The discovery that grasses can “borrow” or steal genes from neighboring vegetation through an unknown mechanism plants an idea in my head: What if, now bear with me, what if humans could do the same? * And what if, again, just speculating here, what if we discover someday that the saying “It’s in my genes” proves to be more accurate than we now imagine? Would, mind you, I’m running through a stream of ideas, would it be possible to breed a peaceful human type that enhances peace by both nature and nurture?
I suppose you’re going to argue that nurture plays a more important role than nature in making a peaceful society. If you adopt that argument, you side with William Golding’s theme in his Lord of the Flies, that humans are basically savage and that the only control on that savagery lies within a civilization. I say “within” because we have a history of accepting violence against people of other civilizations through war, an event that justifies killing outside the arbitrary boundaries of socially and politically unified people within the society at war. Something in there, in that group of blood and social relatives says, “Okay, as long as you don’t hurt anyone in the ‘family.’” So, assuming you have adopted the Golding psychology of inherent savagery, I think the only recourse you have to explain peace is nurture. Train little humans to be peaceful as they begin their life’s journey through the maze of conflicting ideas and behaviors that are characteristic of any society’s accepted membership. What do we nurture today? Don’t we define a group, define outside groups, and train kids it’s okay to hurt the latter but not the former. Has there ever been a year without a war somewhere?
But, as I was asking above, but what if, just what if, there could be a peaceful nature, maybe one that unfolds as an expression of a gene? What if peace came from biology and not from culture?
That Golding thing I mentioned, is that your view? Are you peaceful because of civilization’s, that is specifically, because of your civilization’s restraints? Are you a veiled monster like the neatly uniformed sailors who rescue the savage raggedly-dressed boys-run-wild at the end of Golding’s novel? Neat but savage: Isn’t that what the sailor represent? They’re at war, you know—but not at war with their shipmates. Do you accept society’s limitations, its restrictions because you see that deep-down savagery that would emerge without such controls?
Golding published his novel in 1954, just a year after anthropologist Siegfried F. Nadel published “Social Control and Self-Regulation.” Nadel begins his article with:
“No one will quarrel with the assertion that social existence is controlled existence, for we all accept a certain basic assumption about human nature—namely, that without some constraint of individual leanings the coordination of action and regularity of conduct which turn a human aggregation into a society could not materialize” (265). **
Nurture. See. Not nature. At least in Nadel’s view. And in his studies of various peoples in eastern Africa, Nadel used the Nuba as an example of what I wrote above. As K. E. Read expresses it:
“[Nadel] pointed out that among the Nuba the evaluation of a crime such as homicide and the sanctions which it provokes, varies according to whether it occurs ‘within the clan or outside it, in or outside the political unit.’ Homicide within the Nuba kinship group or clan is an unpunishable offence, in the sense that it does not provoke forceful retaliation by the members of the clan or its segments. Between clans, however, punishment is exacted in the form of blood feud and revenge” (202). ***
Sounds like the Hatfields and McCoys along the West Virginia-Kentucky border of Big Sandy River in the nineteenth century, doesn’t it? Acceptable violence, that is, acceptable violence as long as it is perpetrated on someone outside the clan. So, I return to my speculation: Are we deep-down Golding-style savages restrained only insofar as we adhere to society’s nurture?
And if that’s so, if, as I was speculating, we are deep-down savages, wouldn’t it behoove us to look for some mutant among us, some deep-down incarnation of peace, that one in a 7 billion with a peace gene, so we could borrow, steal, rent, or, as the phytologists say with regard to grasses, laterally transfer that gene? Wouldn’t it be great that if such an incarnation of peace were available, that we could do what grasses do, that is, that we could transfer the peace gene into people, all people? And once implanted in the DNA of this generation of humans, wouldn’t that gene find expression in the next, a mutation preserved because it is a favorable one, favorable because it extends the life of members of the species on average in the absence of inter-clan conflict and inter-civilization war? Why, wouldn’t such a gene even prevent domestic violence?
Apparently, ubiquitous grasses became ubiquitous because they had the ability to somehow incorporate genes from other plants that were favorable to the survival of the grass. We don’t know how they do it, but we know that grasses do, in fact, borrow genes. Now if only we could figure out a way…
Okay, I know I’m just speculating. And there’s a counter argument. If we are, in fact, controlled by biology, even the biology of peace, then what’s that say about our belief in mind, or psyche, or freedom, especially the freedom we call free will? Could we through lateral gene transfer make humanity an analog of gentle Golden Retrievers? Then what might happen to the aggression that drives us through some Will to Power that also leads to invention? Would civilization have become civilization without invention? Is there some savage drive toward success in a risky world that was populated by large and dangerous carnivores? Is our savagery a survival mechanism?
I think of Carl Sandberg’s “The Grass”:
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work--
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Yres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and the passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work.
There’s a lesson in the grass, but I don’t think we’re capable of learning it.
Whew! So many questions and so few answers. Well, just something for you to think about.
Notes:
*University of Sheffield. Naturally GM: Crops steal genes from other species to accelerate evolution. Phys.Org. 23 April 2021. Online at https://phys.org/news/2021-04-naturally-gm-crops-genes-species.html Accessed April 23, 2021. Hibdige, Samuel G. S., et al., Widespread lateral gene transfer among grasses. New Phytologist. 22 April 2021. Online at https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.17328 Accessed April 23, 2021.
**Nadel, S. F. “Social Control and Self-Regulation,” Social Forces, Volume 31, Issue 3, March 1953, pp. 26 5-273 https://doi.org/10.2307/2574226
***Read, K. E. “Morality and the Concept of the Person among the Gahuku-Gama” in John Middleton, ED., Myth and Cosmos: Readings in Mythology and Symbolism. Garden City. The Natural History Press, 1967.
I suppose you’re going to argue that nurture plays a more important role than nature in making a peaceful society. If you adopt that argument, you side with William Golding’s theme in his Lord of the Flies, that humans are basically savage and that the only control on that savagery lies within a civilization. I say “within” because we have a history of accepting violence against people of other civilizations through war, an event that justifies killing outside the arbitrary boundaries of socially and politically unified people within the society at war. Something in there, in that group of blood and social relatives says, “Okay, as long as you don’t hurt anyone in the ‘family.’” So, assuming you have adopted the Golding psychology of inherent savagery, I think the only recourse you have to explain peace is nurture. Train little humans to be peaceful as they begin their life’s journey through the maze of conflicting ideas and behaviors that are characteristic of any society’s accepted membership. What do we nurture today? Don’t we define a group, define outside groups, and train kids it’s okay to hurt the latter but not the former. Has there ever been a year without a war somewhere?
But, as I was asking above, but what if, just what if, there could be a peaceful nature, maybe one that unfolds as an expression of a gene? What if peace came from biology and not from culture?
That Golding thing I mentioned, is that your view? Are you peaceful because of civilization’s, that is specifically, because of your civilization’s restraints? Are you a veiled monster like the neatly uniformed sailors who rescue the savage raggedly-dressed boys-run-wild at the end of Golding’s novel? Neat but savage: Isn’t that what the sailor represent? They’re at war, you know—but not at war with their shipmates. Do you accept society’s limitations, its restrictions because you see that deep-down savagery that would emerge without such controls?
Golding published his novel in 1954, just a year after anthropologist Siegfried F. Nadel published “Social Control and Self-Regulation.” Nadel begins his article with:
“No one will quarrel with the assertion that social existence is controlled existence, for we all accept a certain basic assumption about human nature—namely, that without some constraint of individual leanings the coordination of action and regularity of conduct which turn a human aggregation into a society could not materialize” (265). **
Nurture. See. Not nature. At least in Nadel’s view. And in his studies of various peoples in eastern Africa, Nadel used the Nuba as an example of what I wrote above. As K. E. Read expresses it:
“[Nadel] pointed out that among the Nuba the evaluation of a crime such as homicide and the sanctions which it provokes, varies according to whether it occurs ‘within the clan or outside it, in or outside the political unit.’ Homicide within the Nuba kinship group or clan is an unpunishable offence, in the sense that it does not provoke forceful retaliation by the members of the clan or its segments. Between clans, however, punishment is exacted in the form of blood feud and revenge” (202). ***
Sounds like the Hatfields and McCoys along the West Virginia-Kentucky border of Big Sandy River in the nineteenth century, doesn’t it? Acceptable violence, that is, acceptable violence as long as it is perpetrated on someone outside the clan. So, I return to my speculation: Are we deep-down Golding-style savages restrained only insofar as we adhere to society’s nurture?
And if that’s so, if, as I was speculating, we are deep-down savages, wouldn’t it behoove us to look for some mutant among us, some deep-down incarnation of peace, that one in a 7 billion with a peace gene, so we could borrow, steal, rent, or, as the phytologists say with regard to grasses, laterally transfer that gene? Wouldn’t it be great that if such an incarnation of peace were available, that we could do what grasses do, that is, that we could transfer the peace gene into people, all people? And once implanted in the DNA of this generation of humans, wouldn’t that gene find expression in the next, a mutation preserved because it is a favorable one, favorable because it extends the life of members of the species on average in the absence of inter-clan conflict and inter-civilization war? Why, wouldn’t such a gene even prevent domestic violence?
Apparently, ubiquitous grasses became ubiquitous because they had the ability to somehow incorporate genes from other plants that were favorable to the survival of the grass. We don’t know how they do it, but we know that grasses do, in fact, borrow genes. Now if only we could figure out a way…
Okay, I know I’m just speculating. And there’s a counter argument. If we are, in fact, controlled by biology, even the biology of peace, then what’s that say about our belief in mind, or psyche, or freedom, especially the freedom we call free will? Could we through lateral gene transfer make humanity an analog of gentle Golden Retrievers? Then what might happen to the aggression that drives us through some Will to Power that also leads to invention? Would civilization have become civilization without invention? Is there some savage drive toward success in a risky world that was populated by large and dangerous carnivores? Is our savagery a survival mechanism?
I think of Carl Sandberg’s “The Grass”:
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work--
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Yres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and the passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work.
There’s a lesson in the grass, but I don’t think we’re capable of learning it.
Whew! So many questions and so few answers. Well, just something for you to think about.
Notes:
*University of Sheffield. Naturally GM: Crops steal genes from other species to accelerate evolution. Phys.Org. 23 April 2021. Online at https://phys.org/news/2021-04-naturally-gm-crops-genes-species.html Accessed April 23, 2021. Hibdige, Samuel G. S., et al., Widespread lateral gene transfer among grasses. New Phytologist. 22 April 2021. Online at https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.17328 Accessed April 23, 2021.
**Nadel, S. F. “Social Control and Self-Regulation,” Social Forces, Volume 31, Issue 3, March 1953, pp. 26 5-273 https://doi.org/10.2307/2574226
***Read, K. E. “Morality and the Concept of the Person among the Gahuku-Gama” in John Middleton, ED., Myth and Cosmos: Readings in Mythology and Symbolism. Garden City. The Natural History Press, 1967.
RSS Feed