Basic Humanity vs. Base Behavior : Violence: Is killing an animal onstage an expression of art? Beyond the artist’s motives, ask what it does to our sensibilities.

Is killing an animal as part of an onstage performance art or abomination? Should it be allowed or abolished?

This sort of question inevitably raises older questions about human nature: Are people genetically scripted for kindness or cruelty, or is our behavior determined by experience?

News of performance artist Rick Gibson’s plan to crush a live rat onstage in Vancouver, B.C., was put in an interesting context by what else was in the news. In the same issue of the Los Angeles Times there was a a debate on whether military women should be sent into combat. That week, there also were reports on the people by whom you are most likely to be murdered, on a humor magazine that featured a photograph of a man just after he has gnawed the head off a live chicken, on ritual murders by cultists, on murder by “poison umbrella,” on Charles Stuart’s murder/suicide in Boston, and so on in grim procession.

Our response to questions about the nature of such behavior determines how we might try to prevent it.

Despite certain inherited behavioral propensities, some of which we share with other primates, for the most part anthropologist Ashley Montagu’s axiom is correct: “Human Nature is what humans learn.” For example, the capacity for speech is genetic, but the ability to speak any particular language is learned, as is the choice of what to say in that language.

One of our inherited propensities is a craving for intense experience, which in different circumstances might result in avid pursuit of marathon-running or hang-gliding or bear-baiting--or military combat. Which forms of excitement we choose to teach and learn determines our character, not to mention our behavior.

Another unmistakable fact is that people tend to replicate their experiences. Those who have been thrilled by the arts tend to become serious supporters of the arts. Those who were abused as children tend to become child-abusers. And those who consume vast quantities of violent entertainment are less distressed by violence and more inclined toward hurtful behaviors than those who haven’t.

The secret guard of Ceausescu, like so many throughout history, apparently was taught to seek and enjoy pain as well as to inflict it. The monstrous Nazi concentration camp guards were carefully taught their hideous tasks--and to relish their own resultant excitement. In Imperial Rome, torture and death were choreographed for the public’s amusement.

Note that in this sequence we have subtly moved from killing as a political expedient to killing as entertainment. Though at first glance they may seem unrelated, given the unity of a person, there is a profound connection between the two. It is no accident that among the crowds witnessing the spectacles at the Colosseum were the legions Rome would send off to conquer other peoples at enormous cost in their own and their victims’ suffering. There are thoughtful people today who wonder if one of the consequences of decades of horrific motion-picture and television entertainment is that young Americans have been conditioned to be willing and able to die and kill in far-off Vietnam, or Grenada or Panama.

Society already acknowledges that experience, particularly entertainment, shapes people and behavior. This is why we outlaw such spectacles as gladiatorial contests, cock-fighting and cat-roasting. If rat-crushing joins them, it will be on similar grounds.

Some comments in response to Gibson’s “act” were illuminating for the abysmal irrelevence that our world inculcates. The issue is not, as another artist said, a matter of degree: that killing a moth onstage is acceptable but killing a rat is not, because it’s “big” and has “a lot more blood.” Society’s concern lies in the motivation for the killing and its likely human consequence.

A primary purpose of any theatrical presentation is to stimulate emotion. One of the outcomes of a successfully titillating performance is to encourage its repetition. And that is the crux: When is a killing titillating? Just consider the difference in motivation and consequence between a performer swatting a distracting moth onstage so as to continue a performance, compared to another who, as part of the performance, slowly and delightedly tears off a moth’s wings as it struggles.

To avert civil-liberties infringements, what we must attempt here, as always, is not compulsion but education and voluntary renunciation. Ultimately, our concern must be not only freedom of expression, but freedom from extinction.