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WHY WE HATE
WHY WE HATE
Understanding the Roots of Human Conflict
Michael Ruse
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing
worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and
certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2022
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in
writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under
terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning
reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same
condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022900031
ISBN 978–0–19–762128–8
eISBN 978–0–19–762130–1
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197621288.001.0001
To the memory of the members of the Warwickshire
Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends
(Quakers), who, in the years after the Second World War,
gave so much to the children in the group and whose loving
influence has guided and enriched my whole life.
CONTENTS
Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Biology of War
2. The Biology of Prejudice
3. The Culture of War
4. The Culture of Prejudice
5. Moving Forward
Epilogue
REFERENCES
INDEX
ILLUSTRATIONS
I was raised a Quaker in the years after the Second World War.
Quakers don’t have the usual trimmings of religion—preachers,
churches (“steeple houses” as we called them of old), or creeds and
dogmas and that sort of thing. However, to conclude that Quakers
have no strong beliefs is to make a major mistake. They could give
St. Paul a run for his money. Above all, for me, being a Quaker
meant being part of a community with my fellow human beings. We
were never very good at literal readings of the Bible, but my
goodness we took the Sermon on the Mount seriously. “Ye have
heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a
tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever
shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also”
(Matthew 5:38–39). And: “Ye have heard that it hath been said,
Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto
you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them
that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and
persecute you” (43–44).
That is our role in life and how we serve our Lord. Loving other
human beings. Quakers talk of the “inner light,” that of God in every
person, and that resonates to this day. Always inspiring me,
haunting me in a way, is the great elegy of the metaphysical poet
John Donne that hung on the wall of nigh every meeting house,
where Quakers met to worship in silence.
No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
(Meditation 17, from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, 1624)
Here was the paradox that has never left me, unchanged by my
loss of faith when I was twenty years old. If we are such social
beings, how can we be so hateful to each other? In my early years,
memories of the Second World War hung over us all: Poland, the Fall
of France, the Blitz, Barbarossa, Pearl Harbor, Stalingrad, and on
down to the end, the Battle of the Bulge and the bombing of
Dresden. Across the world, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet this only
confirmed what we already knew. The Second World War was the
more recent, but it was the First World War—the Great War—that
permeated every aspect of our culture. My teachers in primary
school were single women, who had lost fiancés and husbands on
the battlefields of Flanders. Parks had lonely men wandering
aimlessly—“shell shocked,” as we were told in pitying terms. Go into
the front parlor, the room unused except for Sundays and special
occasions, like funerals. There stood a picture of Uncle Bert,
eighteen years old, proud in his new uniform. Dead at twenty at
Passchendaele. Then I went to Canada when I was twenty-two and
soon found that it was the Great War that defined that country—as it
did other parts of the Commonwealth, notably Australia and New
Zealand. The triumphs—when the Canadians at Easter 1917 took
Vimy Ridge, that had withstood so many earlier attempts—and the
tragedies—when on July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the
Somme, some eight hundred members of the Newfoundland
Regiment went over the top, and the next morning at roll call there
were but sixty-eight who responded. Every day, walking to and from
my university, I passed the birthplace of John McCrae, author of the
most-quoted poem of the war: “In Flanders Fields.”
Add to all of this the dreadful ways in which we behave to each
other in our daily lives. Above all, in the years after the war, as we
became increasingly aware of the horrors of the Holocaust, we saw
the depths to which we humans could fall. It is but part of a general
story of prejudice, and there is not one of us who can look back on
history without guilt and regret. No one living in the American South,
as do I, can avoid daily reminders of the appalling treatment of
white people toward black people. Over two centuries of slavery
followed by a century of Jim Crow. Contempt, belittlement, lack of
respect—toward strangers, toward people of different classes,
toward members of other races, toward those with minority sexual
orientations, toward adherents of different religions, toward the
disabled, toward Jews, and of men toward women. Was it not
naïveté, bordering on the callous, to go on talking about the social
nature—the inherent goodness—of human beings? It is this, our
conflicted nature—so social, so hateful—that has driven me to write
this book. I have found that, in the past two decades, there have
been incredibly important discoveries and reinterpretations of our
understanding of human evolution. Discoveries and reinterpretations
highly pertinent to my quest. Finally, there seem to be some
answers. I am amazed at and grateful for what I learned. It is this
new understanding that I want to share, less concerned about
whether you agree or disagree with me than that you appreciate the
importance of the problem and the need to continue the inquiry. It is
a moral obligation laid on us all. If you doubt me, think Ukraine.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Origins
The prehistory of humans starts with the Big Bang about 13.8 billion
years ago (Morison 2014). (See Figure I.1.) Our solar system, about
halfway through its life span, is about 4.5 billion years old. The
planet Earth was formed from detritus circling the sun. Life appeared
about 3.8 billion years ago, in other words about as soon as it could,
after the oceans cooled enough to support its existence and
continuation (Bada and Lazcana 2009). For about half of the
subsequent time, life was primitive, one-celled organisms—
prokaryotes. Then came multicelled organisms—eukaryotes.
FIGURE I.1 The history of life on Earth.
Although it did not come out of the blue, the big event—at least
as far as we humans are concerned—was the Cambrian explosion,
about 550 million years ago. That was when the major life groups
appeared—including chordates, a subset of which were the
vertebrates, animals with backbones. Things were now racing ahead
—fish, amphibians, reptiles (including the dinosaurs), and then
mammals and birds. Mammals first appeared about 225 million years
ago, rat-like, nocturnal creatures, careful to keep out of the way of
the dominant life group, the dinosaurs. The dinos went extinct
around 65 million years ago, thanks to the planet’s disruption by the
impact of a meteor or similar body from space—birds, their direct
descendants, survived—and the way was opened for mammals to
thrive and diversify, and so came the primates about 50 million years
ago. Going down in time, finally we get the great apes, and the
important action—at least, with respect to humans—takes place in
the last ten million years. Amazingly, we now know our human line—
hominins—split from other apes, gorillas, and chimpanzees, around
seven million years ago, or less. Even more amazing is that we are
more closely related to the chimpanzees than they are to gorillas.
The break with the other great apes came with our move out
from the jungle and onto the plains. This led to bipedalism. There is
speculation about the reason for this. Being able to stand upright
and look for predators is one plausible suggestion. As is the point
that, being bipedal, we are not that fast, comparatively, but we can
keep going for much longer than an ape that uses its front legs for
motion. Whether as cause or effect, it is thought that these early
hominins moved to a hunter-gatherer type of existence. Being
bipedal could be of value in hunting down prey, which outrun us but
collapse finally from exhaustion. As we moved to walking on two
legs, so also our brain started to grow, marking an increase in
intelligence. The famous missing link, Lucy, a member of
Australopithecus afarensis, is about 3 million years old. She walked
upright, if not as well as we modern humans. Compensating, she
was probably better at climbing trees. Her brain was about 400 cubic
centimeters, about the size of a chimpanzee’s, compared to our
brains of about 1300 cc. It is important to note that, while her brain
was the size of a chimpanzee brain, she was well on the way to
having a human brain (Johanson and Wong 2009). Our species,
Homo sapiens, appeared half a million years ago or a bit later. Apart
from our line, there were two other subspecies, the Neanderthals (in
the West) and the Denisovans (in the East). Both are extinct.
Apparently in our history we went through bottlenecks. The whole
human population comes from about fourteen thousand individuals,
and out-of-Africa humans from less than three thousand individuals
(Lieberman 2013). This will be a part of our story.
Charles Darwin
What caused all of this? Evolution through natural selection. In his
On the Origin of Species (1859), the English naturalist Charles
Darwin made the case simply and strongly. Organisms have a
reproductive tendency to multiply geometrically—1, 2, 4, 8—whereas
food and space supplies at best multiply arithmetically—1, 2, 3, 4.
Hence, there will be what the clergyman-economist Thomas Robert
Malthus (1826) called a “struggle for existence.” Darwin took this up
unchanged: “as more individuals are produced than can possibly
survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either
one individual with another of the same species, or with the
individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life”
(Darwin 1859, 63). Truly, it is reproduction rather than bare
existence that counts. Taking this insight, and combining it with the
belief—reinforced by a decade-long study of barnacles—that in
natural populations new variation is constantly appearing, Darwin
argued for an equivalent to the selective breeding that farmers and
fanciers apply so successfully in creating new forms—shaggier
sheep, beefier cattle, more melodious songbirds.
Can it . . . be thought improbable, seeing that variations useful to man have
undoubtedly occurred, that other variations useful in some way to each being
in the great and complex battle of life, should sometimes occur in the course
of thousands of generations? If such do occur, can we doubt (remembering
that many more individuals are born than can possibly survive) that
individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the
best chance of surviving and of procreating their kind? On the other hand, we
may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly
destroyed. This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of
injurious variations, I call Natural Selection. (80–81)