Letters | 20 August 2011

Violent by nature

Sir: Amongst the sociological why-oh-why-ery trying to explain the motivation of the rioters, the simplest explanation has been overlooked: human nature is utterly violent and wicked. Conservatism — the heir of Christianity in this respect — realises this. Recent work on violence in hunter-gatherer societies has demolished sociological explanations of violence: it is not society that makes people violent but our nature, evolved over the last 100,000 years. Forty per cent of Rousseau’s ‘noble savages’ in primitive hunter-gatherer societies die at the hands of another. We are all descended from successful rapists. Steven Pinker’s Blank Slate — an attack on the idea that human nature is socially constructed — puts it very well: ‘As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin’s anarchism. I laughed off my parents’ argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8.00 a.m. on 17 October 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. By 11.20 a.m. the first bank was robbed. By noon most downtown stores had closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that competed with them, a rooftop sniper killed a police officer, a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, 12 fires had been set, 40 carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order. This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters…’

Matthew Leeming
Old Alresford, Hampshire

•••

Windy debate