Is Violence Innate In Us?

Not a single day passes without several violent incidents being reported in the newspapers or on television. The nature of violence varies from place to place, but there is a common refrain beading the incidents together – man’s inhumanity to man. Truth to tell, violence, like pollution or unemployment, is a ubiquitous and inescapable fact of life on earth today. In India, there was a time when violence was largely an urban and lower-class phenomenon. It goes without saying that this is no longer the case. Violence is as conspicuous a feature of contemporary rural society as of the urban or semi-urban variety.

Meanwhile, sociological research has revealed that children of low-income parents show a marked tendency towards violence. Compared to them, middle-class children show a crime-rate at least five times lower. Reasons for this are not far to seek, says the social scientist. Lower-class children are the worst victims of deprivation, their poor and usually uneducated parents being unable to provide them with the barest economic standards.

Not unnaturally, therefore, a favourite subject with alert academicians is: From where does so much violence spring? Examining the question about 100 years ago, Sigmund Freud detected in human instincts “a powerful measure of desire for aggression”. The instinctual theory of aggression was thus pioneered. In other words, Freud depicted man as a born aggressor, a gruesome little monster whose aggressiveness increases as he grows in age and body. He further added that “the very emphasis of the commandment, ‘Thou shall not kill’, makes it certain that we (human beings) are descended from an endlessly long chain of generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood, as it is perhaps also in ours”.

Freud also maintained that inherent in man is something like a death instinct which, since it cannot be satisfied except in suicide, prompts him to attack and hurt others. In short, he saw no connection, as many a student of human behaviour does today, between the development of a human being and the state of his society, or between human development and the environmental conditions in which men and women grow up This is a point of view which is sought to be demolished by a host of present-day critics.

In 1893, in course of an exchange of letters, Freud wrote to Einstein: “ … I would like to dwell a little longer on this destructive instinct … With the least of speculative efforts we are led to conclude that this instinct functions in every living being, striving to work its ruin and reduce life to its primal state of inert matter. Indeed it might well be called the ‘death instinct’; whereas the erotic instincts vouch for the struggle to live on. The death instinct becomes an impulse to destruction when, with the aid of certain organs, it directs its action outwards, against external objects … The diversion of the destructive impulse towards the external world must have beneficial effects. Here is then the biological justification for all those vile, pernicious propensities which we now are combating …”

Many a behavioural scientist has disagreed with the Freudian conception of the death instinct. Even in his lifetime, Freud met with a trickle of opposition to this portion of his overall theory, but he refused to budge from what he had so confidently asserted. The views contained in the excerpt taken from the letter to Einstein are present in the last book written by Freud, Outline of Psycho-analysis.

Some of Freud’s contentions have been most sharply challenged by Fredric Wertham, who held that violence is “learned behaviour”, that it is a result of the inter-action between society and environment, between the individual and his society, and not a product of the so-called innate nature of man. Wertham argued: “The violent man is not the natural but the socially alienated man”.

The German Nobel-winning naturalist Konrad Lorenz’s line of thinking, however, reflected to a degree the Freudian scheme of things. Lorenz believed that violence is not exactly innate, but that it can be more accurately described as “a basic component of human nature”. Man learnt two things simultaneously – how to make and use weapons to kill, and certain moral values or restraints which told him not to kill members of his own species. But these values were only skin-deep and never penetrated far enough to make any impression on his nature. As Lorenz perceptively observed: “The deep emotional layers of our personality simply do not register the fact that the cocking of a forefinger to release a shot tears the entrails of another man”.

Vidyarthy Chatterjee writes on cinema, society, politics