal world in which solitary man was good, amiable, without need or animosity for his fellow, never existed in i man's dimmest beginnings or can exist in man's most remote j consummations. Likewise we know that the Hobbesian view of a primal world in which every man warred against every man could never have existed as it can never exist. Neither Rousseau nor Hobbes in those pre-Darwinian days recognized that the social imperative has always been with us and must be with \ us till the last human spark goes out. Nor has the social imperative ever so compelled us as it compels us today.

The violent sub-group even as it asserts itself defeats itself. The student depends on the postman if he is to receive his check from home. The postman depends on the milkman if his infant children are to survive. The milkman depends on the dentist, unless he intends to renounce toothaches. The dentist depends on the telephone system if the milkman is to make an appointment. The telephone system depends on God knows whom, black or white, if bells are to ring. And the black man depends on the ring of the telephone if he is to have hope of organizing any but an amateur riot. So it goes.

The intricacy of sub-groups in a modern, developed society presents us with our greatest vulnerability. But the intricate j web of interdependence should present equal dismay to the violent little worlds. The animal cannot stand alone, and least of all animals, modern man. I should sink into folly, however, if I presumed that in a time of advancing non-communication a proposition of such elementary logic could exert influence or inhibition on the actions of an animal renowned less for reason than for ruckus. And so let us return to evolution's playing fields, to their rules, to their regulations.

Governments may fall, societies will persist. There is no alternative. A new Caesar will cross a Rubicon; Italy will remain.

Technological achievement, while eliminating the need for economic security from the lives of growing majorities, condemns likewise to anonymity the same growing majorities. The search for identity will not vanish.

The violent sub-group, whatever its just demands or righteous protestations, seeks as a primary satisfaction the innate need for identity. Violence proposes present success, ultimate failure. The warring sub-group, denying the social needs of all others, denies in the end its own.

The evolutionary course stands as virtually an imperative. We have come to translate security solely in terms of freedom from material want. But walking across a storm-swept city to work when the busmen are on strike is not security. Climbing twenty-two floors to an office because electrical workers are on strike and elevators are stilled is not security. Being unable to telephone the doctor when your child is ill -- even the worry that one will be unable to -- this is less than the secure life. Being unable to cash your paycheck -- be you carpenter, oilfield rigger, or busman or telephone worker, for that matter -- because the bank clerks are out offers small security if the rent is due. And wondering, when your husband is unaccountably late from work, what might have happened down the street -- it is the uneasy way. Or listening tensely in a suburban bedroom -- were those footsteps outside or inside? They must have been outside, but why are things so quiet? It does not make for restful sleep. Or at the office the numbing news that your competitor has failed through incapacity to keep up production, while you know that you are as bad off as he is, and you have 800 employees who may fall victim if fifty strike. At home watching in horror on the television screen a riot on 18th Street -- the blood, the screams, the unloosed ferocity -- did your son go? for he said he might. Why oh why is your husband so late? Why oh why have you had not a word for three long months from your daughter at college? And your husband, stuck for two long hours in a traffic jam caused by a hundred or so persons in a seated demonstration at an intersection, is pondering emotionally the values of the police state.

The portrait I draw is a gentle one, exceeding in no detail present commonplaces of human experience. I include no flamboyant though quite certain projections of violence's future, neither mass ravage nor mass reprisal. What I have emphasized is simply the replacement of materialism's old insecurities by violence's new anxieties. The accomplishments of anarchy return the entire social body to preoccupation with the lowest of the innate needs: security. Whereas yesterday we wondered where the next meal would come from, tomorrow we must wonder where the next blow will fall.

The disintegration of security may take either of two roads. There is the new road which I have been discussing, the way of fear, of anxiety for one's person, the superb terror of that new unknowable, just what outrage may happen next. But there is also the quaint possibility of the old road: that the erosions of anarchy will dismantle our vast technological establishment. The immense industrial and agricultural complex which has banished or can banish economic insecurity from our lives rests, as much as any other social institution, on the web of interdependence. Without a high degree of order -- too high if we take the long view -- it cannot function. And so the old road may take us back to those scenes we thought behind us, through old villages of bankruptcy and bank failure, lowering productivity, diminishing exports, pay cuts, mass unemployment. It is possible.

One cannot predict the manner of one's own execution, whether by the hangman's noose or the firing squad at dawn. We seem presently determined on the one or the other. Yet. present determinations in a species so famous for its foresight, so inadequately equipped to display its credentials, excite small trust. How profound is our propensity for violence? We must look into it. To what degree is our capacity of foreseeing dependable? History will tell us, if the younger of those among us live to read it. Will some quite unpredictable surge of common sense overcome Homo sapiens in his extremity? While it is improbable, it is not impossible. Such could be our evolutionary way.

The evolutionist may treasure a certain optimism concerning man, because he is an animal. It is not an optimism to be taken too seriously. Yet a student of order and disorder may fairly predict that long, long before we achieve such calamities as I have outlined, decision will have been withdrawn from our command. Whether or not we have the vision to see him, still ; he is there beyond the broad dark river. He broods, he waits, just as he has always waited. Neither tall nor short, neither broad nor lean, shadowy in outline, without distinction of feature, he wears an odd sort of hat and an old, old sword at his side. And if we do not act in time, then he will.