Yesterday I completed my reading of Konrad Lorenz's “On
Aggression”. The last couple of chapters
are well worth reading, as indeed is the whole book. Below is the first part of
another extract from the book. The second part will be posted within a day or
two. I have edited and omitted some paragraphs in the text below. This is done
for brevity and to remove passages that might prove confusing outside the
context of the book. I strongly urge you to read the original work!
As
already mentioned, norms of social behaviour developed by cultural
ritualization play at least as important a part in the context of human society
as instinctive motivation and the control exerted by responsible morality. Even
at the earliest dawn of culture, when the invention of tools was just beginning
to upset the equilibrium of phylogenetically evolved patterns of social behaviour,
man’s newborn responsibility must have found a strong aid in cultural
ritualization. Evidence of cultural rites reaches back almost as far as that of
the use of tools and of fire. Of course we can expect
prehistorical evidence of culturally ritualized behaviour only when
ritualization has reached comparatively high levels of differentiation,
as in burial ceremonies or in the arts of painting and sculpture. These make
their first appearance simultaneously with our own species
and the wonderful proficiency of the first-known
painters and sculptors suggests that even by their time, art had quite a long
history behind it. Considering all this, it is quite possible that a cultural
tradition of behavioural norms originated as early as the use of tools or even
earlier.
Through the processes
described in Chapter 5, customs and taboos may acquire the power to motivate
behaviour in a way comparable to that of autonomous instincts. Not only highly developed
rites or ceremonies but also simpler and less conspicuous norms of social
behaviour may attain, after a number of generations, the character of sacred
customs which are loved and considered as values whose infringement is severely
frowned upon by public opinion. As also has already been hinted in Chapter 5,
sacred custom owes its motivating force to phylogenetically evolved behaviour
patterns of which two are of particular importance. One is the response of militant enthusiasm by which any group defends its own social norms and rites
against another group not possessing them; the other is the group’s cruel
taunting of any of its members who fail to conform with the accepted ‘good
form’ of behaviour. Without the phylogenetically programmed love for
traditional custom human society would lack the supporting apparatus to which
it owes its indispensable structure. Yet, like any phylogenetically programmed behaviour
mechanism, the one under discussion can miscarry. School classes or companies
of soldiers, which can both be regarded as models of primitive group structure,
can be very cruel indeed in their ganging up against an outsider. The purely
instinctive response to a physically abnormal individual, for instance the
jeering at a fat boy, is absolutely identical, as far as overt behaviour is
concerned, with discrimination against a person who differs from the
group in culturally developed social norms – for instance a child who speaks a
different dialect.
The ganging up against an
individual diverging from the social norms characteristic of a group, and the
group’s enthusiastic readiness to defend these social norms and rites, are both
good illustrations of the way in which culturally determined conditioned
stimulus situations release activities which are fundamentally instinctive.
They are also excellent examples of typical compound behaviour patterns whose
primary survival value is as obvious as the danger of their misfiring under
the conditions of the modern social order. I shall have to come back later on
to the different ways in which the function of militant enthusiasm can miscarry and to possible means of preventing this eventuality.
Before enlarging on this subject, however, I must say a few words about the
functions of social norms and rites in general.
First of all I must
recall to the reader’s memory the somewhat surprising fact, mentioned in
Chapter 5: we have no immediate knowledge of the function and/or survival value
of the majority of our own established customs, notwithstanding our emotional conviction
that they do indeed constitute high values. This paradoxical state of affairs is
explained by the simple fact that customs are not man-made in the same sense as
human inventions, are, from the pebble tool up to the jet plane. There may be
exceptional cases in which causal insight gained by a great lawgiver determines
a social norm. Moses is said to have recognized the pig as a host of the Trichina, but if he
did, he preferred to rely on the devout religious observance of his people
rather than on their intellect when he asserted that Jehovah himself had
declared the porker an unclean animal. In general, however, it is quite certain
that it hardly ever was insight into a valuable function that gave rise to
traditional norms and rites, but the age-old process of natural selection.
Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution
of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.
In both cases the great
constructor has produced results which may not be the best of all conceivable
solutions but which at least prove their practicability by their very
existence. To the biologist who knows the ways in which selection works and who
is also aware of its limitations it is in no way surprising to find, in its
constructions, some details which are unnecessary or even detrimental to
survival. The human mind, endowed with the power of deduction, can quite often find solutions
to problems which natural selection fails to resolve. Selection may produce
incomplete adaptation even when it uses the material furnished by mutation and
when it has huge time periods at its disposal. It is much more likely to do so
when it has to determine, in an incomparably shorter time, which of the
randomly arising customs of a culture make it best fitted to
survival. Small wonder indeed if, among the social norms and rites of any
culture, we find a considerable number which are unnecessary or even
clearly inexpedient and which selection nevertheless has failed to eliminate.
Many superstitions, comparable to my little greylag’s detour towards the
window, can become institutionalized and be carried on for generations. Also, intra-specific selection
often plays as dangerous a role in the development of cultural ritualization as
in phylogenesis. The process of so-called status-seeking, for instance,
produces the bizarre excrescences in social norms and rites which are so typical
of intra-specific selection.
However, even if some
social norms or rites are quite obviously maladaptive, this does not imply that
they may be eliminated without further consideration. The social organization
of any culture is a complicated system of universal interaction between a great
many divergent traditional norms of behaviour, and it can never be predicted
without a very thorough analysis what repercussions the cutting out of even one
single part may have for the functioning of the whole. For instance, it is
easily intelligible to anybody that the custom of head-hunting, widely spread
among tropical tribes, has a somewhat unpleasant side to it, and that the
peoples still adhering to it would be better off, in many
ways, without it. The studies of the ethnologist and psycho-analyst Derek
Freeman, however, have shown that head-hunting is so intricately interwoven
with the whole social system of some Bornean tribes that its abolition tends to
disintegrate their whole culture, even seriously jeopardizing the survival of
the people.
The balanced interaction
between all the single norms of social behaviour characteristic of a culture
accounts for the fact that it usually proves highly dangerous to mix cultures.
To kill a culture it is often sufficient to bring it into contact with
another, particularly if the latter is higher, or is at least regarded as
higher, as the culture of a conquering nation usually is. The people of the
subdued side then tend to look down upon everything they previously held sacred
and to ape the customs which they regard as superior. As the system of social
norms and rites characteristic of a culture is always adapted, in many
particular ways, to the special conditions of its environment, this
unquestioning acceptance of foreign customs almost invariably leads to
maladaptation. Colonial history offers abundant examples of its causing
the destruction not only of cultures but also of peoples and races. Even in the
less tragic case of rather closely related and roughly equivalent cultures
mixing there usually are some undesirable results, because each finds it easier
to imitate the most superficial, least valuable customs of the
other. The first items of American culture imitated by German
youth immediately after the last war were gum-chewing, Coca-cola drinking, the
crew cut and the reading of coloured comic strips. More valuable social norms
characteristic of American culture were obviously less easy to imitate.
Quite apart from the
danger to one culture arising from contact with another, all systems of social
norms and rites are vulnerable in the same way as systems of phylogenetically
evolved patterns of social behaviour. Not being man-made, but produced by
selection, their function is, without special scientific
investigation, unknown to man himself, and therefore their balance is as easily
upset by the effects of conceptual thought as that of any system of
instinctive behaviour. Like the latter, they can be made to miscarry by any
environmental change not ‘foreseen’ in their ‘programming’, but while instincts
persist for better or worse, traditional systems of social behaviour can
disappear altogether within one generation, because, like the continuous state
that constitutes the life of an organism, that which constitutes a culture cannot
bear any interruption of its continuity.
Several coinciding
factors are at present threatening to interrupt the continuity of our Western
culture. There is, in our culture, an alarming break of traditional continuity
between the generation born in about 1900 and the next. This fact is incontestable;
its causes are still doubtful. Diminishing cohesion of the family group and
decreasing personal contact between teacher and pupil are probably important
factors. Very few of the present younger generation have ever had the
opportunity of seeing their fathers at work, few pupils learn from their
teachers by collaborating with them. This used to be the rule with peasants, artisans
and even scientists, provided they taught at relatively small universities. The
industrialization that prevails in all sectors of human life produces a
distance between the generations which is not compensated for by the greatest
familiarity, by the most democratic tolerance and permissiveness of which we
are so proud. Young people seem to be unable to accept the values held in
honour by the older generation, unless they are in close contact with at least
one of its representatives who commands their unrestricted respect and love. Another
probably important factor contributing to the same effect is the
real obsolescence of many social norms and rites still on
aggression valued by some of the older generation. The extreme speed of ecological
and sociological change wrought by the development of technology causes many
customs to become maladaptive within one generation. The romantic veneration of
national values, so movingly expressed in the works of Rudyard Kipling or C. S.
Forrester, is obviously an anachronism that can do nothing but damage today. Such
criticism is indubitably over-stressed by the prevalence of scientific thought and
the unrelenting demand for causal understanding, both of which are the most
characteristic, if not the only, virtues of our century. However, scientific
enlightenment tends to engender doubt in the value of traditional beliefs long
before it furnishes the causal insight necessary to decide whether some
accepted custom is an obsolete superstition or a still indispensable part of a
system of social norms. Again, it is the unripe fruit of the tree of knowledge
that proves to be dangerous; indeed I suspect that the whole legend of the tree
of knowledge is meant to defend sacred traditions against the premature inroads
of incomplete rationalization. As it is, we do not know enough about the
function of any system of culturally ritualized norms of behaviour to give a rational
answer to the perfectly rational question what some particular custom is good
for, in other words wherein lies its survival value. When an innovator rebels
against established norms of social behaviour and asks why he should conform
with them, we are usually at a loss for an answer. It is only in rare cases, as
in my example of Moses’ law against eating pigs, that we can give the would-be
reformer such a succinct answer as: ‘You will get trichinosis if you don’t
obey.’ In most cases the defender of accepted tradition has to resort to
seemingly lame replies, saying that certain things are ‘simply not done’, are
not cricket, are un-American or sinful, if he does not prefer to appeal to the
authority of some venerable father-figure who also regarded the social
norm under discussion as inviolable. To anyone for whom the latter is still
endowed with the emotional value of a sacred rite, such an answer appears as
self-evident and satisfactory; to anybody who has lost this feeling of reverence
it sounds hollow and sanctimonious. Understandably, if not quite forgivably,
such a person tends to think that the social norm in question is just
superstition, if he does not go so far as to consider its defender as
insincere. This, incidentally, is very frequently the main point of dissension
between people of different generations.
All this applies
unrestrictedly to the ‘solidified’, that is to say institutionalized,
system of social norms and rites which function very much like a supporting
skeleton in human cultures. In the growth of human cultures, as in that of
arthropods, there is a built-in mechanism providing for graduated change.
During and shortly after puberty human beings have an indubitable tendency to loosen
their allegiance to all traditional rites and social norms of their culture,
allowing conceptual thought to cast doubt on their value and to look around for
new and perhaps more worthy ideals.
There probably is, at
that time of life, a definite sensitive period for a new
object-fixation, much as in the case of the object-fixation found
in animals and called imprinting. If at that critical time of life old ideals
prove fallacious under critical scrutiny and new ones fail to appear, the result
is that complete aimlessness, the utter boredom which characterizes the young
delinquent.
If, on the other hand, the clever demagogue,
well versed in the dangerous art of producing supra-normal stimulus situations,
gets hold of young people at the susceptible age, he finds it easy
to guide their object-fixation in a direction subservient to
his political aims. At the post-puberal age some human beings seem to be driven
by an overpowering urge to espouse a cause, and, failing to find a worthy one,
may become fixated on astonishingly inferior substitutes. The
instinctive need to be the member of a closely knit group fighting for
common ideals may grow so strong that it becomes inessential what these ideals
are and whether they possess any intrinsic value. This, I believe, explains the
formation of juvenile gangs whose social structure is very probably a rather
close reconstruction of that prevailing in primitive human society.
Apparently this process
of object-fixation can take its full effect only once
in an individual’s life. Once the valuation of certain social norms or the
allegiance to a certain cause is fully established, it cannot be erased again,
at least not to the extent of making room for a new, equally strong one. Also
it would seem that once the sensitive period has elapsed, a man’s ability to embrace
ideals at all is considerably reduced. All this helps to explain the hackneyed
truth that human beings have to live through a rather dangerous period at and
shortly after puberty. The tragic paradox is that the danger is greatest for
those who are by nature best fitted to serve the noble cause of
humanity. The process of object-fixation has consequences of an
importance that can hardly be overestimated. It determines neither more nor
less than that which a man will live for, struggle for and, under certain
circumstances, blindly go to war for. It determines the conditioned stimulus
situation releasing a powerful phylogenetically evolved behaviour which I
propose to call that of militant enthusiasm.
The Books
