Reflections on Richard Wrangham's book, The Goodness Paradox - Part IV

Aggression, Violence, and Tolerance

Oct 31, 2024

"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." - Salvor Hardin

"Aggression, meaning a behavior intended to cause physical or mental harm, falls into two major types, so distinct in their function and biology that from an evolutionary viewpoint they need to be considered separately. I use the terms “proactive” and “reactive aggression,” but many other word pairs connote the same sense: cold and hot, offensive and defensive, or premeditated and impulsive—all refer to the same core distinction."

If my intent were to summarize or review Wrangham's book, a discussion on the distinction between proactive and reactive aggression would have perhaps been a good place to start. But that wasn't my intent. In Parts I-III, I covered several elements of the book that were instrumental in shifting how I framed a few of the more salient contemporary cultural and social issues. How I think about aggression, violence, and tolerance hasn't particularly shifted after reading "The Goodness Paradox." Rather, the book has confirmed much of what I already understood and affirmed much of what I've already experienced.

The world of human experience is rarely black and white. There are shades of gray. It isn't always hot or cold. There is warmth. We need not always be on the offence or defense. We can choose tolerance and patience. But it seems a small, but growing segment of the population of humans can only experience black and white, feel nothing unless it's hot or cold, and live out their days oscillating between offence and defense as per the desires of those who feed their bodies and minds.

It's hard to gauge whether or not our society is becoming more or less violent. The quality of crime data seems sketchy and much of it ends up on the cutting floor. The parameter definitions are governed by politics and reporting is inconsistent.¹ It's easier to hold a cool breeze in your hand than it is to get a clear definition of what a "child" is, for example. It depends entirely on the agenda and objectives of the definition proponent.

My sense of it is our society is more violent around the edges - edges most apparent in the dense urban areas of the country - while a malignant form of intolerance seems to be worming its way in toward society's core. Facilitating the worm's progress are misguided educational practices and corrupt legal objectives that seek to eliminate accountability and responsibility in the name of false agency. I see the biases described in Part III (Inaction, Side Effect, and Noncontact biases) becoming more common, even normalized in many contexts.

On the face of it, this shift in behavior may appear as more tolerant. It's certainly packaged as "tolerance." But closer examination suggests something more insidious. In general, the population is becoming more fearful and less inclined to work toward correcting course. A population that is less inclined to help each other means it's more vulnerable to aggressive and violent modern day alpha males and coalitions of pan-gender beta humans, each bent on status, power, and revenge.

Aggressive and Violent Individuals

Aggressive and violent individuals are relatively easy to suss. We known them by their actions. The rules that drive their behavior are simple and predictable. Observing these rules in action requires little more than patience and caution. Eventually they have a reputation that precedes them and steps can be taken to avoid or protect ourselves against their reactive aggression. Research suggests that most homicides begin as trivial confrontations stemming from a need to maintain status. Furthermore...

"The reactive murderers had less activity in their prefrontal cortex, the inhibitory part of the brain. The difference contributes to an explanation of why some people are more vulnerable to committing a crime of impulsive violence: they find it hard to control themselves."

The power equalizing effect of guns, the decision-eroding effects of drugs and alcohol, and intentional failures to enforce laws have combined to transform a once adaptive response into a maladaptive expression of impulse. However...

"The environment in which a young human grows up is likely to affect all genetic influences on behavior. Mostly, individual gene differences are only weakly predictive."

This would suggest that the control of reactive aggression is, at least in part, a learned skill. If so, how can control of reactive aggression be learned such that it is reliably maintained? The evidence is clear that our innate behavior toward tolerance and control of reactive aggressive impulses, acquired over the past tens of thousands of years, is vastly superior to our nearest evolutionary relatives - chimpanzees and bonobos.

Just how tolerant are we? anthropologist Sarah Hrdy notes "that to pack hundreds of chimpanzees into close quarters on an airplane would be to invite violent chaos." And yet, millions of humans not only routinely and voluntarily (even pay money for the experience!) confine themselves in aluminum tubes for hours at a time, and they do so with astonishingly few violent episodes.

In regard to the increased prevalence of reactively aggressive individuals, I'm left with the question, "What social constraints are being removed that previously channeled people in the direction of learning impulse control?"

"Sometimes a ready propensity for reactive aggression is an advantage. If the competitors who are most ready to fight tend to win the competition for status, food, and mates, to have more infants, and to survive better, reactive aggression is favored and self-domestication will not occur. But changed conditions of life can change the costs and benefits of a given behavior. Being too quick to lose your temper might then no longer pay dividends. The evolution of modern chimpanzees and bonobos from a common ancestor offers a compelling example of different environments favoring different levels of reactive aggression."

Shame, guilt, physical connection to family and community? Things like suburbia, offices (particularly cubes), the elimination of third places, and more recently "social" media have resulted in individuals becoming increasingly isolated. Spending more time with the unfettered fantasies created in our own mind is hardly a recipe for developing impulse control and tolerance. In contemporary society, the conditions that tip the cost/benefit scale toward tolerance and cooperation are being removed. The benefits of behaviors based on reactive aggression - status, access to resources (via threat and theft) - begin to yield the higher returns with less cost (i.e. no jail time, no consequences).

Pan-Gender Coalitions

Unlike aggressive and violent individuals, coalitions bent on proactive aggression are amorphous and so much more difficult to identify and avoid. This makes the modern day coalitions of pan-gender beta humans an order of magnitude more concerning. Whereas the aggressive individuals may be driven by fits of rage amplified by drugs or alcohol, the proactive aggression wielded by a pan-gender coalition has been tempered, at least a little, by deliberation and consideration of the costs of their actions. Since no single member of the coalition is likely to pay the consequences, the cost threshold is lower than that for an aggressive individual. Dissuading a coalition from taking action, then, requires a considerably higher cost.

I find it interesting that this insular quality of coalitions is reflected in Saul Alinsky's thirteenth rule for radicals: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."

"By this I mean that in a complex, interrelated, urban society, it becomes increasingly difficult to single out who is to blame for any particular evil. There is a constant, and somewhat legitimate, passing of the buck."

Alinsky further elaborates:

"The other important point in the choosing of a target is that it must be a personification, not something general and abstract such as a community’s segregated practices or a major corporation or City Hall. It is not possible to develop the necessary hostility against, say, City Hall, which after all is a concrete, physical, inanimate structure, or against a corporation, which has no soul or identity, or a public school administration, which again is an inanimate system."

The thirteenth rule represents a tactic for re-introducing the rules for dealing with undesirable individuals when facing a conflict with an amorphous coalition. When the coalition grows to sufficient size, it is primed for a leader to emerge. Someone - regardless of gender - who controls the salient reins on the coalition and can drive them in the direction that is their bidding. Identifying a coalition's leader may not always be straightforward or obvious, but doing so and applying Alinsky's rules has been shown to work as a way to elevate the cost of the coalition's actions. One need not be a radical to employ such a tactic.

Closing Thoughts

What's changed? What's missing or has been subtracted/eliminated from our evolutionary progress? One thing suggested by Wrangham is play. More specifically, rough play, particularly for males. [The execution of the execution hypothesis?]

"Not only did adult bonobos initiate play and use play faces more often than adult chimpanzees, but, interestingly, bonobos also played more roughly. One might have expected rough play to be the choice of the more aggressive chimpanzees, but since roughness demands more tolerance from the partner, rougher play is explicable by the overall nonaggressiveness of bonobos."

And...

"In other words, the low reactive aggression of bonobos is a newly evolved phenomenon."

This suggests rough play serves as an evolutionary derived mechanism for developing our unique quality for low emotional reactivity to provocation and therefore social tolerance. And yet rather than accommodate the evolutionary pattern by calibrating the "rough play" scale to define where the zone of "too far" is, educators (mostly women) have as a goal the complete elimination of all traces of aggression down to the level of gestures and words. Boys, far and away the intended target, are sedated and shamed for expressing tens of thousands of years of evolutionary adaptive behavior. Playground recess has been removed from elementary education and any hint of rough play or competition is punished. Doing so has the effect of reversing a 300,000 year evolutionary trend toward increased tolerance. The educators may have good intentions, but the evidence is building that the results of their first order thinking and actions are dramatically contributing to the demise of social health and well-being.

If Wrangham is correct, our ability to cooperate depends on our ability for tolerance. In other words, the fact we have a mostly civilized society today is the result of cooperation between tribe members so that we could successfully win violent confrontations with other tribes for scarce resources. The degree to which we cooperate is driven by how tolerant we are of fellow tribal members and, eventually, citizens of our shared society.

Presumably, if tolerance erodes, so will our ability to cooperate. Failure to cooperate weakens the shared society and makes it increasingly vulnerable to compromise or destruction from external groups interested in our resources. We're seeing this unfold real-time in the current presidential campaigns.

The intriguing question is, can we force a particular social outcome independently from the pace of evolution? Can we "legislate" an evolutionary outcome? The answer is most likely "no" to each of these questions as any mandated or "legislated" outcome would be subject to the equilibrium rules inherent to the evolution game. Any law will also have unintended consequences. The rules of evolution would say any adverse consequences to any law would cause the law to be ignored and die out over time.

If we are to take the reins of the powerful evolution dragon, we would need feedback loops of sufficient quality to quickly evaluate the outcomes and alter or reverse the lessons gained by studying the consequences. We would also need a coldly objective will to roll things back or acknowledge errors. We don't have this. We are self-obsessed beings intent on maximizing our own self-interests or the interests of our tribe when it come to matters of raw survival. 21st century influences from technology seem to be driving things further into a preference for self-interests with a delusional expectation that Big Government will help us advance our own individual interests and catch us when we fall.

The people who are demanding solutions expect them to be found by someone else and the someone else they expect to find the solutions have every incentive to insure nothing ever gets solved. We're stuck in a loop and it's pulling us backward.

Footnotes

¹ Exempli gratia: The FBI's "final" crime data for 2022, released in September 2023, reported that the violent crime decreased by 2.1%. They recently revised their numbers and reported that violent crime increased in 2022 by 4.5%. (Stealth Edit: FBI Quietly Revises Violent Crime Stats)