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The Violence of Man

Remarks On Konrad Lorenz: On Aggression

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

David T. Wieck
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Violence pervades the mainstreams of human culture; indeed one could try to write the whole history of mankind as a history of violence. Traditional political histories, chronicles thick with wars, civil wars, conquests, struggles for nation and empire, seizures of state power, assassinations, insurrections, only begin to tell the story. Consider, for example: The plunder of India, the enslavement and exportation of Africans, the extortion of monopolies in the world's minerals, the exploitation and degradation of starving populations menaced by police and armies—all perfectly legal by the Thrasymachean laws of Europe and America—translates itself (congeals) finally into wealth, which bargains against poverty from positions of financial and technological power; which proclaims then a morality of peace, proposes to wipe the moral slate clean, but wishes to perpetuate a balance of power progressively more unfavorable to the powerless; and which is prepared for new violence (executes new violence) in order to preserve its disproportionate wealth, its privileged status, its authority. Now we have before us fuller principles for writing the history of mankind as the history of violence; for none of this is new under the sun, and a similar pattern has been repeated, former victims of colonialism not excepted, in the internal history of nation after nation.

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Type
Notes and Discussion
Information
Diogenes , Volume 16 , Issue 62 , June 1968, pp. 103 - 123
Copyright
Copyright © 1968 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

1 Begun as a review of Lorenz' book, this paper was developed for presentation to the Rensselaer Seminar in Philosophy and Science, January 11, 1967.

2 New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966; pp. XIV + 299.

3 Lorenz looks for the "ideal" pattern, which for various reasons many (or even most) individuals will not fulfill. Natural behavior in an Aristotelian sense is a legitimate object for scientific intuition when (by hypothesis) we have to do with instincts in presumable non-selfconscious animals.

4 Actually, the effects of natural-social selection may be much more complex, if one assumes as Lorenz apparently does that aggressive disposition is a variable quantity within a species. A stable society tends to shelter individuals who would have been unfit for the strenuous life of early man; it tends to protect pacifists and life-incompetent geniuses, as well as the subnormal individuals about whom eugenicists worry. There is also, I would think, a tendency for warriors to have small families, for other reasons besides short life-expectancy. One would seem to confront an unmanageable tangle of possible selection-tendencies.

5 In other words, "man" is not a purely biological concept, although I have followed Lorenz in using it as such loosely. "Then became man" is of course metaphorical; I should imagine that several stages separate man-animal from recognizable cultural-man.

6 We recognize immediately that we should not infer from what doves will do sometimes when caged to what they always "want" to do normally but are powerless to do. Yet we make such inferences incautiously about men. Carry this a step further: Suppose it is the case that most men live, in effect, in cages?— Freud's vision of civilization.

7 More generally one would say that Kant's morality individualizes what are better understood as social problems. (Perpetual Peace is another matter; but its philosophical weakness probably reflects the weakness of the rational ethics as foundation.) This criticism is akin in type to the criticism of Kantian aesthetics that it is a remarkable analysis of artistic excellence, especially in the Classical tradition, but misleadingly incomplete if taken as an account of aesthetic values.

8 Army organizations aim of course at eliciting ferocity in the ranks, at turning to account any dispositions to find gratification in violence. Yet the results are very complex. "I shot up Charlie in the paddies today," said the pilot, quoted in I.F. Stone's Weekly, 11/28/66. "I ran that little mother all over the place hosing him with guns but somehow or other we just didn't hit him. Finally, he turned on us and stood there facing us with the rifle. We really busted his ass then. Blew him up like a toy balloon." I do not quote this for the horror of it. I quote it to suggest that this man has chosen to be as he is, and to boast of it, because he could not otherwise have executed the orders he has been given, which he does not exceed. I do not think that he had anything to do with starting the war. (Secondarily, perhaps, he wants to leave no doubt in the mind of the civilian reporter of the nature of the airman's work.)