From: hbokure@aol.com
Date: Sat Jan 03 2009 - 03:37:08 EST
The obligations of the sciences of human understanding to human welfare and reconciliation are such that without them their disciplines would have no reason to exist. Such an obligation dictates both humility and objectivity. It will not? do to be pleased with oneself as a citizen of the world when the world is in trouble.
The demand for hypothesis of predictive value inspires this work, as it has inspired my previous investigations. If accepted doctrines of human sovereignty, uniqueness, perfectibility had provided such hypothesis, then we should be all right. But I find it difficult to believe that this century would have left quite such an irreproachable record of massacre and terror, of high intentions frustrated and low intentions consummated, had we been guided by other than error; just as I cannot believe that this century's legacy to the next should include quite so many problems without answers. We have given the philosophy of the impossible its try. Is it permissible to suggest that we turn to another?
That a hypothesis derived from study of man's evolutionary nature may have predictive value receives a certain confirmation from the lamented Vietnam War. In The Territorial Imperative I inspected the history and the nature of a biological force called territory, first diagnosed in bird life by the British amateur ornithologist, Eliot Howard. Today we can predict that in many species other than birds the male will defend his territory- his exclusive bit of of the world's space - against all intrusion with a high probability of success even though the intruder be the stronger. A corollary to the proposition I termed the amity-enmity complex, the likelihood that a group of defenders of a territory will be drawn together, united, and their efforts compounded by the intruding enemy. I suggest that man is a territorial species, and that we defend our homes or our homelands for biological reasons, not because we choose but because we must.
I was writing early in 1966, when escalation of American power in Vietnam was less than a year old and American optimism was still a native resource. Applying the territorial principle, I published my conclusion that the war was unwinnable. A powerful intruder, uninhibited by world censure, may with a single blow annihilate a territorial defender. But an effort to escape moral obloquy through gradual escalation of force gives the weakest defender opportunity to escalate his own quite incalculable biological resources. Incapable of playing the Hitler, we played instead evolution's food.
There is an ironic footnote to America's most profound humiliation. Any insight into man's evolutionary nature would have determined that the war must not take place. It was belief in man's rational nature - acceptance of psychology's reinforcement theory that, confronted by sufficient punishment, tempted by sufficient reward, men will come to their senses - that encouraged hope in our escalation policy. And in utmost humility we must add a footnote to our footnote. The final decision to escalate - and that ultimate of follies, to bomb North Vietnam - was made not by the much abused generals, but by a group of the most acute, most educated civilian minds of which my country could boast. And educated they were.
The Vietnam war was the most costly experiment ever designed to test a scientific theory accepted by the most educated of men. And the Vietnamese, in some wild , wild fashion , differed, as events were to demonstrate, from B.F. Skinner's domesticated rats. There is a jungle in the human heart? that denies, as so frequently occurs in the jungle of animals, the thesis that might makes right. The territorial principle is a portion of of that denial. While in many a minor fashion we may accept reinforcement theory, and the general principle that men confronted by choice will accept the more pleasurable, the less painful, still a breaking point between the reasonable and the unreasonable must be reached. There is too ancient wisdom in natural law to leave the survival of populations, the possession of a territory, to the vagaries of somebody's reinforcement theory. Far too immense is the balance of evolutionary forces to endure such a rational conclusion as that might makes a right. And so a weary time in America
n history came about when we abandoned the question, When will the Vietnamese learn? Yet we still have not accepted the question, When shall we?
* This insightful? treatise is still at work? in terms of current American and Ethiopian experience in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa.
Source:-
Ardrey, Robert (1970). The Social Contract. Page 22-24
Mr. Ardrey is also the author of African Genesis and The Territorial Imperatives.
Submitted by Haile Bokure