The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times(13)
Half Sinner, Half Saint
“In the end, which wins out—the evil or the good?” I asked. “Are we fifty-one percent good or fifty-one percent evil?”
“Well, there’s plenty of evidence for both sides of this debate, but I think we’re split down the middle,” Jane said. “Humans are incredibly adaptive and will do whatever is required to survive in their environment. The environment we create will determine what prevails. In other words, what we nurture and encourage wins.”
There’s a strange feeling of having your world turned upside down. I was experiencing that disorienting feeling of seeing the world in a new way.
What I had been calling good and evil were simply the qualities of kindness and cruelty, generosity and selfishness, tenderness and aggression that we had evolved to survive in different environments and under different circumstances. And as Jane had said, we will do whatever it takes to survive in the world. If we live in a society with a reasonable standard of living and some degree of social justice, the generous and peaceful aspects of our nature are likely to prevail; while in a society of racial discrimination and economic injustice, violence will thrive.
“Well,” said Jane, when I shared these thoughts, “I think that to a large extent that’s true. Think of the genocide that occurred both in Rwanda and Burundi where the ethnic mix of Hutu and Tutsi is the same. International aid poured into Rwanda after the genocide because of President Bill Clinton’s visit. But Burundi was more or less ignored. As a result, Rwanda has been able to build up its infrastructure with roads and hospitals, international businesses have established themselves, and the Hutu and Tutsi are living seemingly in peace. Whilst in Burundi, none of this has happened and there is still periodic violence and bloodshed to this day.
“But we have to remember that a society is made up of people, and there are always people seeking change. So many Burundian citizens are wanting to create a more peaceful society. Societies only seem stable when they are ruled over by an autocratic government. Think of the ethnic conflicts that emerged after the breakup of the Soviet Union.”
“Do you think we’re capable of a peaceful and harmonious society? What about our aggressive tendencies?”
Jane shook her head. “Aggressive behavior has almost certainly been part of our genetic makeup inherited from our far distant hominid ancestors. You know the reason Leakey sent me off to Gombe was because he believed humans and chimpanzees had a common ancestor about five to seven million years ago and that if I found behavior similar—or the same—in modern chimps and modern humans, it probably originated in that apelike humanlike ancestor and stayed with us during our separate evolutionary paths. And that would give him a better idea of how early humans—whose fossilized remains he had discovered in various parts of Africa—might have behaved. Things like kissing, embracing, and the bonding of family members. And—what is relevant to the question you asked—very similar aggressive patterns including a kind of primitive warfare between neighboring groups.”
I remembered Jane telling me that she had been advised to play down the chimps’ aggressive behavior because back then, in the 1970s, many scientists were trying to convince people that aggressive behavior was learned—the nature-versus-nurture controversy.
“Fortunately, because of our extraordinary intellect and our ability to communicate with words,” Jane continued, “we have been able to progress beyond the purely emotional aggressive responses of other animals and, as I said, we have the ability to make conscious choices as to how we react in different situations. And the choices we make will partly reflect what we learned as children—and that will depend on the country and culture into which we were born.
“I suspect that it’s true of small children everywhere that, when angry, they are likely to hit out at what has upset them. My sister, Judy, and I were taught that it was wrong to hit and kick and bite other children. In this way we acquired an understanding of the moral values of our society: this is good, and this is bad; this is right, and this is wrong. The bad and the wrong were punished—verbally—and the good and the right were rewarded.”
“So children learn the moral values of their society,” I said.
“Yes, and this makes human aggression worse than that of other species because we may act aggressively knowing full well that it is morally wrong—at least what we believe is morally wrong. For this reason I believe that only humans are capable of true evil—only we can sit down and, in cold blood, work out ways to torture people, to inflict pain. Carefully plan horrific cruelty.”
I knew that this was a subject that haunted Jane. She had grown up in England while the Holocaust was happening in German-occupied Europe and had been shocked to discover its horrors. She was in Gombe when the genocides occurred in Rwanda and Burundi. Burundi is just north of Gombe. Some people, near the border between Tanzania and Burundi, said they saw the blood of slaughtered Burundians in the lake; and many refugees fleeing the violence in Burundi had settled in the hills behind Gombe. She had listened to horrifying stories of the barbaric cruelty from which they were fleeing.
Jane was also in Gombe when an armed group from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) abducted four of her students in the middle of the night. Much later, she had been in Kinshasa, the capital of the DRC, when there was rioting in the street outside the house where she was staying and a soldier was killed just below her window. She was in New York on 9/11 when terrorists flew planes into the Twin Towers.