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June 2001
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October 2001

Nobelist on Aggression in Man
By Merri Rosenberg

Originally published nearly 40 years ago, this compelling work by Nobelist Konrad Lorenz strikes an eerily prescient tone in the immediate aftermath of the September 11th horrific events. A study of the biological and evolutionary underpinnings of aggressive instincts in other species and in man, this volume echoes with peculiarly prophetic cautionary notes.

Although Lorenz, writing in the 1960s, was responding to other issues, his insights apply to the newly uncertain world that came into being on September 11. His scientific and academic concerns, which resonate with added meaning today, focus on why members of a species direct aggression against each other.

Take, for example, this insight, which could be part of any current Op-Ed piece: “Without the tolerance born of this realization, it is all too easy for one man to see the personification of all evil in the god of his neighbor, and the very inviolability of rites and social norms which constitutes their most important property can lead to the most terrible of all wars, to religious war–which is exactly what is threatening us today .”

Consider this one chilling passage: “None of them can ever have such devastating effects as unbridled militant enthusiasm when it infects great masses and overrides all other considerations by its single-mindedness and its specious nobility.” Then think about this one: what “contributes enormously to the releasing of intense militant enthusiasm is the presence of a hated enemy from whom the threat to the ‘above’ values emanates.”

Such an accumulation of cogent analysis could make the current world situation even more frightening than it already is, especially if political and military behaviors would appear to be predetermined by biological and evolutionary compulsions.

Like Merlin instructing the future King Arthur in the ways of the world by example and metaphor drawn from the animal kingdom, so too does Lorenz use these analogies . Whether it’s the attacking behavior of brightly colored fish on a Florida coral reef, the hostilities rats exhibit towards other rats who come from outside the particular group, or the pecking that ducks display towards one another, Lorenz explains that there is a reasonable scientific explanation for such actions. As he sees it, there are distinctive benefits to aggressive behaviors towards members of one’s own kind. “Darwin’s “struggle for existence” really refers to the conflict between near relations,” Lorenz writes.

For humans, reluctant though they may be to identify with the rest of the animal kingdom, there is an equally deep-rooted force causing aggression towards other people. According to Lorenz, “what we must guard against with all the power of rational responsibility, is our natural inclination to regard the social rites and norms of other cultures as inferior...[that] makes us consider the members of pseudo-species other than our own as not human.”

There is something poignant about his repeated assertion that man’s inability to perceive the stranger, that fearsome ‘other’, as something like himself, is what ultimately leads to harmful aggression. As Lorenz says, “No one is able to hate, whole-heartedly, a nation among whose numbers he has several friends.”

Although Lorenz ultimately concludes, with a touching mix of naivete, optimism, and faith, that art, music, science and education will be able to transcend man’s aggressive impulses towards one another, it is perhaps less easy for us who read this today to share his outlook.

Merri Rosenberg is a freelance writer who specializes in educational issues and topics.

 

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