Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Killing Our Way Out of ViolenceEngaging Wrangham's The Goodness ParadoxChris Haw (bio) and Richard Wrangham (bio)Wrangham's Goodness Paradox (GP) offers excellent anthropological research for mimetic theorists interested in the questions of human evolution and violence. It theorizes a framework of how group killing played a selective function in the emergence of our species, but it leaves open plenty of questions and concerns for productive, critical dialogue. Wolfgang Palaver has written a short affirmation of the book, and Melvin Konner reviewed it for The Atlantic.1 But as one who has taken keen interest in the evolutionary and theological dimensions of mimetic theory,2 I offer here a longer engagement with the book and the author. I begin by extrapolating Wrangham's argument, I offer some critique, and then I share an edited version of my extended conversation with him.Wrangham's overall paradox is that humanity emerged through killing our way out of violence. More precisely, proactive coalitionary killing against aggressive, alpha-male individuals selected out, in a genetic pressure over hundreds of thousands of years, the more temperamental threads of Homo, resulting in a species (sapiens) who are relatively more domesticated and docile.3 [End Page 63]The argument proceeds as follows. First: Domestication is a real, genetic thing. Various domesticated species tend to share an odd, seemingly unrelated set of features called a "domestication syndrome." This refers to some combination of phenotype differences as compared to nondomesticated cousins: reduced skeleton mass, reduced/rounder cranium sizes and jaw lines, floppier ears, white patches of fur, extended juvenility, more frequent fertile periods, males with greater approximation to female characteristics, and so on. Beneath all these is a genetic reduction in "reactive aggression," which is the propensity for violence related to irascibility and short-fused tempers.Two: Domestication can happen intentionally or just randomly in nature. Humans have domesticated foxes in quick succession, breeding only ones with reduced reactive aggression, resulting in a domestication syndrome.4 The same seems to have happened slowly, with increasing intentionality over time, in the domestication of wolves into dogs. (This perhaps first began with the natural selection of wolves who were least aggravated by getting near humans to eat their camp detritus.) But domestication can also happen outside the human sphere, as in bonobos, who are basically a domesticated cousin of chimpanzees—evidenced not only in their reduced aggression but in their own domestication syndrome.5 This happened, he argues, largely through contingent, niche ecological features related to landscape, dramatic climate variations, and changes in competition over food.Three: It has long been asked whether humans are a "domesticated" species or whether such a thought is just anthropocentrism. The answer is definitely yes, but who domesticated us? A traditional answer, of course, was that God made us (or that some humans are properly domesticated, and others savage); but what if we ask in a more specifically scientific, causal framework? One early anthropologist posed that perhaps some now-extinct super-species domesticated us.6 Wrangham's answer is that we unintentionally domesticated ourselves by persistently killing off the genetic lines of the most aggressive individuals. This has resulted in Homo sapiens being basically a domesticated version of Homo neanderthalensis, erectus, and so on. Girard's not-unrelated answer is that religion domesticated us. By "religion" Girard means an integrated pattern of chaotic/exceptional and ordered/normal behaviors that contain violence, mediated through our mimetic capacity: chaotic mimetic violence restrained and channeled through mimetic ritual, taboo, and myth. This created an increasing feedback loop that exercised and intensified our mimetic capacity while protecting against its dangerous excess. Whatever the case, compared with our hominin cousins, the human phenotype shows strong signs of a domestication [End Page 64] syndrome: reduced cranium and jaw sizes, smaller skeleton mass, and a likely decreased reactive aggression in comparison to previous Homo.Fourth, and finally: Wrangham argues this domestication is related to a long, prehuman arc of transition, throughout the mid-Pleistocene (the Pleistocene ranges from about 2 million years ago to the thawing of the last ice age, 12,000 years ago), from older alpha-dominance patterns to tyrannies of egalitarian patriarchy. Wrangham draws upon hunter...