Does Human Nature Make Genocide Inevitable?

Source: Wikimedia Commons

In July 1995 more than 8,000 Bosniaks died in the Srebrenica massacre, the worst atrocity in Europe since World War Two. To commemorate the massacre’s 20th anniversary, the BBC recently held a debate on its ‘Sunday Morning Live’ TV show on the topic ‘Is future genocide inevitable’? I participated in this debate (which you can view here), to provide an evolutionary psychological view about whether there is something about human nature that makes us powerless to avert acts of extreme intergroup violence.

Debate participants included four other panel members as well as people in the broadcast audience who emailed in their reactions. I was struck by two aspects of other participants’ reactions to the question of whether human nature makes genocide inevitable. First, all assumed that human nature must be either fundamentally good or else fundamentally evil, with no middle ground. Second, nearly all sided with the ‘fundamentally evil’ view, and so seemed extremely pessimistic about our ability to avert future genocide. My own reaction was very different: I argued that human nature is inherently good and evil, and that knowledge about our nature will increase our power to promote the good and suppress the evil. So, the evolutionary psychologist on the panel (myself) turned out to be the most optimistic person there about the inevitability of genocide. This may seem ironic to some, in that a false but pervasive caricature of evolutionary psychology is that it says we’re all just ‘slaves to our genes’ and therefore that bad behaviours like infidelity and war are inevitable. I disagree with this noxious caricature entirely, and during the debate I did all I could to turn it on its head.

Why am I optimistic? If you take the question ‘is future genocide inevitable’ at face value—that is, interpret it to mean ‘is it very likely that extreme intergroup violence will occur again at some future time?’—the answer is clearly yes. But that’s a pretty boring way to interpret the question. I interpreted it to mean ‘are we powerless to make future genocide less likely?’, and to this I think the answer is clearly no. Knowledge is power, and knowledge about human nature gives us power to control it.

Just as the human body consists of many adaptations (organs) that are specialized for solving particular problems related to survival and reproduction, so does the human brain [1]. These psychological adaptations enable the kinds of ‘groupish’ behaviours at which humans excel, for better or worse: we readily assort into groups and then act to favour members of our own group while disfavouring outgroup members. This intergroup competitiveness usually stops short of violence, and can often be healthy and conducive to the greater good—for instance, rival teams that bring out the best in each other, or competition between firms that results in better products and lower prices for consumers. So not only does intergroup competitiveness not lead inevitably to violence, it can have strongly positive effects for society. Moreover, although humans do have adaptations that lead them to commit intergroup violence under some conditions, they also have adaptations that lead to intergroup forgiveness, cooperation, and peaceful dispute resolution under other conditions [2]. Over past centuries and millennia, civilisations have become increasingly skilled at creating the latter, peace-inducing environments and abolishing the former, violence-inducing ones. As a result, we humans are vastly less violent today than we were in our prehistoric past [3].

To minimize future intergroup violence, however, we need to do more than merely suppress violence between different political factions. A strong central government (like that in Yugoslavia prior to the 1980s) may be able to prevent violence between rival factions (like Serbs and Bosniaks) for a while, but if that government weakens, animosities may explode. In Yugoslavia’s case, as in so many others, groups were fighting each other over ancient ethnic, religious, and cultural identities that gave them insufficient reasons to look toward a shared future, or to imagine each other as allies with common values and goals. Not enough reasons, in short, to cooperate. And one key insight from evolutionary psychology is that for different factions to avoid competing destructively with one another, they must have transcendent shared goals that provide them with genuine reasons to cooperate. Humans are remarkably well-adapted for cooperation, which means they can be very good at it when they want to be but they won't do it for no reason. They'll do it, rather, when cooperating fulfils its evolutionary function of enabling individuals to accomplish some longed-for goal that they couldn’t achieve by acting alone.

From this perspective, then, the most important aspect of averting future intergroup violence is not merely insisting that rival factions tolerate each other, but on providing them with good reasons—shared goals and values—to actively cooperate.

However, getting rival political factions to cooperate is easier said than done. There are two major challenges.

The first big challenge is overcoming people’s tendency to define themselves in terms of the past—ethnic ancestry, religious tradition, and so forth— rather than the future. There is nothing inherently wrong with being proud of your ancient heritage, whatever it might be, but it shouldn’t preclude you from imagining and realizing the best possible future for yourself and your society. And if members of different groups can’t cooperate fully because they can’t stop living in the past, maybe they should place a higher value on looking forward instead of backward.

The second big challenge is identifying the shared goals and values that can bring different factions together. There are many possibilities, but the most promising are those which don’t discriminate among different factions and which apply, at least in principle, equally for all. I have a strong personal preference for values associated with scientific inquiry, because I believe they are in principle equally useful for everyone in terms of the benefits they provide. Science is in this sense the only truly unbiased and objective road to enlightenment, in that its results apply equally to everyone, regardless of culture and heritage. (I realize fully, of course, that some cultural traditions are themselves anti-science; however this rejection doesn’t affect the truth of scientific facts. Whatever one’s culture says, the earth revolves around the sun). A fuller embracement of scientific values by otherwise disparate political factions could increase humanity’s ability to accomplish goals of benefit to many or to all: defeating disease, saving the environment, protecting children from exploitation, even conquering death.

Scientific values and goals may or may not prove to be the most unifying ones that humanity has. Regardless, knowledge about human nature could help us minimize future political conflict by encouraging factions to look ahead to a brighter and more cooperative future, as opposed to looking backward to the divisive tribal identities of their ancestors. By damping down the aspects of our nature that cling to these historical identities, and promoting those which embrace novel and transcendent opportunities for large-scale cooperation, we’ll put ourselves in the best position to secure a peaceful future.

Environment Essential Reads

The Gift of Plants

Should Changing Your Environment Be Your New Year's Resolution?

Copyright Michael E. Price 2015. All rights reserved.

References

1. Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (1992). The psychological foundations of culture. In J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby (Eds.), The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. New York: Oxford University Press.
2. McCullough, M. (2008). Beyond revenge: The evolution of the forgiveness instinct. Jossey-Bass.
3. Pinker, S. (2011). The better angels of our nature: The decline of violence in history and its causes. Penguin.