Many of us think that on the whole human beings are pretty nice: Usually friendly and helpful, even self-sacrificing. In contrast, others point to our frequent cruelty, violence and the horrendous wars that are never out of the news.
Evolutionary biologist Richard Wrangham characterizes the first view as Rousseauian, after the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau popularly credited with the idea that we are all born good but grow up corrupted by society. He characterizes the opposing idea as Hobbesian, after the English political philosopher, who described the lives of people without a government to keep them in line as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
The author untangles this paradox using the analogy of the chimera, a mythic beast having the body of a goat and the head of a lion. “It was neither one thing nor the other: it was both With respect to our tendency for aggression, a human being is both a goat and a lion. We have a low propensity for reactive aggression, and a high propensity for proactive aggression.”
By reactive aggression, he means the instant snarls and bites of lions, wolves and many other animals when they are approached — certainly by other species and often also by their own kind. Humans don't behave like this, but one of our closest animal relatives the chimpanzee does.
Mr. Wrangham began his career studying chimpanzees under the direction of Jane Goodall. His descriptions of them are vivid and illuminating, so we understand when he notes that it is impossible to think of 300 chimpanzees sitting close together for several hours without the eruption of utter chaos — indeed carnage. Yet we humans manage this feat pretty much every time we travel by air.
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