A theory on violence

 

NSM Rally (image from Southern Poverty Law Centre)

From what I have read so far there is not much evidence of violence among the early neolithic communities of Anatolia and the fertile crescent. There is circumstancial evidence that the priests were up so something strange at Cayonu Tepesi and the copper mace head found at Can Hasan implies that violence was not unheard of in these communities. But there seem to have been plenty of neolithic settlements like Çatalhöyük, where the evidence suggests that people lived peacefully and buried their dead intact.

So when, where, why and how did warfare become the norm? Edward (Ned) Pegler’s blog Armchair Prehistory poses a similar question: “What was happening in Neolithic and Chalcolithic Europe and the Near East between 5500BC and 3500BC to make it an apparently much more violent place?” He goes on to ask “What evidence can be used to indicate violence?” I’ll list the four bullet points he suggests, because his approach is sometimes more systematic than mine:

1. Signs of deliberate wounding on buried individuals;
2. The presence of fortifications such as walls and ditches around settlements;
3. Extensive burning layers at settlements;
4. Pictorial or written records of violence;

And I’ll add a couple more:

• Remains of weapons in archeological sites;
• State of mind indicators in archeological remains.

Starting backwards, indicators of mindset might include architectural style and artwork. Remains of small houses of similar style and size might indicate an egalitarian mindset or ideology. More complex houses of varying sizes might indicate a more hierarchical mindset. The absence of community buildings might indicate an informal laid back society, focussed on the individual and the family. The presence of community buildings might indicate more social organisation and community focus. The presence of temples with alters or elaborate design might indicate a high level of community organisation and a powerful priesthood. Evidence of systematic mutilation or murder in temple buildings might indicate a priesthood so powerful it was losing its grip on reality and beginning to display signs of what psychologists today might call criminal psychosis.

In the artistic record, portrayals of fat, pregnant, or nursing female figurines would seem to indicate a society focussed on nurturing and fertility; one which recognises the primal importance of women in maintaining an abundant community. Male figurines copulating, displaying or playing with their phallus, might indicate that boys are joining in the conversation and saying let’s talk about dicks. And when the paintings and pottery are full of battle scenes, that would seem to indicate that blokes in general and soldiers in particular have pretty much taken over the cultural agenda.

Fortification might be regarded as circumstatial evidence of a violent environment, although, as mentioned above, the first walls of Jericho were built to keep out flood waters, so care needs to be taken before jumping to conclusions. Similarly a burnt layer in the archeological record of a settlement might indicate that the settlement was attacked and rased to the ground, or it may indicate an unfortunate accident, as was the case in the great fire of London.

Moving through the list to weapons, the presence of weapons in the archeological record depends on the weapons not rotting away, so as long as people were using wooden weapons, the evidence might be sparce indeed. One exception to this is a collection spears found in Germany and dated as 400,000 old. These even predate our current species. Another exception is the so called Thames beater, found in the Thames, and carbon dated to c3500 BC.

Forensic analysis of a c.5000 BC mass grave in Austria found that the fracture pattern on some of the skulls closely matched that created when a model of the Thames beater was used to bash a synthetic skull. Two other sites from a similar period have been found in Austria and Germany with skeletal remains having similar injuries. So this is evidence of deliberate violence, without the actual weapons having been found in situ.

According to Britannica one of the first weapons crafted specifically for use by humans against humans was the mace: “a simple rock, shaped for the hand and intended to smash bone and flesh, to which a handle had been added to increase the velocity and force of the blow.” It would have been a great tool for caving someone’s head in, and I shudder to think what type of would ever use it. But if the handle was wooden, it might rot away with the passage of time, and you would be left with a rock, which might look like any other rock and be hard to recognise as a weapon. One notable exception to this is the copper mace head found at Can Hasan, which is clearly recognisable as a weapon. Common sense would suggest that it wasn’t invented then, but that the copper version was a ceremonial copy of something similar in regular use.

The signs of violence listed above might give clues on the when and where of warfare, but not the why and how. Ned Pegler’s blog gives a list of possible ideas on the why:

1. A revolution resulting from inequalities in the system;
2. Copper economics;
3. Climate;
4. Invasion;
5. And a few variants and combos.

I am sure there is lots of merit in these ideas but for me they focus too much on social circumstances and macro-economics and not enough on the individual. I hated history at school, because we were just given a list of kings and what they wore. And today I hate the mindset that has been handed down to us: from Genesis, that we are fashioned in the image of a god, and from the history books and romantic literature which tell us that war is a noble activity, warriors are noble beings, and royalty are the noblest of all. I think if you stand back and look at what warriors do, besides rescuing and ravishing maidens, they are not so much noble beings, as psychopaths.

What is a psychopath

According to healthline “psychopath” is no longer a medical term. It has been replaced by the phrase: “Anti-Social Personality Disorder (ASPD)”. But if you look at the signs and symptoms of this mental disorder, they fit pretty well with the profile of a good warrior:

• socially irresponsible behavior;
• disregarding or violating the rights of others;
• inability to distinguish between right and wrong (which is kind of ironic);
• difficulty with showing remorse or empathy;
• tendency to lie;
• manipulating and hurting others;
• general disregard towards safety and responsibility;
• tendency to take risks and engage in reckless behavior;

The frequency, or prevalence of ASPD in the general population has been estimated to be in the range of 1-4%. So here is my theory.

My ASPD theory on violence

In the Warless paleolithic hunter gatherer groups would number usually less than one hundred people. So at any one time there would not usually be more than one psychopath (I’m going to keep using the term) in the group. In the absence of peer reinforcement they would probably keep their antisocial urges to themselves. They might be a pain in the arse, and they might torture small animals, but probably not much worse. In the unlikely event that they did kill another person, they would be dealt with by the group, and the group would move on.

During the neolithic, group sizes grew into the hundreds. Now the possibility existed for there to be two, three or more psychopaths in a single community. The impact this had on community behaviour would have depended on a number of things:

1. The pre-existing ethos of the community;
2. The ability of the psychopaths to interact freely with each other;
3. The intellectual ability of the psychopaths;
4. The position of the psychopaths in the social order;
5. The ability of the psychopaths to make a case for group hostility;
6. The ability of the psychopaths to prove their case.

The first four items are just about numbers and probability. Once you had enough communities of several hundred people, organised into a social hierarchy, there would eventually have been enough psychos in the elite to influence community policy. This might have been the case at Cayonu Tepesi, where there was a bit of mutilation going on although no evidence of full on warfare.

Full on warfare would have required the last two conditions to be satisfied, and that is where Ned Pegler’s list comes in, as a list of scenarios in which the psychos might make a case for war.

The earliest settlers at Jericho and Çatalhöyük were able to live without fear of attack, partly because few people even knew they were there, and even those that did probably knew they had nothing worth stealing.

But as they and other agricultural pioneers became better at what they were doing, generated a surplus and started trading, not only were they advertising their presence, but also making themselves a target worth attacking.

What Ned Pegler’s blog calls “copper economics” could simply be called increasing prosperity. Under these conditions, a well organised social community, with psychopaths already in control, might consider going on a crime spree, including robbery, murder and possibly destruction. In the history books, the crime spree would come to be called a raid, and if the victims fought back it would be called a war; and it would all be depicted as very romantic and manly.

The exact mechanism is not important, and the point in history is not important. All that matters is that a critical mass of psychopaths coalesce to effect political and/or military change.

From the current era, Brexit is an example of a small group of rabble rowsers from the lunatic fringe of the political extreme right gaining sufficient popular support to scare a mainstream party into holding a referendum. Eighty years earlier, small groups of political extremists played on the emotions of the victims of economic depression so as to get Hitler elected as leader, from where he steered the whole country into war. In Zimbabwe, under Mugabe, vigilantes drove white farmers off their land. They might have wanted to do that for the previous hundred years, but under white rule the State constrained their freedom to act; under Mugabe they were encouraged to act as they wished.

The mechanism varies and the outcome varies, but the common theme is that people with ASPD coalesce and have their twisted belief system reinforced, by each other, and by some form of reward, which may be social approbation, as in the case of the Brexiteers, Mugabe’s goons and the Nazis, or it may be economic, as in the case of robbers and organised criminals from any era.

So to recap, I believe that in the paleothic the population was too sparce for people with ASPD to coalesce. In the early neolithic they could coalesce, but the scope for social approbation or reward was limited. But as the neolithic progressed, food surpluses grew, and people started to collect trinkets, and as those trinkets turned from heavy low value stone and pottery to metal, the conditions were right for both social approbation and economic reward.

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Top image: Southern Poverty Law Center