Genocide and Genes : A ‘natural’ action may be atrociously immoral, too
Genocide, according to Jared Diamond, a research biologist at UCLA, is a behavior that Homo sapiens shares with the other primates, notably with the two extant species of chimpanzee. Attested in several other species, genocide is particularly well-documented among primates. Field research has shown clearly that bands of chimps exterminate rival bands down to the last member. As for the normality of genocide in humans, its empirical frequency--Diamond counts 17 attested occurrences between 1950 and 1990 alone--is disturbing confirmation that, in this of all instances, the immoral is not unnatural.
Do Humans Have a Collective Genetic Capacity for Genocide?
In morality, as in all human achievement,humankind often challenges nature. We are genetically programmed to like sweets, for example, but our original environment, in which they were rare, has been succeeded by one in which they are harmfully abundant. A correction is called for. Our collective capacity for genocide, fatally enhanced by technology, calls more urgently for a similarly collective correction.
Unfortunately, as Diamond and such other observers as psychologist Robert Jay Lifton have noted, genocide induces a psychic numbing not just in its victims and perpetrators but also in those who merely witness or hear of it. The ape in us, so to speak, knows enough about ape destructive capability to run from the sight and sound of mass murder. But the ape’s repugnance may indeed be like the craving for sweets: undeniably natural but, in the contemporary context, a harmful reaction.
Writing in 1992 in his brilliant “The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal,” Diamond carefully distinguishes several situations in which genocide is attested, including the ominously familiar “lengthy power struggle within a pluralistic society, leading to one group’s seeking a final solution by killing the other. Cases involving two different ethnic groups are the killing of Tutsi in Rwanda by Hutu in 1962-63, of Hutu in Burundi by Tutsi in 1972-73, of Serbs by Croats in Yugoslavia during World War II, of Croats by Serbs at the end of that war. . . . “
Can It Be Triggered Practically Anywhere and in Anyone?
One cannot say that if genocide is halted in Rwanda and Bosnia then by some simple causal sequence it will become less likely in Los Angeles.
At the same time, genocide can no longer be thought of as something that only “they” do. Chimps and humans are, genetically, 98% identical; and historical experience confirms genetics: The suggestion is that genocide--race murder--arises from a tendency that, under given pressures, may be activated practically anywhere and triggered in practically anyone.
Measures to neutralize the tendency are encouragingly widespread and effective, but they are not yet universal or infallible. So, no, sure, it can’t happen here; and yet, in a world in which the escalation of civil strife is a more proximate danger than a superpower exchange, making sure that it can’t happen there either may be a prudent hedging of the evolutionary bet.
