Summary and conclusion
Aggression is a normal and necessary feature of the behaviour of social animals including humans. Its function is primarily to establish the status of each individual within a social group. In this way fighting and bickering are avoided and co-operation becomes possible. In this way too the group becomes a society rather than a random collection of individuals. The qualities which will determine someone’s position within a social hierarchy will vary according to the ecological niche that society fills (whether it earns its livelihood by fishing for instance or by agriculture).
Aggression between societies serves the purpose of spacing them out, and thereby preventing them from becoming too big and maintaining their integrity and internal cohesion.
The destructiveness of aggression can be reduced to a minimum in a number of ways: firstly, by fission, secondly by ritualisation, thirdly by learning to live with it. The mechanisms involved are culturally determined. They are only operative when a society is living in an environment that closely approximates that in which it has evolved.
As one departs from this situation, as large-scale agricultural societies develop and worse still as industry takes over, so do such controls become increasingly inoperative. New conditions appear which have the opposite effect, increasing the destructiveness of aggression. These conditions are created principally by the increased dependence of societies on each other, the increased capital-intensity of weaponry, the development of authoritarian government and the general disintegration of societies under the stresses of industrialisation.
Self-righteous exhortations in favour of peace or pious declarations of the universal brotherhood of man can serve no purpose save to mask the real issues.
The problem can, in fact, only be solved by methodically and systematically de-industrialising and decentralising society, thereby recreating those conditions in which new cultural patterns can re-emerge, once more to regulate aggression both between individuals and between the societies into which they are organised.
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