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Cruelty’s
Rewards: The Gratifications of
Perpetrators and Spectators
Victor Nell
Institute for Social and Health Sciences
5 Brookfield Mansions
Highgate West Hill
Keywords: compassion;
cruelty; entertainment industry; evolutionary psychology; intraspecific
killing; pain; predation; punishment; torture; violence prevention
Abstract: Cruelty is the deliberate infliction of physical or
psychological pain on other living creatures, sometimes indifferently, but
often with delight. Though cruelty is an
overwhelming presence in the world, there is no neurobiological or psychological explanation for its
ubiquity and reward value. This paper
attempts to provide such explanations by describing three stages in the development of cruelty. Stage 1 is the development of the
predatory adaptation from the Palaeozoic to the ethology of predation in
canids, felids, and primates. Stage 2,
through palaeontological and anthropological evidence, traces the emergence of
the hunting adaptation in the Pliocene, its development in early hominids and
its emotional loading in surviving forager societies. This adaptation provides an explanation for
the powerful emotions—high arousal and strong affect—evoked by the
pain-blood-death complex. Stage 3
is the emergence of cruelty about 1.5 million years ago as a hominid behavioural repertoire that promoted fitness
through the maintenance of personal and social power. The resulting cultural elaborations of
cruelty in war, in sacrificial rites, and as entertainment are examined to show
the historical and cross-cultural stability of the uses of cruelty for
punishment, amusement, and social control.
Effective
violence prevention must begin with perpetrators, not victims. If the upstream approaches to violence
prevention advocated by the public health model are to be effective,
psychologists must be able to provide violence prevention workers with a
fine-grained understanding of perpetrator gratifications. This is a distasteful task that will compel
researchers to interact with torturers and abusers, and to acknowledge that
their gratifications are rooted in a common human past. It is nonetheless an essential step in
developing effective strategies for the primary prevention of violence.
Cruelty (from the Latin crudelem,
morally rough) is the deliberate infliction of physical or psychological pain
on a living creature; its most repugnant and puzzling feature is the frequently
evident delight of the perpetrators.
Cruelty is an overwhelming presence in the world—in wars and massacres,
in the routine work of police and military interrogators, in children’s play,
in the dealings of men with women, and of adults with children. Though
the ease with which situations can overwhelm values and elicit cruelty in
hitherto irreproachable individuals is empirically (Haney, Banks, &
Zimbardo, 1973; Milgram, 1974; Zimbardo,
2003) and observationally (Browning, 1993; Grossman, 1996; Tester, 1996)
well-established, there is no
motivational or neurobiological explanation for cruelty’s prevalence or
fascination.
This paper argues that reinforcement value of
pain and bloodshed derives from the predatory adaptation from the middle
Cambrian to the Pleistocene. The argument is therefore
1. that cruelty is a
behavioural by-product of predation;
2. that it is
driven by reinforcers that derive from this adaptation;
3. that, since cruelty presupposes the intention to inflict
pain, and is therefore exclusively a hominid behaviour, it dates to no earlier
than H. erectus, about 1.5 million years ago (Ma);
4. that
cruelty has fitness benefits in solving problems of survival and reproduction
in forager, pastoral, and urban societies;
5. and that the
enjoyment of cruelty is a culturally elaborated manifestation of the predatory
adaptation.
These hypotheses
generate a research agenda for affective neuroscience, for social psychology,
and for violence prevention. They also
provide a heuristic for understanding why media violence is attractive, why men
find war beautiful, why homicide has been a fixed feature of human societies
from prehistoric times to the present, and why, despite the human capacity for
compassion, atrocities continue.
1.1 Three stages in the emergence
of cruelty
Predation. The predatory adaptation derives from
resource competition between and within species, which, in the Cambrian,
becomes predation, the killing and consumption of one living creature by
another. Predation is hard work: the evidence reviewed in Section 3 is that it
is powerfully reinforced in mammalian carnivores and in the hunting apes by a
set of linked conditioned stimuli that are carried over to the hunting
adaptation in hominids. The stimuli driving predation and hunting are the pain-blood-death (PBD) complex—the prey’s terror and
struggles to escape as it is brought down, the shedding of its blood, and its
vocalisations as it is wounded and eaten, often while it is still alive. A range of anticipatory and consummatory
reinforcers is triggered by the PBD complex, which is also active in
intraspecific killing, and strikingly so in chimpanzees. The material in Section 3 on the neurobiology
of predation suggests that predation is dopaminergic, affectively positive, and
distinct from rage.
Hunting. Nutritional killing
by hominids is also hard work: the
palaeontological and anthropological evidence reviewed below suggests that
hunting in hominids, as with predation in canids, felids, and primates, is
reinforced by the PBD complex, and that the non-nutritional “other end” of
hunting, for which anthropologists have sought, derives from these reinforcers.
Power. Cruelty requires a
sufficient cognitive basis for intentionality, and a sufficient social basis
for its disciplinary elaboration (Section 5).
Once these foundations have been laid, there are florid social and
cultural elaborations of cruelty as punishment, for amusement, and for social
control. Each of these modalities
affirms the power of the perpetrator–this may be an individual acting alone or
as the agent of a collective–over the victim.
In hierarchical states with centralised power, cruelty becomes a vehicle
for public entertainments that buttress the power of the state and heroise war. The affective loading of these elaborations
is described in order to identify parallels between blood as a principle
reinforcer of predators and hunters on the one hand, and, on the other, of the
audiences that delight in spectacles of pain and bloodshed.
In Stage 3, the use of cruelty is a
strongly male gendered and contextually sensitive adaptation, which “could
remain dormant for the entire life of an individual, if the relevant contexts
are not encountered” (Buss, 1999, p. 284), promoting inclusive fitness by
augmenting the personal power, survival, and sexual access of cruel
individuals. Historically, the enjoyment
of cruelty has been sufficiently powerful to have channelled huge social
resources into cruel rites and spectacles, and remains a primary driver of the
modern entertainment industry. The distinction
between use and enjoyment has behavioural and neurobehavioral
implications that may have animal parallels with quiet-biting predation on the
one hand and aggressive rage on the other.
However, as with all behavioural states, the boundaries between
instrumentality and affectivity are permeable:
for example, hunters may inflict pain on the prey beyond that which is
instrumentally necessary, and the hunt may slip into surplus killing that
continues beyond the satisfaction of nutritional needs (as with Actaeon in
Ovid’s Metamorphoses, c. 8 AD/1997, p. 105). Violence is a significant by-product of
cruelty (Section 6).
Evidence for the continued salience of the
predatory adaptation for human behaviour is derived from palaeontology and taphonomy
(Brain, 1981), predator ethology; primatology, with special reference to
chimpanzee predation and intraspecific killing; cognitive evolution with
special reference to language; the psychology of motivation and learning; the
anthropology of provisioning; societal evolution; cultural history; and the
psychology of individual differences.
The reinforcers of cruelty feed into violence,
defined by the World Health Organisation as the intentional use of physical force or power against
oneself, another individual or group that causes injury, death, or
psychological harm (Krug, Dahlberg, Mercy, Zwi, & Lozano, 2002, p. 5): one of the paper’s purposes is to show
cruelty’s relevance to the initiation and escalation of high-volume everyday
violence such as drunken brawls, child beating, and sexual assault.
The study of cruelty, which is one of the
manifestations of evil, is dangerous on three counts: first, because of the
fear that evil is contagious, and that those who deal with it become tainted
(as for example in The Problem of Evil in
Coetzee, 2003); second, because to probe the psychology of perpetrators fails
to condemn, casting a shadow over the researcher’s rectitude; and third,
because rooting cruelty in the human evolutionary past appears to naturalise
it, absolving perpetrators and their audiences of moral responsibility. The study of cruelty neither contaminates nor
condones, and the purpose of this paper is compassionate and preventive. Cruelty will not be contained through
obscurantism. Its reinforcers must be
understood, and if these have evolutionary origins, effective prevention
requires that they be revealed.
The preconditions for cruelty are a mental
state, namely the intention to inflict pain, which in turn presupposes a theory
of mind; and an action, which is the deliberate infliction of physical or
psychological1 pain on another living
creature, or on the self2.
Punishment is cruel if its
purpose is not to vanquish or disable the victim, but to inflict pain; if the
victim has no control over the intensity or duration of the pain; and if the
victim is physically restrained or otherwise rendered helpless. Punishment may also be used for social control and discipline: here, the preconditions are that the reason
for the punishment is communicated to the victim, that the punishment is
derived from a penal code, is imposed by a higher authority, and is implemented
by agents of that authority.
Affectivity. Cruelty’s affective state is ferocity
(from the Latin ferox, fierce, now in the sense of savage
violence). Cruel acts arouse strong
positive or negative emotions in the perpetrator and the audience, though
habituation and instrumentality may attenuate them. Whether or not the conditions for punishment
are met, an act is cruel if the perpetrator or the audience experiences
physiological or psychological arousal triggered by the victim’s pain. Entertainment is cruel if the audience
is aroused by the intentional shedding of blood or infliction of pain; the
infliction of pain for amusement is always cruel.
These definitions hold regardless of the
perpetrator’s position on a continuum ranging from instrumental cruelty,
marked by the perpetrator’s emotional coldness and distance from the victim, to
expressive or affective cruelty, marked by the perpetrator’s
escalating arousal.
Exclusions. These definitions of cruelty exclude pain
that results from fighting, killing, and war3,
in which the goal is not to inflict pain but to cause the adversary’s flight,
submission, or death; and pain that is a by-product of treatment intended to
cure or heal.
3. Stage 1: The Predatory Adaptation
Predation’s precursor is competitive
aggression, which confers fitness by solving an animal’s problems in relation
to self-preservation, protection of the young, and resource competition
(Archer, 1988, p. ix); this competition began 3 billion years ago with the
first primordial cell, a benthic procaryote, which, “outreproducing its
competitors, took the lead in the process of cell division and evolution” and
made the world we know (Alberts, Bray, Lewis, Raff, Roberts, & Watson,
1989, p. 10). Organisms at a primitive
level of neural organisation and without specialised effector organs are
capable of aggression. Thus, intertidal
molluscs such as limpets and chitons show spatial aggression by crawling over a
rival conspecific and trying to dislodge it from its rock crevice by backward
and forward movements; and the nematocysts of the solitary anemone, Actinia
equina, are used for offence against conspecifics, with the loser detaching
from the substrate (Archer, 1988, pp. 18-19).
The earliest evidence of predation in the
fossil record is from the terminal Proterozoic, 600 Ma, from which Cloudina
fossils with tiny rounded holes have been recovered, suggesting that the
attacking organism was a predator, selecting its prey for size (Brain,
2001). With the middle Cambrian
explosion of animal life, 540-523 Ma, the first effective predators emerged,
with sense organs to locate prey, and the ability to pursue and overpower
it. The largest and most fearsome of
these was Anomalocaris, an active swimmer growing up to 50 cm with two
large eyes; Opabinia, another Burgess Shale organism, “had five large eyes
at the front of the head and a long flexible proboscis that ended in an array
of grasping spines” (Brain, 2001, p. 23).
Predation is widespread in the animal
kingdom. Salticids, the largest family
of spiders, have elaborate, vision-mediated predatory behaviour that is
prey-specific, with behavioural flexibility that includes conditional predatory
strategies, trial-and-error to solve predatory problems, and detours to reach
prey (Jackson & Pollard, 1996); there is similar flexibility in the
predatory behaviour of Pacific white sharks (Klimley, 1994) and electric rays
(Lowe, Bray, & Nelson, 1994).
The ethology of mammalian predation is now
reviewed in relation to the arousal level, sensory feedback, and biochemical
neurobiological drivers of the search-swoop-kill-feed cycle. Photographic evidence and the field
observations reported below show that this cycle is accompanied by a range of
auditory, visual, olfactory, tactile, gustatory and visceral stimuli which
together make up the PBD complex.
In his Serengeti notebook,
Kruuk describes an adult male wildebeest turning to confront four spotted
hyenas who have pursued it at speeds of 40-50 km/h over a 3 km distance:
The hyenas tried to bite him in the
hindquarters, sides, and especially the testicles, while he in turn struggled
to horn his attackers.... All four
[hyenas] bit simultaneously at the loins, testicles, and anal region of the
wildebeest, paying little attention to his horns. The mobility of the victim was much impaired
by the four pursuers hanging onto his hindquarters. Another two minutes later the wildebeest had
a large gash in the right loin, the testicles had been bitten off, and he stood
as if in a state of shock. Occasionally
he made some frantic movements and was able to struggle free from the hyenas,
but then some member of the pack would renew the attack.... Eight minutes after the wildebeest had stopped
running he went down and the hyenas stood over him pulling out his
insides. Another two minutes later, the
wildebeest died (Kruuk, 1972, p. 149).
Like wild dogs (Van Lawick,
1977, pp. 242-3, 246-7), hyenas “kill the victim by eating it” (Kruuk, 1972, p.
153), in that the animal may be struggling and vocalising as feeding begins,
dying up to a quarter hour later. The
belly and loins are torn open, the fetus eaten if the prey is pregnant, the
testicles or udder eaten, the stomach pulled out, the stomach wall eaten and
the contents spilled on the ground (Kruuk, 1972, p. 125). Mills’ descriptions (1990, p. 103 and Fig.
3.25) and photographs (Mills & Harvey, 2001, pp. 66-69) of spotted hyenas
hunting and feeding in the Kalahari, and Van Lawick’s (1977, pp. 186-187) for
the Serengeti, show virtually identical behaviour.
Lions kill by slow strangulation, biting the
throat of their prey: death is rapid for small prey, but may take an hour for
an adult wildebeest (Schaller, 1973, p. 31) while the animal struggles to
escape.
Auditory stimuli.
Most prey species emit distress calls as they are wounded during the
kill—zebras give a high intense scream that is quite different to their bark or
snort alarm calls; wildebeest and buffalo bleat or moan, like an intensified
lowing (Mills, personal communication, November 22, 2001). Schaller describes the “wild...frenzied cry
of a dying zebra” (1973, p. 97), and Kruuk writes of wildebeest “moaning at the
incessant...bites” inflicted by hyenas (1972, pp. 27, 29). A Thompson’s gazelle fawn pursued by a hyena
“jumped, ran, bleated until the hyena’s jaws closed around its shoulders”
(Kruuk, 1972, p. 25). Lions dig out a
warthog burrow, the animal finally bolts, and, “amid screaming cries from the
pig, the lions...tear it apart” (Mills & Harvey, 2001, p. 46).
Olfactory stimuli are equally rich. Schaller arrived at a fresh zebra kill to
find “the air heavy with the odors of blood and sour rumen contents” (1973, p.
97). Visceral reinforcers operate
through gastric distention and satiation.
Hyenas for example gorge themselves at great speed: Kruuk describes a pack of 25 hyenas
completely consuming a zebra and her foal within 40 minutes (1972, p. 16). Tactile stimuli include proprioceptive
feedback as the prey is clawed and bitten, and the prey’s bucking, writhing,
kicking and goring as it attempts to escape.
Arousal level. The predatory cycle is highly energised. Schaller writes that “at no other time do
animals convey such a high level of mental and physical tension” (1973, p.
25). Kruuk describes hyena hunts as
“wild and exciting.... there is the
sudden action, the wild run, the gasps of the victim.... Then the kill,
steaming in the chill air, with a hyena cacaphony over and around it” (1975, p.
23, p. 33). Lion hunts are attended by
the same high arousal (Mills & Harvey, 2001, pp. 44-45).
Arousal during feeding. High arousal is maintained during the feeding
phase as the predators scan for scavengers, chase them off, and jostle one
another (Schaller, 1973, p. 83), while hyenas also feed in large competitive
groups; a single hyena may be overwhelmed by vultures (Van Lawick, 1977, pp.
188-189). For lions, scavenging from a
hyena kill (and vice versa: Van Lawick, 1977, pp. 98-99) is dangerous
work accompanied by loud vocalisations.
Baboons
and capuchins
One of the earliest authenticated cases of
baboon predation is an eyewitness description with photographs in Dart, 1957
(Figures 11 and 12). The Gilgil baboons
in Kenya hunt cooperatively and eat meat once a day—more often than any other
nonhuman primate population (Strum, 1981, in Stanford, 1999). New world capuchins “hunt as avidly and
successfully as chimpanzees” (Stanford, 1999, p. 30), preying on squirrels,
tamarin monkeys, and immature coatis.
Like chimpanzees, they have a high brain to body mass ratio.
Chimpanzees
At the Gombe, TaV, Mahale and Kibale research
sites, chimpanzees hunt red colobus monkeys as well as other primate and ungulate
species (Mitani & Watts, 1999).
Hunting is coalitionary (Boesch, 1994):
for example, a group of Gombe chimpanzees locates a troop of red
colobus, posts drivers and blockers, the trap closes, and the colobus retreat
to the highest branches: “all the forest
is screaming, meat is so rare and so special, there is huge excitement”
(soundtrack, National Geographic, 1995).
The prey is often an immature colobus “that is grasped by the hands,
pinned to the branch, and bitten through the rear of the skull or the neck”
(Stanford, 1999, p. 96). Chimpanzees are
highly successful hunters (Wrangham & Peterson, 1996, p. 216; Stanford,
Wallis, Mpongo, & Goodall, 1994; Stanford, 1999), and arousal during hunts
is very high, with pant-hooting, screaming, whistling, piloerection to
exaggerate body size, charge displays and the shaking of tree branches (Michael
L. Wilson, personal communication, April 24, 2001). At all the sites,
the chimpanzees’
visceral reaction to a hunt and kill is intense excitement. The forest comes
alive with the barks and hoots and cries of the apes, and aroused newcomers
race in from several directions. The
monkey may be eaten alive, shrieking as it is torn apart. Dominant males try to seize the prey, leading
to fights and charges and screams of rage.
For one or two hours or more, the thrilled apes tear apart and devour
the monkey. This is blood lust in its rawest form (Wrangham &
Peterson, 1996, p. 216; see also pp. 10-11).
Bonobos, on the other hand, do not prey on monkeys, and are socially more
peaceable than their close relations, the chimpanzees: Wrangham and Peterson (1996, p.219) speculate
that as predation was suppressed, so was intraspecific violence.
The array of
sensory and autonomic reinforcers that operate during nutritional hunting is
also activated when conspecifics are attacked, wounded, or killed, as with
Norway rats (Blanchard, Spencer, Weiss, et al., 1993) and wild rats
(Niehoff, 1999, p. 61). Hyenas and lions
defend their home ranges vigorously.
Kruuk records four sightings of hyenas dead near the site of a kill
“with clear evidence that they were killed by other hyenas” (1972, p. 256);
Schaller (1973, p. 76) documents territorial killing in Serengeti lions.
Among chimpanzees,
alpha-male unseating can lead to life-threatening or fatal wounds (Wrangham
& Peterson, 1996, De Waal, 1989), and territorial defence may involve
lethal violence. As with colobus hunts,
these inter-band confrontations are marked by intense excitement that appears
indistinguishable from that during predation.
Goodall’s early account of such intergroup violence (1990, p. 89) has
now been supplemented by Wrangham & Peterson (1996) and Wilson, Hauser,
& Wrangham (2001). Though rarer than
nutritional hunting, chimpanzee intraspecific killing is frequent enough to
account for between 24 and 52% of Gombe male mortality (Wrangham &
Peterson, 1996, pp. 271-272).
3.4 The Neurobiology of Predation
Three distinct
aggressive circuits in the mammalian brain are evoked by electrical stimulation
(ESB) of three slightly different brain areas, namely predatory aggression;
intermale territorial and sex-related aggression; and angry aggression (RAGE in
Panksepp’s terminology—1998, pp. 51 & 188).
Predatory aggression. Predatory,
quiet-biting aggression is mediated by the SEEKING system, a foraging,
exploration, curiosity, and expectancy system “that leads organisms to eagerly
pursue the fruits of their environment....
Energy is delight” (Panksepp, 1998, p. 145, p. 164), and SEEKING is its
vehicle. Predatory aggression is quiet,
with methodical stalking and well-directed pouncing
ESB in the ascending
dopamine pathways from midbrain nuclei through the extended lateral
hypothalamic corridor from the ventral tegmental area to the nucleus accumbens,
evokes the most highly energized exploratory and search behaviours of which the
animal is capable (1998, p. 145). The
emotional tone of affective attack is unpleasant (3.4.2), but the hunt and kill
are positive emotional experiences for the predator (Panksepp, 1998, p. 188):
The most effective
quiet-biting attack electrodes always evoke self-stimulation....
[self-stimulation and predatory aggression] are two behavioural expressions of
SEEKING tendencies that emerge from homologous systems in the brains of
different species. The species-typical
expressions of this system lead to foraging in some species and predatory
stalking in others (Panksepp, 1998, p. 194).
Though SEEKING is
dopaminergic, the pleasures of the consummatory processes (feeding, sex)
diminish arousal in the SEEKING system (1998, p. 147) and are strongly linked
to brain opioid systems which “may participate in every pleasure, serving as a
general neurochemical signal that the body is returning to homeostasis” (1998,
p. 184).
Affective aggression.
RAGE circuits run from the medial areas of the amygdala through the
hypothalamus and down to the dorsal PAG.
Affective attack sites yield escape behaviours (p. 195), and most
animals soon learn to turn off rage-inducing ESB (p. 194). High testosterone, high MAO-A and low
serotonin potentiate aggression; in “tournament species,” testosterone is
highest in the breeding season (p. 189).
Affective attack,
whether offensive or defensive (this latter is a mix of RAGE and FEAR), has
marked display features—piloerection with noisy hissing and growling (the
chimpanzee vocalisation during affective attack is the pant-hoot). Both quiet-biting attack and self-stimulation
are evoked by ESB to the ventral periaqueductal grey (PAG) of the midbrain,
while the dorsal PAG evokes affective attack and aversive response.
Predation in relation to aggression. It has been customary to make a clear
distinction between predation and aggression.
Archer (1988) holds that “so-called predatory aggression is so
motivationally and neurally different from other forms of aggression that it is
most usefully considered as a separate form of behaviour” (p. 25; also Lorenz,
1963 and Niehoff, 1999).
Panksepp’s model accords
more parsimoniously with the above behavioural accounts of predation and
intraspecific killing, which suggest that predation and aggression are closely
interwoven (see also Wilson, 1975, p. 243), with quiet stalking (felids) or
observation (canids and hyenids) alternating with noisy defence of the
kill. It also provides a
neurobehavioural basis for predation’s distinctiveness, in that, first,
predation and affective attack have separate circuits in the brain; second, the
RAGE and SEEKING circuits have mutually inhibitory interactions and cannot
therefore co-occur; third, predatory attack is endogenously generated because
the predatory cycle usually begins before the stimulus is present—unlike
affective attack, which is triggered by the presence of the target; and fourth,
it is accompanied by positive affect, even though the energising contribution
made by hunger may be aversive, and, “from the animal’s point of view, there is
no apparent anger involved in this food-seeking response” (p. 198).
Endogenous opioids.
The literature on
the role of the neuropeptides in predation, especially endorphin and the
enkephalins, is sparse and contradictory, for example that microinjection of
naloxone at PAG sites at which ESB evoked quiet-biting attack in cats blocked
predatory behaviour (Weiner, Shaikh, Shaikh, & Siegel, 1991); a later study
(Manchanda, Poddar, Saha, Bhatia, Kumar, & Nayar, 1995) showed on the other
hand that microinjection of an enkephalin at excitatory PAG sites suppressed
both the somatomotor and affective display components of predatory attack.
On the other hand,
there is a copious literature on opioid release under predatory threat, which
entrains a sequence of defensive responses in prey that include hypoalgesia (in
mice exposed to a cat, Kavaliers & Colwell, 1994, and to insect stings,
Kavaliers, Colwell, & Choleris, 1994), and, as a final-stage response,
tonic immobility (Gargaglioni, Pereira, & Hoffmann, 2001). Predator odours are highly salient in
eliciting innate defensive analgesia (Williams, 1999). In humans, the release of endogenous opioids
in acute traumatic injuries correlates significantly with physician pain
ratings and scores on an injury severity scale (Bernstein, Garzone, Rudy,
Kramer, Stiff, & Peitzman, 1995), suggesting that anecdotal accounts of
spontaneous analgesia in soldiers wounded in combat have a physiological basis.
The hunt and kill
are a dangerous time for predators. The
prey butts, kicks and gores, and scavengers must be repulsed. If the predator is the scavenger—as often
happens with hyenas and lions—the risk of injury increases. The known links between consummatory
processes and brain opioid systems may therefore be augmented during the
killing-feeding cycle by further opioid release in response to injuries: an aspect of the predatory adaptation may
thus be an opioid “high” that is further augmented by injury.
Pain and pleasure in predation, hunting and sexuality. The predatory cycle
makes massive energy demands of the predator, among them a sustained high level
of autonomic arousal, the physical exertion of what may be a prolonged
high-speed chase, the act of killing, during which the predator must overcome
the last highly energised struggle of the prey and the close-in hazards of the
kill, followed by scavenger threats. The
aversive stimuli of physical exertion to the point of exhaustion are augmented
by this final struggle. Yet the dopaminergic
biochemistry of the predatory cycle and ESB evidence of its reward value
indicate that far from being aversive, predation is a powerfully rewarding
experience even before satiation occurs.
One may thus
hypothesise that a necessary condition for the success of the predatory and
hunting adaptations is the conjunction of pain—the stress of exertion and the
pain of injury—with a high level of pleasurable reward intermixed with sexual
arousal, and that this is also true of fighting in its various forms—single
combat, assaults by individuals or groups on rivals, and war: though fighting is by definition not cruel,
pain is inseparable from combat.
It is
incomprehensible that the infliction of pain on the self is both pleasurable
and also sexually arousing. This
unlikely conjunction has long puzzled moral philosophers and
psychologists. In a famous passage,
Freud wrote that “the existence of a masochistic trend in the instinctual life
of human beings may justly be described as mysterious from an economic point of
view” (1924/1985, p. 413). Yet using
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Becerra, Breiter, Wise,
Gonzalez, and Borsook (2001) report that a pain stimulus (a probe heated to 46NC
applied to the skin) activated the brain’s reward circuitry, following a
pathway similar to that of the pleasure response: protein from the cfos gene shows “that
many neurons in the amygdala that are aroused by aggressive encounters are also
aroused by sexual activity” (Panksepp, 1998, p. 199): the underlying motivation may be the seeking of safety.
The intertwining of
aggression and sexuality is linguistically and ethologically apparent. The term for the !Kung hunting bow, n!au, is
“a bawdy metaphor for the penis” (Lee, 1979, p. 207), and !Kung hunters say that
“when one’s heart is sweet with the thought of the kill, intercourse is
particularly good” (Lee, 1979, p. 220).
In primates and humans, intermale territorial and dominance-seeking
aggression is driven by reproductive fitness needs, with females responding
positively to aggressive success so that the most vigorous males get
preferential access to reproductive opportunities (Panksepp, 1998). Men with absolute power may father several
hundred children (Wrangham & Peterson, 1996, p. 234; Ridley, 1993).
4 Stage 2: The Hunting Adaptation
Despite its high
costs, the hunting adaptation mediates powerful social and psychological
rewards, and is “the most successful and persistent... man has ever achieved”
(Lee & DeVore, 1968, p. 3). It
remains so in 58 surviving forager societies from the equator to latitudes
above 60", in which the contribution of hunting to annual food
intake converges on 35% (Lee, 1968). The
following sections review the emergence of hominid hunting, and then, in two
forager societies, the Dobe !Kung of Botswana (Lee,
1979, 1984) and the Yanomamö of southern
As hominids moved
into the dry savannas of the Pliocene, the evolutionary shift from gathering to
meat eating required major changes in sociality, brain size, and weapons
(Stanford, 1999). The nutritional
accommodation of a big brain is by shrinking the gut, which can only be done if
there has been a switch to easily digested and highly nutritious foods (Aiello
& Wheeler, 1995) such as meat and tubers, with pre-consumption processing of
chemically or mechanically protected tubers (O’Connell, Hawkes, & Blurton
Jones, 1999).
The earliest fossil
evidence of hominid meat eating is the appearance of crude stone tools in east
Africa in the mid-Pliocene about 2.5 Ma, probably representing an overlay of
large mammal scavenging on a tradition of small mammal hunting (Plummer &
Stanford, 2000); killing or meat scavenging without tools may be much earlier,
but would not have left fossil evidence (Stanford, 1999). O’Connell et al.
(1999) argue that the earliest hominid meat eating is considerably later,
contemporaneous with the appearance of African H. erectus about 1.8
Ma. Changes driven by
“grandmothering”—foraging by post-menopausal women—would have promoted larger
group size, which in turn brought advantages in defending against predators,
and opened the way to aggressive scavenging (O’Connell et al.,
1999). Isotope evidence shows that
archaic H. sapiens were not only scavengers, but also top-level
carnivores, obtaining almost all of their dietary protein from animal sources
(Richards, Pettitt, Trinkaus, Smith, Paunovic, & Karavanic, 2000; but see
Binford, 1987, on H. erectus as primarily an aggressive scavenger).
The controlled use
of fire, which Brain (2001) has dated from 1.42 Ma in East Africa, served both
to make meat more palatable and to keep predators at bay: hominids were both hunters and hunted (Brain,
1981; Frison, 1998), with both life-threatening dangers and nutritional
opportunities driving the development of hominid intelligence. Folded within this brain development were the
emotional drivers of the predatory adaptation, responding powerfully then as
now to any opportunity to pursue, butcher and consume prey animals, whether as
hunters making the kill or as scavengers drawn to the kills of other predators.
4.2 The high arousal of the hunt
Learning to hunt. The
rough-and–tumble play of young predators—rats, puppies, kittens—mimics the
techniques for tripping up, gripping, and biting prey (Van Lawick, 1977, pp.
164-165; Panksepp, 1998, Fig. 15.2).
There are aspects of children’s play that are also a preparation for
predation. Lee (1979, pp. 236-238)
describes the predation games of !Kung children, and among the Yanomamö
young boys capture a live lizard, tie it to a stick in the village clearing,
and gleefully shoot featherless arrows at it with their miniature bows: “since lizards are very quick and little boys
are poor shots, the target practice can last for hours” (Chagnon, 1983, p.
118).
The hunter’s arousal. The large antelope species and giraffe are
hunted with bow and poisoned arrows. The
hunt proceeds through a cycle of stalking, wounding, tracking, killing and
butchering. !Kung hunters, like felids,
are intensely focussed and silent stalkers: when the prey is sighted, “one man
moves forward, crouching at first, then crawling, then inching forward on his
belly” (Lee, 1979, p. 217). If the
animal shows any signs of alarm, the hunter freezes for several minutes at a
time, then having reached bowshot range (10m is the optimum) he looses the
first arrow. The time for stealth is now
over, he breaks cover, running to intercept the fleeing animal and shooting his
remaining arrows at it.
The hunting group
now tracks the wounded animal until the poison takes effect and it
collapses: “in all cases a spear is
methodically worked in and out of the throat to ensure that the animal is dead”
(p. 221). The party then immediately
sets about butchering the animal, first skinning it, then removing the heart,
liver and lungs, and emtying the stomach contents. The liver is cooked and eaten on the spot, and
the long leg bones may be split for the marrow, which is rubbed onto the
body. Blood from abdominal cavity is
collected and carried home in an empty stomach sac; during the night after a
kill, the hunter “is in a ritually heightened state” (Lee, 1979, p. 220). The excitement of the pursuit and kill is no
less for small game (ibid, pp. 216-221).
4.3 The status of hunting and the hunter
Lexical and
narrative elaboration are markers for the social salience of a phenomenon;
similarly, elaborated memories of distant events are evidence both of its
social significance, and high arousal at the time of the event: Rolls (1999) notes that if a powerful
reinforcer accompanies a situation, many details will be stored, including
memories of the emotional state that accompanied that situation. This storage may be implemented by
nonspecific projecting systems to the cerebral cortex and hippocampus including
cholinergic pathways in the basal forebrain and ascending noradrenergic
pathways.
Lee writes that
“hunting vocabulary has undergone a fantastic elaboration in !Kung
speech...there are many dozens of synonyms, metaphors, and euphemisms” (1979,
p. 207) for stalking, shooting, fleeing, finishing off the wounded animal,
butchering, etc. Men tell the story of
the hunt round the fire “until the sky rips open” [dawn breaks].... Graphic descriptions of hunts, both recent
and distant, constitute an almost nightly activity.... Men can portray a hunt, step-by-step, in
microscopic and baroque detail” (pp. 207, 205), and give lifetime retrospective
hunting histories (Lee, 1979, pp. 230-231).
Hunting success
confers direct fitness benefits:
Among the Ache, “better hunters were more often named as lovers by Ache
women and better hunters had more surviving children.... Better hunters had much higher fertility than
other men” (Hawkes et al., 2001, p. 134; also Holmberg, 1950).
4.4 The high costs of meat eating
The costs of meat eating
are high for both predators and hunters.
Predators. The balance between the moose and wolves
on Isle Royale in Lake Superior—there are 20-25 wolves and 600-1000 moose—is
maintained because “it is very hard work to trap and kill a moose” (Wilson,
1975, p.86). The wolves travel an
average of 25-30 kms a day during the winter, and one set of field observations
showed that on 131 separate moose hunts, 77 resulted in a confrontation, and in
only six of these were moose killed. The kill success rate is 4.58%, and the
meat yield is 4 kgs of meat per wolf per day.
The success rates for Kalahari spotted hyena are 63% for all encounters
with gemsbok calves, 14% for gemsbok adults, 39% for wildebeest, and 31% for springbok
(Mills, 1990, pp. 94-110). For the Gombe
chimpanzees, hunting is nutritionally uneconomic: a 1kg baby monkey is the typical yield for a
hunting party of up to 20, so that the effort expended “is enormously costly
relative to the quantity of meat that is usually available” (Stanford, 1999, p.
97).
Hunters. In human
hunter-gatherer societies, the meat yield is high for the group, but successes
for the individual hunter are sparse and unpredictable, with the daily failure
rate for individual Hadza hunters at 97%, and a hunter may go days or weeks
without a kill (Hawkes et al., 2001); the !Kung hunting yield is 1hr/100
calories. Nonetheless, “the !Kung ...
are willing to devote considerable energy to the less reliable and more highly
valued food sources such as medium and large mammals” (Lee, 1968, p. 41).
Why do hunters make
such large investments in a non-essential resource? O’Connell et al. (1999) argue that human
paternal provisioning, a key aspect of the man-the-hunter hypothesis, is absent
in primates and is not the purpose of human big game hunting. If it were, hunters would spend more time on
small game and plant foods which are more reliable food source: that they do not “strongly suggests that big
game hunting serves some other end, unrelated to provisioning wives and
children” (p. 464): the material in this
section, taken together with the cultural elaborations of cruelty (5.2) suggest
that this other end is the confirmation of male sexual desirability through
shedding the blood and taking the life of big game, which is both scarce and
dangerous.
4.5 Pain, blood, and death in predation and hunting
Though the
predatory cycle is endogenously generated, usually beginning before the stimulus
is present (Panksepp, 1998), the predator is greatly energised by the prey’s
presence and its actual or attempted flight, which is a powerful trigger
for pursuit and attack; by the prey’s pain (ears, lips, and genitalia
are ripped off, and the prey is disembowelled while alive; hunters snare, club
and stab living animals); and by the invariable nexus between the infliction of
pain and release of the prey’s blood, which is a signal for the prey’s
imminent death: the muzzles of
two spotted hyenas tearing at a zebra’s stomach are red with blood (Van Lawick,
1977, pp. 186-187; Mills & Harvey, 2001, p. 128); blood smears the teeth,
mandibles, and snouts of feeding lions (Mills & Harvey, 2001, p. 128;
Schaller, 1973, p. 21). It is possible that in forager societies,
blood has become a principle conditioner of the reward system that
drives predation, deriving its cultural weight (5.2.6) from its centrality in
predation, hunting, and intraspecific violence.
Stimuli regularly
attached to a rewarding activity become conditioned reinforcers: during both mammalian and hominid evolution,
the prey’s flight and pain, and then the sight, smell and taste of blood, were
prominent among the reinforcers that shaped the predatory and hunting
adaptations. For predators, pain and
blood signal satiation; for humans, they are the harbingers not only of
impending satiation and sexual access, but also of the animal’s death, which
was bound up with the precarious survival of Pleistocene hunters, who were also
the hunted (Brain, 1981).
In historical
context, these notions emerged in a largely-forgotten and in its time
much-derided 1953 paper, The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man, in
which the South African palaeontologist Raymond Dart characterised Australopithecus africanus as
“carnivorous creatures that seized living quarries by violence, battered them
to death, tore apart their broken bodies, dismembered them limb from limb,
slaking their ravenous thirst with the hot blood of victims, and greedily
devouring living writhing flesh” (Dart, 1953, p. 209). Towards the end of the paper, Dart observed
that “the taste for animal meat led inexorably...to unspeakable cruelties” (p.
219).
In the 1950s,
Dart’s thesis that the australopithecines were bloodthirsty murderers, and the
suggestion that their bloodlust was the foundation of human cruelty, were
ridiculed by palaeontologists. The
orthodox and altogether more optimistic view was that of Richard Leakey—that
early hominids were food-sharing foragers, and that violence emerged only “when
we became psycho-social man probably 30 to 40 000 years ago” (in White, 1985,
p. 7). Dart writes of himself that
because of this onslaught, he was presumed to have retired “wounded or wroth….
into some parochial tent to brood upon the unresponsive attitudes of my
overseas colleagues” (1957, p. vii).
R.F. Ewer, Dart’s
colleague, once remarked that Dart was usually right—though sometimes for the
wrong reasons. Bob Brain, Dart’s student
and collaborator, who described Dart as “this gentle, yet strangely
bloodthirsty man” (1993, p. 4), has shown that most of the reasons Dart gave
for his characterisation of the australopithecines were indeed wrong (Brain,
1981). But if, as this paper has argued,
there is a wide and accommodating passage from predation to cruelty, he was
right after all.
5 Stage 3: The Social Uses of
Cruelty
Section 5.1 considers
the points in hominid evolution at which punitive and disciplinary cruelty
could have emerged in relation to the preconditions set by the taxonomy of
cruelty, and its design features at these points. Section 5.2 reviews the fitness benefits of cruelty
through its various social and cultural elaborations.
5.1 Emergence and Design Features of Cruelty in Relation
to Cognitive and Societal Evolution
Punishment in the
sense of inflicting pain on another creature has no preconditions: in this sense, the behaviour of the rats,
hyenas, lions, and chimpanzees described in Section 3 is indeed punishment, but
the great apes cannot meet the first of the criteria for disciplinary cruelty,
that the reason for the punishment must be communicated to the victim: Donald
(1993) argues that although the great apes are brilliant event perceivers, with
the capacity for social attribution and insight, they are unable to communicate
even their simplest intentions because they cannot “actively shape and modify
their own actions or...voluntarily access their own stored representations”
(Donald, 1993, p. 739; Tomasello, Call, & Gluckman, 1998, cite field evidence
that apes cannot understand the communicative intentions of others).
Mimesis as a
sufficient basis for intentionality
Mimetic communication “broke
the hold of the environment on hominid motor behaviour” (Donald, 1993, p.
740). Using the whole body as a
communication device, body actions can be retrieved from memory, replayed,
stopped, and refined, allowing the development of toolmaking, social expressiveness,
and extended competition, all with prosodic intonation of non-linguistic
vocalisations. The transition to a
mimetic culture with H. erectus would thus have increased the
differences between individuals and groups in the capacity for social
manipulation, fighting, physical dominance, and rewards for competitive
success; it would therefore also have provided a sufficient communicative basis
for the emergence of the preconditions for cruelty and disciplinary cruelty.
Stages of societal
evolution
Johnson & Earle (1987)
identify three levels of socioeconomic integration, emerging in sequence as
population density increases: the
family-level group, the local group, and the regional polity.
Cruelty in the
family-level and local group
Hominid forager societies,
dating to no later than 1 Ma (Brain, 2001), are organised as family-level
groups of some 25-50 individuals, as for example the !Kung San. Leadership in most surviving forager
societies is egalitarian, with consensual decision-making and a strict humility
ethic that effectively blocks any aspirations to dominance and leadership that
a high-status and physically powerful individual might have. In the local group (for example the
Yanomamö) with aggregations of 300-500 people, a strong charismatic leader, the
Big Man, may emerge who maintains group cohesion and negotiates intergroup
alliances—but in the absence of coercive social mechanisms, his power lasts
only as long as supporters’ loyalty.
Disciplinary cruelty cannot occur at these levels because the requisite
hierarchical social structure with a penal code and judicial system is
unavailable.
Design features of cruel punishment in the family-level
and local group. However, there
is a sufficient linguistic and organisational basis to punish individuals
threatening group survival, for example by deliberately frightening off game
during a hunt or defection from a war party.
The offended individuals and their kin would have had the communicative
and social resources to restrain the offender and flog, break bones, or inflict
other exemplary pain. Since group
disintegration would have created major survival threats in relation to food
procurement, predator dangers, and attack by rival groups, public punishment
would have been strongly adaptative by contributing to effective hunting,
defence, mate guarding, and stable food sharing.
Trinkaus (1992)
observes that “the difficult existence of the Neanderthals is reflected in
their high frequency of traumatic injury.... The remains of all older
individuals show signs of serious wounds, sprains, or breaks” (p. 838; also
Walker, 1989). The palaeopathological
evidence required to date the first emergence of cruel punishment would be to
differentiate bone fracture caused by combat or accidental injury from the
pre-mortem twisting or other manipulation of broken bones, which causes intense
pain (Edgerton, 1985, p. 135), and would leave identifiable pre-mortem traces
in the fossil record (White, 1985). The
theory of mind requirement (5.1.1) suggests that such evidence would not be
found earlier than H. erectus (c. 2 Ma).
Anthropological
investigation of surviving forager and pastoral societies might determine
whether violation of fundamental social norms elicits cruel punishment in the
family-level group (5.1.3); and whether disciplinary cruelty is absent under
Big Man leadership (5.1.4), first appearing in regional polities.
Disciplinary cruelty: the
regional polity and early state. Regional polities, whether as
chiefdoms of several thousand people or the empires that emerged in Egypt,
China and India in the 3rd millenium BC, brought “not only dazzling advances in
civilisation, but also the enormously powerful instrument of state power as a
new moving force in history” (Heilbroner, 1992, p. 907).
Disciplinary
cruelty that meets the conditions in Section 2 becomes a political imperative
with the establishment of conscript armies reqiring the immediate punishment of
cowardice or desertion, and the systematic slaughter of rebels4; and the creation of slave or serf
populations: the costs of maintenance
and subjugation are recovered through coerced labour, necessitating an
escalation in the frequency and severity of punishment in order to maintain
productivity (on slave penal codes, see Kiefer, 1938; Hornblower &
Spawforth, 1999): cruelty thus acquires
an economic driver.
Design features of cruelty in the regional polity. Kings or
emperors affirm their power as social regulators through carnivalesque public
entertainments and punishments in which the social purpose of cruelty is
manifest: the infliction of prolonged pain is an effective way to establish and
maintain social dominance; the harsher or more painful the punishment, the
greater is the relative status advantage of the perpetrator in relation to the
victim; and the more terrible the punishment, the more permanent its effects on
the social system.
The retained design features of cruelty. The social control
functions of Roman and mediaeval carnivals of death continue to the present in
public entertainments that are unwillingly stopped short of frank
killing—boxing and kickboxing, college football, car and motorcycle
racing. Animal baiting continues in
enclave groups in the west, and more openly in other cultures. The willingness of military establishments to
develop technologies of cruelty as instruments of war flourishes globally,
while the coercive forces of the state and its opponents use confessional and
disciplinary cruelty for political ends.
Deliberate
infliction of pain, as with any other decisive manifestation of interpersonal
power, enhances the status of the perpetrator.
Accordingly, the initiation and coordination of punishment in the
family-level and local group would have facilitated the emergence of a
leadership figure, whose willingness to injure would have created a reputation
for ferocity with significant resource access benefits for that
individual. Thus with Agathocles the
Sicilian in the 3rd century B.C., whose “barbarous cruelty and
inhumanity, together with his countless atrocities” are recounted with approval
by Machiavelli (1513/1940, p. 32), and with gang life in Glasgow’s
Gorbals: Boyle (1977) tells how he
slashed a boy in a fight, the first time a knife had been used in a gang fight
in that area. Within days he was a force
to be reckoned with and placed on a pedestal by his own gang. Today as in the past, aggression linked to a readiness to inflict pain is a route to
prestige, leadership and social mastery that entrains survival and reproductive
benefits. Empirically, it might be shown that group
hierarchy rankings are significantly altered by “cruelty rumours,” for example
that a low-ranking member had tortured and killed a rival. Cruelty attributions may elevate status,
leadership, and sexual attraction ratings more, for example, than attributions
of physical strength or intelligence.
5.2 Social and Cultural Elaborations of Cruelty
The striking
stability of the social uses of cruelty for punishment, amusement and
social control suggests that the underlying motivational structures have a
species-wide evolutionary origin. Within
the cultural sphere “quite new kinds of evolution may occur” with great
rapidity, spreading through a population or becoming extinct within a single
generation (Lea, 1999, pp. 17-18; cp. Plotkin, 1996). Whether a cultural innovation spreads or
becomes extinct will be determined by its social utility and its contribution
to individual fitness.
This section
reviews evidence that throughout recorded history and in a diversity of
cultures, cruel entertainments—which as a means of social control also have a
fitness value—have attracted huge audiences.
The attractions of war, the veneration of the warrior hero, and the
symbolic weight of blood are further cultural manifestations of the predatory
adaptation.
Cruel punishment.
The strong
routinely use pain as punishment (from the Latin pÉna, penalty) in their
dealings with the weak—masters with slaves, adults with children, and men with
women. When Sarai complained to Abram of
Hagar’s contempt, he replied, “‘Your slave-girl is in your power, do with her
as you please.’ Then Sarai dealt harshly
with her, and she ran away from her” (Genesis 16.6). Corporal punishment of children and pupils
was part of mediaeval and early modern life.
From the 15th century, the birching of school pupils became
increasingly common and brutal “for all offences and all ages” (AriPs, 1962, p.
259). If a Yanomamö woman is tardy in
responding to her husbands’ needs, “the husband is within his rights to beat
her.... It is not uncommon for a man to
injure his errant wife seriously” (Chagnon, 1983, p. 112). This domestic cruelty has behavioural
parallels among chimpanzees. When a
young male attains the size of an adult female, he is “systematically brutal
towards each female in turn”; a male can almost always coerce an unwilling
female into copulation (Wrangham & Peterson, 1996, pp. 143, 145; Stanford,
1999).
Cruelty as
amusement
The boundaries between punishment
and amusement are permeable. Caligula
(12-41 AD) tortured Roman senators, men he knew well, not to extract
information, but for amusement (Kiefer, 1938).
Commodus (177-192 AD) was destructive even in his humorous moments (Scriptores
Historiae Augustae, c. 500 AD/1960), and a chief delight of the
Emperor Augustus was to watch boxing matches, “and not merely professional
bouts, in which he used to pit Italians against Greeks, but slogging matches
between untrained roughs in city alleys” (Suetonius, Augustus, 45); the
combatants wore gloves made of leather bands loaded with balls of lead or iron
that often blinded the fighters (Tertullian, 197/1958, p. 97, note 7).
When the state’s
official torturers believe that they will not be held accountable, the
oscillation between instrumental affective cruelty becomes apparent. Thus with surreptitiously videotaped scenes
of South African police brutality—setting dogs on prisoners as a “training
exercise” or burning an unconscious hijack suspect with a cigarette
lighter: the perpetrators laugh
uproariously. In his notebooks, the
artist Francis Bacon writes, “The reek of human blood, /it’s laughter to my
heart.”
The escalation of cruelty. A hallmark of cruelty
is its rapid escalation, from a slap to a punch to the smashing of bones and
teeth, from teasing to murder: the
closing scenes of Pasolini’s Salo illustrate the frenzy of the torturer
inflamed by the terror and pain of his victims.
The underlying mechanisms appear to be, first, that the affective tone
of bullies and mob killers is energised and exultant. Since RAGE and SEEKING
are mutually inhibitory in animals (Panksepp,
1998), it is possible that in humans, cruelty’s escalation arises
from the SEEKING rather than the affectively aversive RAGE-aggression
circuits. A hypothesis worth
investigating is whether the gratifications of perpetrators are dopaminergic and fuelled by opioid
release. Second, though victims’
distress can inhibit violence (Blair, 1997), their fear and pain may also escalate the perpetrator’s
savagery, paralleling the predator’s escalating ferocity in the prey’s death
struggle as its terror and its vocalisations mount.
Disciplinary
cruelty
Judicial punishment in order to enforce laws and
preserve discipline ranges from verbal reprimand, shaming, and ostracism
(Endnote 2), to death by execution or lethal mutilation. The agent of these punishments (sometimes
formally appointed to this role:
Applbaum, 1995), is emotionally cold.
Herodotus (440 B.C., V, 25) tells how the Persian King Cambyses ordered
a corrupt judge to be flayed. Gerard
David’s Justice of Cambyses (1498) portrays the flaying in a scene as
devoid of emotion as a coroner’s autopsy: the ritualised severity of the
executioners and the assembled court perfectly illustrate the emotional quality
of instrumental cruelty. The contrast
between this high sobriety and the laughing crowds portrayed in popular
wood-cuts of execution scenes (Puppi, 1991, passim) is striking.
Mutilative
punishments derive from the principle of talion, retaliation, first
codified by Hammurabi (c. 1760 BC) and transmitted through Deuteronomy
19:19-21 (c. 600 BC), and the Roman Law of the Twelve tables (450
BC): its cruelty led Gibbon to remark
that it is “written in characters of blood” (1776/1903, Vol. 4, p. 587).
Social control. The worst
cruelties were inflicted on slaves and the “inferior races” of the new world
colonies. Spartan youths killed helots
for sport (Plutarch, c.100AD/1988, 28), and in Roman law, citizens
freely used the power of life and death they had over their slaves (Kiefer,
1938). Torture to inculcate terror was a
favoured instrument of political control in Europe’s African and South American
colonies: 15 million Africans are
reported to have perished in King Leopold’s Congo (Kimbrough, 1972); rubber
traders on the Putamayo River, a tributary of the Amazon, were equally cruel
(Mitchell, 1997; Taussig, 1986). In the
late 20th century, the Greek and Argentinian juntas adopted torture
as an instrument of state policy (Haritos-Fatouros, 2003; Timerman, 1981).
Confessional cruelty. Pain bends the victim’s will to the
torturer’s. Judicial torture in order to
obtain evidentially admissible confessions was recognised by the Greek, Roman,
and mediaeval European legal systems (Held, 1985; Robbins, 1960). Criminals torture to uncover loot: in early 14th century
Cruelty as
Entertainment
The Roman arena. Cruelty as an
instrument of social control in the form of elaborate, state-sponsored
entertainments (Coleman, 1990; Wistrand, 1992) reached its apogee in the late
Gladiatorial shows
in the amphitheatre were “the most prominent and most popular spectacle of
all,” writes Tertullian (197 AD/1958, 12:1). One cannot attend the Arena spectacles, he
continues, “without his mind being aroused and his soul being stirred by some
unspoken agitation. No-one ever
approaches a pleasure such as this without passion [and] violent agitation of
the soul” (15.2-6). Even sober
citizens demanded that “the man who has been slain be dragged back to feast
[their] eyes on him, taking delight in scrutinising [his death] close at hand (21.1-5). The allusion is to a platform in the middle
of the arena to which wounded victims were dragged, “thus enabling the
spectators to observe more closely their death struggle” (Tertullian, 197/1958,
p. 94, Note 3). In his Confessions,
On occasion, this
frenzy tipped spectators into active killing, as with Pothinus of Lyons
(Musurillo, 1979, Martyrs of Lyons, 5.35), and the Oriental monk,
Telemachus, who in 404 AD in Rome leaped from the stands into the arena
demanding that the bloodshed cease: he
was stoned to death (other versions say that he was torn limb from limb) by the
enraged spectators (Durant, 1950).
Bullfights arouse similar passions:
if a matador has been unsuccessful, writes Hemingway, the spectators may
decide to kill the bull themselves, “swarming on him... with knives, daggers,
butcher knives and rocks... cutting up at him until he sways and goes down”
(1939/1994, p. 21).
As the neurobiology
of predation predicts, blood and death have erotic force. Barton (1993) writes that the raging
sexuality of the arena came to a focus in the gladiator’s scarred body, and
Mediaeval carnivals of death. Spectacles of pain
and death were a fixed part of medieval life, and there is a rich popular art
of execution scenes (Edgerton, 1985; Puppi, 1991). The route followed by the executioner’s cart
was planned so as to draw the whole of the urban fabric into these public
demonstrations of the sovereign’s power (Foucault, 1975/1986). Great crowds followed the wagon and gathered
at the place of execution, as with the Catholic conspirator Guido Fawkes, who
in 1606 was drawn backwards through the streets of London at a horse’s tail
with his head near the ground, “being not entitled to the common air” (Fraser,
1996, p. 223).
Animal baiting.
The conjunction
between pleasure and the pain of animals is especially distressing to western
sensibilities, but ubiquitous across time and cultures. The Romans scoured their African and Asian
provinces for exotic beasts that were transported to
War
War may be the most
significant social product of the predatory adaptation. The material that follows suggests that the
emotional state of the warrior in combat mimics that of predators and hunters,
with high arousal, positive affect, and heightened libido, which in turn raises
the possibility that in the transition from predation to intraspecific,
non-nutritional killing, the reinforcers of the pain-blood-death complex
complex have become attached to combat and warfare.
The warrior hero.
In mythology,
ethnography, and contemporary culture, there are explicit links between
hunting, war, and manhood. Because of
the male gendering of hunting (Lee & DeVore, 1968b; Lee, 1979; Stanford,
1999, pp. 40-41; Hawkes et al. 2001), it becomes an affirmation of
manhood: Croesus of Lydia dreamed that
his son Atys would die by the blow of an iron weapon, and accordingly forbade
him to hunt a huge boar that troubled the people of
Reciprocally, the
great warrior is a great predator, and combat, like hunting, is a high-risk
activity. Warlike brutality may be
invoked through the metaphors of predation, as in Yanomamö war party
preparation (Chagnon, 1983); Achilles is “a soaring eagle/ launching down from
the dark clouds to earth/ to snatch some helpless lamb or trembling hare”
(Homer, 800BC/1990, 22, 364-368).
In the hominid past, young “warrior hawks” were highly prized because of
violent interband rivalry that made it essential for a group to have a
contingent of “dawn warriors... healthy, adventurous, and potentially violent
young men.... The most brutal... have the advantage over their less ‘sociopathic’
adversaries” (Bailey, 1995, p. 542). As
in the Arena, killing is erotic: a
It is possible that
in combat and in cruel acts, the intensity of wounding and killing activity is
escalated by pain, just as the dopaminergic biochemistry of predation, in
itself powerfully rewarding, may be augmented by endorphin release in response
to exertion and pain (4.4 - 4.5). If so,
this dopaminergic escalation could be experimentally demonstrated.
The beauty of war.
In Dispatches
(1978), Michael Herr describes the nights at Khe Sanh:
Even the incoming
was beautiful at night, beautiful and deeply dreadful. I remembered the way a Phantom
pilot had talked about how beautiful the surface-to-air missiles looked as they
drifted up towards his plane to kill him...
A reviewer of
Herr’s book wrote that he had returned from
The weight of blood
If war is
predation’s most significant social product, its principle cultural
product is the emotional weight of blood in mythology, religion, literature and
the graphic arts. A fixed feature of
early religions is the gods’ thirst for animal and human blood: “for the life of the flesh is in the blood:
... for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul” (Leviticus,
Blood feeds frenzy
and frenzy demands blood. In Euripides’
Bacchae (c. 406 BC/1970), the ecstatic women, bare-handed, attack
grazing cattle, “tearing full-grown cows to pieces” and hurling body parts to
and fro in a scene of bloodlust that parallels the Wrangham & Peterson
description in Section 3 of chimpanzees dismembering red colobus monkeys.
5.3 The Walls of Shame
Given that the human appetite for cruel spectacles is unabated, and that
arousal by scenes of cruelty remains part of the human condition, it is
remarkable that punishment and killing, once openly displayed in amphitheatres
and city streets, have for the past two centuries been banished from public
view and hidden behind prison walls.
What psychosocial mechanisms have operated to achieve this great shift
from the permitted to the taboo? Part of
the answer is given by Norbert Elias (1939/2000), who writes that the history
of western civilisation is of “an advance in the frontiers of shame, in the
threshold of repugnance,” 5 (p. 172). No shame attached to the public torment of
humans and animals in ancient or mediaeval times (5.2.4); the warrior had
“extraordinary freedom in living out his feelings and passions, it allows
savage joys... [and] hatred in destroying and tormenting anything hostile or
belonging to an enemy [and] a particular pleasure ... in the mutilation of
prisoners” (Elias, 1939/2000, pp. 162-3 ,
371)6.
But in the 17th and 18th centuries, knights became
courtiers, so that “a warrior nobility [was] replaced by a tamed nobility with
more muted affects” (p. 389). Soon
after, centralised state power created pacified social spaces, the restraint of
aggressive instincts was internalised, and “an automatic, blindly functioning
apparatus of self-control [was] established ... [protected] by a wall of
deep-rooted fears” (p. 368). Regrettably,
these barriers are permeable and crumble as opportunity and situation
allow: the challenge for violence
prevention is to anchor them more deeply in the life of the instincts.
6. The Problem of
Violence Prevention
Though treatment of
the victims of cruelty (Basoglu, 1992; De Jong, 2002) remains a moral
imperative, effective prevention must begin with perpetrators. How might the foregoing analysis of cruelty’s
reward systems relate to the prevention of violence, defined by the World
Health Organisation as the intentional use of physical force or power against
oneself or others that threatens or causes injury, death, or psychological harm
(Krug, Dahlberg, Mercy, Zwi, & Lozano, 2002, p. 5)? Put differently, the question is how many of
the 1,659,000 violence-related deaths in the year 2000 (Krug et al., 2002, p.
270) were driven by delight in pain and bloodshed, and might therefore have
been prevented if the public health upstream initiatives advocated by Krug et
al. (2002, p. 243) had, however imperfectly, acknowledged and found ways to address
the power of cruelty to inflame violence?
6.1 The voice of the perpetrator
To begin developing
answers to these questions would in the first place require an understanding of
the large individual differences in cruelty’s eliciting triggers and
behavioural expressions on the one hand, and an understanding of the needs and
gratifications of perpetrators on the other:
if so, the perpetrator’s voice must be heard. Repugnant though this may be, violence prevention
workers will need to gather affectively rich descriptions of the inner
experience of police and military torturers and interrogators. These cannot be affectively bland public
confessions, with amnesty and social rehabilitation in mind (Gardo, 1987;
Victor, 1981; Huggins, 2000), but clinical data elicited by skilled
interviewers under conditions that guarantee confidentiality (Fanon, 1968;
Haritos-Fatouros, 2003). Some elements
of the required analysis are given below.
The potential for cruelty. Current evidence is that under
situational press, readiness to commit cruel acts is a human universal. In the 1970s, Milgram’s “Eichmann experiment”
(1974) and the Stanford prison experiment (Haney, Banks, & Zimbardo, 1973)
demonstrated the “enormous power of situations” (Haney & Zimbardo, 1998, p.
709) to shape and transform the behaviour of perfectly ordinary people, whose
actions are facilitated by a stance of moral disengagement (Bandura,
1990). Obedience makes moral idiots of
otherwise admirable individuals: the men
of Charlie Company who massacred 350 civilians at My Lai in 1968 are described
as “a typical cross-section of American youth assigned to most combat units
throughout the Army.... most would
regard [William Calley] as coming close to the American ideal” (Tester, 1996,
pp. 84-85). It is resistance to situations
that makes moral heroes.
The potential for compassion. Common wisdom holds human nature to be
fundamentally compassionate: “Nature
hath implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a
moral instinct...which prompts us irresistibly to feed and succour their
distresses” (Thomas Jefferson, 1814, in Fiering, 1976, p. 195; Nell,2004). The universal instinct for compassion derives
from genetically-based kinship bonds (Blair, 1997; Panksepp, 1998).
The gendering of
hunting and the links between testosterone and aggression suggest that active
cruelty would be strongly male gendered.
Mealey (1995) notes that boys with high sensation seeking and high
testosterone are more likely to initiate aggressive behaviour and be successful
in dominance interactions, which in turn triggers further testosterone release.
These universal potentials cause an
oscillation between fascination and horror (see 2.4.1). Fascination may be dopaminergic,
originating in the proximate and distal rewards of the predatory/hunting
adaptations. The horror is
compassionate, “a certain pain at an apparently destructive or painful evil
happening to one who does not deserve it and which a person might expect
himself or one of his own to suffer” (Aristotle, Rhetoric, c. 330 BC,
1385b): this inward-turning,
narcissistic quality is captured by Darwin:
“Almost every one would experience [horror] in the highest degree in
witnessing a man being tortured or going to be tortured” (1965/1872, p. 304).
If there is indeed an oscillation
between cruelty and compassion, experienced by the subject as a switch from
fascinated gratification to horror, the reversal (Apter, 1979) might be
neurally detectable. One would further
predict that high and low readiness individuals would differ in the location of
this reversal on the cruelty continuum.
This location could be determined by construction and validation of a
Cruelty Readiness Questionnaire (CRQ), generated through content analysis of
experiential material gathered from perpetrators telling of their responses to
the pain and terror of their victims.
The theoretical prediction is that high scorers would be individuals at
the high readiness end of the cruelty continuum, with a low optimal level of
arousal, and therefore have a higher reversal threshold than low scorers. If high CRQ scores do indeed correlate with
high readiness and pleasurable arousal at cruelty that continues beyond the
point at which low scorers experience a reversal, they might have utility in
the prediction of dangerousness.
5.6 Passive and active cruelty
The actualisation
of this universal potential to use and enjoy cruelty may vary along a continuum
from low to high readiness. At the low
readiness end are those who passively enjoy media cruelty but refrain
from cruel acts; moving along the continuum are those who respond to
situational cues, inflicting pain if social inhibitions are removed and role
triggers are present, and following a pathway into affective cruelty through a
reversal from cruelty inhibition to cruelty potentiation, in which the victim’s
cries and pleading activate the PBD complex, augmenting the perpetrator’s
arousal and escalating cruelty. At the
high readiness end of the continuum are active sadists: the crazed monks
in Juliette (Sade, 1798/1968), Fritz Haarman and Karl Denke Weimar
Germany (Tatar, 1995), the 1960s Yorkshire Moors murderers Ian Brady and Myra
Hindley, and the protagonist of American Psycho (Ellis, 1991): these are the monsters of history and the
most spectacular members of the criminal class, for whose atrocities there is
an endless public appetite. Mealey (1995,
p. 526) notes that criminality and sociopathy have a substantial and
overlapping heritable component which suggests that a common factor may
underlie the various expressions of social deviance, including active sadism.
Behaviourally,
individuals with a high readiness for cruelty are likely to have a predatory,
victim-seeking style, with homologies between predator self-stimulation in
animals, and the behavioural sequence of victim stalking, capture and wounding
in humans: this novelty- and
harm-seeking sequence may be found to map to dopaminergic SEEKING circuit.
“Psychologically,
when different states feel different, they are different” (Klinger, 1971, p.
7). If so, there will not be a single neurology
of cruelty, but many, with different points on the active-passive continuum
that may be marked by the activation of distinctive patterns of neural
drivers: mapping these is a cardinal
prevention challenge. Is the passion of
the street-fighter neurally distinct from the cold interest of the cigarette
burner? can the rapt, immobile spectator
be distinguished from Alypius’ friends, howling as the gladiators fall? can
perpetrators be distinguished from spectators?
is recall for portrayals of torture and painful punishment, and
rumination on such scenes, more intense in low- or high-readiness individuals,
and does this recall covary with optimal
level of arousal (Eysenck and Gudjonsson, 1989)? As noted above, this differential affective
neuroscience should begin by gathering affectively rich descriptions of the
inner experience of perpetrators.
6 Is Cruelty an Adaptation?
Ferocity is a
prerequisite for successful competition and aggression, predation, hunting, and
affective cruelty. The behavioural
commonalities between competitive aggression and early predation, the ferocity
of predators, and the high arousal of hunters, perpetrators, and spectators
suggest that common neural pathways dating to the Cambrian subserve this
cascade of behaviours that begins with primordial competition and may end with
human cruelty. The symbolic weight of
blood and death, and their retained power to arouse powerful emotions, may
derive from an endlessly repeated scene in early hominid history: at the kill, the hunting party is flooded
with the fresh blood of the prey, smeared with its bone marrow, and exposed to
its stomach contents. These conditioned
stimuli are preceded by a multitude of sensations associated with the prey’s
pain and death, followed by proximate physiological rewards and deferred
reproductive advantages. These stimuli
make up the pain-blood-death complex, which continued to have survival and
reproductive benefits at successively more recent stages of societal evolution.
With appropriate contextual
judgment, the use of cruelty leads to the accretion of social power and its
maintenance; contextually inappropriate or excessive use will result in social
ostracism and punishment. The former has
survival and fitness advantages, especially
if male violence is under stabilising sexual selection, while the latter
will limit or prevent reproductive access.
However, despite its ancient
provenance, it is unlikely that cruelty is an adaptation that emerges through
the activation of a special-purpose evolutionary module hard-wired in the
cortex. A more parsimonious view that
would account for the striking homologies between predation, hunting, and human fascination with pain, blood and death,
is that all have a common origin in “the archetypal emotional-motivational
processes that all mammals share” (Panksepp
& Panksepp, 2000, p. 112):
biogenic amines, present in the nervous systems of many animal groups,
from molluscs through to mammals, provide the cortical foundation for these
processes. Projections from the neurons
that produce these amines “stretch over large areas of neural tissue and
release chemical messages diffusely, rather then through information-specific
synaptic transmissions” (loc. cit., p.
120). These hypothesised continuities
between predation and cruelty would be confirmed if fMRI demonstrated cerebral pathways, homologous to those that
evoke predatory gratification in canid, felid, and primate predators, in human males
exposed to scenes of pursuit, mutilation and killing of human victims, and
their pain vocalisations: there is no
lack of graphic stimulus material, as for example in films such as Last Exit to Brooklyn (Uli Edel,
Germany, 1989) and Salo (Pier
Paolo Pasolini, Italy, 1975). The male gendering of cruelty could be
confirmed by comparison of male-female responses to these stimuli.
It is therefore plausible that the
wide range of behaviours linked to the pain-blood-death complex, from the
passive enjoyment of media violence and blood sports to the activities of
interrogators and abusers, is reinforced by these diffuse and very old
emotional circuits that humans share with animals, that “are able to imbue ‘cold’ perceptions with a ‘hot’ affective charge”
(Panksepp & Panksepp, 2000, p. 115). This would in turn account for the apparent
universality of these emotions, which erupt as powerfully in the educated and
morally exemplary citizens of the 21st century as in the monsters of
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Endnotes
1. Though not further considered in
this paper, psychological punishments that inflict no physical pain are also
cruel, as in solitary confinement, public shaming, or social ostracism. The pittura infamanti (defaming portraits) of
mediaeval
2.
Self-inflicted pain is not the preserve of masochists, but a pervasive
social phenomenon in contests and sports, especially contact, endurance and
“extreme” sports. Humour and the mutual
vulnerability of lovers also hold cruelty in tension. A life without reflexive pain would be dull
and colourless, but again, as with psychological pain, and except in passing, I
have excluded this domain from the argument.
3.
I have dealt with war and massacres from the perspective of the
individual actors, and not in its political context: the exhilaration of the machine gunner is
relevant, but not, in this paper, the military command structures that control
these events.
4.
A wall carving in the north palace at Nineveh shows King Ashurbanipal
and his commanders walking over headless enemy bodies, with a beheading still
in progress (Bersani & Dutoit, 1985,
Fig. 26). Roman commanders summarily
executed rebels: a stone relief
(Andreae, 1978, Fig. 536) shows the beheading of rebellious barbarians under
Marcus Aurelius in about 170 AD.
5. AriPs (1981) chronicles a similar process, within a similar
time frame, that has displaced natural deaths from the public to the private
domain.
6. This condition
recapitulates the famous passage in Hobbes’ Leviathan : in war, “every man is enemy to
every man.... in such condition, there is no place for industry, because the
fruit thereof is uncertain...; no account of time, no arts, no letters, no
society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent
death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”
(1651/1996, p. 84)