This is a longer post than previous ones, but this topic is a complex and difficult one and it deserves a thorough discussion.
There are two ways of thinking about most military conflicts, including the Israel/Palestine one, and I don’t mean the partisan approach of backing one horse or the other then swearing at the jockey riding the one you don’t like. From the evolutionary perspective I take, there is what I’m going to call a top-down and a bottom-up way of looking at them. But, as far as I know, no one – and I mean no one – ever considers the bottom-up method. So, reader, what do you think I’m going to do?
But as blogs are a kind of personal account. There is something I need to say first. The images on our television screens over past months have been some of the worst I have ever seen, and uniquely for me, I have been unable to watch much of it. I usually keep a close eye on the news but at the beginning of the conflict the monstrous atrocities we were confronted with left me turning away from the news, reeling in disgust and exasperation, but most of all with a tremendous sense of concern, and empathy with those who are suffering.
To provide a thorough account of this conflict, we need to be both a ladder climber for the bottom-up method and a snake slider to use the top-down perspective. And, in the best traditions of snake sliding, I am going to start by getting the traditional sociological/historical/religious approach out of the way, with the caveat that I’m not a historian, theologian or sociologist and this must be seen in that context, but here’s how I see it:
I used to take the simplistic view that Zionism, the idea that Jews belong in Palestine and should return there, was wrong because, as a humanist, I don’t believe in God, so from my perspective there could be no biblical “Promised Land”, and the Jews had no religiously inspired justification to claim territory in what used to be Judea and Israel before the Romans evicted them two thousand years ago. But as I learned more about it, I realised that there was more to it than that. The Jews, as I now understand it, have always had a presence there, and in the early days of the conflict, Jews legitimately bought land from Palestinian people. The 1917 Balfour Declaration, which suggested that the Jews should be able to return to what they consider their ancestral homeland, was not made by Jews, but for Jews. The Declaration was made partly for political reasons during the First World War by the British and, sadly, in full conformance with the arrogant colonialist attitudes of the time, the wishes and interests of the Palestinian people, who already lived there were barely considered.
Both sides claim the capital of their territory to be Jerusalem, and this is a significant complicating factor. The city was the site of the Tenth Century BCE temple built by King Solomon: the son of the renowned and revered leader of the Jews, King David, before it was demolished by the Babylonians, then rebuilt, and finally demolished again by the Romans, but the site where it was built: the Temple Mount, remains a core part of Jewish identity. However, the Muslims claim the Temple Mount for themselves because, of some connections with their prophet, Mohammed, and for the fact that two of their most sacred buildings, The Dome of the Rock and the al Aqsa Mosque have been built on the ancient site, giving them, they believe, grounds for claiming the site and they consider it to be the third holiest site in the Islamic world.
The situation is further complicated by the fact that the Jews have been a stateless people for two thousand years and, because they had no safe homeland, they have experienced the most appalling cruelty, oppression and discrimination throughout much of that time culminating, in the 1940s, of course in the most monstrous crime of all time: the holocaust. It would be the most hard-hearted of all political ideologies to deny them the right to a homeland after all they have endured.
But it isn’t that simple either is it? Where should the homeland be? I once spoke to an American Jewish lady at a scientific conference (I am not a scientist but have been known to attend them) and she suggested that there had been a proposal to have a Jewish state in the US, which sounds OK, but what would the people living in that part of the world have to say about it? Although, I suppose that problem might have been overcome with the right political will and appropriate compensation deals. But from the Jewish people’s perspective, after the Second World war, it is perhaps understandable that Zionism, the return to Jerusalem and the former “Promised Land”, would probably be the only solution they would find acceptable.
The original UN resolution that set up the state of Israel in 1947, and provisionally defined its borders, was never fully accepted by the Arab peoples who it principally affected, and setting up a Jewish homeland on what they considered their territory was obviously going to be a difficult ask for the Palestinian people. How would the British feel about someone telling them, because of some historical “accident” they’ll have to give up London and Birmingham, but they can have Liverpool and Manchester? Or the Americans being told they can have Los Angeles and San Francisco but they’ll have to give up New York and Washington DC?
It is true, as I understand it, that the Palestinian leadership has never accepted a negotiated settlement that involves a two-state solution, although there have been peacemakers, and genuine attempts to find a solution, such as those by then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, (who was murdered for his efforts), and worthy attempts by the Americans, particularly during the Clinton Administration in the 1990s, when the Israeli leader, Ehud Barak worked for a deal with the then Palestinian Leader, Yasser Arafat, but this failed principally, it is claimed, on Arafat’s intransigence, and also by the actions of extremists on both sides who seem often to have timed their attacks at delicate diplomatic moments in order to thwart peace efforts.
When these initiatives failed, it was perhaps understandable that Barak lost the next election. Unfortunately, for hopes of peace, this was to the right winger, Ariel Sharon, and it is now led by his successor from the same political party, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has moved the country even further to the political right. These leaders forced a sharp turn in Israeli Government policy away from the search for peace. Although Israel did withdraw all its citizens from the tiny territory of Gaza, the Israeli Government consistently manoeuvred to achieve what now seems to be their long-term aim of incorporating the much larger territories in the West Bank, which it has occupied since the 1967 Six-Day War, into Israel. On occasion this involved bulldozing Palestinian people’s homes in the occupied territories so their own settlers could take their land in breach of international law.
Over many decades, the Israeli governments’ retaliatory responses to Hamas’ attacks have often looked like “punishment” incursions into Palestinian territories, which seems, accurately or not, only to be resolved to Israeli satisfaction when the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) had killed at least ten Palestinians for each dead Israeli. This seems to be replicated in the current “bent gun barrel” military tactics in the present war: the IDF and their political overlords – exhibiting the typical political posturing and platitudes most people around the world have become used to from their leaders – tell us that they are aiming at Hamas terrorists, when their bullets, shells and bombs often seem instead to be finding innocent people, including children, to the extent that these suspiciously errant bullets, shells and warheads repeatedly obliterate entire civilian neighbourhoods. All this seems to bear out what my father thought: He served with the forces supporting the British Mandate, when the British ran Palestine prior to the establishment of the Israeli State in 1948, and his view was that the Israeli Jews were “warmongers”.
But this is far from the one-sided conflict that it might be supposed from the above remarks.
Hamas is an extreme Islamist organisation, and if allowed would probably create a hard-line Islamic state in Palestine, similar to the one in Afghanistan. It is ironic then that some women and LGBT people have recently come out in support of Hamas, when, if they had to live in the society Hamas would want to create, women would have rights denied and be forced to wear Islamic dress, while LGBT people would be discriminated against, cruelly oppressed or even killed. Would pro-Palestinian left-wing demonstrators have come out in support of ISIS, the Taliban or Al-Qaeda? Elements of the hard-line Islamists like the Hamas leadership are very unlikely to enter meaningful peace negotiations with their hated Western, and Zionist, “oppressors”. Although, in 2017 Hamas seemed to accept that they might consider a Palestinian State set up in line with the borders established after the 1967 Israeli/Palestine war, which roughly match the ones originally set up in the UN Resolution, in which Gaza and the West Bank should remain Palestinian while the rest of the territory should be controlled by Israel. Although, it must be said that Hamas has never accepted the right of the Jews to have their own state on, what they think of as, Palestinian land. And the character of these people can be measured by the fact that they actively teach the children in their schools to hate Jews from an early age, and if any further evidence were needed, we only need to consider their repeated mindless and indiscriminate missile attacks on Israeli and Western interests, and most tellingly of all their brutal tactics on the 7th of October. Hamas deliberately, and illegally site their weapons, and forces, in places where there are civilians, and especially, children so that if the Israelis retaliate, they can point to the deaths of children and other innocent people and blame the Israelis, knowing that the international community is likely to hold Israel responsible for such action. While Hamas is at a massive military disadvantage, they have for years put Israel in an impossible position and, as I have already implied, have been intermittently firing rockets at Israeli targets for decades. No state could be expected to stand by while this is happening to them, and it seems unarguable that the Israeli Government should have a right to defend its people against such attacks.
I have mentioned the situation regarding the dispute over the Temple Mount, but more needs to be said about the role of religion, and its possible place in underpinning the different sociological dispositions of the two peoples engaged in this sickening war. I have mentioned that the Jewish understanding is that the biblical lands of Israel and Judea were promised to them by God. Both Judaism and Islam, like Christianity, belong to the monotheistic, Abrahamic tradition, which is to say that they all have, what Christians call, the Old Testament as their foundational doctrinal text. The Old Testament has a different character from the newer, Christian texts as they exclude the gospels which record Jesus’s alleged life and teachings. The Old Testament God is the final arbiter of good and evil and, although it contains the Ten Commandments which do have clear moral teachings such as “Thou shalt not kill” and “Thou shalt not bear false witness…” (tell lies). It often sees women as men’s property and does not explicitly condemn slavery nor genocide, indeed it seems to support a “might is right”, “winner takes all” mentality, in contrast to the Christian Gospels which include “kinder” texts such as Jesus’s injunction to “turn the other cheek” and “love thy neighbour” so there is a noticeable shift towards love, humility and kindness in the more recent texts and away from, force, mastery and domination.
It is interesting to speculate whether, because the Jews deny that Christ was the Messiah and their religion is not influenced by New Testament values, this is reflected in the way Israel’s leaders approach this dispute. They certainly seem to want to use their military advantage to impose their will on the situation, hoping – falsely, as it turned out – that their massive military superiority would contain the Palestinians in the regions where the Israeli Government want them to live, so that they would gradually achieve their Zionist ambitions by a combination of military containment of their “enemy” and stealthy encroachment of settlers into the occupied territories. In the present war, they also denied humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people in Gaza. Do they, perhaps, hope that eventually the Palestinian people will eventually succumb to their domination, lose spirit, and accept the inevitable? Netanyahu has been clear that he has no interest in a two-state solution.
From the Muslim perspective, of course, while they see Jesus as an important prophet, they do not ascribe the same weight to his teachings, as do the Christians. The ayatollahs, mullahs and imams, as in the case of the more extreme elements on the other side such as the ultra-orthodox Jews, treat themselves to the unwarranted certainty, not only that there is a god, but their particular interpretation of God is the right one.
In the Christian West, while Christians have also gifted themselves with their own “absolutes” in respect of their own “God” ideology, there was a scientific revolution which led to the enlightenment. In Britain, this was embodied in the ideas of thinkers such as John Locke, David Hume and John Stewart Mill. And in America Founding Fathers, like Thomas Paine, put aside religious considerations when they set up their constitution and legal structures. And while the Muslims did have their own scientific revolution, between the eighth and fifteenth centuries this did not seem to work its way through to the kind of enlightenment values of human rights and respect for the individual that developed in the West. It might be reasonable then to suppose that the hard-line Old Testament values may be embodied in Hamas’s casual disregard for the lives of not only the Jews but their own people, and that this does contrast with the Jews, who although they may, on this interpretation, share some of the “hard man” Old Testament values, many, if not most Israeli Jews are immigrants from Western countries, where they will have inculcated some western values. Although their government has committed, what some might feel to be egregious violations of human rights, they are generally more committed to them than their adversaries. For example, in their attacks against Hamas they do not, they argue, deliberately target civilians, and they certainly don’t video themselves decapitating people, despoiling dead bodies or stabbing babies then posting the footage online, as the Hamas killers did on October 7th. As far as has been reported, the IDF do not indulge in mass rape and mutilation of their prisoners.
So, who’s to blame for this dispute? Well, let’s consider one possible answer: let us suppose that the leadership on both sides are at fault. From the top-down perspective, it seems relatively easy to accuse these people, of treachery. One of the principal roles of a governing authority is to ensure the welfare of its people. The Hamas leadership would have known that the attacks on October 7th, and indeed their previous and continuing missile attacks on Israel would inevitably trigger a response causing the wounding and death of many thousands of innocent Palestinian people. And on the other side, as I understand it, despite their protestations that they are only trying to provide security for their people, the Israeli Government have Illegally allowed 700,000 Israeli immigrants to live in settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. If such deliberate actions were perpetrated by any other nation on earth, it would almost certainly be defined as: “ethnic cleansing” which is the forced replacement of one ethnic group with another, and in normal circumstances, an international coalition might be being gathered together to oppose, or stop, this abuse of power, such as happened, successfully in the Balkans in the 1990s. The only reason, it seems, that it isn’t happening now is that the principal world superpower of the moment, the United States, see Israel as their ally, even though they are as frustrated as the rest of the world, by what many think is Netanyahu’s dangerous militaristic opportunism. From the perspective of a peacemaker, this all looks like the Israeli Government have created 700,000 obstacles to peace. And, in this interpretation, recent Israeli Governments have not just betrayed their own population. Television reports, over decades showing the repeated and unequal contests between Israeli bulldozers and the humble homes of innocent Palestinians, as well as the denial of rights and humanitarian aid in Gaza and the occupied territories, have led many westerners, to falsely conflate the aims of the Israeli Government with Jewish people in general, leading to an increase in anti-Semitism around the world.
The goal of leadership, it seems, on both sides in this dispute seems not to achieve peace and protect their own citizens from attack but to be dedicated to their partisan cause. And while some of these leaders might argue that they are ready to lay their own lives down in pursuit of their “cause”, it begs the question as to whether they have the right to put at risk the lives of those who are not so inclined, and who just want to live out their lives in peace. Or to put this another way, these leaders look like single-minded, ideological boneheads committed to winning the game, whatever the cost in innocent life. A game I might add, neither side can win. The Palestinians, faced with overwhelming military odds from a powerful nuclear armed state like Israel will never be able to prosecute anything more than a guerrilla war against them. While the Israelis might be able to destroy their leadership and dismantle and degrade Hamas’s fighting capabilities, Palestinian resistance is an idea, not an army, and you cannot defeat an idea, without killing everyone who has that idea, which would involve the complete annihilation of the Palestinian people – this would the crime of genocide, and one which the Jewish people are history’s most well-known victims. Even if the Israelis do manage to defeat Hamas in Gaza, it seems inevitable that an Arab armed resistance movement will continue in some form or other.
If you think my language, in calling the leaders on both sides “traitors” or “boneheads” is unduly hyperbolic, or unnecessarily emotive, you just need to look at the haunted faces of the brutalised, probably gang-raped, and likely doomed, innocent Israeli young women being dragged into captivity by cruel Hamas “fighters”, or the grime-streaked faces of poor mangled Palestinian kids pulled out from under rubble, to know why issues like this demand more than dry academic analysis.
But is it fair to put the blame on the respective leaderships of the two warring peoples? Both Hamas and the current right-wing Israeli coalition government were elected by their people, and recent polls in the West Bank, appear to show massively increased support for Hamas, and although Hamas is less popular in Gaza, most people there support the October attack on Israel. Looked at from this perspective it seems that the people themselves have some culpability in this matter so that this many-layered dispute might be seen to have yet another layer of complexity, and one that cannot be easily explained from the top-down perspective. If the people living in Israel/Palestine really do just want to live reasonably in peace with each other, why would they elect leaders who want to extend and escalate the dispute? Isn’t this turkeys voting for Christmas?
The top-down view, as I’ve outlined it above, explores this dispute, from a historical and sociological perspective, but I think we should all want a better explanation than that; The top-down view gives only a superficial explanation and fails to answer some fundamental questions regarding the rationality of the behaviour of not only the leaders, but the populations of the peoples involved. This is why we need a deeper, more fundamental, bottom-up scientific/philosophical explanation, and now that our playing pieces have slid down to the bottom of the Snakes and Ladders’ gameboard it is time to start climbing back up.
Here I need to flag up the consideration that, because we will be exploring the fundamentals of human nature, the inferences we will be drawing, will be relevant not just to the Israel/Palestine dispute, but to warfare in general. (I have published a series of eight ad-free podcasts called “Not 42, The Real Meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything” which expands on some of the ideas I am going to explore here. I will add links to relevant episodes in case anyone wants to know more.)
Let’s start with the fundamentals: First, we need to accept that we know that we evolved, and that it follows necessarily from this that we are animals. (This fact does not in any way imply that, as feeling beings, we are diminished or lessened in any sense at all by this revelation. But that is for another blog post, or alternatively, listen to Episode Three in my podcast series: “The Nova Point”. And those who doubt that I can say I “know” evolution happened could listen to Episode One of my podcast series, “The Absolute Truth”, and Episode Two, “What You Didn’t know You Knew”, where I explain what I mean by what it is to “know” something, and how we know that life on earth evolved.)
If we are animals, it seems reasonable to look at other closely related animals, to give us some perspective about the kind of animal we are. When we do this, we find that they behave in different ways from each other, and from the human animal. Each species has its own way of feeling, thinking about, and responding to the world in which they live. In other words, each kind of animal has their own “Deep Nature”. (Episodes Six: “Diving into Deep Nature” and Seven: “Putin, Patriotism and Peacocks” refer.) At the species level, physical and behavioural properties are entirely governed by genes. This contrasts with the individual animal, where the kind of personality and behavioural attributes that an individual animal or human expresses, are not just properties of their genes but are strongly influenced by their environment, experience and development.
It follows necessarily that because we are animals, we also will have a deep nature. For example, chimpanzees, are much more volatile, aggressive and argumentative, than human beings, and are known to indulge in warlike behaviour, a trait they share with human beings, but not with their closest evolutionary relatives, bonobos, who are much more peaceable and appear not to have inter-group warfare, although they have been known, on occasion, to engage in extremely brutal sexist violence. Their sexism does not, however, work in way you might think: The only violent attacks I know about are ones perpetrated by females against males who, in bonobo society are of very low status. Like bonobos, humans are generally very placid; almost all human interactions are respectful, civil and polite. Violence in humans, at least compared to that in chimpanzee society, is relatively rare.
So how do we explain aggressive behaviour of belligerents, the support of the general population, and the, often unconscionable, atrocities that frequently take place during wars like the one in Gaza? One element seems to be that it is part of our species’ deep nature, again like chimpanzees, but unlike bonobos, that we are predisposed towards tribalism. This does not, in itself, generate violent behaviour in the general population, which, simply put, is made up of distinct identity groups that mostly rub along reasonable amicably, playing football, golf and cricket with each other. But tribalism seems obviously relevant to the dispute between the Israeli and Palestinian “tribes”. Tribalism obviously engenders extremely powerful feelings both positive in respect of feelings of belonging and within-tribe cohesion, but also negative ones as it can act as a trigger for violence when a tribal unit, such as a nation state, ethnic or racial identity group, feels threatened. At such times it seems that our species lapses into what I’ve called an “Emergency Mode” (Episode Seven) when conventional rules of social engagement are suspended, leading to the breakdown of stable societal interaction, suspension of human rights, inter-“tribal” tension, and war along with its associated atrocities.
The role of religion needs also to be factored into this explanation. It seems to be part of our deep nature that we have spiritual feelings, which usually manifest themselves into some kind of belief system, which is often expressed as a kind of tribal identity marker. It might be possible to hold up Christianity as a more respectful, kinder and more innocent religious tradition, but that would be to miss the point. People raised in the Christian tradition have been responsible for some of the worst atrocities in history including the worst of all in terms of number of victims affected: the holocaust. It is not the character of the religion that is of predominant importance, in this sense, it is the role of religion, and faith systems themselves, as an underlying bulwark of the tribal identity system.
Part of our deep nature seems to want to command the kind of animal we are to create an in-group to which we belong and to be ready to defend it against those in any out-group if it ever comes under threat. And we seem to be predisposed to adhere to a set of belief systems, of whatever character, that helps define ourselves in shared relationship to members of our own kind and distinct from those in any out-group.
While it is easy to see that feelings of love, kindness, respect and fairness should be the basis for human rights, because that is part of the central aim of making the world a better place, the tribal instincts I described in the previous paragraph frequently do the opposite.
So, the blame for the war in Palestine, and for that matter, those currently taking place in Ukraine, Sudan and Yemen, are, on the bottom-up analysis, genes. Species are defined by their genes, they programme our deep nature, and it is part of our deep nature to establish tribal identities, and if we didn’t have those genetic predispositions, there would be no one against whom we could go to war: there would be no nation states, no national boundaries or ethnic, religious or cultural groupings to set us apart one from another. We would all just be people. To this way of thinking, powerful feelings of belonging, nationalism and even, profoundly felt, “noble”, ones like patriotism just look like inappropriate, ancient, dangerous, genetically motivated, hangover behaviours from our distant tribal ancestors.
So, why tribalism? Our species evolved in what scientists call an “environment of evolutionary adaptiveness” (an EEA). All this means is that when we evolved, we would have become adapted to the world in which we found ourselves then. And in the natural world it would have been advantageous for people to form themselves into groups in order to exploit the food and water resources in one area, while peacefully trading with other groups. However, it would also have been advantageous for a tribe to wipe out a neighbouring one if its own territory was not providing enough resources for them, or if there was perceived injustice towards them from another tribe. Nature has no moral dimension – and here we have reached the core of the philosophical system I’m proposing, where I argue that we need to draw a distinction between the world of feeling above what I call the “Awareness Horizon” and the mechanistic world of nature below it (Please listen to Episode Three). And in such circumstances it would be “better” – in the very narrow and completely amoral evolutionary sense in the world below the Horizon – for one group to wipe out another. Because, while we were living in the EEA, the groups would have been very small this would easily have been possible, and once the war was over life could continue as normal. (This is a simplification of what would have really happened during our evolutionary history, because tribes would have been interconnected in complex ways and it is likely that there would have been alliances between tribes, just as there are alliances, say, between individual chimps.) The point here is that warfare could have been a useful strategy allowing a tribe to “succeed” in the completely arbitrary, and amoral, sense that it would be able to get its genes into the next generation. The important thing to note here is that we no longer live in that EEA, and now, those tiny tribes largely do not exist. For either side to “win” in the Israeli/Palestinian dispute would involve the unacceptable killing of millions of people. That is why, if we understood who we are and where we came from, we would understand why dialogue and peaceful compromise in disputes like this are the only possible solution.
Tribal feelings of patriotism, nationalism and ethnic partisanship fuelled the abominations of the 20th Century: the trenches of the First World War; Dresden, Coventry, Hiroshima and Auschwitz, during the Second and – although many people will not know this – if it had not been for a remarkable series of happy coincidences during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, there would have been a Third World War, except, this time, in all likelihood, a full scale nuclear confrontation. (All this lead me to ask, in the final episode of my podcasts, Episode Eight, “The Road’s end – Or the End of the Road?”, whether our species might be “terminally ill with the genetic disease of patriotism”.)
One thing we might consider here is that, from an evolutionary perspective, selection appears to be everywhere, and it does not always apply to genes. As I understand it, the population of Israel is made up mainly of immigrants, this population is therefore self-selected, and Jewish people from around the world, who most strongly identify with their Jewish identity, and might be more attracted to Zionism are the ones who would have been more likely to have moved to Israel. The people who currently live in Israel, we might then reasonably expect, will be more militant and more dedicated to their “tribe” than the Jewish population as a whole, whether this is because they have a more strongly than average genetic predisposition to tribalism or whether they have been influenced by education, family, friends or by social media interaction. I suspect that this movement of population effect, which I think of as “Demographic selection” is far more widespread and important than people realise, and this may partly explain the Israeli public’s support for their current leaders. There is more I could say about demographic selection, but it wouldn’t be relevant here.
From a top-down perspective, the approach of recent Israeli Governments to the Israeli/Palestinian dispute looks naïve and frankly bizarre; from the bottom-up it becomes explicable, although not justifiable. The emergency mode makes the bizarre look normal, the unreasonable, reasonable and makes intellect redundant, and it is a massive failure of intellect, on the Israeli Government’s part, not to realise that Palestinian People are a people: While it might be possible to torture and beat an individual human being into submission, even if only temporarily, if the Israeli Government’s real intention is to subdue and demoralise a tribal people, like the Palestinians to extent that they lose their spirit, then this is doomed to failure. If you push people too hard, they will push back – that is just human nature. Equally Hamas’s repeated missile attacks, and the barbaric attack on October 7th against what amounts to a regional superpower was never going to result in anything but one-sided, overwhelming retaliation, which was inevitably going to have a massive impact on children and innocent members of their population. They can never hope to win against such overwhelming odds and would be well advised to find another way to reach some kind of acceptable compromise if only their patriotic, and extremist religious instincts will let them.
The only way for peace to come about in this dispute was going to be the empowerment of moderates and the marginalisation of extremism on both sides, so that a growing, lasting and sustainable respect might emerge, which involves a proper consideration for their respective points of view. Other, seemingly intractable, disputes, like the one in Northern Ireland have been if not solved, at least significantly mitigated, with the right political will on both sides, allowing both sides to roll themselves back out of their emergency mode.
We seem to have arrived at the penultimate square at the top of our Snakes and Ladders game, but there is one further step we can take.
If the prospects for peace in Israel and Palestine look bleak, I would have to agree. But, for hundreds of years, on the wider, historical, world stage things seem to have been moving firmly in the right direction. We no longer enjoy watching people disembowel each other as they used to do in the Roman Colosseum, we don’t burn witches, we’ve abolished slavery and outlawed racism, homophobia and sexism. And, interestingly, the levels of violence and murder rates across all societies seem to be falling markedly and consistently. There is, what some have called, a shifting moral zeitgeist, a kind of cultural evolution to a kinder and more equitable society, not just in the west, but all around the world. Although there have been recent and very significant steps backward in progress towards a peaceful world, especially during the 20th Century, the overall trend seems to be strongly positive.
Astute readers of this post, will have noticed that I have switched back into top-down mode, expressing this movement towards peace, justice and non-violence from a historical/sociological perspective. A zeitgeist, after all, is an expression of the public mood at one particular time, and it usually expresses itself as a kind of tidal phenomenon: over time, divorce and abortion rates go up and down like tides, as do the hemlines of women’s skirts. The murder rate however doesn’t seem to follow this pattern, it seems to have been going downwards consistently over a long period of time, suggesting that something deeper might be happening. But, if we switch back to bottom-up mode, gradual change over long periods of time is something we expect of Darwinian evolutionary processes. We are animals and animals evolve, don’t they? Might we be evolving to be less violent, less warlike? Well, it turns out that most animals are not evolving. Almost all animals are well adapted to their own respective EEAs, and so for most of the time any selection pressure will be about keeping the animals as they are (technically this is called stabilising selection). Think about a great white shark: often described as a perfect killing machine, how could such an animal evolve further if it is already “perfect” and there is nowhere for it to evolve to? Any selective effect on their genes is just going to preserve their “perfection” and any shark that does not meet sufficient high standards in respect of survival and reproductive qualities is going to be less likely to survive.
What is really interesting about our species, is that the human animal did not evolve in the environment in which we are now living, we are a new species and may not be well fitted to the new world we have created for ourselves. If we are evolving in biological as opposed to cultural terms it would mean that the genes that make us warlike, would be visible to selection, and would be getting weeded out: that’s what evolution does – that’s what it is.
In terms of our general morphology (our basic body size, shape etc), any selection currently in play is unlikely to be significant. Being, tall or short or being able to run fast is unlikely to make a difference in a world where we have eliminated our predators and most threats to our survival, and where we can simply jump in the car and go to the supermarket if we are hungry or turn the heating up if we are cold. If we are evolving, the selection would be less likely to be influencing morphology, and more likely to be acting on genes that influence any behaviour that might stop us surviving or reproducing.
Here’s something Charles Darwin said in a book in 1874:
“The bravest men, who were always willing to come to the front in war, and who freely risked their lives for others, would on an average perish in larger numbers than other men. Therefore it hardly seem probable, that the number of men gifted with such virtues, or that the standard of their excellence, could be increased through natural selection, that is, by the survival of the fittest; for we are not here speaking of one tribe being victorious over another.”
What Darwin is saying here is that natural selection (the force that is principally responsible for making evolution work) could be acting on human beings in real time now. Could it be that in time, humans will, as Darwin suggests, become more selfish and self-protective, becoming less brave and virtuous perhaps, because (using modern terminology – genes hadn’t been discovered in Darwin’s time) those with genes that predispose them to be ready to surrender their lives for their country are less likely to return from a war? Or is it that our species will evolve to be less warlike because the influence that incites someone to go to war is a genetically mediated tribal instinct that expresses itself as nationalism? This obviously turns on the motivation driving someone to fight; is the motivation to go to war a noble, brave and selfless impulse, or a base tribal instinct that conceals its selfish nationalistic character behind a mask of noble patriotism? If it is happening, is it making people better, or making them worse? This paradox illustrates a difficult dilemma: Identifying what selective effects might be real is a bit like staring into – to steal a phrase from T S Eliot – a “wilderness of mirrors”; for every selective effect you can propose you can often see an opposite effect staring right back at you.
Darwin died before the horrors of the Twentieth Century, and before the invention of nuclear weapons, and may have modified his opinion about the brave selflessness of people who decide to become combatants, but that’s a question we’ll never get to ask him.
Any suggestion that we can currently guess where human evolution might be taking us has to be seen as extremely speculative. Even if our society doesn’t change – and the relatively speedy advances in science, culture and technology could change our societies beyond recognition, which might involve cancelling or reversing any selective effect – we cannot rule out the possibility that the very real reduction in murder rates and the general reduction in violence that we seem to be seeing in our societies might at least in part, have a genetic origin, although the selective effect Darwin suggested would not, in itself, explain changes in, for example, murder rates: this question must remain outside of the scope of this discussion.
So, we are at our final square at the top of our snakes and ladders board, and perhaps the suggestion left to us from our journey down and back up again is that the Two State Solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict looks a long way away, as does any suggestion of a One State multi-ethnic peaceful coexistence between the two groups. Maybe one message though is that we should think of people who strongly embody and express tribal/nationalistic, or extreme religious impulses, like Netanyahu, the Hamas leaders and Putin as chest-beating, alpha-male’ silverbacks who have no place in the modern world, and no one, regardless of their political persuasion, should ever vote for them.
But this analysis suggests that it isn’t really leaders that are at fault, our species, like all others, is defined by its genes, and it seems likely that it is the influence of ancient and inappropriate genes that make us occasionally behave in such appalling ways towards each other. And it is only from this, bottom-up perspective that this becomes evident. It is our genes that define us as the kind of species that goes to war, and it is those genes that we need to confront, subvert and challenge, because our very survival as a species might depend on it. (Again, this idea is expanded in “Episode Eight”.)
If our species really is evolving, where might our evolution eventually take us if we manage to dodge the two great threats to our species’ survival: climate change and nuclear war, over the next couple of thousand years or so?
One phrase keeps forcing itself in my mind although I’m reluctant to give it voice because it is a quote from someone, although he was highly regarded by many and had very advanced ideas for his time, was also rather misguided. He was a Jewish cult leader from the First Century, called Yeshua, who told his followers to leave their wives, husbands, children and families and to follow him. This was because the Jews were being severely oppressed by the Romans at the time, leading him to think he was living through the end times, and that God would be returning imminently to protect His “Chosen People”, and if God was coming in the next couple of weeks or months they wouldn’t need to worry about their families. The quote I’m thinking of was: “the meek shall inherit the earth”. And, as you’ve probably guessed, Yeshua is better known today as Jesus Christ.
If I’m right about this, and the meek really will inherit the earth, a “meek” world won’t look to them like the boring dispiriting and uninspiring place it might to us. We are engaged, excited and sometimes amused by disputation and conflict in a way they would not be, or at least not to the same extent, because, of course, meekness would be the new norm. It is interesting to speculate, though, that they might well read their history with astonished, and appalled, wonderment at our failure to properly understand who we are and where we came from despite the massive evidence that we are a species of animal. And, perhaps, from their perspective in their kinder, more respectful and peaceful world, they might reflect with great sadness and empathy towards us: we the poor “modern” people condemned by our genes to be embroiled in the madness, cruelty and destruction wrought during, what they might see as, the violent dawn of our species.
Peter D Fisher 