Getting Along

 It is Sunday in Iowa, and I sat quietly in our Quaker meeting this morning. It felt like such a special thing, no one fighting for attention, everyone sitting quietly, respectful, waiting for the spirit to grow within us. It is not very often that we do this in our everyday lives. Hardly ever do we have a room full of people sitting in silence, a friendly, warm, welcoming silence. What a novelty compared to our normal gatherings. This group quiet is a time to re-set, to go deep, to send our roots down. However, we’ve been vicariously experiencing the opposite setting in our current political scene. I sat there this morning thinking about this, about the contrast, and about human behaviour in general, about how we got to this current state of affairs. I couldn’t help smiling as I imagined the folks I was sitting with this morning in the guise of early humans, gathered perhaps in a cave or around a fire, close to the earth, banding together for safely, comfort and the sharing of essentials. These were our ancestors. We evolved from them, as they evolved from earlier species of animals, all the way back to the first life on the planet. We are all connected, way back in time.

This morning I wondered about those early humans. Were they mostly cooperative, sharing equally, working together? Did they have leaders? If so, how were they picked? And then the image of a huge black furry male gorilla came to mind (something I’ve seen in nature movies). He was loudly beating on his chest, commanding attention and perhaps obedience. And early humans evolved from similar animals. I think this especially-male tendency for domination and sometimes violence did not get ditched in the evolutionary process. It’s still with us, curtailed and held back by cultural norms. But sometimes it shows up in the present, the gorilla beating his chest, shaking his fist, demanding followers. And indeed the followers gather as if they were just waiting for some dominant, tough-speaking man to lead them. And often the message is “us against them”. Follow the leader and fight against the others.

And this, of course, brought to mind the ever-present occasions of war in the world. War is the opposite of humans cooperating and supporting each other, the opposite of trying for acceptance and understanding. And certainly in relatively recent history, war seems to be almost always present in one area of the world or another. I wondered if this was mostly a modern invention, or were our distant ancestors also involved in wars? And when I got home today, I did some research. I was hoping to read that in the beginning of human culture, war was absent. It makes such a nice story: a peaceful species living together in small communities, gradually learning, evolving, improving their skills but still living cooperatively. Unfortunately, what I learned was that many war scholars think that war is an ancestral aspect of human nature. There is much evidence of prehistoric warfare. As many as 95% of primitive societies went to war, often constantly. Oh my. This was not fun reading!

So here are some statistics. It is estimated that between 2-15% of all deaths of Neanderthals and the ancestors of primates were caused by war. Moving toward the present, it is interesting that when looking at the percentage of war deaths through the ages, there’s not been much change. Even the sophisticated weaponry of the modern age hasn’t changed the proportion of people dying in war compared to the total population, even when compared to warfare thousands of years ago. Scholars of various subjects mostly seem to believe that there is a human tendency to aggressively dominate or kill members of other groups. This is attributed to different causes: the need for more land, power or economic necessities; a mass discharge of internal rage; inner fears focused on mass destruction, etc. It was agreed that the common people don’t tend to want war. Their lives are much happier when in peace. It is the leaders who declare war. And when that happens, people follow. Partly this is because education and socialization prepares young people to lay down their lives for their country or group. It is made out to be an honorable thing, going to war, killing your enemies, even dying.

I was hoping to end with something positive. And indeed there have been a few tiny cultures in the past and in the present where war seems to be entirely absent. That is a hopeful sign. It shows that it is possible for humans to live without war. I would like to explore what made these cultures able to maintain peace, for it seems to me that we badly need to learn how to do this! It is one of those evolutionary steps waiting for us to achieve, like taking care of the earth we live on rather than stripping it of its wealth. As in everything, we live in an imperfect world and changing things is a slow process. Yet that does not mean we don’t do our best to make positive change. We can just keep going step by step, moving forward, as we learn and work together to make our world a healthier, more peaceful place.