A psychological basis for a theory of aggression was advanced by Freud, who originally regarded it as the frustration of the sexual drive by the ego. After the First World War, in which two of his sons served with distinction but which marked him by its tragedy, he adopted a darker view.8 In a famous correspondence with Einstein, published as Why War?, he states bluntly that ‘man has within himself a lust for hatred and destruction’ and offered as the only hope of offsetting it the development of ‘a well-founded dread of the form future wars will take’. These observations, adopted by Freudians as the theory of the ‘death drive’, principally concerned the individual. In Totem and Taboo (1913), Freud had proposed a theory of group aggression which drew heavily on literary anthropology. He suggested that the patriarchal family was the primal social unit and that it had ramified by the working of sexual tensions within it. The patriarchal father was supposed to have had exclusive sexual rights over the family women, thus driving his sexually deprived sons to murder and then eat him. Ridden by guilt, they then outlawed or tabooed the practice of incest and instituted that of exogamy — marrying beyond the family circle — with all its potentiality for wife-stealing, rape and consequent inter-family and then inter-tribal feud of which the study of primitive societies yields so many examples.
Totem and Taboo was a work of the imagination. More recently the new discipline of ethology, in which psychological theory is combined with the study of animal behaviour, has produced more rigorous explanations of group aggression. The founding ‘territorial’ idea derives from the work of Konrad Lorenz, a Nobel prizewinner, who argued from his observation of animals in the wild and in controlled environments that aggression was a natural ‘drive’, deriving its energy from the organism itself, which achieves ‘discharge’ when stimulated by an appropriate ‘releaser’. Most animals of the same species, however, possessed in his view the ability to palliate the aggressive discharge in others of their own kind, usually by displaying signs of submission or retreat. Man, he argued, originally behaved in the same way; but by learning to make hunting weapons he succeeded in overpopulating his territory. Individuals then had to kill others in order to defend a patch, and the use of weapons, which emotionally ‘distanced’ killer from victim, atrophied the submissive response. Such was the process, he believed, by which man had been transformed from a subsistence hunter of other species into an aggressive killer of his own.
Robert Ardrey elaborated Lorenz’s territorial idea to suggest how individual aggression might have become group aggression. Being more effective as hunters than individuals, groups of humans, he argued, learnt to hunt cooperatively over common territories as hunting animals had adapted to do, so that cooperative hunting became the basis of social organisation and supplied the impulse to fight human interlopers.From Ardrey’s hunting thesis, Robin Fox and Lionel Tiger have gone on to propose an explanation of why males provide social leadership. Hunting-bands, they say, had to be exclusively male in composition, not just because males are stronger but because the presence of women would be a biological distraction; because hunting-bands had to accept leadershipfor reasons of efficiency and were for millennia the principal providers of sustenance, aggressive male leadership thereafter determined the ethos of all forms of social organisation.
The theories of Lorenz, Ardrey, Tiger and Fox, which drew heavily on the work of human and animal behavioural scientists, were not welcomed by the practitioners of the oldest discipline in social science, anthropology. Anthropology is an extension of ethnography, the study of surviving ‘primitive’ peoples in their habitats; from ethnography it attempts to supply explanations of the origins and nature
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