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Can We Survive Our Origins?
Readings In René Girard's Theory Of Violence and The Sacred
By Pierpaolo Antonello, Paul Gifford Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2015 Michigan State University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61186-149-5
CHAPTER 1
PART ONE The Programming of Origins: Sacred Violence and Its Legacy
A Covenant among Beasts
Human and Chimpanzee Violence in Evolutionary Perspective
Paul Dumouchel
René Girard in Violence and the Sacred (1972) and again in Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (1978) claims that in most animal species intraspecific violence is generally limited, and that instinctual inhibitions strongly reduce or totally exclude murder among conspecifics. He adds that the weakness of instinctual checks against murder among humans gave a special urgency to the problem of violence in our species. In this he partially followed Konrad Lorenz, who had argued, a few years earlier, that while most animal species had evolved mechanisms that rein in intraspecific aggression or divert it toward alternative targets, humans apparently lacked such mechanisms, or at least that modern technology had made these natural restraints obsolete (Lorenz 1969).
Girard, in fact, suggested an explanation for what Lorenz essentially presented as an empirical observation. Humans, he claimed, are characterized by a propensity for imitation that he called mimesis, which is many times stronger than what we find among other animals; and it is this greater capacity for imitation that came to override instinctual restraints against intraspecific murder. Implicit in Girard's proposal is an important, but usually unnoticed, change of outlook relative to Lorenz and to that of most primatologists or sociobiologists interested in the relationship between animal violence and human violence.
As indicated by the original title of Lorenz's book, the Austrian ethologist proposes a "natural history of aggression" in order to understand what we call "evil." He argues that from an evolutionary point of view, aggression is good and useful, and that in many species, animals have evolved characteristics that capitalize on the beneficial effects of aggression and reduce its negative consequences. Furthermore, Lorenz claims that it is the invention of modern weapons, which allow us to kill others easily and from a distance, that explains why such mechanisms seem unable to restrain our violent behavior toward each other. There is a clear Rousseauistic flavor to Lorenz's argument—i.e., nature is good while culture is bad—but principally, it implies a form of dualism according to which human violence is in some way "unnatural," and culture is called upon to explain this "unnaturalness."
Girard rejects this common prejudice and reverses the tenor of the explanation. While Lorenz views human aggression as unnatural in some way and calls upon culture to explain the particularity of human violence, Girard considers the higher propensity for intraspecific violence as a biological characteristic of our species, and uses this particular characteristic to build a naturalistic explanation of human culture. Nothing could be more different than these two points of view: Lorenz, like most sociobiologists, is looking for vestiges of the natural history of aggression in human behavior; Girard is trying to understand the appearance of culture as an adaptation to a novel situation created by the heightened propensity among humans for imitation and violence.
It might, however, be argued that an essential part of what Girard learned from Lorenz has turned out to be false. By far the major part of the observations that Lorenz reports are correct, but one of the specific claims on which Girard builds his argument—the absence of intraspecific murder among most animal species—today needs to be qualified in an important way. In the forty years that separate us from the original publication of Violence and the Sacred, extensive observation of chimpanzees both in the wild and in captivity has shown that our closest cousins regularly engage in the killing of conspecifics, and that the number of victims is far from negligible. In fact, Richard Wrangham et al. have even argued that death rates from violent aggression are similar among chimpanzees and hunter-gatherers (Wrangham, Wilson, and Muller 2006, 14–26).
Even if this particular claim is perhaps not entirely convincing, it seems that the difference between human violence and that of our closest relatives is not absolute, as Girard assumed it to be. More to the point: if it is the greater level of violence among humans that forced us to invent culture, why have chimpanzees failed to do so, if among them the level of intraspecific violence is more or less similar to that in Homo sapiens? Furthermore, according to Girard, the heightened violence of humans comes from their greater ability to imitate. Observation during those forty years partially supports that claim by showing that great apes, including chimpanzees, do not imitate, or imitate only very little, compared to humans. However, if such is the case, how can we account, from a Girardian point of view, for the high level of intraspecific violence among chimpanzees? What role does imitation, or mimesis, play in human violence?
My purpose in this chapter is to review, in the light of recent developments in primatology and in the study of imitation, Girard's claim of having provided a "naturalistic" explanation of the rise of culture. Far from falsifying Girard's central tenets, will I argue, these developments strengthen their claims, since they allow us to determine more precisely the difference between human and chimpanzee violence, and to pinpoint the role of mimesis in the humanization process. However, first a detour is necessary. It will take us from the way in which mainstream evolutionary biology conceives the relationship between cooperation and conflict to the meaning of social species.
Competition and Cooperation, Altruism and Conflict
Evolutionary biologists tend to view conflict and cooperation as polar opposites. They tend to consider that one excludes the other: when animals cooperate they are not in conflict, and vice versa. This impression may be due in part to the extensive use of evolutionary game theory, which induces us to represent animal behavior as composed of discrete, even mutually exclusive elements, a persuasion that has led biologists, in the last forty years or so, to accord a central and strategic significance to the issue of "altruism." An action is said to be altruistic when it has a cost for the agent who performs it, but benefits a different organism. Conversely, an action is selfish if it benefits the agent; but this is true whether or not it also costs something to another. When it does, either directly or indirectly, the animals are in competition, and conflict can develop as a more extreme form of competition. Altruistic actions are Other-regarding, while selfish actions are Self-regarding. Animals who are in conflict, however, do seek to harm each other; so that conflict, like altruism, must also be seen as Other-regarding. Perhaps that is the exact and sufficient reason why conflict tends to appear to us not just as the opposite of altruism, but also—misleadingly—as incompatible with it.
According to our current understanding of evolutionary theory, altruistic actions should not, in principle, occur, because selection must be expected to act against altruists. Since, by definition, altruistic actions reduce the fitness of those who perform them, in favor of one or more other organisms, altruists should normally, under a regime of survival of the fittest, come to be replaced by the more selfish creatures that benefit from their generosity. Competition and conflict, on the other hand, are something we take for granted: given that everyone is assumed to act selfishly, in a finite environment organisms will inevitably become rivals and enemies. Nonetheless, it is clear that animals sometimes do cooperate and act at least as if they were incurring a cost in order to help others. Consequently, explaining the "anomaly" of altruism has been high on the agenda of biologists.
There are two issues involved here; one is empirical and the other theoretical. The empirical issue is whether altruistic behaviours really are altruistic. Empirically it is not clear how much true altruism there is "out there," and it could be that much of what we consider as such may be better described as forms of competition, or of reliable signalling which involves a cost to the signaller. (Zahavi and Zahavi 1997)
However, the empirical issue has been overshadowed by the theoretical issue. The question here is to explain how altruistic behavior could have been selected for. Darwin appealed to group selection to explain the existence of moral altruism, arguing that groups that contain individuals who were willing to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of the group would win in a competition with groups composed of pure egoists.
However, until recently it was considered that group selection is too weak to counterbalance selection against altruism at the genetic or individual level. Today the received explanation rests on the notions of kin selection, and more generally, of fitness correlation. Organisms, it is argued, will generally tend to cooperate and to act altruistically toward one another to the extent that the fitness of one is correlated to the fitness of the other, whether this correlation is due to genetic causes, as is the case in kin selection, or to social or ecological factors. That is to say, altruism is possible (and consistent with evolutionary theory) whenever the fitness of the donor is related to the fitness of the recipient in such a way that the benefit accruing to the latter will ultimately also benefit the donor or his genes. Organisms that are naturally and necessarily selfish will only act generously toward each other if that generosity is also in some way beneficial to them; otherwise, natural selection will inexorably weed out the generous. As Joan Roughgarden says, such theories "take the altruism out of altruism" (Roughgarden 2009, 3).
In these explanations, fitness correlation plays the role of "particular circumstances." What is usually argued, in fact, is that there are certain particular circumstances—i.e., whenever the fitness of the donor organism and of the recipient are related in the right way—in which altruism and cooperation are possible or even likely. However, even in those circumstances, appearances notwithstanding, selfishness remains the rule, and conflict and competition should be expected as the default behavior most of the time.
Yet conflict, as mentioned earlier—unlike competition, predation, or even aggression—is a relation where organisms seek to harm each other. It seems therefore that if naturally and necessarily selfish organisms will only cooperate and act altruistically when certain circumstances are satisfied, they will also only enter into conflict in specific circumstances; for conflict is expensive and dangerous. Animals will tend to minimize danger to themselves and will not—or at least they should not—choose conflict when walking (or running) away is a better deal. If selfishness can be expected to lead to a high rate of aggression—for example, in disputes over resources or territories—aggression will often lead to rather limited conflicts, with one of the adversaries rapidly fleeing. Conflicts will be more intense when the prize is more important and when walking away is not an option.
Social Animals, Group Intelligence
Interestingly enough, to my knowledge, there are few definitions of the "social animal" or of "social species" in biology. There is a generally received (and sometimes challenged) definition of "eusociality"; but it is, apparently and for the most part, assumed that everyone knows what the concept "social species" means and can recognize a "social animal" when he or she sees one. For example, searching the Internet, one can find the following examples of definitions: "A social animal is a loosely defined term for an organism that is highly interactive with other members of its species to the point of having a recognizable and distinct society." Another rather unhelpful but common definition, also found on the Internet, is: "an animal that exhibits social behavior," while the Encyclopedia Britannica defines social behavior as "the suite of interactions that occur between two or more individual animals, usually of the same species, when they form simple aggregations, cooperate in sexual or parental behavior, engage in disputes over territory and access to mates, or simply communicate across space." Unsatisfactory as these definitions may be, they all indicate that social animals spend a lot of time interacting with each other, and that these interactions play a fundamental role in the fitness of each individual. This suggests a rather straightforward definition of social species: a species is social to the extent that the fitness of its members depends on their interactions with each other rather than on each individual's unmediated relationship to the environment. This suggestion has the advantage of avoiding the circularity that plagues many definitions of social animals, which claim, as above, that social animals are animals that interact to the point of forming recognizable societies. Mostly it captures something that is biologically fundamental: an animal's fitness, and the extent to which it depends on the actions—and therefore the fitness —of other conspecifics.
Understood in this way, sociality is a question of degree; most (probably all) animal species are more or less social, and all sexually reproducing organisms are to that extent social. The more animals are social, the more their fitness is related to that of other members of their species. Sociality is an aspect of an organism's niche that can, in fact, be measured in at least two dimensions, its importance and its extension. How important is the contribution that interactions with conspecifics bring to an individual's biological success, and to how many conspecifics (to mate and family only, or also to others) does this codependence extend? Sociality is not just a question of living in close proximity or in groups, therefore; it depends, rather, on the relations that exist between the animals, and on the extent to which animals of the same species affect each other's fitness.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Can We Survive Our Origins? by Pierpaolo Antonello, Paul Gifford. Copyright © 2015 Michigan State University. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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