The Phylogeny of Violence

ON AGGRESSION by Konrad Lorenz. 306 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $5.75.

The mark of Cain is on the century. More than 100 million people in the last six decades have been killed in military action alone, and the hairy thumb of violence has not lost its itch. Can man learn, before it is too late, to control the Cain in his constitution? Only if he understands the brute, says Austria's celebrated Naturalist Konrad Lorenz (King Solomon's Ring, Man Meets Dog). But the brute, he hastens to add, cannot finally be understood in psychiatric terms because man is too small a measure for such things. Aggression is as old as the amoeba, and in the violent process of evolution many species have resolved the problem of violence in a way that man might profitably emulate--or hopefully avoid. In this spirited essay Naturalist Lorenz describes the experience of these species in a natural history of aggression presented as a series of scientifically verified but shrewdly Aesopian fables for our time.

Psychotic Rats. Aggression, Lorenz instantly announces, is not a bad thing in itself. As one of the four fundamental instincts (hunger, sex, fight, flight), it is indispensable to most animal species. By means of aggression a species defends its members, attacks its prey, winnows its weak in mating fights and achieves safety through wide distribution--the territory of some species expands because each male maintains a domain that no other male is permitted to invade. Aggression, on the other hand, is a force more carefully controlled in most animals than it is in man. Members of two different animal species frequently fight to a fatal finish; members of the same species seldom go so far. At the last minute, the animal getting the worst of it makes a gesture of submission and the victor, no matter how furious his rage, is compelled by the gesture to spare the victim's life.

Unhappily, the prohibitions are not foolproof--vixens disturbed by a low-flying plane can go berserk and murder their cubs. And sometimes the prohibitions are limited to members of the immediate tribe--rats never bite rats that belong to their own colony, but two colonies of rats have been known to meet in a pitched battle that leaves hundreds of dead on the ground. These bloodbaths, Lorenz suggests, are epidemics of mass psychosis; they serve no rat-preserving purpose that he or any other naturalist can see. In general, he concludes ominously, a species is less often annihilated by its natural enemies than by its own mistakes.

Warrior Virtues. Man, in Lorenz' opinion, is one of the species most likely to fail for this reason. Man's specific problem, as he sees it, is that in the state of nature he was not a very aggressive animal. On the contrary, it was so hard for one primitive man to kill another that nature never bothered to develop an instinctual safeguard against homicide. Then all at once, with the aid of his powerful brain, man discovered weapons; and with the aid of weapons a creature created for flight was abruptly transformed into a creature equipped to attack. Unprohibited by instinct, man more and more effectively attacked members of his own species. At the start of the early Stone Age (500,000 B.C.), war and the hunt became his exclusive occupations, and for about 40,000 years thereafter the warrior virtues of aggression and cunning were intensively bred into his bones.

These virtues, in fact, served man well until the 20th century, until the arrow was transformed into a missile and the cudgel into an atomic warhead. All at once man had more aggression than he dared to use and less control than he needed.

Aggression into Love. Is there a way out of this dilemma? Lorenz finds it in an animal capacity called "redirected activity." In the case of the greylag goose, redirection works like this: the same movements the goose makes when it attacks an enemy it makes with only slight variation when it professes love for its lifelong mate. The movements are the same, the feeling is totally altered. What has intervened, in the author's opinion, is an instinctual process analogous to the one Freud calls sublimation. Animal rage has been sublimated into social feeling, aggression has been transformed into love.

From this and many similar instances, Lorenz draws a further conclusion--one that is commonly sensed if not frequently articulated: love, which is exhibited only by species that also strongly exhibit aggression, is in fact intrinsically and always a redirection or transformation of aggressive energy. Lorenz concludes that the same must be true of human love, and finds in this a viable hope that missiles may some day be beaten into Mixmasters and the species survive.

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