Anatomy of Human Destructiveness

Let us now look from the same perspective at the second “poison,” human propensity to aggression. Modern study of aggressive behavior started with Charles Darwin’s epoch-making discoveries in the field of evolution in the middle of the nineteenth century (Darwin 1952). The attempts to explain human aggression from our animal origin generated such theoretical concepts as Desmond Morris's image of the “naked ape” (Morris 1967), Robert Ardrey’s idea of the “territorial imperative” (Ardrey 1961), Paul MacLean’s “triune brain” (MacLean 1973), and Richard Dawkins’s sociobiological explanations interpreting aggression in terms of genetic strategies of the “selfish genes” (Dawkins 1976). More refined models of behavior developed by pioneers in ethology, such as Konrad Lorenz, Nikolaas Tinbergen, and others, complemented mechanical emphasis on instincts by the study of ritualistic and motivational elements (Lorenz 1963, Tinbergen 1965).

Any theories suggesting that the human tendency to violence simply reflects our animal origin are inadequate and unconvincing. With rare exceptions, such as the occasional violent group raids of the chimpanzees against neighboring groups (Wrangham and Peterson 1996), animals do not prey on their own kind. They exhibit aggression when they are hungry, defend their territory, or compete for sex. The nature and scope of human violence - Erich Fromm's “malignant aggression” - has no parallels in the animal kingdom (Fromm 1973). The realization that human aggression can not be adequately explained as a result of phylogenetic evolution led to the formulation of psychodynamic and psychosocial theories that consider a significant part of human aggression to be learned phenomena. This trend began in the late 1930s and was initiated by the work of Dollard and Miller (Dollard et al. 1939).