Philosophobia: Fearing the Knowledge of Human Nature in the 21st Century; pt 1

One of my favorite hobbies these days, is posting interesting news articles having to do with climate change, whether it be the science of, or ways to combat, or the efforts of some entity.  I am a member of Care2, which encourages the sharing of relevant news, and so I enjoy sharing these stories with the hope of getting even just one person to consider their personal habits and the effect they have on the fragile world we are living in, in this day and age.  One thing that I didn’t quite expect, at least where I’m concerned, is the interest that this would awaken in me in human behavior. 

Humans are very destructive; or perhaps a better word is enterprising, or opportunistic.  If we find that we can make something, sell something, or use something that comes from the planet, we most certainly will.  We’ll burn it up, cut it down, hunt it to extinction, eat it, drink it, wear it, bottle it, market it, sell it, and ultimately use it until it is completely gone.  This particular behavior actually brought me around to a second angle to that thought: do we perhaps hate ourselves so much that we destroy, and consume on purpose?  It is a self-hating ritual because we know that it’s going to lead to our demise?  Does anyone even know the answer?  I decided to do some research.

As many of you can guess, my first thread of “results” in my search were based on religious wars, killings, martyrdom…  These are relevant issues, but not exactly what I was looking for.  I really wanted to see the science of the human psyche, so I started with those listings from a scientific standpoint.  The first story, lo and behold, was about Chimps killing for territory, just like we humans do.  Jackpot?  Chimps kill each other for territory, study finds.  Let’s see…

 According to World Science, in a recent study, they found that, “Chim­panzees kill each oth­er. They kill their neigh­bors. Up un­til now, we have not known why. Our ob­serva­t­ions in­di­cate that they do so to ex­pand their ter­ri­to­ries at the ex­pense of their vic­tims,” said John Mi­tani of the Uni­vers­ity of Mich­i­gan, a mem­ber of the re­search group. 

The article went on to describe what almost sounded like a Chimp army, or militia, rather than a group on group collision.  In fact one scenario presented; “the chimp killers specifically seek out lone or badly outnumbered victims for an easy ambush” which, I don’t know about you, but that makes sense in an animal way, we see it on nature programs all the time.  However, we also see human groups behaving in similar ways, although not generally in the Army sense, but it IS a common tactic. 

I was intrigued by these findings.  Especially when you consider all of the media hype by various political figures of late, with their non-belief in ideas like evolution, or climate change.  Evolution; to me at least, seems like an exercise in Occam‘s razor.  We know that animals adapt to their surroundings quite often, and we know that humans are animals, therefore wouldn’t it stand to reason that we are, and have always been subject to evolution (adaptation), as well?  Uh oh.  I also said humans are animals.  I guess now I am going to hell.  (For the trivia savvy, I do not believe in hell.)

A few more behaviors described by this article included things such as stealth patrols of neighboring chimp communities and even how their “ob­serva­t­ions in­di­cate that ter­ri­to­rial con­flict leads chim­panzees in some groups to cede land to mem­bers of oth­er groups as a con­se­quence of le­thal coali­tionary ag­gres­sion,” the re­search­ers wrote. “In the pro­cess, chim­panzees in com­mun­i­ties that gain ter­ri­to­ry ob­tain in­creased ac­cess to re­sources that are then avail­a­ble to oth­ers in the group.”

The final line of the article was rather heart-stopping:  “The ev­o­lu­tion­ary ques­tion is wheth­er these ben­e­fits out­weigh the costs for in­di­vid­ual chimps; if not, it’s hard to ex­plain how such co­op­er­a­tive be­hav­ior could have evolved”.  We know it evolved though, because we see it every day of our lives in one form or another all across the face of humanity.  There is no shortage of stories throughout our history of this scenario.  Humans start wars over religious differences in order to further their own belief structure.  Humans start wars over terrorism and perceived weapons, only to hope for expanded control of oil.  Humans even engage in wars on our own people, solely for the hope of undefined personal gains.  It’s quite chilling.

We all know that humans are not easily defined.  We humans are creatures of unknown depth, and are capable of extreme beauty in our art and extreme brutality in our art of war.  It is the jigsaw of the human condition that I hope to paint, and this is but a first draft of a bigger portrait.  I hope I can do this justice, and perhaps in doing so we will all learn something about ourselves.