Murdering Our Own Species

Review of Jeffrey Moussaieff’s Beasts: What Animals Can

Page 229

Teach Us about the Origins of Good and Evil (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), ISBN 978-1-60819-615-9, 213 pages, hardbound, $26.00.

Steven Pinker’s 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined hit a nerve with many. Some were happy to support his declaration that humanity has improved since the establishment of the modern Western state, the Enlightenment, the rule of reason, and later the rise of feminism. His use of statistics to show that the percentage of those who die from homicide and war is on the wane seemed to give an empirical foundation to his overall thesis. Others found that he overestimated the degree of violence among hunter-gatherers and that the percentage of the population who died from war, genocide, or tyranny has risen over the last few centuries.

Into this fray steps Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson with his recently published Beasts: What Animals Can Teach Us about the Origins of Good and Evil. Masson is known to those in psychoanalytic circles for, among other things, his ability to convince Anna Freud to allow him to translate her father’s complete letters to Wilhelm Fliess. The 1985 publication of this correspondence revealed so much more about Freud’s inner life than the 1954 expurgated version.

On the other hand, in his 1984 book Assault on Truth, Masson made the absurd claim that Freud abandoned the so-called seduction theory out of moral cowardice. If he had closely read the letters he edited, he would have seen the reasons Freud, in his self-analysis, had for changing his mind. Earlier, in late 1983, a The New Yorker profile of Masson portrayed him as a narcissistic fool. Masson sued the writer, Janet Malcolm, for libel. He lost this suit and eventually resettled in New Zealand.

Can such a notorious person add anything to the controversies surrounding Pinker’s claims? The answer is yes. As do others, Masson questions Pinker’s claims of horrendous death rates among hunter-gatherers due to violence. Masson is not alone in claiming that “war probably emerged only after the advent of agriculture, between ten thousand and twelve thousand years ago” (175). Pinker calls those with such views “the anthropologists of peace,” and approvingly notes another scholar’s labeling them as “the Peace and Harmony Mafia” (Better Angels, 36). As such, Pinker does not seriously consider all the evidence, which is for different

Page 230

reasons, also true of Masson as well. There are two opposing mythologies here.

Masson is astounded by the “cavalier manner” in which Pinker “treats most violence in the world over the past fifty years.” Masson lists many barbaric actions from the mid-50s on that get “little or no mention” from Pinker, including the genocide in Rwanda, the Chinese killing of 17% of the population of Tibet, the ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia and East Timor, and the million deaths in India’s partition. Masson says that in “a book about the alleged decline of human violence” Pinker does not pay much attention to “some of the most violent episodes in our recent history” (176). Masson has a point. Pinker has trouble dealing with certain issues that do not fit into his thesis. The 55 million deaths in World War II are not evidence of violence’s decline. While Pinker blames Hitler for the war, this view does not account for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Very few actions compare to the Hitler-initiated Holocaust. Still, in World War II there were enough barbaric actions by both sides to give anyone pause before proclaiming the better angels of our nature are ascending.

On the other hand, neither Masson nor Pinker accurately reports the disagreements among anthropologists on the prevalence of war among hunter-gatherers. Lawrence Keeley, on whom Pinker relies, stresses high death rates due to war among hunter-gatherers (War Before Civilization, 1996). Carol Ember randomly surveys 50 hunter-gatherer groups who do not herd or farm. Ten percent did not have war or did so only rarely, while 64% had war at least every two years (Ethnology, 1978, Volume 17: 439-448). Raymond Kelly found that hunter-gatherer groups without war had one kind of social structure and those with war had another (Warless Societies and the Origins of War, 2000). Keith Otterbein says that when there was a lot of hunting there was warfare and, when hunting declined, so did war (The Anthropology of War, 2009). In other words, war began before the advent of agriculture, but many hunter-gatherer groups did not often engage in war, did not have high death rates from war, and external conditions influenced the frequency of warfare. Both Masson and Pinker can be seen, in part, as polemicists intent on arguing for a favorite point of view and discounting highly relevant evidence. In Pinker’s case, he even calls his opponents members of the mafia.

While Pinker has a message of progress, Masson does not. To him, “we were better off before civilization” (97). The human

Page 231

turning point, to Masson, is when we began cultivating plants and domesticating animals. Masson approvingly quotes Jared Diamond’s assertion that domestication is “‘the second worst mistake in the history of the human race’” (100). Masson traces the “origin of greed” to this period, as he does with war. He also maintains that “the very idea of ‘the other’ as somebody without value could be traced back to animal domestication” (97, 100). Now we see Masson’s view of the origin of human evil. It is in the exploitation of animals following the development of agriculture. Here is another version of humanity’s fall. Derived from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, this view is highly romanticized. Much of the rest of Masson’s book focuses on how animals are, by and large, not very aggressive toward humans, while the same cannot be said for our treatment of other creatures.

Masson adds that “certain kinds of violence exist only in our species” (38). This would include “domestic violence” which is to be found only in “human families” (36). He mentions that “homicide is the third-leading cause of death of American children five to fourteen years old” (38). Much of his book is centered on what we can do to treat animals better. Yet Masson also sees the destructive actions humans impose on each other. Not without reason, Masson asserts that “the most important question human beings can face is this: What makes us so violent to one another” (159)? Masson does not fully explore this question. Across the globe, there are 400,000 victims of homicide and 1.2 million deaths due to violence a year. Few other primates practice intragroup killing, and we are the only one who within our own groups murder adult females. You bet your life there are few more important questions than why we are so violent toward each other. As Naomi Bliven writes in The New Yorker, the “greatest of… mysteries… is why human beings have never learned to cherish their own species” (Sept. 12, 1983, 153).

Page 232