Violence: Competition or Cooperation 
By John Swomley

[Dr. John Swomley is professor emeritus of Social Ethics at St. Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, Missouri.  He is a frequent contributor to this journal.]

We live in a very violent world.  There are wars, murders, rapes and other forms of violence reported every day in our newspapers.  What is the origin of such human violence?

And why does the reaction to violence seem to be inconsistent?  Some religious leaders who speak of life as sacred neither respect their adversaries nor serve as models of nonviolence. From the Pope on over to Pat Robertson and James Dobson, life in the womb is sacred but the life of the pregnant woman is not. During the second World War and theCold War, none of the above leaders of religious group and few others who speak of the sanctity of life opposed war or the development of nuclear and other weapons that could be used to destroy hundreds of thousands of non-combatants, innocent men, women, and children.

There are various theories about the origin of violence, though apparently some of us have never even wondered how humans became as violent as we are.  One theory about the origin of violence relies on the Genesis account that God created a perfect world and that violence was caused by human sin.

A book, The Fall to Violence, by a very able theologian, Marjorie H. Suchocki, states: “A tendency toward aggression is built into human nature, so that if this tendency is a cause of sin, then the creator of human nature would be implicated in the fact of human sin. Hence the only creaturely basis of sin that could save the Creator from implication was human freedom, for which each human was solely responsible.”

The traditional religious view that there was a Garden of Eden where all life lived harmoniously is questioned by many.  Those who believe in a supernatural Creator who created all animal, marine, and insect life must realize that many living creatures have to live by feeding on other life and therefore have to kill. This is not only true of lions and tigers but beetles that kill trees and other insects that kill vegetation or attack human beings.

There are other reasons for rejecting violence as human rebellion against God. A second is that God did not create a perfect world, but one in which natural disasters such as droughts, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, and tidal waves, sometimes destroy the lives of thousands of humans and animals.

A third reason is, according to the biblical record, that God sometimes sanctions human violence.

What is the evidence in the biblical record? The Exoduc account of the Ten Commandments for example, contains strong words against creating images, worship-ping them, and not keeping the Sabbath, among other kinds of reprehensible behavior.  But the commandment against killing is listed sixth.  Thereafter is a list of people to be put to death, such as those who curse father or mother. These acts of violent capital punishment commanded by God were understood as punishment for rebellion against God and hence the violence of punishment as such was not rebellion.

The biblical God, not only commands his followers sometimes to go to war but on rare occasions even orders violent abortions such as in Isaiah 13: “Every one that is found shall be thrustthrough…their wives be ravished…and they shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb…." And in Hosea 13:16: "their infants shall be dashed in pieces and their women with child shall be ripped up."

Another theory about the origin of violence appears in Henry Bailey Stevens book, The Recovery of Culture. Based upon evolution, his book asserts that plants or vegetation preceded by millions of years any form of fish or animal life; that man's family, the primates, lived off the fruit and nut trees long before agriculture came into being. His thesis is that the ancestors of humans and that the ancestors of humans and that the early humans themselves show no evidence of war so long as they were essen-tially living without killing animals for food.

He wrote: “When the excavations of prehistoric cities get down to levels over four thousand years old, they no longer find the war-like weapons, the signs of a soldier class and the elaborate prepara-tions for defense which characterize recent times. Even tribes in-volved with hunting and fishing, who were at war with the animal kingdom, appear to have been as free from human conflict as are the Eskimos today.” Stevens theory was that, once tribes began killing animals (perhaps because of the encroachment of an Ice Age) they also began to kill people in other tribes.

Still another theory of evolution related to the origin of human violence is that of Darwin, whose “survival of the fittest” idea has been misinterpreted by T. H. Huxley and others. Huxley interpreted Darwin as telling us that “the weakest and stupidest went to the wall, while the toughest and shrewdest, those who were best, fitted to cope with their circumstances, but not the best in another way, survived. Life was a continuous free fight and beyond the limited and temporary relations of the family, the Hobbesian[i] war of each against all was the normal state of existence.”

Actually, Darwin in The Descent of Man did not emphasize a struggle for existence between separate individuals, but insisted that it was not the physically strongest nor, the most cunning who survive, but those whose struggle is replaced by cooperation. “Those communities,” he wrote, “which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best and rear the greatest number of offspring.”

One of the most influential books on evolution thus far written is Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution by Peter Kropotkin, a Russian naturalist. He does not discuss the origin of violence but minimizes it as a factor in evolution. He provides numerous instances of insect and animal life that survive because they are sociable, living in families or colonies. For example:

The flat lands of the four great continents are still covered with countless colonies of mice, ground squirrels, marmots and other rodents….The coasts of the ocean are enlivened by flocks of seals…; its waters by shoals of sociable cetaceans; and even in the depths of the great plateau of Central Asia we find herds of wild horses, wild donkeys, wild camels sometimes numbering hundreds of thousands of individuals…  How trifling, in comparison with them, are the numbers of the carnivores! And how false, therefore, is the view of those who speak of the animal world as if nothing were to be seen in it but lions and hyenas plunging their bleeding teeth into the flesh of their victims.

Kropotkin maintains that competition within or between species “is always injurious to the species.”  He wrote, “Better conditions are created by the elimination of competition by means of mutual aid and mutual support. The ants combine in nests and nations; they pile up their stores, they rear their cattle--and thus avoid competition.”

Kropokin's book is not only a great classic but makes the case, with many illustrations, that cooperation rather than competition is the key factor in evolution and in survival.

Recently a new theory of the origin of human violence has been published by two men who have spent years in Africa, South America and elsewhere observing animals and humans. The book, Demonic Males, -Apes and the Origin of Human Violence, by Richard Wrangham, professor of anthropology at Harvard University, and Dale Peterson, another expert on primates, asserts that “chimpanzees and humans are each others' closest relatives”.  They think DNA analysis places humans as an offshoot of the chimpanzees[ii] along with another of the great ape group,,the bonobos. The authors observed sporadic violence against others of the chimpanzee species and their raids against members of neighboring groups, and noted similar human practices, declaring these acts of violence within species are “startling exceptions to the normal rule for animals.” This suggests that “intergroup aggression in our two species has a common origin…and that chimpanzee-like violence preceded and paved the way for human war, making modern humans the dazed survivors of a continuous, five-million-year habit of lethal aggression.”

To test this thesis the authors visited the Yamamamo in southern Venezuela and northern Brazil, the largest tribe on earth that has not been destroyed or integrated into the rest of the world. They live in separate villages scattered so that no common hierarchies have developed. For various reasons they engage in raids against an enemy village. These raids are described in detail and closely resemble the chimpanzee raids.

The authors note that “Among chimpanzees, every adult male is dominant to every adult female.” However, another species called bonobos resemble chimpanzees and have “ancestral relationships with chimpanzees and gorillas.”  But “Bonobos differ from chimpanzees in that they are somewhat smaller and the sexes are co-dominant,” that is, “the top female and top male are equal.” The authors observe that “Female power is the secret to male gentleness among bonobos.” It is “cooperation among females that kept the male in his place.”

The bonobos use sex in much the same way as humans, and not just for reproduction. There are homosexual pairs and heterosexual activities. “In other words, just as people use sex as a way for deepening relationships, comforting each other and testing each other, not to mention having fun or getting pleasure, so do bonobos.”

Generally speaking bonobos do not raid other bonobo communities. When two groups meet, even while looking for food, they do not fight but watch each other over a sort of demilitarized zone. Then a female crosses the neutral zone and has sex with a female from the other group. Then the two parties eat and rest together as if they were members of a single community.

In other words, bonobos rarely engage in any personal violence or aggression, yet they evolved “from a chimpanzee-like ancestor. The authors explain this in the following ways: "Bonobos can afford to live in larger, more stable parties than chimpanzees because they live in a world without gorillas”--a factor of their development south of the Zaire River.

Although they will eat meat, they do not hunt, but forage in groups. Their food supply is “chiefly protein-rich buds and stem bases of young herbs” and nuts and fruit. “Party stability produced female power. They form alliances that effectively protect them against male aggression.”

While the authors trace human violence to our presumed chimpanzee heritage of aggression and male dominance, they indicate that human societies can, like the bonobos, avoid violence, as some modern human communities do.

There is much more to be explored in speculating about the origin of violence. But one thing seems to be certain: there are more non-carnivorous animals than there are those that hunt and kill. Fertility may be one factor. But fertility among humans doesn't provide stability in highly populated areas.  If humans do not eliminate weapons of destruction, solve the over-population problem, and build a cooperative world community, our destiny on earth may be dim.

By contrast, the ants have demonstrated a different kind of community. Here is what Kropotkin had to say about ants: 

The ants and termites have renounced the "Hobbesian war" and they are the better for it. Their wonderful nests, their buildings, superior in relative size to those of man; their paved roads and overground vaulted galleries; their spacious halls and granaries their cornfields; harvesting and "malting" of grain; their rational methods of nursing their eggs and larvae and of building special nests for rearing the aphids--the cows of the ants--and, finally, their courage, pluck, and superior intelligence--all of these are the natural outcome of the mutual aid which they practice at every stage of their busy and laborious lives.

Even an ancient book, the Bible, in Proverbs 6:6 says, “Go to the ant, 0 sluggard; consider her ways and be wise. Without having any chief officer or ruler, she prepares her food in summer and gathers her sustenance in harvest.”

In line with such admonitions, humans are challenged to learn how to treat the world as one human community, even if we never learn for sure how we became so violent.

Endnotes

Updated Tuesday, December 26, 2000