When Moe hits Larry ...
One thing we are learning in these dark days of suicide bombers is that pain has its own peculiar metabolism. Often, victims react to their own distress by victimizing someone else, someone who had nothing to do with the initial outrage.
After Serbs committed “ethnic cleansing” against Bosnian Muslims in Banja Luka, one told journalist Lawrence Weschler that this occurred “because of what the Ustasha did to us during the Second World War -- they leveled our [Serbian] Orthodox churches.” But the Ustasha had been Croats, not Muslims! If the outcome weren’t so tragic, the process would be comical, as in the Three Stooges routine when Moe hits Larry, who responds by hitting Curly.
What is happening here has long been known to biologists as “redirected aggression.” Many decades ago, when ethology -- the biological study of animal behavior -- was in its adolescence, future Nobel Prize-winners Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen described the peculiar process whereby a victim reacts by attacking not the victimizer, but someone else. So, baboon A beats up B, who responds by attacking C.
When people, no less than animals, are hurt physically or emotionally they are inclined to pass it along, as though pain were a physical burden that could be lightened if it were offloaded onto someone else, no matter who.
The seeming illogic of redirected aggression is now beginning to make physiological sense. Studies show that when an alpha baboon (call him Moe) attacks a subordinate (Larry), the latter’s stress response is activated. His testosterone levels go down, the hormone cortisol goes up. He may develop ulcers, especially if he is unable to retaliate against his persecutor.
But if, like the proverbial hot potato, “subordination stress” gets tossed down the line to another victim, the hormone situation is eased, at least for the original victim. Thus, if another baboon (Curly) is nearby and can be attacked with impunity, Larry has every reason to pass on the pain. Stanford University’s Robert Sapolsky, whose research uncovered this connection, referred to the person who “doesn’t get ulcers, he causes them.”
The ancient Israelites used to hold a ceremony in which the high priest would place his hands over the head of a goat and “confess over him all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions and all their sins.” (Leviticus 16:20) The goat was led off into the wilderness, and the iniquities went with it. Ever since, humans have made scapegoating -- and the redirection of their aggressions -- into a fine art.
In a now-classic study, social psychologists found they could predict the frequency of lynchings in the early 20th century South simply by knowing the price of cotton on the Northern mercantile exchanges: Cheap cotton caused economic pain and hardship, which found an outlet in redirected aggression against African Americans. Moreover, logic demands that we ask whether some of the public enthusiasm for invading Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein wasn’t generated simply by the pain of 9/11, and an ensuing need to get back at someone. Anyone.
This little ditty made its way around the Internet two years ago (to the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands”): “If you cannot find Osama, bomb Iraq/ If the market’s hurt your momma, bomb Iraq/ If they’ve repossessed your Audi, and the terrorists are Saudi/ And you’re feeling kind of rowdy, bomb Iraq!”
The implications of redirected aggression may be surprisingly large. Might it help explain those persistent cycles of domestic violence that so bedevil modern communities? And when the family of a crime victim demands punishment, to what extent does their call for “justice” reflect their physiological need to relieve subordination stress by offloading their pain onto another? When terrorists act terribly, and when their victims retaliatewith a barrage of violence, are the victims no less than the victimizers tapping into an ancient tradition of passing their pain along?
Of course, human beings aren’t baboons. We could choose to take out our anger and pain harmlessly, or even in healthy ways. Still, in redirecting their aggression, people have long been in the habit of acting like their primate cousins, slipping into a “bio logic” that is, regrettably, easier to understand than to overcome.
