A Revisit with "The Origin of the Self-Destructive Species (with apologies to Charles Darwin)"
"Either this nation shall kill racism, or racism shall kill this nation." (S. Jonas, August, 2018)
Homininae.svg. And by golly, somehow we ended up as the only one of the species-set that kills each other in great numbers, the cause of which is what this column speculates about.
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Introduction (2022): I originally published this column back in 2014. It was inspired both by some theoretical work I had been doing on two subjects which were, in my mind at least, related. The first was the fact that Homo Sapiens is, among all of the myriad species on Earth, the only one that is for the most part dependent for its existence upon the following: the conversion of various resources that it encounters, animal, vegetable, and mineral, in the environment, into various kinds of foods, products, forms of shelter, basic means survival (e.g., finding and preserving pure water supply/figuring out how to dispose of wastes in such a way that they don't kill species-members), and so on and so forth. The processes of conversion become evermore complex as what we call "civilization" proceeds/develops apace. The second subject that I was exploring was the matter of how and why Homo Sapiens has developed into the only self-destructive-species-on-a-mass scale that life-on-Earth has ever known. I came to the conclusion that those two remarkable features of the species are intimately related. Which is what this column is about.
For me, the examination of both phenomena in some detail happens to have begun with a consideration of a movie from 2014 entitled "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes" (for the reference see below). I am revisiting that column at this time for several reasons that might seem obvious, but are well worth stating and re-stating.
1. Catastrophic consequences of human-caused climate change are no longer something "down the road if we don't do something." They range from, for example, from the massive floods in Pakistan that can in part be directly linked to the global-warming-related melting of glaciers way up in the Himalayas, to the excessive heat waves in countries ranging from Portugal to the West of the United States, to the collapse of a massive Antarctic glacier plus the melting of the Greenland ice cap which have the potential for raising sea levels to some significant very damaging degree.
2. One of the participants in the "Ukraine War" is a) threatening the possible use of "tactical nuclear weapons," and b) engaged in activities in and around a nuclear plant that could result in another "Chernobyl," or worse.
3. Authoritarian government of one form or another is threatening to become the norm in an increasing number of nations around the world. Its past history has always involved self-destruction-of-the-species to a greater or lesser extent.
And so, the revisit to the earlier column (with modest edits here and there), is presented from this point forward.
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Intrigued with the 2014 movie the "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes," I reviewed it on these pages. In that review, I noted that among the levels on which the movie could be seen was as an essay in paleo-anthropology. In the movie, a group of great apes (collectively known as the "Simians") and a group of Homo sapiens that are survivors of a world-wide, highly fatal infectious disease epidemic which the humans conveniently name the "Simian flu" (even though its origin was of human manufacture, to be experimented with on apes.)
The Simian population leads a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, in a communal setting. One outstanding feature of that society is that while they have one acknowledged political leader, Caesar, no one appears to have either a) any control over the hunting-gathering processes, or b) any material advantages over anyone else. They also appear to not engage in intra-Simian violence, as a routine. When one episode of that sort does occur, an attack on Caesar, when the latter wins and condemns the perpetrator to death, before he does so Caesar pronounces the profound words: "You are not an ape."
The Homo sapiens population is, well, classically Homo sapien. (Note the irony of the name, which translated into English means "wise man.") They have guns aplenty and with few exceptions are ready to use them at a moment's notice. Violence, against other species and within their own, is both commonplace and for the most part fully accepted. But of course, as noted, they are members of one of the only species of animal on the planet that kills, indeed slaughters, each other in numbers that have grown ever larger in the geologically microscopically brief period of time that the species has existed in its so-called "civilized" mode of organization. (Anthropologists have given this very short segment of geological time the name "Anthropocene".)
Homo sapiens are devious, both with each other and with the Simians. Most importantly, unlike the Simians, the Homo sapiens cannot exist for very long without converting one or more elements that they find in their environment into one or more other goods and services. In the movie, forming the plot line it is the struggle of the Homo sapiens to physically get to an abandoned hydro-electric dam that lies to the north of where the Simians live so that they, the Homo sapiens, can have the electricity they need on an ongoing basis to power a variety of conversion processes. The Homo sapiens are about to run out of power as the fuel supply for the electrical generators they are currently using runs out.
So, what we see here is a fundamental conflict between an apparently economically egalitarian society of hunter-gatherers which, among other things rejects the use of use of intra-species (actually in this case intra-genus) violence, and the classic Homo sapiens society. An essential characteristic of that society (ours, of course) is that, as noted, in order to survive, uniquely among the species on Earth, conversion-of-resources is essential. Of course, those processes have become ever more complex over time.
In postulating what human-like life might be like on one or more of the numerous other planets in the vastness of the universe that could conceivably support life as we know it, Elsewhere I have discussed in some detail what has happened in the history of Homo sapiens concerning the essential "conversion-of-natural-elements-in-order-to-survive" process. Apparently from pretty close in time to the beginning of communities organized at any level, then societies, the ownership of the various means of production that converts elements found in the environment into those goods and services needed/used for individual and species survival has for the most part been in private hands.
The "means of production" in those days could include anything from the ownership of farm or grazing land, the ownership/manufacturing of weapons, the ownership of boats for fishing, in the beginning on inland lakes, or the ownership of the means by which raw meat/game, vegetables, and grains were made into food, and distributed. It is precisely that mode of ownership, and the means the owners have used over time to protect their ownership, that eventually leads to violence within and between societies, on a larger and larger scale.
In one way "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes" can be seen as a parable of the apparent conflict that took place over many tens thousands of years between the species Homo sapiens and the one that we call "Neanderthal." (The word, by the way, refers to the valley, Thal, through which in Germany the Neander river, where the first Neanderthal remains were found, runs.) Apparently, the Neanderthals were hunter-gatherers, not resource-converters. There is no evidence, at least not yet, that they engaged in intra-species violence.
Neanderthals apparently did have larger brain cases than ourselves. Whether or not that indicates that they were more intelligent has been the subject of great debate. Whether or not Homo sapiens and Neanderthals fought each other, as species, with ours eventually eliminating theirs, presumably through violent means, is also the subject of debate, as is the matter of whether or not there was inter-species breeding. What are not subjects of debate is that we are here and they are not, and that we survive only through the means of conversion-of-resources, once again in modern terms known as the "means of production."
Indeed, since just about the earliest of times, human society has been characterized by intra-species violence. Confirming what I have said, "Live Science" has summarized it this way:
"Compared with most animals, we humans engage in a host of behaviors that are destructive to our own kind and to ourselves. We lie, cheat and steal, carve ornamentations into our own bodies, stress out and kill ourselves, and of course kill others."
That then raises the question of whether from just about the beginning of the appearance of our version of the genus Homo (and of course there were many others before us), is there possibly a gene or genes in Homo sapiens for intra-species violence on a mass scale that exists in no other species? (If they are to survive, all animal species need to have one or more violence genes directing activities at one or more other species.) Or is it simply a behavioral manifestation arising out of the necessity of conversion-of-resources-for-survival that would naturally arise as the means of production were arrogated into private hands.
Either way, behavioral or genetic (and it might have been a combination of both), it is most likely that it was the private ownership of the means of production that has, over time, selected for intra-species violence. This pattern may have started even before the organization of communities around agriculture: "Now, analyses of archaeological sites as well as ethnographies of traditional societies are etching a more complex picture, suggesting that some ancient hunter-gatherers may have accumulated wealth and political clout by taking control of concentrated patches of wild foods." In this view, it is the ownership of small, "resource-rich areas"--- and the ease of bestowing them on descendants"--- that fosters inequality, rather than agriculture itself."
And how better to preserve the private ownership of those early "means of production" than through intra-species violence, on the part of the owners and those non-owners who they engage to protect their ownership, against those who work for them and their interests. Certainly, in known historical times it hasn't been done through the use of reason.
Thus in summary, it would appear that it has been, since the earliest times of the organization into communities of the species Homo sapiens, the private ownership of those necessary-for-species-survival-means-of-conversion-then-production that has promoted, and indeed may have even selected for, the use of intra-species violence and the gene or genes that may underlie it. Furthermore, it is the perpetuation of the interests of certain owners of various means of production which have contributed so substantially to the immediate threat of global warming and its catastrophic consequences fro species Homo sapiens and myriad others. Combine this with the fact that Homo Sapiens has developed ever more violent and massive means of intra-species destruction, the future does not look too healthy, does it. At least as long as the ownership of the means of production necessary to species survival remains in private hands, that is.
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For the two earlier columns of mine (actually published just about eight years ago) from which this one is drawn, Click Here; Click Here