Harnessing the Five Inner Demons (Food Poisoning for Thought Reprint)

(*Reprinted from Food Poisoning for Thought as part my ongoing process to unify my web presence.*)

I don't like the body of work that linguist Stephen Pinker has amassed. I think his adherence to Noam Chomsky's field work antagonistic theory of language leaves him on barren ground with regarding to the field of linguistics. I feel he is out of his depth regarding his forays into other fields, as evidenced by his willingness to use discredited sources (Napoleon Chagnon for instance) and to even then mischaracterize the research he finds to suit his conclusions.

I find the most to disagree with in his work "the Angels of our Better Nature". I find the work paternalistic and racist in its assumptions. I feel that it misuses the data that is does show accurately and misrepresents other data, presenting it as things that it isn't. But this isn't a critique of Pinker's attempt at creating what amounts to a work of propaganda for the myth of human progress. He makes an interesting and useful point amidst all the poor logic and misrepresented data, although his conclusion after making this interesting point is precisely wrong.

Pinker asserts that much violence derives from five sources, what he calls the "Five inner demons": Predatory or practical violence, dominance, revenge, sadism, and ideology. He then asserts that empathy, self-control, the moral sense, and reason are civilization's "Four Better Angels"- as though we somehow lacked these things before civilization- but I digress. Pinker needs to draw heavily on the ludicrous work of Thomas Hobbes- whom he argues was 'undervalued' in an attempt to justify Hobbes' fetishism of state violence to remove individual violence. But the point stands, for a culture to survive, it must harness those five inner demons. Pinker seems to prefer repressing them, missing the point that tribal cultures recognized and used them as tools.

Practical violence is a function of situational need. As I said in the fall of the Liberal Dilettante, in times of need most of us become pragmatists. This was what Hobbes' observed when he called the state of existence without civilization "nasty, brutish and short". The tribe of course is anything but that. Physical archaeological data shows that we lived longer (if we didn't die in childbirth or early life- the primary time of mortality in tribal cultures) that any civilized group did until the mid to late 20th century. Likewise, tribal people were taller and healthier, based on physical archaeological data, than civilized peoples until (again) the mid to late 20th century. How does this relate to practical violence? These tribal people's were not fighting over scraps, in equity was low to non-existent. Practical violence was directed outwards, towards the stranger and not towards the tribe. And this may sound violent to civilized ears, but it was powerful population control. And if this sounds harsh to civilized ears, remember that we too are animals and we too have sustainable levels of population.

Skipping ahead to sadism, Lt. Grossman pointed out in 'On Killing' that the small percentage of the population which is unaffected by the stress of combat and can take sadistic joy in the act of violence is mobilized by tribal cultures into a warrior caste or other in group and given direction and leeway, their sadism used as a weapon to the advantage of the tribe. Once again, the violence was pointed outward.

Dominance and ideology are the purview of the civilization and not the tribal nomadic hunter gatherer. But the ritualized violence of sport, martial art, dueling, and rites of passage all existed as methods of directing and controlling the violence of dominance, even in tribal days. It was not until the ten thousand years of civilized history that the need for dominance drove the creation of mass empires. Ideology as a driver for violence is again is a feature of civilization. Certainly tribes used ideology to justify practical violence, but the holy war and the cold war are not features of tribal life.

Revenge is an oft vilified and overlooked aspect of peacekeeping and population control. Social Critic Daniel Quinn describes a tribal warfare strategy which he terms 'erratic retaliator', in which tribes periodically raid their neighbours to prove their strength, and in which their neighbours respond in kind, and afterword there is a peace agreement, frequently a feast and often young people engage in cross tribal courting. The net result is a strategy that keeps population stable, diverse and genetically sturdy; but could easily be misinterpreted as revenge by a modern mind and could just as easily morph into the revenge blood feud traditions of pseudo civilized tribal cultures of the modern world- caught between the past and the present in a vice they can't escape.