Fromm on Aggression

Is man an instinctive killer, fated by his genes to be cruel and aggressive? Or is he a product of his environment who, with proper conditioning, would be gentle, peaceful and loving? Perhaps the most notable advocate of the "instinctivist" theory is Konrad Lorenz (On Aggression), co-winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Lorenz found instinctive aggression in animals and suggested that man is similarly programmed by evolution. Behaviorist B.F. Skinner, conversely, has long argued that man can be conditioned to forsake his violent ways. Now Erich Fromm, 73, social philosopher, psychoanalyst and bestselling author (The Sane Society, The Art of Loving), has written a new book, The Anatomy of Human Destruction (Holt, Rinehart & Winston; $10.95), that challenges both schools of thought.

Lorenz is a fine observer of animals, Fromm concedes, who unfortunately "decided to venture out into a field in which he had little experience or competence, that of human behavior." Men and animals do fight instinctively to protect their vital interests --Fromm calls this "benign" aggression--but "only man seems to take pleasure in destroying life without any reason or purpose other than that of destroying." It is this "malignant" aggression that Lorenz has failed to identify and that now threatens man's very survival.

Manipulated Man. Fromm cites evidence to show that man's "malignant" lust for blood is not instinctive. He argues that "cooperation and sharing was a practical necessity for most hunting societies," and that historically, "warlikeness grows in proportion to civilization."

Yet Fromm does not agree with B.F. Skinner's plans for altering man through altering society. "Skinner," he writes, "recommends the hell of the isolated, manipulated man of the cybernetic age as the heaven of progress." According to Fromm, reinforcing peaceful behavior is not enough unless the reinforcers take into account Freud's discovery that the forces driving man are often unconscious. In spite of the emphasis he puts on man's passions and unconscious drives, Fromm believes that the most important determinant of a man's character is society. Echoing arguments he has sprinkled throughout a score of earlier books, Fromm cites Mesopotamia's urban revolution in the third millennium B.C. as being the fall from Eden. At that point simple rural egalitarian society began giving way to cities, authoritarian rule and organized industrial and military power. Alienated from his work and no longer free, man needed new ways to express his humanity, to demonstrate that he could still affect the world around him. Thus warps of character appeared: sadism, the passion to control others, and necrophilia, the attraction to death and destruction. That sadism and necrophilia still are character traits in the 20th century, Fromm demonstrates through chilling psychobiographies of Sadists Stalin and Himmler, and the necrophilous Adolf Hitler.

Fromm is often eloquent as a chronicler of society's sicknesses, but he gives only cursory attention to their cures. Sadism will disappear, he says, "when exploitative control of any class, sex, or minority group has been done away with." This can be done "only if the whole [social and political] system as it has existed during the last 6,000 years of history can be replaced by a fundamentally different one."

At times, Fromm's premises seem as sweeping as those Utopian prescriptions. His picture of the peace-loving primitive man is unconvincing ("Wars among primitive hunters are characteristically unbloody"). His explanation for the rise of patriarchal rule during the urban revolution seems equally shaky ("No longer the womb, but the mind became the creative power, and with this, not women, but men dominated society").

In the end, in spite of the distinctions Fromm tries to make between his approach and Skinner's, he falls victim to his own criticisms of the behaviorists. As with Skinner, his recommendations that society change its "system of production, ownership and consumption" depend on faith in man's manipulability and desire to change.

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