Prime Time Replay:
Barbara Ehrenreich
on the Roots of the Fascination with War
MsgId: *brain_storm(1)
Date: Fri Jun 20 21:55:27 EDT 1997
From: Rob_Killheffer At: 205.198.117.63
Good evening, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Brainstorms. Tonight our guest is Barbara Ehrenreich, consummate essayist and author of a perceptive and revolutionary new book, BLOOD RITES, which traces the psychological forces behind our eternal fascination with war deep into the human past -- but to a different source than most earlier theories have found.Welcome, Barbara. I've got to say I found your book riveting. It amazes me that the idea that the roots of war lie in humanity's preshistory as a hunter has gone unexamined for so long. When did you start to question that assumption in the course of your research?
MsgId: *brain_storm(4)
Date: Fri Jun 20 22:03:56 EDT 1997
From: Barbara_Ehrenreich At: 207.172.74.198
I think I got drawn to the opposite sort of theory, the problem of man the hunted, rather than man the hunter, partly because the theme of predator and predator beasts kept coming up in mythology and in stories of war and things like that. There's been quite a bit of skepticism on the huge emphasis of human hunting in human history -- it tends to keep women out of the picture, or what were probably women's contributions like gathering.
MsgId: *brain_storm(5)
Date: Fri Jun 20 22:06:07 EDT 1997
From: Rob_Killheffer At: 205.198.117.63
In some ways your theory that war draws on and is fueled by responses we developed in the experience of being hunted doesn't entirely reject the "man-the-hunter" concept, though -- it adds a vital twist, that's humanity's experience as a hunter has such emotional power because we weren't _always_ hunters, yes?
MsgId: *brain_storm(6)
Date: Fri Jun 20 22:09:39 EDT 1997
From: Barbara_Ehrenreich At: 207.172.74.198
By no means am I rejecting the role of big game hunting in human prehistory. But there's a lot of question now about when big game hunting really began, with estimates ranging from as long as five hundred thousand years ago to as recently as 70 thousand years ago, and that's quite a range. I mean, I think war itself, the practice of war, has roots in hunting, clearly, the weaponry of war was probably originally developed for use against animals.The theory of origin of war that I found most convincing is one that says really war begins about 12 thousand years ago, not just because people were turning to agriculture, but because they were literally running out of animals to hunt, not just for game, but animals to fight as predators. What I'm arguing in BLOOD RITES is that the passions we bring to war originate in the experience of being hunted. The war itself probably has more recent roots in the hunting.
MsgId: *brain_storm(8)
Date: Fri Jun 20 22:10:35 EDT 1997
From: Rob_Killheffer At: 205.198.117.63
One of the things that struck me while reading BLOOD RITES was how clear and obvious your idea seemed once you laid it out. How else to explain some things that hold on even today, children's stories with wolves and bears as the threats, and people's outraged and extreme reactions when an animal kills a human -- even when that human is at fault. Once you make that man-the-hunted connection, you start to see it everywhere. Do you think that long prehistoric experience plays a role in other aspects of human behavior besides war?Yes, I certainly do and here's a big one, for example -- anthropologists are now, just in the last few years, concluding that the entire reason we are social animals in the first place has to do with the threat of predation. The leaving the trees and leaving the forest for the savanna put our ancestors into harm's way, very directly, and the response of all kinds of primates seems to be to group, to cluster, into bands. For one reason just because in a large group, there are more eyes and ears to detect a large intruder. cont...
MsgId: *brain_storm(10)
Date: Fri Jun 20 22:15:15 EDT 1997
From: Barbara_Ehrenreich At: 207.172.74.198
What's special about our species, compared even to chimpanzees, is that we seem to have the capacity for group defense, for banding together and fighting an intruder, much more than the other species we're related to. There are speculations, too, that certain neurotic conditions like phobias, chronic anxiety, and even depression may have roots in this preparedness, this mental preparedness, to deal with the danger of predation. So there are major ways in which our psychology was probably shaped by other animals, particularly the cats. And that's a humbling thing to realize.
MsgId: *brain_storm(11)
Date: Fri Jun 20 22:17:44 EDT 1997
From: Rob_Killheffer At: 205.198.117.63
Hmmm -- makes me wonder about my own relationship to _my_ cats ... indeed, about humanity's association with pets in general. Is it an accident that our chief pets are representatives of the fierce predator families -- cats and canines?
MsgId: *brain_storm(12)
Date: Fri Jun 20 22:20:30 EDT 1997
From: Barbara_Ehrenreich At: 207.172.74.198
I don't know, historically, how that came to be, but there may be some fascination. Dogs are kind of different because I think they were recruited to be companions in the hunt, probably earlier than cats were domesticated. But I think we enjoy trivializing our former enemies as puppy dogs, pussy cats, teddy bears. Another thing I wanted to mention in this connection is our continuing fascination with predation as a theme in the entertainment media. I just saw THE LOST WORLD and clearly the thrill there is that you get to see the dinosaurs actually chomping down on humans, with arms and legs dangling out of dinosaur mouths. Why would you want to see this? I think because it's probably a safe way to view the worst thing we can imagine. It's in the theatre and we can see it and walk out alive and there's some satisfaction in that, I guess.
MsgId: *brain_storm(13)
Date: Fri Jun 20 22:22:31 EDT 1997
From: Rob_Killheffer At: 205.198.117.63
That's right -- that's what I mean by how obvious it seems once you think about it. I doubt that lions would have the same kind of horrified response to seeing a film of lions being eaten by dinosaurs -- just as my tough-guy cat, Brutus, doesn't ever seem to have the same kinds of anxious or fearful feelings that I do. Interesting. What about other kinds of human violence -- murder, rape, boxing, football. Is there any relationship there you can see? Or is that something different from war?
MsgId: *brain_storm(15)
Date: Fri Jun 20 22:24:26 EDT 1997
From: Barbara_Ehrenreich At: 207.172.74.198
As a child, I had nightmares about lions, although there were very few of them roaming the streets of Pittsburg where I was growing up. Obviously we don't retain some kind of visual image of a lion from generation to generation, but there are studies that we can probably develop a fear of something like a lion a lot faster than we can develop a fear of something we should really be afraid of like speeding cars and nuclear weapons. In other words, the archaic fears seem to have more of a grip on us.
MsgId: *brain_storm(16)
Date: Fri Jun 20 22:26:44 EDT 1997
From: Rob_Killheffer At: 205.198.117.63
Did you catch my last question, re: other forms of human violence?
MsgId: *brain_storm(17)
Date: Fri Jun 20 22:28:26 EDT 1997
From: Barbara_Ehrenreich At: 207.172.74.198
I think it's different. I don't think war is just a barroom brawl on a large scale, or domestic violence extended to strangers because war is a highly-organized collective activity. It's not impulsive. Within combat, aggression and rage can come out, but combat is a small part of war. And in modern combat, you don't want to be in the grip of emotions, you want to be cool and level-headed. It's different than random kinds of violence.
MsgId: *brain_storm(18)
Date: Fri Jun 20 22:31:43 EDT 1997
From: Rob_Killheffer At: 205.198.117.63
One of the angles -- the main angles -- in BLOOD RITES involves how the roots of religion, as well as war, seem to lie in this experience of prey becoming predator. It's not hard to imagine that connection when thinking of something like Aztec human sacrifice, but does it play any role in religion today?
MsgId: *brain_storm(19)
Date: Fri Jun 20 22:35:44 EDT 1997
From: Barbara_Ehrenreich At: 207.172.74.198
Well, my radical conjecture here is that the original deities were predator beasts. One reason for guessing that is that in many of the ancient religions, the dieties demand blood sacrifices and the dieties are imagined to be eating, or in some way consuming these blood sacrifices. We still see some of this in the behavior of the diety in the early part of the Old Testament, where he is not at all responsible or rational, or easy to explain in any way. He really is a scary and violent god. Themes of sacrifice, of course, figure very largely in the New Testament, too, and Christianity, but that's sort of a different story. I was fascinated by the fact that the oldest dieties in many cultures seem to be female, but they weren't exactly the nurturing earth mothers that we're led to believe by our feminist friends. They seem to be anthropomorphized predator beasts, generally associated literally with a predator beast, like Durga is associated with the tiger, and Artemis associated with the lion.
MsgId: *brain_storm(21)
Date: Fri Jun 20 22:39:36 EDT 1997
From: Rob_Killheffer At: 205.198.117.63
The thought occurs to me that, as far as more modern religions is that the practice of the eucharist is much like those older sacrifices -- an offering of meat and blood -- but that it inverts the old order, not offering it to a god but to the worshippers.
MsgId: *brain_storm(22)
Date: Fri Jun 20 22:42:02 EDT 1997
From: Barbara_Ehrenreich At: 207.172.74.198
I don't know how to interpret that, partly because I was not raised in any religion and have no direct experience of the ritual communion, but I would point out that animal sacrifice still goes on in parts of the world. Some Hindu cults and some Muslims do continue animal sacrifice as I was somewhat surprised to find on a trip to India several years ago. One of my fears is that the Christian Right will really take the Bible literally and notice how much of the first five books of the Old Testament is detailed instructions for animal sacrifice and I'm afraid they'll start demanding we do this in the public schools.
MsgId: *brain_storm(23)
Date: Fri Jun 20 22:43:48 EDT 1997
From: Rob_Killheffer At: 205.198.117.63
Certainly some people -- not Christians yet, but who knows? -- perform animal sacrifices right here in New York. They're always finding chickens and such in the parks -- probably santeria rituals. It's not something that's far behind us at all. ...
MsgId: *brain_storm(24)
Date: Fri Jun 20 22:46:12 EDT 1997
From: Barbara_Ehrenreich At: 207.172.74.198
No, kosher rituals for preparation of meat are an older vestige of older sacrifice. Santeria is practiced reputedly in Key West near where I live today. I think we still have human sacrifice in the form of capital punishment. In fact, in ancient societies that practiced human sacrifice, so-called criminals were sometimes used as victims instead of captives of war or other people.
MsgId: *brain_storm(25)
Date: Fri Jun 20 22:46:12 EDT 1997
From: Rob_Killheffer At: 205.198.117.63
At any rate, while your book opens up a new interpretation of war and its origins, the question of its future remains. Whether it's "man the hunter" or "man the hunted," there's still the sense that, if it's such a deeply engrained part of our emotional makeup, is there any way to stop it?
MsgId: *brain_storm(26)
Date: Fri Jun 20 22:50:46 EDT 1997
From: Barbara_Ehrenreich At: 207.172.74.198
Well, what's deeply engrained in our emotional makeup is something that's very positive -- the capacity to band together to experience a kind of euphoria from collective defense against a common enemy. I think those are the emotions we bring to wars and I think those are very noble and generous and altruistic. The problem is to direct those emotions somewhere else, or to experience them other ways. One way, for example, that we could have a trivial experience of bonding and solidarity against an enemy is sports, but I think our species has plenty of real non-human enemies that we could mobilize the same emotions in defending ourselves against.Thinking most of all of the microbes whose planet this really is, in terms of numbers, anyway, and ability to wipe us out. So I came out of this thinking that the problem was not to try to eradicate some kind of flaw in our makeup, but I came out of it with some respect for this fighting spirit we have which seems to be part of our makeup.
MsgId: *brain_storm(28)
Date: Fri Jun 20 22:53:49 EDT 1997
From: Rob_Killheffer At: 205.198.117.63
That's true, certainly -- that we could put the same impulses to work in other ways -- but I wonder how possible that really is. It does seem so much easier to get people roused and passionate when the enemy is something more directly tangible -- and when the mode of combat is straightforward and bloody. It's no wonder that INDEPENDENCE DAY stirs up those emotions so well, while the War Against Hunger doesn't. Do you really think we'll find a way to make a battle against disease arouse those same passions?
MsgId: *brain_storm(30)
Date: Fri Jun 20 22:56:41 EDT 1997
From: Barbara_Ehrenreich At: 207.172.74.198
It's our only hope. But I think also that one of the things we have to direct our fighting spirit against is war itself. Another thing I eventually concluded to my total surprise while working on this book is that war is, in a formal sense, a living thing in that it's self-reproducing. In the way a computer virus is self-reproducing, it doesn't have any intentions and desires, but it tends to spread from one region to another as war tends to spread from one region to another. Maybe we should think of war as the predator beast we have to do battle with in this war of the species. If we can't uproot it from our cultures, it will destroy us.
MsgId: *brain_storm(31)
Date: Fri Jun 20 22:58:19 EDT 1997
From: Rob_Killheffer At: 205.198.117.63
Sounds like Richard Dawkins' concept of "memes" -- self-reproducing elements of culture or behavior. And it often seems that the most effective and tenacious such memes are the bad ones ... and war would be a good example. We're just about out of time for tonight, so I'll have to make this my final comment. I admire your optimism, just as I admire your book -- but I'm not sure I share it. It's hard for me to imagine any of these positive twists really standing up against the more reflexive forms of the warlike urge. As long as there are human conflicts, it'll be all too easy to find human enemies ... At any rate, thanks for joining me tonight, Barbara, and for a very interesting discussion.
MsgId: *brain_storm(33)
Date: Fri Jun 20 23:01:52 EDT 1997
From: Barbara_Ehrenreich At: 207.172.74.198
Thank you, Rob! I hope to continue it another time. Good night. :)
MsgId: *brain_storm(34)
Date: Fri Jun 20 23:03:07 EDT 1997
From: Rob_Killheffer At: 205.198.117.63
That would be wonderful. Thanks again for coming, Barbara. To our audience, I can't recommend BLOOD RITES highly enough. Go out and get yourself a copy! It'll change the way you think about many aspects of human behavior and human history. That's all for tonight. For Brainstorms, this is Rob Killheffer, signing off!
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