8. The Amity-Enmity Complex

Plutonium is a substance which does not normally occur in nature. You can make it, though, out of uranium, a widely spread ingredient in the earth's crust. If you make enough you can even ask in your friends, make sure that the children are sleeping soundly, sing a few sad songs, and blow up the world.

Concrete is another substance which cannot be obtained from nature. But since it is put together from some of the commonest stuff that we have about us, if you have the right formula -- not a complicated one at all -- you ca make enough concrete to build a new world.

Amity is still another substance which if it exists i nature occurs in quantities insufficient to be useful. It to must be made. For fifty or sixty million years our primate family has been experimenting with techniques for manu facturing the stuff. Those species which survive have bee uniformly successful. Those species which failed to survive; have left us no exact information. Perhaps some were so; clever that they became romantics and, believing that amity grew on trees, saw no need to manufacture it: so, they died of social starvation.

The process for the manufacture of amity is simpl enough, requiring almost no brains at all, as the lemu have demonstrated. Its formula a child can grasp, and t emphasize its simplicity my wife has inscribed the equatioi of the amity-enmity complex on children's blocks:

The amity, in other words, which an animal expresses for others of its kind will be equal to the sum of the forces of enmity and hazard which are arrayed against it. By enmity I refer to those forces of antagonism and hostility originating in members of one's own species. By hazard I mean those threats which do not originate in one's own species. They may be natural or they may be supernatural. There is the threat of the predator, for example. In the life of the baboon, leopards and men and pythons may be regarded as natural hazards. In the life of the bird, snakes and hawks may dominate his natural fears. In the life of the emerging hominid, to such predatory hazards as lions and wild dogs and cheetahs and leopards was added the powerful defensive equipment of his prey, the horns of the buffalo and kudu, the fangs of the hippo and baboon, the trampling feet of elephant and rhino. For the emerging hominid there were also hazards commonly afflicting all animals: drought and the vanishing of old accustomed water holes, floods and the raging of rivers, cold and blizzards that paralyzed all life. And as man rose higher along his evolving way, he encountered hazards uncommon to his fellow animal: pests that denuded his fields, predators like wolves and foxes whose victims were his livestock rather than himself and his kin. Storms at sea afflicted his journeyings, fire attacked his home and his forests, drought and flood raised new hazards to existence. As higher and higher rose his technology, accident arrived as a major threat, natural in its random meanderings. Wrecks of cars, trains, and aircraft dotted his new experience with hazard. All for the moment or for the month brought forth amity among men.

And we must not forget the supernatural hazard, as real as the natural so long as men believed. Witchcraft and hexes, omens and portents, the thunder of Jehovah and the slyness of Satan, sulphur and brimstone and the afflictions of the hereafter, all powerfully affected the way of man. Whether our hominid ancestors had the capacity to dread the hazards of the supernatural, we cannot yet know. In the history of human affairs, however, they made an honorable contribution to social amity, and the fact that they lose force in our enlightened times is no reason to demean their memory.

Such are the varieties of hazard that may be summed up as h in the amity-enmity equation. But it is E -- enmity, [250] hostility, antagonism, aggression, however you may care to express it -- that is the major ingredient in amity's making, for E grows truly on trees. Hazard is fluctuating in supply, unreliable in quality, temporary in effect. Enmity is the gold of amity's market, the magical fiber in amity's thread. Without enmity we should be nightingales and no air to tread on, three-spined sticklebacks and no water to fin through, the larvae of Capricorn beetles and no tree trunks to bore into. Without enmity we primates should be lost and forgotten along with the pterodactyl, for workable amity is our strand of life weaving ineffective bodies and limited brains into a multipatterned fabric of lasting strength, cohesive in its functions, legitimate in its grandeurs. Primates, fortunate creatures that we are, have the privilege of spinning this artificial stuff from an ingredient omnipresent in nature, a commodity that grows on every bush and tree, that flourishes in every glen, on every highland pasture, along the water meadows of every seeking stream, in this black forest nook, on that bright rocky height, in the blindness of moles and the seeing of eagles, in the butting of cows and the coughing of leopards, in the challenges of mice and the defiance of lizards: hostility for others of one's kind.

I do not deny that amity exists in nature, as there is a trace of gold in all sea water. We have even seen one social group, that of the chimpanzee, where amity seems the dominating force, drawing individuals together through nothing much but good nature. And there may very well exist in species some residual force of amity which through long association presides on its own. If so, then we may speculate that such innate or residual amity multiplies to slight degree that amity which is a product of enmity, and to a greater degree that amity which occurs in the face of hazard. And letting k stand for such natural amity, we may rewrite the equation more accurately and in a fashion comprehensible only to mathematicians:

And we may promptly forget it. I am speaking of workable amity, of effective social amity that enhances the survival prospects of the individual and the population. (We must not forget that in the face of danger the amiable chimpanzee hides himself without warning his partners.) \ [251] The factor of innate or residual amity, k, whether we use it to multiply simply or by its square, will affect our equation too little to be of significance. And besides, let us when dealing with fine points keep in mind that the equation has been introduced by means of children's blocks. I am reminded of my oldtime friend and adviser in such matters as these, William Fielding Ogburn. He was a superb sociologist and chairman of the social sciences at the University of Chicago. And Ogburn's friendly advice was homely indeed: "Never take a trend out a window." We may remind ourselves that since the human being is an incalculable stew of evolutionary endowment, individual genetic variation, and personal experience never common even to identical twins, so man lies beyond all mathematics. A = E + h is presented for purposes of illumination, not definition. As an equation it is an expression of probability, not determination. If we are to pursue this particular trend out the window, then it would be better by far that we left it undisturbed on the floor of the kindergarten. So let us get back to the amity-enmity complex in its most general terms.

Enmity is the biological condition of cross-purposes. It is the innate response of an organism to any and all members of its own species, and enmity will be suspended, totally or partially, only for such period of time as two or more individuals are embraced by a single, more powerful purpose which inhibits all or part of their mutual animosities and channels the inhibited energy into a joint drive to achieve the joint purpose. Since amity persists no longer than mutual purpose, then when the purpose is either achieved or permanently frustrated, amity will end. Unless a new joint purpose arises to channel joint energies, individuals will return to a normal condition of mutual animosity.

I am sure that in a generalization so broad, the ethol-ogist, with an eye on species lacking any discernible capacity for foresight, would prefer that I speak of appetite and consummation rather than purpose and achievement. And in truth, if we think of our own sexual behavior, it becomes a little grand to speak of sexual purpose to describe what occurs in the eyes of a man and a woman when they look at each other in a wondering way. It is a little pompous to speak of achievement when hostilities have been suspended and energies channeled, and a [252] wondering look has been converted into a mutual orgasm. Yet the pattern has been followed. With consummation, amity will vanish and hostilities and suspicions will be resumed unless rewards have been such as to arouse further mutual desire. It then becomes an affair. But sooner or later the affair will end; he will go his way, she hers, rarely with residual amity. New mutual conditions, of course, may have come to dominate their lives: children, marriage, home, the pair territory. Only when defense of what is mutually theirs turns their antagonisms jointly outward may we properly speak of effective social amity.

While I grant the real distinction between appetite and purpose, I do not believe that it significantly affects this discussion. Neither do I believe that the human psychologist, with an eye on learning and the conditioned reflex, may raise significant objections. He may ask: Does not the habit of association and the habit of acting in concerted fashion contribute a measure of permanence to amicable arrangements? Granted that enmity is the root of all goodness -- a concession which he is unlikely to make -- will there not be some conditioned residue of affection, loyalty, trust that will continue to motivate the pair, family, or larger social group even when common defense no longer unites them? Must there always be enmity? What about love, for God's sake?

I hasten to confess that I have nothing against love and indeed should lack the courage -- a most salient point -- to contemplate existence without it. But I do not believe that long association in amity or long conditioning of individuals to a habitual way contributes measurably to the human outcome.

The mother-infant relationship prevails in exquisite amity -- for a season. Shall we inquire of a jury of mothers what normally happens when the season of dependence fades? Or for the value of long association in amity we may glance at two well-told tales. Amity may have prevailed in a family for a lifetime, in a marriage for decades. Yet when death strikes the one or divorce the other, the innocent bystander watches in dismay. One would have had no clue that anything but affection, loyalty, trust, and civilized understanding dominated relationships. Yet all in a dirty twinkling such sentiments vanish. Prop- i erty is king. Bitterly, resentfully, contestants face each other [253] while each tries to jerk from the hands of another this old table, that old tray of silver spoons.

Roe deer, not unlike certain wise observers of human nature, take the outcome for granted. As the doe with her fawns drifts down through the forest toward the winter browse, and the buck returns from his autumn's wanderings, they well may meet on some dusky afternoon when nights grow long. He will not know her, or she him. No tears will dampen the fallen leaves nor recriminations soil the woodland's stillness. As nature permits these summertime lovers no recognition in the fall, so she endows them with an animal wisdom: where goes real estate, there goes love.

The amity-enmity complex need not be the product of the territorial principle, for we must not forget the factor h in our equation. Simple arithmetic will demonstrate that to produce a given quantity of amity in a social group, every increase in hazard which the group faces reduces the need for enmity. As h goes up, so E comes down. A human community facing extraordinary hazard may well have no need of enemies at all to attain the most perfect social amity and concerted action. This, however, has not been the common human circumstance. The amity-enmity complex has been the behavioral mechanism innately commanding the defenders of a social territory threatened by Intruding Man. With every addition to the value of E, there has been produced an additional value of [254] A. Our propensity for preying on our own kind has commanded the identity of territory and the amity-enmity complex.

The territorial imperative may have fashioned one biological morality for this species, another morality for that. But the territorial principle has perfected the amity-enmity complex as the supreme morality for ours.

Three examples will sufficiently show, I believe, that the amity-enmity complex works in other than primates as smoothly as in higher animals. The first of these was carefully observed in Chicago's Jackson Park, a locale intimately familiar to me in those younger years when I had graduated from the monument works but had not yet obtained a ticket for more distant rock piles. The park faces Lake Michigan and there was the shore with a veritable surf, there were curving paths between tall oaks and elms, there were green dells leaping with veritable squirrels, and there were the broad winding peaceful lagoons. It was a good green sort of place when all else you had was the South Side's bleak geometry. I can only wish that in my time, as in Dale Jenkins' later time, the lagoons and the islands had been set aside as a bird sanctuary.

Jenkins must have been another student of Allee's at the nearby University of Chicago. By the 1940's the lagoons were attracting geese and ducks as permanent residents. There were Canada geese, lesser snow geese, blue geese; there were mallard and wood ducks. All species of geese and ducks belong to a family called Anatidae, and they row with each other as freely as if indeed they were members of a single family. Through an autumn and winter of observation Dale Jenkins' chief attention was on a family of blue geese -- a father and mother and two almost fully grown juveniles -- and its relation with neighbors whatever the species. The blue-goose family held a lagoon territory about thirty-five feet in diameter, surrounded by six territories held by twenty-six largei Canada geese. The blue-goose family could not abide Canada geese and would tolerate no least intrusion. If the Canada geese were away feeding, the family might or occasion allow snow geese or even a pair of their owr species on its paddling territory. But if the Canadas re- [255] turned, the blues would chase everyone away. What irritated them most, in traditional territorial style, was the neighbor whoever he might be.

The record of the terrible-tempered blue-goose family was unassailable. They dominated the much larger, much stronger Canada geese in every instance, even twice when the family of four faced simultaneous invasion by all twenty-six neighbors. The family finished the season with what we call in American baseball a shut-out: they had pecked the Canadas 259 times and had never been pecked back. Their less violent response to other species had paid off approximately as well. They had shut out mallard ducks 44-0, and all other ducks 13-0. They had taken a few pecks from their fellow blue geese, but had still won, 99-6. The snow geese they blanketed, 185-13. Their record for concerted action was as impeccable. The four attacked as a group, and when faced by challenge on two borders, at once divided forces as occasion demanded.

One may admire such handsomely successful outward antagonism, but it was the consequent inward amity that deserves the silver cup. While in the course of the autumn and winter the family dealt out some 600 pecks to its enemies, the members delivered two to each other; and even these, between the family's young folks, Jenkins records as doubtful. And while the skeptic may protest that no relationship of cause and consequence has been established, and what we have observed may well have been the natural action of a naturally loving, amiable, co-operating family, my answer must be of the gentlest sort. Never since animal records have been kept, never certainly since Noah ushered his passengers aboard the ark, has history recalled the hatching of a naturally loving, amiable, co-operative goose.

Another unreasonable bird, with an unreasonable name as well, is the smooth-billed ani, an aberrant member of the cuckoo family. D. E. Davis, today a colleague of Carpenter's at Pennsylvania State University, spent 1300 hours in the field studying the bird's most exotic behavior. The smooth-billed ani lives in groups containing from seven to two dozen adults jointly defending a social territory, it forms a true biological nation complete with amity-enmity complex, and the females lay all their eggs in one nest which the whole group builds co-operatively. Hens take turns [256] brooding and when the young are hatched, all or most join the feeding.

The primate may have achieved triumphs of social amity in the defense of the young, but no monkey or ape ever faced the problem of putting all its eggs into one basket. For the smooth-billed ani there is amity or there is extinction. And so there is amity. Never in his long observations in Cuba did Davis witness discord. Everybody preens everybody. If one should be injured, all crowd about in intense excitement. The group has a large social territory, perhaps ten acres, but it sleeps together in a single tree or bamboo clump. Territorial defense is total, . including all adults and all juveniles.

And that defense is ferocious. An intruding individual will be chased by a member of the group, by a relay of members, or by the group as a whole. As a robin will attack a stuffed decoy, so the smooth-billed ani will destroy and tear to fragments a decoy placed on the property. A live decoy will be killed by the group even though at the same time a man threatens the collective nest. Hierarchy of instinct determines that territorial defense and outward antagonism come first; inward amity will follow. If a brood must be sacrificed in the process, then social integrity will have been preserved and another brood may be raised. It is a hierarchy of instinct with which warring man is not unfamiliar.

Another kind of community in which the amity-enmity complex has been exploited for all its worth is the prairie-dog town. It is a social organization resembling that of modern man more acutely than does that of any primate. John A. King, in the early 1950's, made one of the lasting American contributions to ethology with his study of a town in Custer County, South Dakota. His town spread out over seventy-five acres with a population of about 800, a number so common to the reproductive communities of population genetics. But what is unique and perhaps ideal about the prairie-dog town is that it manages to apply the pattern of the noyau to the competition of biological na-a tions, while at the same time achieving defensive co-operation.

Each nation -- each coterie, to use King's terms -- has a territory up to an acre in size, with forty or fifty burrows. All members are free to use any burrow. King divided his town into "wards," and in Ward A, his study area, there [257] was a population of about sixty divided into four major coteries. In each coterie one male will be dominant and will spend much of his time patrolling boundaries. He will lead all actions of defense and be the first up in the morning and the last in the burrow at night. If a social partner gets into a border row, he may drive the partner away and carry on the fight himself. Not even in the baboon troop does the gang at the top assume greater responsibility.

Defense as a rule, however, is a joint affair enlisting all males, all females, and all maturing young. It is aroused by a special cry which draws response only from the members of the coterie. It is a cry quite distinct from a series of short barks warning of the approach of a hawk, a golden eagle, a coyote, or a man. This the whole town responds to, standing alertly on their mounds if the predator is ground-borne, diving into their burrows if air-borne. Here is one noyau which has managed to eat its cake and have it too. Since the alertness of but one pair of eyes is sufficient to warn the entire community, the noyau is well-nigh invulnerable. But since its organization is that of a society of inward antagonism, security is achieved at no loss of stimulation.

That stimulation is intense. Within the town, the intrusion of one nation on another is normally accidental, or at the most experimental. But conquest occurs. In the prairie-dog town we encounter the only equivalent of human conquest that has ever come to my attention. Two male lions once entered the Nairobi game reserve, drove out all other lions, and took the place over for themselves. They were extraordinary lions. When C. R. Carpenter first established his colony of rhesus monkeys on an island in the West Indies, groups established territories, and one, led by an alpha male of enormous dominance, continually intruded with success on neighboring preserves. When the male was experimentally removed, the group no longer trespassed. Restored, he again led it on the path of conquest. Carpenter's experiment has impressive significance for man but later, research has revealed that in rhesus life the conditions were artificial, that territorial defense is abnormal, and that defense was probably inadequate. Also, Garibaldi was a remarkable monkey.

Among all my notes on territorial behavior, these are the only exceptions to the rule that territory is a mechanism entirely defensive. The lions and the monkeys involved [258] special circumstance; prairie dogs involve none. As in the history of Intruding Man, the threat of conquest is normal, continual, and resting on ingredients neither exceptional nor artificial. Every leader seems aware of the quality of defense put up by neighboring coteries. There is constant probing. Any symptom of illness, disability, or social instability will be rewarded by invasion. Just as defense unites all members young and old, so invasion will be the work of a coterie's entire ensemble. And it may succeed. A portion of a neighboring property may be added to the domain of the successful.

Such enhancement of territorial animosities through the threat of conquest has had a consequence in achievement of amity comparable to few animal societies. If A = E + h, then the enhancement of E has produced an enhancement of A. The vigilance of defenders is constant. The responsibility placed on the leader is never neglected; neither need he exert the least threat to obtain discipline. As in the smooth-billed ani, there is much general nibbling and grooming among members. They play together. And there is the famous prairie-dog kiss. The kiss came about, I should assume, as a means of identification in the dark recesses of one's burrow to make sure by proper flavor' that no stranger has sneaked in. Whatever its origin or selective value may be, when two members of a coterie meet, they exchange what is very nearly a human kiss, open-mouthed, and they seem to enjoy it. But the value of extraordinary amity to prairie-dog society may be measured in terms more quantitative than the arguable pleasures of kissing. In King's Ward A, fifty-eight pups were born the first season, and only one failed to survive. I know of no

animal parallel.

A prairie-dog town is like some realistically idealized human society, some entire civilization. Within the civilization, nations compete even to the ultimate inimical threat of conquest. As in a giant noyau, ultimate stimulation is achieved through ultimate competition. And since the competition is among biological nations, the amity-enmity complex generates within the groups those social imperatives of co-operation and individual sacrifice essential for security and identification. Yet enclosing the entire com- » munity of competing nations, as certain rules and regula- 1 tions and tacit understandings might ideally unite a civiliza- | tion against threats from without, are the barks and [259] innate responses understandable to all. The hawk is anticipated, the coyote foiled. Hazard is rightly if innately comprehended, and enmity is suspended.

The prairie-dog town is a wonder of nature, in its rodent fulfillment perhaps impossible of attainment by that most afflicted of primates, man.

The amity-enmity complex is the resolution of a paradox posed by Darwin, solved by Wallace, explored by Spencer and Sumner, revived and extended by Keith, and for the last twenty years cast aside under the pretense that it does not exist.

The paradox may be simply stated: If the evolutionary process is a merciless struggle among individuals to survive, with natural selection determining the fittest, then how could such human qualities as altruism, loyalty, charity, and mercy have ever come into existence? If Darwinian evolution presents a picture of dog eat dog, then how did dogs ever get together?

The newcomer to the history of evolutionary thought may with difficulty apprehend the stress that this single question has placed on philosophy. How can man's ethical values be a product of the evolutionary process? How can there exist, for example, such a human factor as conscience if natural selection demands of the individual self-dedication that he may survive? I shall not belabor the question, since the perceptive reader of these pages is probably by now far [260] ahead of the answer. But there is a danger that this same perceptive reader will take the answer for granted. Philosophy does not. To account for man's undoubted moral nature, a variety of suppositions have been advanced: that man is at constant war with the evolutionary process; that his mind has delivered him exemption from evolutionary law, and that natural selection takes place now only in the field of ideas; that intervention, divine or cultural, has created a gap between man and other animals. All or some of these suppositions, to a degree which you cannot guess, combine to provide your children with their education and to provide you, in your daily life, with dubious solutions to the problems which surround you.

All, of course, are false. What seems to have occurred to no one, excepting possibly Keith, is that the animal is a moral being, and that human morality is a simple evolutionary extension of a form of conduct which has existed in nature for many hundreds of millions of years. But unless we inspect both the history of the falsehood and the history of the truth, we shall not in least part grasp our contemporary predicament. Let us look at the history of the truth first, since it is simpler and lamentably brief.

Alfred Russel Wallace was Darwin's great but neglected contemporary, co-originator of the theory of natural selection. And it was he who gave preliminary resolution to the paradox just a century ago. The answer lay not in selection between individuals, but in selection between groups.

When Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, almost undoubtedly he saw evolution as a dog-eat-dog proposition. At the end of his chapter on instinct he wrote:

No instinct can be shown to have been produced I for the good of other animals, though animals take advantage of the instincts of others. . . . [There is] one general law leading to the advancement of all organic 1 beings, -- namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live | and the weakest die.

These were not sentences buried in a prolix tome. I Modern biologists may explain that the Darwinian view was of a milder order, that it was a gentler conflict in which j the more successful left to succeeding generations a more numerous offspring. All is true. But I am a playwright, and for what a play is all about I look to what is said when [261] a curtain falls. Darwin let a curtain fall on an inflammatory definition. And I can understand why his apostle T. H. Huxley interpreted Darwinian evolution as jungle law. I can understand too the pessimism that Darwin inspired in many a Victorian mind, and why Tennyson wrote his famous line, "Nature, red in tooth and claw."

The Origin of Species was published in 1859, The Descent of Man in 1871. Between these dates something happened to Darwin's thinking. Group selection entered his appraisal of possibilities. Wallace had bowed to Darwin as the legitimate father of the theory of natural selection; now Darwin bowed to Wallace as the author of the theory of group selection. The bow was clear, obvious, self-effacing. But by 1871 few cared. The melodrama of nature, red in tooth and claw, had become the television serial of the time. An audience accustomed to the gorier interpretations of evolution wanted more gore, not less. Intellectuals growing accustomed to the pangs of pessimism wanted more pangs, not fewer. But I, a century after Darwin, live in a world wherein gore and disaster have become human commonplaces. Pessimism, under the rule of a Pax Britannica, was a dirty little luxury which any could afford; under a pax atomica it carries small selective value.

Chasing down the original statement of Wallace's thoughts is a chore recommended only for those with a free week in London. He had presented his paper to a meeting of London's Anthropological Society, then only three years old, on the evening of March 1, 1864. It was printed in the young society's Journal, and I at last found a copy extant in the guarded library of today's Royal Anthropological Society in Bedford Square.

One must brush through a deal of topical slag to reach the Wallace iron. But it is there. The great but forgotten naturalist, who described for us the beauty of New Guinea's bird of paradise, describes for us the significance of evolution's group selection:

In proportion as physical characteristics become of less importance, mental and moral qualities will have increasing importance to the well-being of a race. Capacity for acting in concert, for protection of food and shelter; sympathy, which leads all in turn to assist each other; the sense of right, which checks depredation upon our fellows ... are all qualities [262] that from earliest appearance must have been for the benefit of each community, and would therefore have become objects of natural selection.

Wallace's thought failed to impress those members of the society present on the evening in 1864. The president, a Dr. Hunt, commented that "some members of this society are accused of bringing forward speculations, but none have yet brought forth anything a thousandth part as speculative as this." The thought nonetheless impressed Darwin. In The Descent of Man he wrote:

When of two adjoining tribes one becomes less numerous or powerful than the other, the contest is soon settled by war, slaughter, cannibalism, slavery and absorption. . . . [But:] When two tribes of primeval man, living in the same country, came into competition, the tribe including the greater number of courageous, sympathetic and faithful members would succeed better and would conquer the other.

Neither Wallace nor Darwin conceived of the principle as applicable to the prairie dog, the howling monkey, the true lemur, the blue goose, the smooth-billed ani. They saw it as a characteristic of human evolution once man became approximately man. Even so, the principle was laid down that in group competition, amity will have a selective value comparable to that of enmity. The profound abyss between biological evolution and human ethics was provided with a bridge. Yet the bridge was ignored. T. H. Huxley failed to consider it when he presented his Romanes lecture, "Evolution and Ethics," in 1893. He could do no better than to conclude that civilization must be eternally at war with the evolutionary process.

Ohe thinker who did not ignore the bridge was Herbert Spencer, Darwin's contemporary and the philosopher most influenced by evolutionary thought. Since his name is associated with the concept of social evolution, modern sociology holds him in low esteem. We may remind ourselves, however, that he was the man who thought that there could be no infidelity to compare with the fear that the truth will be bad. Spencer gave us the phrases "the code of amity" and "the code of enmity."

The dual nature of man has puzzled philosophers since [263] philosophy began. In the same individual we find infinite capacity for tenderness, sympathy, charity, love, and infinite capacity for cruelty, callousness, destruction, hate. Herbert Spencer saw it as the natural consequence of the life,of social man, who must obey two codes: there is the code of amity, which he must honor in his relations with his social partners, and the code of enmity, which he must honor in his relations with the outside world. He follows them unthinkingly, since he has no alternative. Let enough members of a society disobey the code of amity, and the society will fragment; let enough disobey the code of enmity and the society will be crushed.

Another nineteenth-century thinker whose views on the human paradox resemble those of Spencer, but whose reputation has survived somewhat better, was Yale's William Graham Sumner, economist, anthropologist, sociologist. At the turn of the century he gave us the terms "in-group" and "out-group," and neither has vanished from circulation. Sumner came very close to a formulation of the amity-enmity complex:

The relation of comradeship and peace in the we-group and that of hostility and war towards the others-group are correlative to each other. The exigencies of war with outsiders are what make peace inside, lest internal discord should weaken the we-group. These exigencies also make government and law in the in-group, in order to prevent quarrels and enforce discipline. Thus war and peace have reacted on each other and developed each other, one within the group, the other in the inter-group relation.

Profound though their insights were, the weakness of both Spencer's and Sumner's thought lay in the assumption that they were dealing with qualities peculiarly human. Sumner seems to have felt that education, travel, and growing human sophistication would finally make impossible the primitive, parochial in-group mentality. Oddly enough, it is Spencer, the evolutionist, who seems by some quirk to have clung to a belief in man's original good nature. He saw the code of enmity as something laid onto man, something that history must one day wash away. Neither was around, of course, to witness the major entertainments of the twentieth century. [264]

Sir Arthur Keith was the last of the Mpe. Even by the 1940's he had become an obsolete man, a living fossil, a poignant leftover reminding us of a day when honesty, courage, and intellectual ruthlessness were qualities generally admired. "Human evolution is based on injustice, and man's mentality has been biased to make him the willing subject of the dual code." We do not say such things today -- or not out loud. "We are ready to believe all that is good about our friends, all that is bad about our enemies. Our minds are enslaved to our prejudices to a far greater degree than is usually thought." His devotion to evolution was without reservation: "A living group is but a link between a dead ancestry and an unborn progeny."

As the last of his line, Keith was the first to see that the territorial concept lends biological unity to Spencer's dual code, to Sumner's in-group and out-group. Keith immediately perceived the implications of Carpenter's work on gibbons and howlers. "Every territory is an evolutionary cradle," he wrote. He had small patience with anthropology's growing vogue of studying kinship relations as a demonstration of the social organization of primal man. "Man must have reached a considerable degree of mental capacity before he could become a genealogist." His allegiance to Carpenter's concept of the social territory led him inevitably to a unified view of duality:

There is no more opposition between the ethical and cosmical codes than there is between the Home Office and the Foreign Office of a Government; the one reacts on the other. The effect of their combined activity determines a nation's evolutionary path and destiny.

Sumner, I believe, would have agreed to this. Buf Keith's understanding that territory provides the unifying principle led him just as inevitably to a biological interpretation of duality, to rejection of the dual code as something peculiarly human, and to an acceptance of its evolutionary origin. Neither Sumner nor Spencer, unaided by modern studies of animal behavior, could have reached such a conclusion except by sheerest speculation. Keith writes:

Spencer regarded our mental subservience to the J dual code as of recent origin; the code had been practiced [265] and ultimately grafted into our inherited nature. He was confident that the cosmical code [of enmity] would die out and the ethical code would be left in sole control of our actions. I, on the other hand, look on the brain-mechanism which subserves the dual code as of extreme antiquity, for it is obeyed instinctively by social animals low in the animal scale; it is deeply entrenched in human nature.

In his last two books, Essays on Human Evolution in 1946 and A New Theory of Human Evolution in 1948, Keith took the final, remorseless step which his thinking had made inevitable. Conscience, he affirmed, is simply that human mechanism dictating allegiance to the dual code. Those who assert that conscience is inborn are therefore correct. But just how far does conscience compel our actions in such an ultimate direction as that of the brotherhood of man? Not far. Conscience is the instrument of the group.

Human nature has a dual constitution; to hate as well as to love are parts of it; and conscience may enforce hate as a duty just as it enforces the duty of love. Conscience has a two-fold role in the soldier: it is his duty to save and protect his own people and equally his duty to destroy their enemies. . . . Thus conscience serves both codes of group behavior; it gives sanction to practices of the code of enmity as well as of the code of amity.

These were Keith's last words on the subject. If the grand old man had any noteworthy capacities for self-delusion, they escape the eye. And when he died a few years later, at the age of ninety, with him ended truth's brief history. His thoughts by then were overwhelmed by the new romanticism, when falsehood came to flower; his sentiments were condemned by that academic monopoly which substituted high-mindedness for the higher learning. And as for almost twenty years no one followed C. R. Carpenter into the rain forest, so for almost twenty years none has followed Sir Arthur Keith into the jungle of noble intentions. [266]

In his Essays David Hume wrote, "Should a traveler give an account of men who were entirely divested of avarice, ambition, and revenge; who knew no pleasure but friendship, generosity, and public spirit, we should immediately detect the falsehood and prove him a liar with the same certitude as if he had stuffed his narration with centaurs and dragons." That was in 1772. When almost two centuries later Ashley Montagu expressed the conviction, which I quoted in my opening chapter, that aggressiveness is not inherent in human nature but like all forms of human violence is learned, one shudders to think of what Hume's comments might have been. But Montagu, one of the most distinguished of contemporary anthropologists, goes to more specific lengths in another work, in the course of which he criticizes Freud:

The evidence concerning the biosocial nature of man, as we know it today, does not support the notion of an aggressive, death, or destructive instinct in man. In fact, the whole notion of predetermined forms of behavior in man is outmoded, for man's uniqueness, among other things, lies in the fact that he is free of all those predeterminants which condition the behavior of nonhuman organisms. . . . The evidence indicates quite clearly that everything human beings do as human beings they have had to learn from other [267] human beings. . . . So far as the development, by evolutionary means, of aggressive tendencies in man is concerned, the idea can be thoroughly dismissed.

The spiritual roots of such contemporary sentiments go back, of course, to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Hume's fellow and friend in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment but scarcely his philosophical comrade. There is today no influential mode of fashionable thought which does not, however much it may be disclaimed, go back to Rousseau's original goodness. But the original goodness is modestly attired in a "scientific vocabulary." Montagu discusses the origins of human aggression:

The evidence is today overwhelming that in order to become an adequate, healthy, cooperative, loving human being it is necessary to be loved. No child is born hostile or aggressive. It becomes so only when its desires to be loved and to love are frustrated, that is, when its expected satisfactions are thwarted -- and the thwarting of an expected satisfaction is the definition of frustration. This is what Freud failed to perceive. What he took to be inborn hostility is, in fact, an acquired form of behavior following upon the frustration of the organism's satisfactions.

I have quoted Professor Montagu at length not because his conclusions differ measurably from those of a majority of his colleagues, but because he expresses them so much more eloquently and concisely. And if he is correct, then amity does indeed grow on trees, and my amity-enmity equation is utterly false. It is enmity which must be manufactured, not amity, and frustration is the machinery of its assembly. In all fairness we must investigate in some detail this competitive interpretation of why men are the way they are.

The frustration-aggression hypothesis is a relatively new interpretation of man. It was conceived by a group of psychologists headed by John Dollard, and born with the publication of their revolutionary book, Frustration and Aggression. I quote two sentences from the book's first page, including the authors' italics:

This study takes as its point of departure the assumption that aggression is always a consequence of [268] frustration. More specifically the proposition is that the occurrence of aggressive behavior always presupposes the existence of frustration and, contrariwise, that the existence of frustration always leads to some form of aggression.

Entirely by coincidence, the book was published in 1939, at just about the moment when Adolf Hitler was blowing up his first city, Warsaw. The coincidence failed to dampen the enthusiasm of American psychologists for the book's thesis. The Dollard group must today take immense satisfaction in having exerted a greater influence on psychology, on the social sciences, and on informed lay thought than did Sigmund Freud with his entire life's work. Yet Dollard's name remains relatively unknown, and since the book is available today as an inexpensive paperback, this is one reason why I urge every reader to possess it. No citizen, bewildered by mass violence, by government by demonstration, by soaring rates of crime and delinquency in a time of affluence, by evidences of social irresponsibility on the part of groups both old and young, even by certain trends in the arts, should in his inquiry into first and collateral causes fail to read Frustration and Aggression, by John Dollard, Neal E. Miller, Leonard W. Doob, O. H. Mowrer, and Robert R. Sears.

A remarkable quality in this omnipotent classic -- almost as remarkable as its treatment of evidence -- is its treatment of Freud. As I have quoted, Montagu courageously flayed Freud alive for his refusal to accept frustration as aggression's cause. But in their acknowledgments the Dollard group's first sentence reads:

Among the many investigators who have struggled with the problem of frustration and aggression special acknowledgment must be made to Sigmund Freud who more than any other scientist has influenced the formu-i lation of our basic hypothesis.

The implication is clear that Freud endorsed the thesis.: Did he or did he not? In the labyrinthine bowels of the] Dollard book one will discover, if one looks hard enough,; that "in recent years" Freud's other concerns turned himi toward other explanations for aggression; their gratitude:] is for his earlier work. That by as early as 1913 Freud hadi [269] abandoned frustration as the cause of aggression, and that in his final works his opposition to such an interpretation is adamant, rests lightly, it seems, on the Dollard group's premise. What Freud thought about aggression cannot rest lightly on ours.

I am not, as is fairly well known, an apologist for Sig-mund Freud. But he brought to human attention three endurable verities -- the role of the unconscious mind in human behavior, the role of instinct as the prime energy source in the workings of the unconscious, and the role of evolution in the development of the unconscious mind itself. What more can be demanded of one man, in one career, I do not know. There is a problem, however. Freud's personal preoccupation with a single facet of instinct, sex, had such a sensational reception in a post-Victorian world that the innocent passerby must be on constant guard against it, as against rocks in a riot. But such a natural defensive posture must not blind one to his genius. His perceptions never failed him. Only his explanations, limited by the conceptions of evolution prevailing in his time, ever went awry.

It was in Totem and Taboo -- a work that in general leaves me with the dark-brown taste of overindulgence the night before -- that Freud in 1913 abandoned frustration as a cause for aggression. The sons, frustrated in their sexual desire for the mother, become aggressive and turn against their father in consequence. But why was the father hostile in the first place? That the conflict between generations does not add up to an Oedipus complex is another day's issue. What Freud anticipated was the chicken-yard question: Beta hen pecks gamma hen because beta got pecked by alpha. This may be interpreted as frustration-aggression. But why did alpha peck beta to begin with? Freud was an honest man. He never again went back to frustration as a cause for aggression.

Sigmund Freud's problem was that while frustration came to seem to him nai've as an explanation for aggressiveness, he could find no other ready answer. He resorted to the death instinct turned outward, but it seems never to have quite satisfied him. One looks to his final statements in Civilization and Its Discontents, published in 1930, and in his last essays published posthumously as An Outline of Psychoanalysis. Is there a clear, independent aggressive instinct or is there not? He writes, in his relaxed way: [270]

I once interested myself in the peculiar fact that peoples whose territories are adjacent and are otherwise closely related are always at feud with and ridiculing each other, as for instance the Spaniards and the Portuguese, the North and South Germans, the English and the Scots, and so on. I gave it the name of "narcissism in respect of minor differences," which does not do much to explain it.

There is no indication in his writings that Freud had ever heard of the social territory in animal life, yet on the private territory his intuitions are equally clear. He writes, concerning communism:

I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communistic system; I cannot inquire into whether the abolition of private property is advantageous and expedient. But I am able to recognize that psychologically it is founded on an untenable illusion. By abolishing private property one deprives the human love of aggression of one of its instruments. . . . This instinct did not arise as the result of property; it reigned almost supreme in primitive times when possessions were still extremely scanty.

He turns to more general forms of hostility, and writes of the injunction to love one's neighbor, and the dilemma of strangers:

Not merely is this stranger on the whole not worthy of my love, but to be honest I must confess he has more claim to my hostility, even to my hatred. He does not seem to have the least trace of love for me, does not show me the slightest consideration. If it will do him any good, he has no hesitation in injuring me. . . . What is more, he does not even need to get an advantage from it; if he can merely get a little pleasure out of it, he thinks nothing of jeering at me, insulting me, slandering me, showing his power over me; and the more secure he feels himself, or the more helpless I am, with so much more certainty can I expect this behavior towards me. . . . The bit of truth behind all this -- one so eagerly denied -- is that men [271] are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked, but that a powerful measure of desire for aggression has to be reckoned as part of their instinctual endowment. . . . Anyone who calls to mind the atrocities of the early migrations, of the invasion by the Huns or by the so-called Mongols under Jenghiz Khan and Tamurlane, of the sack of Jerusalem by the pious Crusaders, even indeed the horrors of the last world war, will have to bow his head humbly before the truth of this view of man.

I find myself bowing my head humbly before this view of Sigmund Freud, who did not live to witness the horrors of the Second World War, yet needed no Belsen to confirm his perceptions of eternal truth. And yet, before he is finished, self-contradiction creeps in:

Never before in any of my previous writings have I had the feeling so strongly as I have now, that what I am describing is common knowledge, that I am requisitioning paper and ink, and in due course the labor of compositors and printers, in order to expound these things that in themselves are obvious. For this reason, if it should appear that the recognition of a special independent instinct of aggression would entail a modification of the psychoanalytical theory of instincts, I should be glad enough to seize upon the idea. We shall see that this is not so, that it is merely a matter of coming to closer quarters with a conclusion to which we long ago committed ourselves and following it out to its logical consequences.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud had come up with the idea of a death instinct constantly working toward an organism's disintegration in opposition to the forces of life, and which when turned against the outside world shows itself as aggression and destructiveness. He now reviews his development of the theory and the controversy which it aroused, and he reaffirms his position. But there is the ambivalence:

In all that follows I take up the standpoint that the tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, in- [272] stinctual disposition in man. . . . The natural instinct of aggressiveness in man, the hostility of each one against all and of all against one, opposes the program of civilization. This instinct of aggression is the derivative and main representative of the death instinct we have found alongside of Eros, sharing his rule over the earth.

Freud lived and worked too soon. He wrote most of these words in 1930, just as population genetics and the new biology were coming into being. He died in 1939, in the same social season in which the Dollard group introduced their bastard debutante with the claim that she was sired by the master. The Age of the Alibi applauded; Freud, no man for alibis, would have hissed from the wings. Were he alive and active today, applying his genius, his honesty, his humility, and his courage to the materials of the new biology and the problems of contemporary life, we should witness some wonders. I cannot conceive of the existence of a no man's land between the social and biological sciences were a man of Freud's audacity poking about in its thickets. Nor can I conceive of his greeting the works of Lorenz and Tinbergen, of Howard and Carpenter, of Allee, Hediger, Wynne-Edwards with anything but the vastest cry: "Well, why didn't somebody tell me before?"

Biology presented Freud in his time with nothing but sex, family, and older views of evolution. From this restricted patch he had to dig up answers as to why people behave as they do. Some of those answers were indigestible. If he explained friendship in terms of aim-inhibited eroticism, or the desire to possess in terms of a child's undying attachment to his feces, we must remember that he had no ethology to present him with wider fields of evolutionary choice.

Despite those limitations which the old biology and his own preoccupations with sex combined to place on his work, Freud's was the last fresh breeze of common sense to reach that dank, many-chambered nautilus, modern psychology. Certain revisions and modifications of the original Dollard thesis were proposed, and some generally accepted. Miller, one of the original group, had immediate second thoughts and showed that frustration might, under certain conditions, lead to consequences other than aggression. P. McKellar showed that aggression grows greater if [273] it does not draw retaliation, a vital point to which no one paid much attention. Another of the Dollard group, R. R. Sears, got together a new batch of colleagues and showed quite the opposite, that the more aggression is punished or frustrated, the greater is the incentive to aggress. With still another colleague he demonstrated that the rise and fall of lynchings in the American South has always been correlated with the fall and rise of the price of cotton. One cannot but recall Raymond Pearl's famous correlation between the rate of survival in cockroaches and in motor cars. Pearl, of course, made his demonstration before science lost its sense of humor.

The compelling literature of frustration-aggression, known in the trade as F-A, while retaining America as its chief print shop, spread to include most of the English-speaking world. Beyond the reaches of the English language there remained a few firm citadels of high barbarism where enlightened minds still clung to the outdated notion that your actions might just possibly be no one's fault but your own. The Anglo-Saxon spirit, however, with all that charming exuberance reserved normally for the discovery of a new religion, threw itself into the ecstasy of F-A, clapped hands to alibi's insistent drum, rolled its delirious body in irresponsibility's resourceful dust, and as the Etruscans once consulted only the livers of sheep to discover the future's auguries, consulted only environment's frustrations to divine the future's peace.

It was a dangerous orgy, of course, and dangerously timed. An understanding of aggression had become central to the general problem of human survival. With the sudden rise of American power the role of the American scientist became one of aching responsibility. John Paul Scott, world authority on dogs and perhaps our most quoted student of animal behavior, published his Aggression in 1958. His publisher was the respected University of Chicago Press, and on the dust jacket one reads: "All research findings point to the fact that there is no physiological evidence of any internal need or spontaneous driving force for fighting; that all stimulation for aggression eventually comes from forces present in the external environment."

The phrase "all research findings" recalls Montagu's "the evidence is today overwhelming." Is it? The participant in our inquiry must find himself just a bit stunned, and moved to inquire, "Certain research findings, maybe, but [274] all research findings? Is this science?" Charitably we must recall that Scott's book was published in 1958, a date in the rapidly moving new biology of virtual Neanderthal antiquity; and a man can change his mind. Three years later our most widely read authoritative journal, The Scientific American, published a piece by Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt called "Fighting Behavior of Animals." The author is one of Europe's most respected ethologists, a colleague of Konrad Lorenz at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior. He pointed out that Scott's conclusion had been largely based on an experiment with mice, back in 1951, which seemed to indicate that aggressiveness had its cause in early unhappy experiences with nest mates. But Eibl-Eibesfeldt had raised rats in isolation, without any possible benefits of youthful frustration, and on their first contact with another rat they had gone through the entire repertory of species-specific aggressive behavior -- the high cries, the arching of the back, the gnashing of teeth. His experience had been extended to many species in a state of nature -- the iguana, the lava lizard, the rattlesnake. He recorded the observations of aggressiveness in the oryx antelope, fallow deer, cichlid fish. And he concluded:

A growing body of evidence from observations in : the field and experiments in the laboratory points to the conclusion that this vital mode of behavior is not learned by the individual but is innate in the species, like the organs specially evolved for such combat in many animals.

In March of the following year The Scientific American published another paper by the late Erich von Hoist. It was called "Electrically Controlled Behavior." Two decades I earlier, a Swiss investigator, W. R. Hess, had succeeded in producing predictable behavior through the discharge of " a low-voltage current through an electrode planted in the I brain of a cat. Now von Hoist and a colleague had com- I pleted a series of experiments with chickens. An electrode I planted in a particular area of the hypothalamus would produce aggressive action against a stuffed hen, theoreti- I cally a rival in the pecking order, and planted in another I area would produce attack of a different sort against a stuffed weasel, in theory a threatening predator. Yet in I [275] the same year, in his contribution to a volume called Roots of Behavior, Scott calmly recorded:

All our present data indicate that fighting behavior among the higher mammals, including man, originates in external stimulation and that there is no evidence of spontaneous internal stimulation.

Now, it is true that a chicken is not a mammal and that external stimulation was present. But since the chickens exhibited only indifference to the stuffed objects until receiving the electrical charge, the statement that there is no evidence for spontaneous internal stimulation skirts the thinnest of technicalities. And to conclude the same volume, David E. Davis, who gave us the smooth-billed ani, wrote a superb paper called "The Phylogeny of Gangs." It is an analysis of the biological motivation of street gangs, and it will concern us in detail at some future date. Davis points out that rank and territory are the objects of aggression in the human gang, as they are likewise the goals of most animal fighting. He concludes:

A wide variety of observations suggests that fighting for rank or territory has innate features. . . . Thus contrary to the conclusions of some authors, it seems that aggression is heavily dependent on genetics. Probably only the means of fighting and the object of attack are learned.

John Paul Scott was undismayed. In his review of a book in Science, on a date as recent as May 7, 1965, he wrote:

All that we know (and this comprises a considerable body of information in certain species) indicates that . . . there is no known physiological mechanism by which internal stimulation for fighting arises. Rather, the physiological mechanisms for fighting are triggered by immediate external stimuli.

"All that we know". . ."all our present data". . ."the evidence is overwhelming". . ."all research findings". . . What must be described as a party line has appeared in the American sciences, protected by its most respected [276] adherents through the use of such iron-curtain phrases as "all that we know." The phrases are false. Is the falsehood successful? Write to your children at university. Ask them, as a favor, to get down their College Outline Series and look into the volume with the title Psychology. What does it say about instinct? Page 51: "Though all the explanations are not worked out, it appears clear that there is no instinctive behavior in man, and probably not in animals."

I suggested on an earlier page that unless we could grasp the extent to which falsehood has triumphed over truth in contemporary thought, we should have difficulty in comprehending our contemporary predicament. In America we appropriate tens of billions of dollars each year for the education of our children: do we ask, as we pay our tax bill, what does that education consist of? Will an education captured in large areas by the forces of scientific romanticism produce citizens less or more able to deal with the dubious future? We do not ask. And yet it is a future of the spinning wheel, of the ball ever poised above double zero.

Still, however, we have not come to a final grip with the contemporary predicament. The problem of aggression could be consigned to the future if it affected merely the 1 education of our children. But it concerns ourselves, as it I is part of today. And if you and I fail to understand it, 1 then whether or not our children receive any education at 1 [277] all may be of peripheral significance. Let us take a look at a symposium held in London in October, 1963.

The scientific meeting was called by Britain's Institute of Biology. The symposium's arresting title, The Natural History of Aggression, was drawn from a book by Konrad Lorenz not yet published in English. Five years earlier, I suspect, such a meeting could not have taken place, and certainly not under auspices so respectable. In an academic world of psychological certainty, of instincts as rare as the griffin, a title like The Natural History of Aggression smacks of science fiction. That the Institute of Biology could dare to enter the no man's land between the social and biological sciences carrying such a banner, to invite representatives of both disciplines to present their views, and as a final heroic gesture to invite a small audience of the scientific elite to witness the mayhem and take part in the reassembly of mutilated corpses, was one of those acts of courage recalling the Spanish Armada and the Battle of Britain which so frequently grace the history of the English people.

James Fisher, D. I. Wallis, Harrison Matthews, K. R. L. Hall, and Konrad Lorenz gave the main case for the universality of innate aggressive behavior in the animal world and the all-but-universal means which evolution has perfected whereby the impact of aggression is ritualized, subjected to rules and regulations, and otherwise diverted to harmless consequence. Stanislav Andreski, John Burton, Denis Hill, and Cecily de Monchaux presented the central arguments for interpreting aggressiveness in uniquely human terms. Derek Freeman, the Australian psychologist, made a spectacular break with his trade, joined the etholo-gists, presented an interpretation of Dart's theory of the predatory transition from ape to man, and along with it a nightmare record of that human consequence which has failed to acknowledge animal rules and regulations. Another student of man, the London psychiatrist Anthony Storr, likewise accepted ethology's view, and made the stunning suggestion that the space race, which so consumes our imaginations as well as an inordinate portion of American and Soviet budgets, is in truth a ritualization of the cold war.

Otherwise, nothing happened. The students of men remained right where they were. I was in Africa at the time of the symposium. I returned to London a few weeks after [278] its close and heard gossip's bemused comment that for many of the eminent minds who attended, the meeting seemed not to exist; that one would have supposed that the theory of evolution had never been successfully demonstrated and that we lived again in the days of Bishop Wilberforce. No historic row had developed; no mutilated corpses had been removed by night from the South Kensington Museum's Gothic pile. It had been as if some defect in the meeting room's acoustics had prevented one side of the house from hearing what the other side was saying.

Gossip was unfair. A confrontation had at least been arranged, a confrontation between the two points of view: that aggression is innate in man, and a fraction of his evolutionary heritage; and that human aggression is acquired, a product of frustration. To achieve such a confrontation was, if only for a day or two, to raise the iron curtain with which environmentalism shields itself, and to reveal if nothing else the breadth of the no man's land between the two wings of our science. It will be enough if I summarize here the conclusions of the men who might be regarded as team captains, Konrad Lorenz for ethology, and John Burton, the historian of London's University College, whose paper closed the meeting.

Lorenz' basic position, in his paper as well as in his forthcoming book, is that few animals can survive without aggressiveness, such is its selective value to the welfare of: individuals, populations, and species. Among its obvious; values are the spacing of individuals over an available habitat, the selection for breeding of better-qualified males through competition, and in social- animals, the formation of a dominant order providing leadership and discipline through which the superior wisdom, experience, andl courage of the leaders are disposed with greatest advantage • to the entire community. Out of his immensely broad \ experience with animals Lorenz gives case upon case to demonstrate the natural history of aggression, and to make .< evident the means by. which nature ritualizes and inhibits actual fighting so that the individual may benefit by aggres-sion's values while the species is saved from aggression's i toll. He told the meeting:

There cannot be any doubt, in the opinion of any biologically-minded scientist, that intraspecific fighting is, in Man, just as much of a spontaneous [279] instinctive drive as in most other higher vertebrates. The beginning synthesis between the findings of ethology and psychoanalysis does not leave any doubt, either, that what Sigmund Freud called the "death drive" is nothing else but the miscarrying of this instinct which, in itself, is as indispensable for survival as any other.

In other words, which is the father, which the child? Freud saw the death instinct as fundamental, and aggression as the death instinct turned outward. Lorenz sees aggression as the normal, natural, fundamental instinct, and any death wish as its neurotic, frustrated consequence, aggression turned inward. The Lorenz approach to human aggression is, first, that we must recognize that it is healthy, that it is necessary, that it is innate, that it is ineradicable; second, that the solution to the human problem is to be sought in the direction of imitation of nature, in other words by the enlargement of all those less-than-lethal competitions, ritu-alizations and displays, whether between individuals or groups, which absorb our hostile energies and turn them to ends either harmless or constructive; and, finally, that to deny innateness of human aggression is to approach its possible control from an inevitably impossible quarter, that to accept its cause as lying in frustration is to lend hostility moral sanction, and to turn its most virulent, violent, antisocial, antisurvival forces loose on a defenseless world.

If, when Konrad Lorenz' book appears in Britain and America, it does not take its place among the landmarks of our thought, then for all my congenital optimism I shall begin to believe that, whatever happens to Lorenz' geese, the human goose is cooked. He even expressed at the symposium what for me is the essence of the amity-enmity complex: "It is a fact worthy of deep meditation," said Lorenz, "that for all we know the bond of personal friendship was evolved by the necessity for certain individuals to cease from fighting each other in order more effectively to combat other fellow-members of the species."

My optimism concerning the capacities of fellow members of my species to come at last to grips with themselves survives, at times, out of processes which must be physiological; it receives small intellectual nourishment. The historian Burton closed the conference with a summation in itself historic: "The notion of aggressiveness in animals may finally be shown to be valid," he began; "however, it [280] should not escape attention that in the present state of our knowledge we have no conclusive evidence of this."

The funds spent on organizing the symposium would seem to have been totally wasted. The lifetime observations of such biologists as Lorenz and Hall and Fisher are dismissed by the historian who wields not the minimum of authority within their discipline. Burton goes on to grant that if such innate hostility is ever finally demonstrated in lower animals, it will have in any case no significance concerning man. He falls back on that wheels-within-wheels academic defense of quoting sympathetic authority unexposed to present, contrary information, in this case a statement by the psychologist F. H. Stanford that "there is no direct physiological evidence for aggression, although the blocked, frustrated or deprived organism can be counted on to show the physiological changes accompanying emotion." In a single sentence we return to 1939, to Dollard, and to F-A.

If we regard the cost of the conference as money wasted, however, we are wrong. For Burton proceeds in all innocence, with all noblest of intentions, to expose in most precise if unself-conscious terms the perilous path of applied F-A:

[The] academic conception of aggression as a secondary or derived motivation does not prevent aggressiveness being treated by law, and by society generally, as a primary one for which the individual himself is responsible. We still endeavor to control and suppress aggression by the individual without regard to environmental causation. Just as vagabonds were once hounded as lazy people, and not considered to be the product of a system which included unemployment, so aggressive people are still an object of i social condemnation, and subject to laws designed to suppress them.

This gap between academic theory and social prac- 1 tice, which exists within a society, is very small when compared with the gap existing between the same theory and practice within the international community. We did not stop to consider the degree to which Western nations were responsible for Italian, German, and Japanese aggressions, and all the atrocities associated with them.

Dr. Burton proceeds to bring us up to date with reference to the Korean conflict and the Indian-Chinese border disputes, and to suggest that the "facts" now available give no support to any notion of unprovoked aggressiveness or expansionism on the part of China (a conclusion of great interest, we may assume, to the Soviet Union).

In both cases domestic political considerations of a most pressing nature in the countries confronting China -- the United States and India -- were relevant to the policies which preceded tense relations with China.

And he concludes his paper and the symposium:

The extension of the "findings of biology and psychology into the international relationship is probably false; but as an analogy it could be useful to point out that in animals and in man, aggressiveness is a non-passive response to the perception of a threat, or to the experience of frustration. Political leaders of states who accuse other states of being aggressive, would then know where the responsibility for aggression finally lies.

I have digressed sufficiently from our basic inquiry, I believe, to acquaint the reader with the development of two opposite points of view within the sciences, with the no man's land existing between them, with the general effects on our educational system and the influences on our daily affairs, and with the degree of suspense which such conflict of academic authority must bring to normal hopes for human survival as we place our faith in "science says." For the reader who wishes to inquire at more detailed length into the present disagreement, the entire proceedings of this remarkable London symposium have been published by the Academic Press in London and New York. But since observations and conclusions fundamental to our present investigations relate not to the aggressive ingredients of man so much as to the defensive mechanisms with which nature has equipped him, it is time, I believe, that we return to the territorial imperative.

I do not agree, quite obviously, with Dr. Burton's suggestion that any extension of the findings of biology into [282] the field of international relations is false. As I believe is easily demonstrable, it has been our failure to comprehend the innate mechanisms of the amity-enmity complex which leads us consistently in our international relations to accomplish the precise opposite of our intentions.

If you program the territorial computer with the amity-enmity equation, and you feed into the machine the State of Israel and the Jewish people, then the monster will cough twice and give out the lunatic answer that there never was any such thing as a Jew, and that if it were not for the Arab League there would probably be no State of Israel, either. And no matter how many repairmen you call in, or how viciously you accuse the computer of drinking too much or how many cold cloths you wrap about its head, the computer will still grind out the same answer.

According to the computer, the story goes like this: For a very long time human nature has been playing a grotesque joke on Jew and Gentile alike. He and we have joined in regarding him as a race. And yet he has less racial distinctiveness than the southern Italian or the Swede. He is a descendant of a mixed bag of Middle Eastern tribes, as I am a descendant of a mixed bag of Scottish clans, and he has no more genetic distinction than you or I or the next man. But nevertheless there has existed a profound difference between us. We have had territories, he has had none. Among modern, civilized peoples he has been unique. And what we have described as a Jew has been nothing other than a de-territorialized man.

Jewish difficulties with territory, it seems, began a very long time ago, when God promised Abraham, leader of some wandering pastoral tribes, title to a most unremarkable piece of real estate on the Mediterranean littoral. [283] No people ever took a promise harder. They managed to gain it, and to settle down, but they were such a quarrelsome, rebellious lot that somebody was always carting them off into slavery. First it was Egypt, where they made out very well but still dreamed of nothing but the Promised Land. After some hair-raising experiences they managed to regain their territory, but then it was the Chaldeans. Nebuchadnezzar hauled most of them away to Babylon. Later it was the Roman Empire that found itself unequal to Jewish argument and so dispersed them by force to a variety of Western destinations. For almost 2000 years the Jew of the West and the Jew of the East had one thing in common: they never saw their Promised Land again.

By the waters of Babylon the Jew sang his song: "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem . . ." And he never did.

Jews call it the Diaspora -- the dispersal of the people. As a population they were denied a social territory; as individuals in most times and places they were denied even the right to own land, to possess private territories. Despite all indignities heaped upon him, the Jew of the East had the easier life, since Mohammed out of respect for Jewish and Christian religions decreed him a "People of the Book." It was not the Moslem but the Christian, we may remember, who drove the Jew out of Spain. Through all Christian lands his fate was a harsh one; perhaps Christian amity demanded an enemy to complete its own complex. Should this be so, then secular society was not one to abjure the Christian creation of an omega fish.

The suspicion must exist that if anti-Semitism had pleasant conveniences for Christians it had certain unpleasant conveniences for Jews as well. The Jew faced a genetic problem confronting no other Western people: How, without the reproductive isolation of territory, could he maintain his genetic integrity? He owned nothing but memories. Anti-Semitism helped. He accepted the grim ghetto. He forbade marriage or intercourse with Gentiles. His rabbis and scholars maintained the memories. The Jewish family became the impregnable equivalent of a Greek phalanx. Spectacularly, the Jew refused to conform, cultivated outlandish costume, beard, headgear, cultivated outlandish dietary customs. He pursued the arts while we pursued each other; he reveled in education while we still reveled in illiteracy. He overlooked nothing, forgot nothing. As century passed into century, millennium into millennium, [284] like some ancient magician the Jew made memories from the dust of the years.

The Jew was different, let there be no doubt. And he maintained that difference with unflagging resolution. We regarded him as a race apart; it was to Jewish interest to agree. We derided the "Jewish personality"; he exaggerated the personality. None of us guessed, of course, he or we, that the "Jewish personality" was nothing but a bundle of mannerisms preserving the identity of a de-territorialized man. And then came Zionism.

Let us pause for a warning: My sympathies have been always with Zionism. But neither my sympathies nor those of the computer at my elbow have the smallest effect on the workings of the amity-enmity equation. We shall see, in due course, what happens when sympathies are reversed.

Zionism, in any event, enlisted my imagination as the next man's dream or the next man's adventure might enlist one's imagination in the reading of a good novel. As the great day of British withdrawal from Palestine approached, my Washington friends panicked. They foresaw an Arab massacre of defenseless Jews beyond anything in the history of pogroms. I was skeptical. I knew nothing about territory in those days, of course, but a playwright tends to give weight to the irrational. It seemed to me that the history of pogroms cast little light on what would happen when a people homeless for two thousand years had again the opportunity to defend its Promised Land.

What happened to the Arabs, then, did not surprise me. But many, many years later, when I had still not visited Israel but my computer and I were beginning to wonder about man and territory, I made a little list. If a territorial interpretation of the Jew carried validity, then certain theoretical consequences should have come about in reality.

First, a territory is a defended area. To defend it one must have hostile neighbors. The Arab League, happily for the Jew, presented him not only with a wealth of hostile neighbors but with the opportunity to make legitimate his territory in the strictest biological sense.

Second, if civilized man is to respect someone else's title to a territory, he needs evidence other than a questionable, long-ago deal with God. He needs, in other words, to see the proprietors in defense of their land slaughter a maximum number of their fellow human [285] beings. Here again the Arab League co-operated splendidly with Jewish purposes. They bared their bodies, they died in piles.

Third, such an astonishing reversal of what we had always regarded as the "Jewish personality" should have shaken the West. It did. From that date in 1948 anti-Semitism may have retained a nostalgia or two, but it ceased to be a workable institution. We flatter ourselves that the Hitler outrages awakened the conscience of mankind. They did nothing of the sort. I recall that in America immediately after World War II anti-Semitism reached peaks never before attained, despite all Nazi contributions to our universal conscience; and the literature of the period will bear me out. It was the photographs of dead Arabs, not of cremated Jews, that awakened our famed conscience. It was in 1948 that a stunned world realized that Jews could behave ju*st like anyone else.

Fourth, acquisition and defense of a territory should have brought the usual enhancement of energy to the Israeli. It did. The Promised Land was as unpromising a collection of rocks, gravel, malarial swamps, and out-and-out desert as the Mediterranean littoral can provide, and had I been Abraham I should have demanded a better deal. Yet a people who for 2000 years had been denied ownership of land, had lived almost entirely in towns, and lacked both fanning tradition and experience, have made themselves very nearly self-sufficient in food supply and are capturing one European market after another with their agricultural exports. I have mentioned the kibbutz. One understands why the collective farm has succeeded here and nowhere else in the Western World. You may visit a kibbutz called Sha'ar Hagolan, near the Sea of Galilee and within gunshot of the Jordan border. You may inspect the Neolithic antiquities which in their spare time the members have dug from their fields and which they display in a convenient bomb shelter; and you will have no need to examine the beaver to confirm the enhancement of energy in a territorial defender.

Fifth, a most important point. If the Jew never existed but was simply a de-territorialized man, then in theory he should cease to be a Jew when he becomes re-territorialized. When you visit Israel you will discover that it is the new nation's favorite joke. There is the story of the visiting French-Jewish doctor met on the dock at Haifa by a [286] friend. The doctor looked in puzzlement at the barrel-chested porters throwing luggage around. "Who are they?" he asked. "Jews," said his host.

It is not just physique. It is posture, a manner of walking, a manner of speaking, a manner of thought. The "Jewish personality" has vanished, replaced by that of the Israeli, a being as confident, as resolute, and as willing to do battle as a roebuck on his wooded acres. You go to a party in Tel-Aviv and someone asks the inevitable question, "How do you like Israel?" and you answer, "Fine. But where are the Jews?" And the party goes off into the greatest laughter, for it is the nation's joke.

Sixth, if territory has transmuted the Jew, physically and psychically, into another being called the Israeli, then in theory there should be a widening breach between the Israeli and the Jew of the Diaspora. The breach is far from theoretical; it is regarded by many in Israel as the second most severe problem that the new nation suffers. Many a thoughtful British or American or Continental Jew reproaches the Israeli as a chauvinist, as a man who has lost his world view and no longer acts according to his conscience, as one who has somehow betrayed the most profound ideals of a people. To the Israeli, his fellow of the Diaspora is a moralizer whose sermons if put into practice would mean death to Israel. Since it has been the financial generosity of world Jewry which has made Zion possible, there is anguish on both sides. What neither understands is that natural law has intervened; that they are no longer the same people sharing the same conscience and the same amity-enmity complex. Life would be easier for both if they understood.

The same division between Jew and Israeli witnessed a heart-rending demonstration during the Eichmann trial. I had not anticipated it with my theoretical list, but the Israeli elders with their intuitions had, for they dreaded what would happen when the inevitable documentation of Nazi atrocities unfolded. The dread was well founded. As the trial progressed, the bewildered young people -- the sabras, the Israeli-born -- confronted their parents in household after household. "Why didn't you do something?" "You don't understand," said the parents, "there was nothing to do." "But if you were going to die -- if somebody knew he was going to die anyway -- why didn't he die fighting?" "You don't understand," said the parents. And [287] it is true that the sabra will never understand, for unlike the Jew of the gas chamber, he is a territorial animal.

The final point I did not anticipate, the Israeli did not anticipate, none but the computer could have anticipated. It is the first of all Israeli problems, and it will be solved or it will destroy the nation. The Arab, of course -- as he well knows -- scarcely constitutes a problem at all beyond the military expense that he adds to the nation's budget. Israel's problem is race.

Had I been a Jew and a pioneer Zionist, I too should have had no inkling as to the horror that would raise its ugly head someday. The Zionist in his innocence accepted the Jew as a Jew, even as did the Gentile. He anticipated difficulties in the welding together of peoples from a hundred different lands speaking a hundred different tongues. He recognized his people as an opinionated lot, and foresaw quarrels. But he foresaw no transcendent problems once all were together in the Promised Land, once all spoke Hebrew as a common language, and once all children grew up in common schools. That the racial reality of the Jew did not exist did not enter his calculation, nor that out of the conglomeration of background would come two entirely different peoples, the Jew of the East and the Jew of the West.

The Zionist fallacy was at first not revealed. Of the 650,-000 Israeli who in 1948 fought the War of Independence, almost all were of the West. For eighty or so generations they had survived the hard conditions of environmental selection imposed by Christian lands: they were tough, resourceful, educated, and none paled at confrontation with a hard day's work. The Arab League, with its generous gift of blood to sanctify their legitimate union, launched successfully the Israeli ship. Then and only then arrived the other Jew in his massive migration. Israel braced itself, embraced the brother who had sung by the rivers of Babylon. It occurred to no one that the Oriental Jew, after one hundred generations of survival and natural selection in environments from Casablanca to Baghdad so different from those of the West, in societies for example where work if possible is left to women and study if possible left to scribes, might bear a genetic scar or two which no classroom could immediately erase.

Today at Hebrew University, Oriental Jewish students are so few that they are outnumbered by Arabs. Abba [288] Eban, until recently Minister of Education, has stated that 30 percent of Oriental children who have reached the age of fourteen and have had eight years of Israeli schooling are unable to write a simple Hebrew text or a legible letter, or to perform the four basic calculations of arithmetic. The attitude toward education differs as does the eagerness to work. While the Western Jew, renouncing the ghetto, has accomplished the agricultural miracle, the Eastern Jew, creating a new ghetto, has crowded over half of his numbers into the Tel-Aviv area. There is little intermarriage. Less than 5 percent of Western women marry Eastern men. The comment of a girl at Hebrew University that the Oriental Jew is "not of our sort" sounds like discrimination; but the Eastern male, of course, is even more unlikely to tolerate a wife with education than he is to seek it himself.

The Oriental Jew is today in a 55-percent majority. He makes bitter charges of racial discrimination. Israeli leadership recoils at a phrase that for any Jew is a blow to memory's solar plexus. Yet discrimination exists. Michael Selzer, writing in London's Jewish Observer, describes a housing development in Jerusalem which excludes schwar-zim, the blacks. Epithets like Cushim and Frankim are common; they correspond to the British kaffir. Zionist leadership in its innocence failed to reckon that when the Jew became an Israeli he would take on his newly straightened shoulders all the common burdens of mankind.

Yet despite all: despite disillusionment in the immediate efficacy of education, despite the failure of social conditioning, despite the entrenchments of "racial" animosities, despite deepening pessimism in many informed Israeli circles: despite all, Israel thrives and will achieve integration long before its pessimists believe. Why? Because of the amity-enmity complex; because the Arab League, persistent to the end in its animosities, will further accomplish the opposite of its purposes and in the end succeed ifl creating what no Israeli resource can produce, a trulj! permanent and united nation.

As the knowledgeable Israeli must dread the day when the Arab League appears on the Promised Land's doorstep, in its hands an olive branch, so the South African must dread the day when like the apocalypse itself there [289] appears below the Limpopo the unheralded cordiality of nations. He could, just possibly, be destroyed.

For a good many years now I have been a commuter in Africa, pursuing my animals and my fossils, and watching out of the corners of my eyes the arrangements of Homo sapiens with an incredulity which my computer does not share. When I began my travels, Ghana was still the Gold Coast and the Mau-Mau still the preoccupation of both Kenya and the world press. As my understanding of territory grew, I came to recognize that the independence movement included two serious flaws: First; the black nations were accepting those arbitrary borders which had been drawn by the colonial powers in their splitting up of the world's spoils. In the Congo, for example, a major tribe like the Bakongo was divided among European-derived entities known as Angola, the Belgian Congo, and the French Congo; whereas, on the other hand, Katanga, a separate entity ethnologically, traditionally, and geographically, had for conveniences of Belgian administration been placed within that area which all but the Congolese regarded as the Congo. And the second serious flaw, of course, was that none of the new states remotely resembled biological nations. Allegiances were tribal and local.

Linear social evolution -- scorned by many a social anthropologist as an affront to human dignity -- has in most peoples proceeded through coalition of primitive hunting bands, differing little in size or organization from animal societies, into larger clans holding merged territ-tories, through the coalition of clans into enlarging tribes perhaps grouped into confederations still recognizing with varying strictness the older boundaries, and finally the evolution of such loose confederations into modern nation-states in which through various political or historical mechanisms a single unified territory commands the allegiance, the sacrifice, and the effective amity of all social partners. The normal condition of coalition comes about when adjoining groups face an outward enemy too strong for any singly to resist, so that alliance becomes voluntary and if the combined amity-enmity complex persists long enough, true coalition will follow. The conquest of a weaker group by a stronger may produce coalition of a temporary nature, but as a rule any permanent, reliable arrangement must be sealed by voluntary allegiance in the face of common threat. [290]

It is difficult to explain why the history of African peoples below the Sahara offers so few examples of coalition beyond the tribal level, while the most ancient monument we have to such social evolution is to be found on the African continent itself. Not an hour's drive from Cairo is the oldest masonry building in the world, the famous step pyramid built for King Zoser of the Third Dynasty almost 5000 years ago. Zoser's predecessors had succeeded, to begin with undoubtedly by conquest, in uniting all those tribes of Upper and Lower Egypt with territories facing the Nile. These districts were called nomes. By the time Zoser came along, the national union must have reached an effective level. In the midst of the hot high glaring desert standing above the Nile's green valley there still remains that ancient community of the dead, the necropolis called Saqqara. Here history's first architect, Imhotep, constructed the pyramid that was to be his king's monument, and reproduced in superbly carved stone for the king's eternal entertainment the living court over which in life he had ruled at Memphis. Politics must have been King Zoser's chief amusement. One explores the great walled compound, the structures built for ceremonies now forgotten, and like boxes in an opera house the flanking niches occupied once by representatives of Egypt's federated nomes. And wandering about among these crumbling niches I discovered to my lasting astonishment symbolic but emphatic fences separating niche from niche. Our first nation had recognized the territorial integrity of each nome in the federated whole, and in civilization's first building of stone had accepted symbolically the territorial boundary as of immortality's stuff.

The date was approximately 2750 B.C. Tribal allegiances while retaining territorial identity as in my own United States deferred to central, national authority. Nearly 5000 years later no comparable condition had been yet achieved in the new African states. Tribal loyalties were uniformly' paramount. Black nationalism held meaning only to north-j em whites, usually painfully ignorant of the man in the; bush, or in the ambitions for power of that handful of' white-educated blacks who came to be known as black Europeans. The talk in northern circles was of "viable nations" as if economics constituted a significant force in the establishment of national identities. The independence movement was real enough, but its emotional basis was a [291] tribal demand first for freedom from the rule of the white man, but second, and finally, from the centralized rule of the black man as well.

Such was the background, as I saw it, for the chaotic future of the new black states. And yet strangely enough, everything that could be said of the black state could be said of that white pariah South Africa as well. Ten years ago little difference met the eye. Tribal animosities were more immediately apparent, in truth, than in most black states. There were two white tribes, Boer and British. The Afrikaner, an amalgam of Dutch and French, had been in possession of its land for so many centuries that its solidarity and political power was the greater. The British tribe, however, was the richer; and the two held each other in mutual contempt. Of comparable size were two black tribes, the Zulu and the Xhosa, among the most able of all tribal groups on the African continent. Their mutual animosities, however, might be compared to that of Boer and Britain, and the Zulu possessed, moreover, a chilling history of warlike ferocity known the world around. And then there was another sizable group known as Cape Colored, more an agglomeration than a tribe, and bearing little relation to modern Africa. Descendants of the pre-Negro Hottentot, of Malay slaves brought in the seventeenth century to the old Dutch colony, and of the whites themselves, the Cape Colored held common bond with almost no one. And besides all these, there was the Indian, and there were minor black tribes to complete the "national" mosaic.

There was one striking difference, however. Whereas the new black states commanded the sympathy of the entire world, South Africa because of its social policy commanded as universal an antipathy. My computer, grinding away at its equations, presumably knew all the answers. I did not, or did not, at least, until the sums lay glaringly before me.

Today there is not a black African state which for all the world's good will and economic aid does not stagger along on one side or the other of the narrow line between order and chaos, solvency and bankruptcy, peace and blood. Whereas the pariah state South Africa is attaining peaks of affluence, order, security, and internal solidarity rivaled by few long-established nations. A degree of tyranny has contributed to the change, but that degree is far [292] smaller than world failure is yet willing to grant. What since 1960 has transmuted a divided, unstable, near-bankrupt state on the verge of racial explosion into a stable, united, incredibly prospering nation in which the threat of racial explosion is almost nonexistent has been natural alchemy: the forced withdrawal of South Africa from the British Commonwealth, the boycotts and embargoes stemming from a world conscience more declared than real, the meaningless threats of war on the part of powerless black African states, the unenforceable resolutions passed unanimously by United Nations, the establishment of training camps in Africa for saboteurs and guerrilla fighters and the raising of funds in Europe for a revolution which will never occur, have in a world holding sacred the sovereign rights of nations been all territorial intrusions. Every law of the territorial principle has been set in motion: the proprietor's innate defense, enhancement of energy, cooperation and acceptance of leadership, and the final A = E + h.

Had the world conspired to make apartheid a permanent South African institution, it could have done no better job. As the Arab League has accomplished in Israel I the precise opposite of its intentions, so better than a hun- I dred nations voting in New York have accomplished the I precise opposite of theirs. In recent months the most incredible of predictions has come to me from South African j sources all of which I trust: were South Africa physically invaded by white forces, 80 percent of South African I blacks would join in the country's defense; were the in- j vasion to be mounted by black forces, the defense would ! be total. One cannot know the accuracy of the prediction, j but since it falls within the probability of the amity-en- j mity equation and since history, one day, may put it toj the test, the suggestion for all its seeming lunacy is worth recording.

The intruder's motives may be superior morally, politically, ideologically; the defender's motives may be paro-chial, contemptible, justifiably intolerable on the part of j world opinion; or relative merits may be reversed: it is all] one, since our sympathies are meaningless. Unless the in-trader, lacking the biologically compounding forces of the.j defensive territorial principle, is both willing and capable j of making such sacrifices as to overcome the proprietor's! inherent advantages, intrusion will not only fail but will [293] accomplish, in all probability, the opposite of its objectives.

Another excellent contemporary example was the American adventure in Vietnam. My sympathies lay frankly on the side of intrusion. I do not share with Dr. Burton his judgment of Chinese aggressiveness as a simple product of F-A. The odors arising from Peking carry to my nostrils a pungency which I cannot ascribe to the springtime blooming of a hundred flowers. My sensibilities remain quite unoffended by actions offering permanent damage to what I regard as the Chinese dream. Furthermore, if containment of Chinese expansionism was our motive, then our adventure in its earliest stages was a grand success. That China failed to come to the rescue of its small ally had immediate consequences in the world's most likely and unlikely capitals. Heads labeled "Made in Peking" rolled in Algeria, in the new black states, in Cuba, in Indonesia, in almost every quarter wherein Chinese expansionism had to that date made substantial progress. The Soviet Union, it is true, busied itself picking up most of the loose Chinese change, and in a way we presented the Russians with their most massive political victory since Yalta. Whether such a consequence was to American interest may be arguable, but fortunately is not the subject of argument here. What lies beyond argument, and what is most definitely a facet of the subject before us, was that policy called escalation, the gradual and almost imperceptible increase of the intruder's exhibited might.

At the very word escalation, my computer groans and wanders off to the bathroom in search of aspirin. If there is a policy of aggression more doomed to failure, then the dreamy Americans, we must assume, will someday invent it. Escalation has several virtues, it is true, but all are clouded: It is a means of getting into a big war in such a small way that your allies will not desert you -- at least not until you need them most. Also, like an economic policy of good money after bad, you will at first gain the support of your own people, who though unmotivated by territorial defense will accept what seems at the moment aggression on the cheap; not until your investment has become so great as to preclude any course but further investment will your troubles at home begin, for the digging into economic and emotional pockets will be made in a spirit notably lacking that enthusiasm so essential to war. Another virtue, more apparent in day-to-day routine than in [294] consummation of victory, is that escalation makes quite unnecessary knowing what you are doing. And a final virtue, of fundamental appeal to a people as virtuous as the Americans, is that after a while it becomes difficult to discern just who is escalating whom, so you can more easily blame the bloody state of affairs on the other fellow; the drawback, of course, being that by then you are truly a victim of circumstance, you have lost all military initiative, and as you have forgotten who started the war, you will probably have forgotten why, too.

Whatever escalation's debatable assets may be for the intruder, it is a ladder to heaven for the defender. Since A = E + h, and E by its slow increase loses all shock value, A will be generated at a rate amply to exploit the defender's resources, however slim. The most minute advantage, the most subtle, marginal multiplication of territorial power, will be placed in the hands of your enemy. And even though in the end you may seem to win -- a probable outcome if you are the world's greatest power and your adversary has been chosen as the smallest and poorest contestant in sight -- 'then two grave consequences may be anticipated: The long, painful, grinding of attrition which has brought you victory at maximum cost may have reduced your enemy's land to ashes, but as there will always be embers there will always be memories, and someday out of the charred old ruin will emerge the unforgetting phoenix, and you must begin all over again. The other consequence, perhaps indeed more ludicrous than grave, will be that while David has never looked braver, Goliath has never looked sillier.

The amity-enmity complex, put to full use by the modern development of the ancient biological nation, has presented to the intruder's path something less pleasing than roses, roses all the way. Since the eighteenth century I can recall only two cases of permanently successful conquest, and neither is clear-cut. My own country successfully stole Texas and California from Mexico; but Mexico was not then a true nation. And the Soviet Union after World War; II made off with Eastern Europe; but whether even that; conquest will be made to stick seems ever more doubtfuLj Conquest, whether for causes noble or causes base, ceased to be a profitable enterprise when broadly organized,) thoroughly integrated territorial societies became the bastions of the freedom of peoples. This biological fact (W [295] life is what the potential intruder must learn. As smooth-billed anis will defend their territory though their collective nest be meanwhile robbed, evolutionary processes of such eternal value must shrug at temporal loss. Human sympathies, moral convictions, political absolutes, philosophical certainties -- none, whatever the discomfort their frustration may cause us, will suborn or suppress the territorial imperative, that biological morality which will still contain the behavior of beings when Homo sapiens is an evolutionary memory.