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politi[f82,jmc]		Politics and sociobiology and original sin

	The religious traditionally ascribe war and oppression to
original sin, saying that the only way to improve society is to
improve morals.  People not believing in God usually reject this
and often propose that if only we had the right social institutions,
we would have peace, and no-one would interfere with the rights of
others.

	We wish to argue, from an entirely non-religious standpoint,
that the notion that war and oppression come from sin contains a
substantial part of the truth.

	We first offer what some skeptical biologists call a "just
so story", an account of some aspects of human nature based on
evolution.

	Our anthropoid ancestors did not live their lives in accordance
with modern liberal doctrines.  Here is one speculation.

	Early on, dominant males had harems, and younger and less dominant
males were driven out.  Some biologists say that this is true in
all mammal species in which the male is as much larger than the
female as our own.  The growth of intelligence may have changed
this, making it possible for the excluded males to gang up on
harem leaders but perhaps the harem leaders of other groups than
that from which the young males were originally driven out.  Later
this evolved into a tribal society in which young males often
raided their neighbors.  Even more complex aggressive behaviors
could have evolved.

	Not much depends on believing this precise speculation.  It
is sufficient that aggressive behavior was selected for, that
aggressiveness depended on sex and age - maybe not even
this much.  But continue this particular
speculation a little longer.  Tribes that could maintain a larger
social organization could dominate those that fragmented often.
A wide variety of such phenomena are observed in primitive cultures
of the present and of the recent past.

	Biological evolution is slow.  With language comes the much
faster process of social evolution.  Perhaps the last necessary
bit of biological evolution is the weakening of instinctive motivations
of all kinds that permit them to be dominated by the customs of
the tribe.  But they don't disappear altogether, and indeed are
essential to keep the tribe competitive.

	Suppose this to be true.  What attitudes might we take to it?

	One attitude is to maintain that the only healthy society is
one that acts in accordance with the true nature of human beings.
If aggression is in our nature, then attempts to suppress aggressiveness
lead to an unhealthy society.

	This reaction is unwarranted.  In the first place, there isn't
one natural society.  The instincts evolved over time, and earlier
behavior patterns are overlain by the later ones and can still come
to the surface.  We can suppose that quarreling between fathers
and sons is enhanced by instincts from the early harem stage, but
this is mitigated by the instincts of a later stage when the success
of a tribe depended on the fathers and sons co-operating in raiding
other tribes.

	In the second place, the word "healthy" taken as meaning
"in accordance with instinct" is a mere metaphor.  If we don't like
societies with lots of aggression, we can try to maintain a different
organization - as in fact we do.  However, we can do this better
if we recognize the biological sources of aggression as well as
purely social sources.  We can then suppress them or channel them
as seems best.

	At present our society is worried about the danger of nuclear
war, and such worry is justified.  This worry obscures for many
people the progress that has been made.  In particular it obscures
the advantages of the more advanced societies, i.e. the industrial
democracies, over the more primitive societies, and I will later
present arguments for counting communist societies among the
more primitive.

	Among the middle classes of advanced countries, murder is
rare, and almost none of it can be counted as tribal warfare.

It is particularly interesting to speculate how the primitive
aggressive instincts affect the behavior of the intellectual and
academic worlds.