Friends and Enemies: Our Need to Love and Hate. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ would be no more than collections of people with whom we occasionally spend some time while other groups would be an integral part of our identity. These groups are usually those of gender, family, race, religion and nationality, but all these categories are not necessarily applicable to everyone. If someone calls me an atheist I can only reply that I am an atheist only in the same way as I am an ‘a-fairy-ist’ or an ‘a-Father-Christmas-ist’. When the broadcaster Jon Snow was asked if he was British he said, ‘I think that Britishness has died off in my lifetime and nothing has replaced it. When I was a child it was Winston Churchill, beefeaters and lots of pink on the globe. Now it’s an irrelevant concept. Personally, I’m a Londoner living in Europe.’⁴

      The groups which we join only transiently we can usually define very simply – ‘the crowd I drink with on Friday nights’, ‘the people who live in my street’, ‘the guys with me at college’, but the groups which are part of our identity, while they might have simple labels like ‘Church of England’ or ‘Australian’, have complex definitions which are difficult to make entirely explicit. ‘Australian’ might mean anyone who carried an Australian passport but it also means a wide range of different attributes. Recently my son sent me two videos made by the Australian Broadcasting Commission. One was the film The Castle, a funny, sentimental story about a family whose home was to be requisitioned for an airport extension, and the other a set of four episodes of the satirical series Frontline about a television current affairs team in Melbourne. The family whose home was their castle were all loving, kind, tolerant and simple-minded to the point of stupidity. The television team were murderously competitive, hurtful and cynical, with an intelligence used only for self-interest. Yet both the film and the series were an accurate representation of what I would recognize as Australian.

      A complex definition of our group allows us to align ourselves with certain aspects of our group and to distance ourselves from other aspects. We can claim to have all the virtues of our group and none of the vices. Primitive pride can make good use of this ploy whenever certain events threaten our meaning structure. Primitive pride is not wedded to truth or logic, and so, as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa revealed more and more of the abuses of the apartheid era, those who had benefited from that era did not reject their group but continued to claim its virtues while denying that they ever knew that such atrocities had occurred. When F. W. de Klerk was in the UK to promote his autobiography he told BBC Radio Four listeners that, on the one hand, his government had done much to promote the welfare of blacks and, on the other hand, he had known nothing of what happened at Vlakplaas, a farm near Pretoria which was used as a base for police hit squads. He had to admit that he had known of the existence of Vlakplaas but he thought it was simply a place where ANC activists were ‘turned round’. The assassins of Vlakplaas were unruly elements who wanted to keep their activities secret from him.⁵

      The chutzpah of primitive pride in action can often leave onlookers flabbergasted. They are unable to point out to the exponent of such pride that every idea we hold, every meaning that we create, has bad implications as well as good. De Klerk might claim ignorance of what was going on in the country of which he was President, but this has the bad implication that he was not doing his job properly. People were acting in his name, and so he was responsible for the matters of which he claimed ignorance.

      However, many people feel that it is better to be charged with incompetence than to be charged with wickedness. By saying, ‘I’m just a poor, fallible human being trying to do my best,’ we can show humility and contrition while taking pride in our humility and contrition. We are all extremely skilled at reinterpreting events in order to hold our meaning structure together.

      One area where we frequently redefine is that of responsibility. Like de Klerk, we can deny responsibility for events for which we were clearly responsible, or we can claim responsibility for events over which in fact we had no control. Such a redefinition, the writer and biologist Barbara Ehrenreich surmises, could be at the beginning of our concepts of sacrifice and religion.

      When, some 100,000 years ago, our species first emerged it was into a world dominated by large animals. We were small creatures, much smaller than we are today, and we were prey to the beasts. It took us many thousands of years to develop tools to defend ourselves. Artificial fire-making and action-at-a-distance weapons like the bow and arrow were not invented until some 15,000 years ago.

      Only then did we turn ourselves from prey to predator. However, the fear of being prey is still very much with us. Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out that grief, depression and helplessness are the experiences of those who are prey. It seems from the research on phobias that people much more readily develop fears of spiders or snakes than they do of cars or guns, even though in a modern world people are much more likely to be killed by cars and guns than they are by spiders or snakes. The psychiatrists Isaac Marks and Randolph Nesse regard panic disorders, phobias and chronic anxiety as evolutionary adaptations to an environment which required human beings to be very readily alarmed at the possibility of danger.⁶ Fear serves to keep us alive.

      This fear not only drove us to flight or fight but also inspired our ancestors to devise ways of outwitting the powerful beasts. They would have noted that the beast was often satisfied with just one kill. They might have reasoned that if they gave the beast some food, even if the food was one of them, the rest of the group might be spared. Thus the idea of appeasing a great power with a sacrifice could have been born, and then flourished as an integral part of the ritual of religion. The idea of sacrifice allows us to reconstrue a disaster over which we had no control as a sacrifice which we had chosen to make. Barbara Ehrenreich considered the possibility that

      Sacrifice, in its most archaic form, was not a ritual at all, but a face-saving euphemism for death by predation. Perhaps no victims were ever thrown to the wolves or lions, but it somehow pleased our hominid ancestors to think of those who died in the jaws of predators as victims voluntarily offered up by the group.⁷

      The concepts of prey and predator, sacrifice and appeasement are still today central to the way in which we define the groups with which we identify. We might no longer think of ourselves as prey to the beasts of the African savannah, but in the economic jungle we’re either the exploited or the exploiter.⁸ Modern religions might not demand blood sacrifices, but the belief in the importance of sacrifice still operates powerfully. In Hinduism, as recounted in the Rig-Veda, the entire world is a result of a sacrifice by the gods. All Christian churches remind the faithful that Christ sacrificed himself for them, and, in all religions, the faithful are reminded of the necessity of personal humility and abasement.

      The concepts of prey, predator and sacrifice are central to our definition of the group because they are central to our experience of being an individual in a group. In the hierarchy of the group we might have enough power to prey on others and force them to make sacrifices, but each of us started life as small and weak and at the mercy of people around us, so even the most powerful know what it is to be prey. This is one of the reasons why the powerful usually hate to relinquish power.

      The concepts of predator, prey and sacrifice have both good and bad implications. To be prey is bad, but if there is a power strong enough to prey on us it might also be strong enough to look after us. The beasts which preyed on our ancient ancestors also provided our ancestors with much of their food. They could scavenge the kills made by the beasts. Thus a sacrifice was both an appeasement and a reward. A savage god might be appeased by a sacrifice and coaxed into generosity. Throw in a few hymns of praise and the prey might be safe.

      Being the predator has its disadvantages too. If the prey becomes an enemy the predator can become prey. When our ancestors turned from being prey to being predators, the most successful predators the world СКАЧАТЬ