La Bête Humaine

This is the title of an 1890 French novel by Émile Zola. I read an English translation that retained the original French title. (The e-circumflex, ê, indicates that there used to be an s in the word. The word is obviously the equivalent of our “beast.”) Zola’s novels were scandalous at the time. This novel has a complex and compelling plot in which the evil desires of nearly all of the characters weave together into a web of murder. I don’t think a single main character was left alive at the end. You like train wrecks? This novel has two.

Zola’s reason for writing this novel, and many others, was to explore what it means to understand that we evolved from wild and savage animals. He makes no mention of evolution per se, but no reader at the time could miss his message. Speakers such as Herbert Spencer, and even preachers like Henry Ward Beecher, went around saying evolution was God’s way of ennobling us. Zola had a different view: evolution condemned us, rather than ennobling us.

This view of the human beast also meant that if someone was in the way of what you wanted to have, whether money or sex, you simply got them out of the way. One of the main characters, the woman Séverine, with whom nearly all of the men were in love and who took advantage of their weaknesses, thought to herself (about killing her husband), “He was in the way, so you got rid of him; what could be more natural?”

But these views were based on an understanding of evolution that we now know to be incorrect. The human beast was not just violent and aggressive; when Zola wrote, “The woman belonged to the [cave]man who could kill his rivals,” he was only partly right. Human nature also includes love and altruism. It is instinctual for us to be bad; it is also instinctual for us to be good. I have written frequently about altruism. Zola was therefore wrong, but so were most scientists. His characters thought, evolution has made me evil; but, in fact, evolution had made them both evil and good at the same time. (One of the characters had a psychiatric disorder; for him, perhaps, being good was impossible.)

The final scene is unforgettable. The only two main characters left alive, two train operators, hated each other because they both loved a woman whom one of them had just murdered. As the train moved at full speed, the men struggled and both fell off the train. The uncontrollable train, full of soldiers headed off to the front in the Franco-Prussian War, flew off to an inevitable catastrophe that even Zola did not dare to write about. This is the picture Zola leaves us with about what the world is like: it is a train on which selfish and clueless humans ride to their destruction.

The real “bête humaine” was society. That is, what some scientists today call the superorganism. No matter what happened, whether murders or train wrecks, the trains were back on their normal schedules with a delay of, at most, one day. The trains, the machine of life, all of society, continue on as if nothing good or (usually) bad has happened in any individual lives.

Face to Face with War: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, part 3

This is the third essay I have written about the novel The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Spanish novelist Vicente Blasco Ibañez. The world in 2021 is no less vulnerable to war than in any previous year, decade, century, or millennium.

I suppose it is about time to describe the novel itself. It is focused on Marcelo Desnoyers, a Frenchman who fled France to avoid being drafted into the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. He earned a fortune in Argentina and returned to France for what he considered to be the pinnacle of cultured life. He bought a big house, and then bought a castle in the country near the Marne River. He filled both places with incredible treasures. His two children were Argentinian citizens. One of them, his son Julio, became well-known in Paris for his dancing and his wasteful lifestyle. In particular, a married woman was his lover.

When the Great War started, Marcelo was too old to fight, and Julio was exempt because he was not a French citizen. The war changed everything for all of them. Marcelo went out to his castle, just in time, it turned out, for the Battle of the Marne. He saw it all from his castle, which the Germans attacked and plundered. The Germans not only slaughtered all of the people they could find in the village near the castle but were also full of arrogance. The German officers feasted on Marcelo’s food, and even dressed themselves in his daughter’s dresses and danced around. They shat upon the rugs. Ibañez vividly describes the scenes, using all of the senses. In the wounded villagers, brains were visible, throbbing behind faces without noses. A cannon ball tore off the head of one soldier, who for just a split second kept walking, with two jets of red blood shooting upward from his neck. Disemboweled horses trampled their own entrails. It was at the greenest time of year, when the wheat was in full grain, the most vivid contrast possible between life and death.

The German officers also pretended to be sincerely good people. They carried photos of their beloved families and proclaimed that only by destroying France would their families be able to live. This was an incredible lie but one that, Ibañez suggested, the Germans actually believed. They recognized Marcelo as the castle owner, and instead of just shooting him they tried to convince him of the righteousness of their cause.

But the Germans were beaten back. During their retreat, they transformed the ruined castle into a military hospital. Here Marcelo watched some of the very officers who had so recently boasted of their inevitable victory return, mangled almost beyond recognition, and die. When the French army returned, the Germans fled.

Northern France began to recover. But life for the Desnoyers family changed forever. Julio’s lover, feeling guilty at cuckolding her husband, found that the husband had become a military hero as he was wounded in battle. She sought him out, stayed by his side, and nursed him back to health. Julio, heartbroken, felt that he could do only one thing: join the French army as a foreign volunteer. He did so and became a hero himself. His motivation was not patriotism so much as it was forlorn love, and to just do something with his life rather than just to enjoy his wealth. His father Marcelo, who every day felt the guilt at having fled his patriotic duty in 1870, was now intensely proud of his son.

As you can certainly guess, Julio was killed in battle. The story ends, after almost 500 pages, with Marcelo and his family feeling almost infinite grief out in the middle of the burial fields, months after the battle was over. The bodies of slaughtered French soldiers had been piled up and their burial places marked only with little wooden crosses. The bodies of the German soldiers were piled in unmarked pits and covered with dirt.

The scale of the burial fields is nearly impossible to imagine apart from Ibañez’s description. I got only a tiny glimpse of what it must have been like when I hiked with my son-in-law’s family in the Vosges Mountains that divide Alsace and Lorraine in France in 2016. We went quickly past a World War One cemetery. The French family had seen it, and dozens of others, scattered throughout the mountains, but for me it was a powerful experience.

To a large extent, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was a story that wove together improbable circumstances in order to give the author, who was a journalist with first-hand experience, the excuse to write about the ideas that led to the war. How likely would it be that the sister of Marcelo’s wife would just happen to marry a German who became a top official in the evil German government, and explained his point of view to the rest of the family in great detail? How likely that Julio and later Marcelo should befriend a Russian socialist living in Paris, who explained his point of view in great detail? He said that the supposed Christianity of the Germans was actually the worship of Thor rather than of Jesus. It was the atheist socialist, not the German Christians, who believed that “blessed are the peacemakers.” But the characters were not simply excuses for ideas; they were, to me, vividly real.

And was it not all ultimately futile? Ibañez wrote, through the mind of Marcelo, “I wonder if any star knows that Bismarck ever existed! I wonder if the plants are aware of the divine mission of the German nation!” But I wonder if Ibañez would have been able to guess that, a hundred years later, the European Union, led by France and Germany, would get the Nobel Peace Prize?

But hope remains defiant. At the very end, Marcelo’s daughter hugged her fiancé, a wounded hero, right out in the middle of the burial fields—love may not triumph over, but it remains defiant against, death.

Just How Strong Is Altruism? The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, part 2

In my columns and books, I have written extensively about altruism. Altruism is doing well by doing good. It is what happens when one animal is good to another animal in the same species. Altruism has been studied extensively by evolutionary scientists, not only via mathematical theory, but with lots and lots of examples from the animal, including the human, world. Altruism occurs because, very often, the best way for an animal to pass its genes on to the next generation (which is what natural selection is all about) is to cooperate with other animals. It often pays to be good. Not only that, but natural selection has favored many positive emotions to encourage altruism: it feels good to be good.

But in order for altruism to work, there has to be a dividing line between the inside and the outside of the group in which altruism occurs. Natural selection may favor altruism inside the group, but favors behavior that is merciless, and feelings of hatred, outside of the group. An undeniable trend of human history has been the uneven and gradual extension of the dividing line, so that we incorporate more and more people as insiders. A lot of us include the whole world, even the non-human world, in our inside group, or at least we think we do. The question, therefore, is not whether altruism is beneficial or even possible, but how common is it? That is, altruism is part of human nature, but so is brutality. Is human nature good, or bad? I believed that it is both. One of my students, however, drew upon his military experience, in which he was traumatized by what he saw in Bosnia and Afghanistan, to say that human nature is evil. I thought he was wrong. Now I’m not so sure. After reading The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (see previous essay), I wonder whether altruism might be fragile and might even go extinct in our world of the immediate future. Are, as the author Ibañez said, the Four Horsemen the reality of the world?

For those of you who may not know, The Apocalypse is the Book of Revelation, the last book of the Christian Bible, in which a man named John described a vision. In just part of this vision, he saw four supernatural horsemen. One was war, another was disease, another was famine, another was death. Can altruism really keep these metaphorical horsemen from galloping around the world? Or is the world actually theirs? I’m no longer sure.

Ibañez envisioned the Four Horseman galloping freely over the Earth. In one scene, Ibañez described an apartment in Paris in which a Frenchman was married to a German woman. As soon as the war began, the Frenchman went off to kill Germans. He did not consider his wife to be part of the hated outside group, despite her nationality. But she felt the guilt of knowing that she was a German surrounded by the French who did not deserve to be attacked by her people. She jumped off her porch and died in the plaza. It was the Four Horsemen, said Ibañez, who pushed her.

A French servant woman, having seen the devastation of war, said something that might summarize the thoughts above: “God has forgotten the world.”

A Science Utopia? Visions of Arthur C. Clarke, part two. Constrained by Evolution

The fiftieth anniversary of the first moonwalk is tomorrow!

Last time, I posted about some utopian visions from Arthur C. Clarke’s 1986 book “July 20, 2019,” which is the fiftieth anniversary of the first moon walk. Some of Clarke’s ideas have happened, and some were laughably off target. Since Clarke was better than anyone else at speculating about the future, that meant that we were probably all off target in the 1980s.

But why did Clarke get some of these things wrong?

Some of Clarke’s off-target predictions were caused by his assumption that humans would, in general, do what was best for the world. Both history and the process of evolution tell us that the technological advances that occur are those that make some individuals rich, even if it makes life worse for most people in the world. For example, Clarke assumed, reasonably enough, that robots can do factory jobs better than humans. You don’t have to pay them, they never get tired, and they won’t sue you. Clarke predicted, “No factory jobs will be left in 2019.” But the simple fact is that there are millions of very poor people who will work for almost nothing; such workers really are cheaper than robots. Clarke also predicted that there will be “more leisure and discretionary income for many workers.” But natural selection, applied to societies, assures that this could not occur. Workers compete for jobs, and the workers who are willing to take almost-full-time jobs (without benefits) and work at night and on weekends and vacations will get the jobs.

Despite his usual hard-headed careful thinking, Clarke shared some misconceptions that are still widespread. He wrote that overpopulation requires “emigration to distant terrains.” Sounds simple enough; too many people here on Earth, send them to the moon. But a few figures show the absurdity of this belief. The population of Earth has a net annual increase of about 80 million people. (Back in 1969, it was even greater, about 100 million.) There is not enough money in the world to send 80 million people a year to the moon and keep them alive. If, as Clarke predicted, world population growth would have stopped in 1990, something he should have known in 1986 would be impossible, then this whole reason for space colonization would be nonexistent.

Here is possibly the most important point. “Who could have known in 1969,” wrote Clarke, “that the Apollo mission would leave man unchanged?” The answer to this question reveals exactly why so many of Clarke’s predictions were wrong: Humans are the product of millions of years of evolution, and this includes our behavior. One reason that metal bodies of vehicles (as opposed to fuel-efficient fiberglass bodies) still exist is that tough redneck guys consider big metal trucks to be essential to their self-identity. One reason we will never have fake mental sex replace real sex (as Clarke predicted) is that many men use real sex not just for fun but for dominance. Clarke speculated that there would still be wars in 2019 but they would be fought by robots. This has not happened, in part because humans, at least males, like to play the fantasy role of the great warrior, and do not want to let robots do all of it for them. Our future, just like our past, will be constrained by evolution.

The conclusion I reach from Clarke’s book is that, fifty years after the first moonwalk, human nature is unchanged. Therefore the world is even more dangerous and unstable than it was when Clarke wrote in 1986.

Just Under the Surface

In the current political climate, where Christians consider Nazi racism to be one legitimate viewpoint even if they do not themselves embrace it, it is certainly possible to believe that the time is not far away when conservatives will institute an evil reign of terror. It seems unlikely that this will happen, but could Germans in 1933 have guess what Hitler would do? And he did it because they let him.

We are surrounded by nice people all day every day. But occasionally we get glimpses of the evil that hides in human nature and which can come out under the right circumstances. Here are some examples.

First example. I had a student a few years ago who was very smart and dedicated, and very nice. Strange topics sometimes come up in individual conversations during laboratory sessions. For some reason, some of us were talking about Vlad the Impaler and this student, with a straight face, made the case that he deserved to be the national hero of Romania. This student, so nice on the outside, harbored at least this bit of evil in her heart. If she should ever in a future dictatorship be in a position to make decisions about what to do with political dissidents, such as myself, what would she do? I doubt she would come up with the idea, but I also doubt she would resist it if a future dictator liked the idea of impaling his enemies.

Second example. In Durant, Oklahoma, a white man who identified himself as “Goofy” went on a verbal rampage against all Mexicans, and said that World War III is going to begin right here with whites against immigrants. Most white people do not feel the way he does, but there must be at least a couple of million people who do and who can cause an immense amount of terrorism once they get started. All they need is some event that will unleash their currently latent fury, like (in this case) hearing a woman speak Spanish on a cell phone. (The woman has been in America legally for 40 years.).

We all have evil in our hearts; evolution has made human nature both good and bad. While altruism is part of human nature, we must understand that we are altruistic only toward those people whom we consider to be inside of our group. Slowly through history we have expanded the boundaries of what we consider our group to be. To many people, altruism extends not only to all humans of every race, but to higher animals, to trees, etc. But there are millions of people who still consider other races to be outside the realm of altruism and therefore not deserving even the simple decency of being allowed to live.

Even a small terrorist minority can ignite the worst elements of human nature and cause a wave of terrorism. Let’s hope (stupidly, perhaps) that this does not happen.

Why Genesis is Wrong, Even Figuratively, Part One: Human Nature

Most readers of this blog know that the creationist insistence on a literal reading of Genesis is completely wrong. One reason for this is that they are picky about which parts they take literally and which parts they consider figurative. They say the Genesis days are 24 hours but they do not believe the “firmament” is actually firm, as implied in the original Hebrew of Genesis 1, or that rain falls through the “windows of heaven” as stated in Genesis 6. Same old, same old, I won’t bore you with this.

What I consider more interesting is that Genesis is wrong even as a figurative picture of the universe, life on earth, and humankind.

One example of this involves human nature, human evolution, and the origin of society. Christian evolutionists (they do exist) have struggled to figure out which stage of human evolution was represented by Adam and Eve. They believe God made Adam from the “dust of the ground,” but that this phrase refers to matter, which includes DNA and cells. Perhaps, they speculate, that there was a point in history in which the spirit of God infused itself into an existing animal species, Homo sapiens. For centuries, even conservative Bible believers have speculated about the existence of “Pre-Adamite” humans.

However, there appears to be no abrupt point in human evolution in which an animal species became suddenly spiritual. Christians in science who try to reconcile Genesis and evolution have had a devil of a time.

And, I believe, they need not bother. The picture of human origins in Genesis is all wrong. It depicts a primordially sinless human race, which experienced “The Fall,” after which humans had a sinful nature. There has never been a time when humans or any of our evolutionary ancestors have not been fighting and killing one another. As far back as you look, you find what we would call sin. Recently, it was reported that one of the Homo heidelbergensis bodies in Sima de los Huesos in Spain was a murder victim at least 350,000 years ago.

And, furthermore, the Christian story depicts humans as falling not only from primitive sinlessness but into modern depravity, or “original sin.” That is, that modern human nature is evil, unless the person has the Spirit of God living in him or her. But this cannot be true. Human nature is not entirely evil. Human nature is characterized by (imperfect) goodness and altruism within groups—cooperation, even love. It is also characterized by genocidal evil between groups. Human nature has both.

So, for example, good Jewish soldiers under Joshua could carry out genocide against Canaanites with not a second thought, because the Canaanites were outside their group. Good Christian Massachusetts pilgrims could slaughter Pequot villagers with scarcely a second thought because the Pequots were not in their group. (I say scarcely, because in his own record of the events, William Bradford was actually bothered by the screams of the Native Americans as they burned or were shot; however, in God’s name, he suppressed those inconvenient humanitarian thoughts.) In the Confederacy, until recently revered by the state of South Carolina and still worshiped by hundreds of thousands of Christian racists, Christian men and women could torture slaves because they classified slaves as “other,” in particular as property rather than persons. As Jon Stewart and associates said, it is difficult to kill a person, but easy to kill a heretic.

One reason we know the Bible is wrong about human nature is that those religious humans who supposedly have the Spirit of God living in them are no better than any other humans, on the average. Conservative Christians are no more or less likely than anyone else to commit fornication, adultery, financial crimes, etc. The constant stream of Christian televangelist scandals is no different than revelations of scandals in any other group of people, except that televangelists proclaim themselves to be morally superior. Reverend Ted Haggard’s homosexual partner was not bothered by the relationship itself, but by Haggard’s hypocrisy—that’s why he spoke out. If there is an indwelling Spirit, it has no overall effect on Christians compared to non-Christians. I know good Christians and good non-Christians and so do you.

There actually is some good news in human history. Humans have gradually (on the whole, not in every individual instance) expanded their compass to include more and more humans in their group. Who could forget the Wedgwood medallion of the early 19^th century, depicting a slave in chains, with the words, “Am I not a man and a brother?” Including slaves in our human family is the only reason they ever got freed.

Therefore, the real picture of human history has been a gradual widening of humanitarianism rather than a sudden Fall from sinlessness into depravity. Furthermore, much and perhaps most of this expansion has occurred in the last few hundred years, long after the completion of the New Covenant and the founding of the Christian Church. In Christian doctrine, New Testament principles as expounded by Jesus were the ultimate expression of goodness, and there has been no improvement since that time.

Consider, for example, Christopher Columbus, about whom I will write as we get closer to October 12. When Columbus tortured and enslaved Native Americans, he was either evil or not. If we believe that the Bible condemns such actions, then Columbus was evil, and we cannot do such things today because they are evil. But if we believe that Columbus was a hero who brought the light of Christianity to the heathens, then he was not evil, and we should be able to do such things today.  No Christian should say “It was OK for Columbus to do those things but it would be wrong for me to do them,” because that implies that during the two thousand years since the New Covenant began God somehow changed the rules.

An evolutionary view, in contrast, would say that since the time of Columbus we have widened our compass of humanitarianism. We can say the standards of good and evil are different now than in Columbus’ day. We cannot condone Columbus (he should have known that rape and murder were wrong) but we can perhaps understand him better. Unlike us, he was raised to think that anyone who was not a member of his holy Catholic Church should die.

In conclusion: Genesis is wrong about human nature and its origin. Genesis implies, even figuratively, that primitive humans were sinless, and modern humans are depraved unless God saves them. An evolutionary view indicates that human nature has always been both good and evil and that morality has evolved.

Is Human Nature Racist?

Human nature is not innately racist. It is human nature to feel empathy for and behave altruistically toward those in your group, but not necessarily toward those outside your group. Through most of human history, human groups were confined within human races. Kids were raised to be racists because other races were outsiders.

But when kids of different races grow up together, they do not express racial hatred unless their parents or other members of society educate them to do so. Rogers and Hammerstein said in South Pacific something like, You have to be carefully taught to hate, before you are six or seven or eight, to hate all the people your relatives hate…

One of the best places to see this is where I live in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Tulsa was the scene of one of the worst racial incidents in American history, when in 1921 white racists burned down “Black Wall Street” (see also here) which was one of the most affluent black business centers in the country. All that remains today are some metal placards in the sidewalks that indicate which black businesses were burned down. Reportedly, whites flew airplanes over the black Greenwood section of town and threw incendiary material onto the buildings. I interpret this as an act of war by white Americans against black Americans.

In the first photo, visitors from France were with us to see the placards.

And yet today you can find white and black children playing together all over town. Not quite everywhere, but certainly in my neighborhood. In the intervening 92 years, racism has been largely unlearned in Tulsa. Problems remain, of course; last year a white police officer drove to the home of a black man and shot him. It has taken a long time—interracial marriage (“miscegenation”) was illegal in some states until 1967—but the progress has been astonishing. (The miscegenation laws were aimed at blacks and whites, apparently not at GIs bringing home Asian wives.)

These and other events make me suspect that there might be, among the many and diverse elements of human nature, an anti-racist sentiment floating around. It might be simply one aspect of the emotion of love. I do not know what it is. But it came seemingly out of nowhere into the mind and heart of an eleven-year-old boy who should have, by nature and nurture, been racist. If this anti-racist element indeed exists in human nature, we should embrace it and celebrate it.

The Biology of War

In 2013 scientific attention was focused on a pair of books that addressed why humans have war. Edward O. Wilson, in his book The Social Conquest of Earth, maintained that war was a human instinct, and that humans have had war as long as we have existed as a separate species. (This was not the main thing Wilson’s book was about.) In contrast, science writer John Horgan, in his book The End of War, argued that war is something that humans learned to do and that we can unlearn.

While this seems like an important debate, I fear that it is mostly over semantics. Humans have had violent conflict as long as we have existed (a fact Horgan does not deny), but full-scale wars have occurred only in the last 11,000 years or so. Did I miss something? When human population started to increase, and humans started living in defined locations such as cities, then violent conflicts became big enough to be classified as wars. Isn’t war just a big violent conflict? Was the conflict between the Cherokees and the Creeks, culminating in the Battle of Taliwa in 1755, a war or an intertribal conflict? I don’t think this would have made any difference to Nanyehi, my 6^th great grandmother, whose saw her husband killed in that battle, and who became a Cherokee war hero right at that moment. She was a war hero, even though no massive troop engagements were involved. She, also at that moment, became an advocate for peace, because whether it was a war or a mere conflict, she was a widow and her two children were orphans.

Nevertheless, Horgan does get us to think about a few very interesting things. He makes the invalid argument that, if violence is part of human nature, then why has war been so sporadic? I think it is obvious why he is wrong. We all feel the occasional zeal of violence; the fact that we do not always put it into action does not mean that it is not part of our nature. But the interesting point is this: war does not always occur when resources are scarce or when there is hostility. War is an emergent property, I think, that must be induced under the right circumstances. Not every conflict of interests between tribes or nations turns into war, just as not every dry grassy field burns. But when war is induced, the violent component of human nature is waiting there as fuel.

Still, Horgan brings up a good point, when we consider that war is not something that automatically happens but something that we must decide to do. To a certain extent, it is something that we have to learn. Sometimes it becomes a tradition into which we are trapped. That is, war is something that our leaders lead us into. Most people (except psychopaths) have a natural tendency to want to not harm other people. But this resistance to major acts of violence can be overcome by intense training, commands from authority figures, long-range weapons, and propaganda. The long-range weapons allow us to kill others without having to see them die.

Horgan makes the point that we start wars not because we are wolves but because we are sheep. We may be inclined to seek peaceful solutions, but we do whatever our leaders tell us to. This is the aspect that can make a whole population become violent, not just the one to two percent who are psychopathic.

The violence that leads easily to war is part of human nature. But peace is also part of human nature. Because of this, war may not be inevitable, if we can break the cause-and-effect chain that keeps war going. This chain goes all the way back to the story of Cain and Abel, which fundamentalists accept as history and I accept as an image. You can think of each human as half Cain, half Abel. Which half will we choose? Perhaps we will always have war, but there is room for diminishing its intensity and frequency.

And to do so we need to cultivate empathy. We need to practice it, think about it, incorporate it into our movies and novels and music and art. We cannot eradicate our violent nature, but maybe we can encyst it so that it does not poison the rest of our collective person. We have to tell ourselves, in celebration, that we all feel the same things. We all love our children and most of our neighbors and most of the people we work with. (As for the ones we don’t love, maybe we can tolerate them.) As Nanyehi said, “The white men are our brothers. The same house shelters them, and the same sky covers us all.”

Do Americans Have the Same Human Nature as Everyone Else?

America bristles with firearms. You can safely assume that everybody you see has one hidden on their person or within easy reach. This is not true, but it is close enough to being true that you certainly would not want to make the opposite assumption.

Firearms advocates, who want to see as many people carrying guns as possible, claim that this makes us safer. They have all kinds of rationalizations and anecdotes to support this.

But the numbers tell a different story. Here are some numbers from Wikipedia regarding the number of firearm-related deaths per 100,000 people per year in recent years. The article appears well-referenced and I consider it more reliable than either conservative or liberal things I see floating around the web.

Country	Firearm deaths per 100,000 per year
Australia	1.06
Austria	2.95
Brazil	19.03
Canada	2.38
Colombia	28.14
Costa Rica	6.28
Denmark	1.45
France	3.01
Germany	1.24
Honduras	64.8
Israel	1.87
Italy	1.28
Japan	0.06
Mexico	11.17
Netherlands	0.46
Nicaragua	7.29
Norway	1.78
South Korea	0.06
Sweden	1.47
UK	0.25
USA	10.3

Clearly, the United States has one of the highest rates of firearm-related homicides in the world—not as high as countries with lots of organized crime, like Mexico, Colombia, and Honduras, but higher than virtually anyone else. Our rate is even higher than Nicaragua, a Central American nation whose socialistic government we considered so evil in the 1980s that President Reagan used illegal means to get firearms to the right-wing “contras.” But if you compare us to countries that have similar living conditions to ours, or so we think, we have ten to a hundred times as many firearm deaths per capita. Just compare the UK and the USA. We cannot claim that there is no social strife in Europe; they have ethnic and economic tensions just as we do. Perhaps ethnic uniformity explains the exceptionally low firearm death rates in Japan and South Korea, but not the UK, France, Germany, or Italy, where they have social tensions with Gypsies and Muslims.

Americans have more guns and more gun deaths. Most other countries have fewer guns and fewer gun deaths. Clearly guns are not keeping us safe from gun deaths.

There appear to me to be two possible explanations. One is that we have too many guns at least in the hands of people who are not capable of handling the responsibility. The other is that there is something exceptional about America that makes us different from everybody else. “American exceptionalism” is usually meant as a belief that America and Americans have special privileges in the world; to religious conservatives it means that we are specially blessed of God, God’s people. A lot of conservative megachurches have American flag backdrops for their services. But if this is so, then it means that one way that we are exceptional is that we are exceptionally bloodthirsty.

There’s something different about an American that will make him (sometimes her) ten to a hundred times more likely to shoot your brains out (or your children’s brains out) than someone from any other country except those with drug cartels or civil wars. What might this be? If it is not simply the fact that so many Americans have guns, then it must be something about us.

I refuse to believe the latter without further proof. I believe that all humans have the same human nature, based on the recent evolutionary diversification of all races only about 100,000 years ago. I do not believe that Americans are biologically or intrinsically more bloodthirsty than Englishmen. I believe that the problem is too many unregulated guns. We need gun regulations—not by themselves but in conjunction with education and a deliberate cultural effort to shift the way we think. If you say that this is impossible, then think about what you are saying: that Americans are intrinsically bloodthirsty.

Either our gun problem is a problem that can be solved, or it isn’t. And if it isn’t then we should hang our heads in shame and not meet the eyes of the rest of the world, recognizing ourselves as incorrigibly bloodthirsty. If there is a third alternative, I am not aware of it and my readers are welcome to post a third alternative.

Happy Fourth of July!

Whose Fault is the Human Condition?

In this essay, I present a very basic reason why I am convinced that orthodox religion (as opposed to religious sensibility or mysticism) is really bad for the human species. In addition, I have another reason, which I will post as a later entry.

There is a famous story about an essay contest in England. The topic was, “What is wrong with the world?” The British writer G. K. Chesterton wrote the winning entry. It consisted of two words: “I am.”

In addressing the question of “Whose fault is the human condition,” I am not going to focus on individuals, as Chesterton did. Instead I am asking about larger human institutions or frames of thought. In particular, I want to consider science and religion: which of these two institutions or frames of thought has had more of an impact on the sad, bloody human condition? The answer is religion. I refer herein to conventional, orthodox religion.

Preachers such as the late D. James Kennedy have been relentless in blaming all human evils on evolution and on science. Of course, this makes no sense. Humans have been killing and oppressing one another as long as there has been evidence of human existence. Humans have always had religion, but have only recently had science. In fact the decline in atrocities has been coincident in time with the spread of science.

But there is another reason that I blame religion as a major cause of human suffering. From a religious viewpoints, either God created human nature, or else God allowed Satan to create human nature. Either way, our nature is God’s will. That’s what makes it human nature; we cannot change it. We can “be saved,” they say. But most of the people I know who “have the Holy Spirit living inside of them” live in just as worldly a fashion as those whom they despise as hell-bound sinners. At the very least, even “saved” people still have human nature, Holy Ghost or no. There are lots of good people, religious or not.

Therefore, from a religious perspective, “is” and “ought” are the same in human nature. Not necessarily in human action, but in human nature. Consider this example. Men are more violent than women. According to religion, this is the way things ought to be; God made us that way. As a matter of fact, it is bad for men to not be violent. I vividly remember a radio broadcast in which James Dobson, a major voice of the religious right, condemned the Berenstain Bears cartoons because they depicted a father bear who was not sufficiently assertive and masculine. It is always men who start wars and who do most of the fighting. And this is the way God made us, religious people claim. Women are supposed to stay home, stay quiet, and stay pregnant with fetuses of future warriors.

Evolutionary science, on the other hand, separates “is” from “ought” in human nature. Darwin proposed sexual selection as the reason that male animals are more “pugnacious.” Males fight more because they evolved that way. Maybe it made sense in the Stone Age. But today it is an evolutionary mismatch—what conferred fitness benefits in the Stone Age is now maladaptive except for a few lucky dictators. Evolutionists do not obtain morals from Stone Age biological and cultural adaptations. Religious people, in contrast, have to obtain their morals from the way God made us. Was God correct in ordering the Israelites to kill all the Canaanites, even the kids? If God is unchanging, then either he is wrong or else all of the Old Testament killing was right. If God said it was right in the past, then it is still right. But if an adaptation evolved in the past, it is not necessarily adaptive today.

I believe I am justified in attributing a great deal of modern human suffering to the idea, strongly held by many Christians, Jews, and Muslims, that God made men to be fighters and that is the way it is supposed to be now and forever. For religious people, Homo bellicosus was intelligently designed. But to evolutionists, Homo sapiens is an ape struggling to subdue its old ape behavior with modern cultural evolution.

It has been this way for a long time. An historian who gave a series of lectures about the Paleolithic claimed that, until the start of agriculture, humanity progressed by “extensification,” that is, by moving into new territory and doing the same things as before. But when the territory was all gone, by about ten thousand years ago, humans had to turn to “intensification.” For example, humans could get more food from the same amount of earth by intensive agriculture than by extensive hunting and gathering. But I believe this historian had his dates wrong. With the exception of North and South America (and, of course, Antarctica), the entire world has been filled with humans for a long time. No extensification (aside from the people who migrated over the Bering Strait over 14,000 years ago) has been possible for at least the last 50,000 years. Modern humans, moving into Siberia, encountered Denisovans; and moving into Europe, they encountered Neanderthals. Modern Homo sapiens had to practice intensification to take resources away from other human species and, later, from one another. Before agriculture, intensification took the form of conflict, much of it inspired by religion. There were religion-spewing conquistadores 30,000 years ago in Europe, just as there were 500 years ago in America.

I will take one further step. Orthodox religion is part of the Stone Age adaptation that conferred success at the time but which now needs to be transcended. Not necessarily by atheism; perhaps orthodoxy should be transcended by a different kind of religion. I think the Earth has had about all of the Moses-and-Joshua style conquest that it can handle; maybe it needs some more of the prophetic voice of people like Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. And, wouldn’t you know it, in the Old Testament there were no female priests; but there were a few women prophets.

Religion is an adaptation, but one which, like so many others, we need to modify in the new world we have created.

A shorter version of this essay appears in the current issue of Humanist.

A Convergence of Readings on Human Evolution

Purely by chance, I happened to read from four different sources last night about human nature and human evolution. They illustrate that we have been confused about human nature for centuries, but that we are making progress in understanding it.

First, I read an article by Ann Gibbons from the August 2 issue of Science: “How a fickle climate made us human.” She reviewed the history of scientific thought about the relationship between climate and human nature. As far back as Raymond Dart, many scientists have noted that hominin evolution began when Africa experienced droughts, starting about five million years ago (at which time the Mediterranean dried up into a salt flat). More recently, this viewpoint is expressed in Steven Stanley’s Children of the Ice Age. Human ancestors had to come down from the trees and start running around on the savanna, perhaps carrying food and babies with them in their hands, rather than having to use their hands as front paws. Even a dog can walk on two legs, but try to get it to carry something in its front paws while doing so. Sounds like a great theory to me. I put the carrying-babies theory into my encyclopedia; I called it the “Let go of my hair! Okay, I’ll carry you” theory. I especially liked it because it gave women an important role in human evolution.

The problem is that the stages of human evolution do not neatly line up with African drought. In 2009, researchers published evidence that Ardipithecus ramidus (“Ardi”) lived in trees and ate fruits and nuts from forests about four million years ago—they walked upright (sort of; they still grasped branches with their big toes) but did not live in the savanna. Also, just because Earth’s tropical and subtropical climate was becoming drier, in general, does not mean that it was doing so in East Africa. Recently, scientists have begun drilling cores in ancient African lake beds to determine what the climate was like in the past near the actual localities where human fossils were discovered. (They can tell that a lake had water if the sediments contained diatom shells, for example.)

What scientists such as Richard Potts found was that rapid evolution in hominins occurred not during long droughts, or during long wet periods, but during periods in which the climate changed back and forth every thousand years or so. That is, when the climate was, as Gibbons put it, fickle. Biological evolution could not keep up with such rapid changes; cultural evolution was necessary, and this put a premium on the capacity for intelligence.

Second, I continued reading E. O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth. An expert on ant societies and an informed writer about human societies, Wilson wondered what ants and humans had in common that promoted the evolution of advanced societies in each. The answer: very little, other than forming a defensible home site (ant nest, tribal campground). Aside from this, ants and humans became social for different reasons. In the case of humans, the increase in intelligence was made possible by adding meat to a herbivorous diet, and later cooking the meat (an idea recently promoted by Richard Wrangham). For a gracile animal to go hunting, intense social cooperation was necessary. Therefore hunting made us an intensely social species, according to Wilson. He takes it further: this is why we have always been and will always be warlike, a view disputed in a recent book by John Horgan.

Third, I read a Jack London short story, “In a distant country.” In this story, two would-be gold miners during the Yukon gold rush gave up the pursuit halfway, and had to spend the winter in an abandoned cabin with two graves outside of it. During the long winter, they became first uncooperative with and then intensely suspicious of one another. Eventually, they would become two more graves outside of the cabin.

London’s story begins, “When a man journeys into a far country, he must be prepared to forget many of the things he has learned, and to acquire such customs as are inherent with existence in the new land; he must abandon the old ideals and the old gods…” London was not thinking about human evolution, I suspect, but he could have been talking about the hominins watching their way of life dry up or get flooded in Africa during periods of “fickle” climate. And to London, human nature was based on conflict.

Fourth, I tried reading a little bit of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, written in 1516. It is slow going. More invented the word utopia, from the Greek topos (place) and a prefix; More deliberately confused the prefixes eu- (good) and ou- (no), implying that this good place can really be found in no place. In this book, More speculates about what a utopia might be like. He criticizes the practice, common in England at the time, in which landowners would drive poor families into desperate poverty, which practically forced them to become thieves, and then the government would arrest the thieves and hang them. European governments were creating their own problems. What should be done instead is for government and economy to work in a way such that everyone helps everyone else—not that all are entirely equal, as communists would think, but everyone can make a decent living and contribute their resources to the good of society. More presented this as a story, told to him by the fictitious Raphael Hythloday, about a utopian society somewhere in the recently-discovered Americas, so that he could if necessary tell King Henry VIII that it was just a story. Actually, Native American societies were closer to this ideal than European societies, and maybe More had heard this. More’s view contrasts greatly with not only other philosophers of his time but also differs greatly from those of Wilson and London that I had just read.

Lastly, I read a little bit of George Carlin, the late cynical humorist. Sometimes I wonder if he understood human nature better than either More or London.

Appealing to the Basest Instincts

What is human nature? This is one of the most basic evolutionary questions. The liberal idea of previous decades, that the human mind is a blank slate upon which human nature is written by childhood experiences, has been largely discarded even by liberals. It is clear to about half of the people in America that human nature is the product of evolution. The other half of the people think it is the product of a joint venture between God and Satan: God created the good part, and for some inexplicable reason allowed Satan to create the bad part. And that bad part will get us sent to hell unless we assent to certain doctrinal beliefs.

What kind of human nature has evolution left us with? It is a complex mixture. A lot of human nature is altruistic—we have a deep emotional urge to help others, even sacrificially. And a lot of human nature is hateful—a desire to defeat, even to kill, those whom we view as a threat. The mixture is not so hard to understand. We feel altruism toward members of our group, and to hate members outside of our group. Although human nature has not changed during history, we have learned to gradually move the dividing line outward, so as to include and love more and more people in our group. The Christian ideal is to include all of humankind in the group that we love; and some parts of the Bible imply that we should love all of the living world.

But however much we have extended our boundaries of altruism, hatred remains a basic, and base, instinct. It is always going to be stronger than altruism. Here is why. Hatred is a quick and pervasive way of arousing the human body to respond to deadly conflict. If you perceive a danger, rage will allow you to respond to it quickly; if you wait and think, you might be dead. The consequences of attacking something or someone that or who turns out to not be a threat (Type II error, in statistical terminology) are far less than the consequences of failing to respond to a real threat (Type I error). This is why, throughout the animal kingdom, rage circumvents conscious thought, while altruism incorporates it. It is quite normal, though horrible, for people to respond to hatred more than to love.

Any public figure who appeals to the base instinct of hatred is going to get more unquestioning support than someone who appeals to love and reason. The altruist may get more reasoned support, but cannot win the battle for unquestioning support. And today in America, it is the conservatives who appeal to the base instinct of hatred. Probably the best example is Rush Limbaugh, who became infamous recently for his statements about a female college student (Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke). He called her a slut, and said, first, that she had so much sex that it was surprising that she could walk, and second, that Americans should have access to videos of her sexual encounters so that we could see what we were getting for our money. These statements were so outrageous that advertisers began pulling their support from Limbaugh’s radio show; and Limbaugh later issued a perfunctory apology, which was clearly not repentance.

But what response did the Republican presidential candidates have? As of this writing, Mitt Romney has avoided any criticism of Rush Limbaugh. And Rick Santorum has even praised Rush Limbaugh. On a March 10 visit to Cape Girardeau, Missouri, Limbaugh’s hometown, Santorum said, “It’s good to be in the hometown of Rush Limbaugh, which some people see as a trip to Mecca.” He was careful to say “some people,” but he was clearly including himself in that statement. He considers himself a Christian, yet (according to his own words) reveres Limbaugh with the same intensity that Muslims revere Mohammed.

Some politicians appeal to reason. This includes many Democrats, and a few Republicans (my favorite reasonable Republican is Mickey Edwards). Other politicians appeal to anger. This appears to include most Republicans, and some liberals. The angry liberals may be just as outrageous as Rush Limbaugh, but clearly their audience is much smaller than his. (My favorite example of an unreasonable liberal was Lynn Samuels, who died last December. Whenever I ran across her on liberal talk radio, my skin would crawl.) This is the generalization that emerges: Republicans use propaganda to appeal to the base instinct of hatred, while Democrats use reasoning to appeal to the higher instinct of altruism. This is strange, since most Republicans do not accept evolution, and believe that hatred was created by Satan.

This essay will soon appear on my website. Please post comments in the comment box.