Aggression Pays… Sometimes
“Talk of world peace is heard today only among the European peoples, and not much among the much more numerous non-European world cultures. This is a perilous state of affairs. When individual thinkers and idealists talk of peace, as they have done since time immemorial, the effect is negligible. But when whole peoples become pacifistic it is a symptom of senility. Strong and unspent races are not pacifistic. To adopt such a position is to abandon the future, for the pacifist ideal is a terminal condition that is contrary to the basic facts of existence. As long as man continues to evolve, there will be wars…” O.Spenger, author of Decline of the West
Today we don’t want to admit it but, sadly, aggression pays, sometimes… After examining the aggressive behaviour of our primate heritage, honey bees and Byzantine diplomacy I will make the case that nothing has really changed and that our refusal to realize that aggression has both a positive and negative face only means that the “good guys” who avoid aggression at all costs [underly-aggressive] only ensure that the “bad guys” ]overly-aggressive] win. Using the Greek idea that “the good” [and practical] approach to all in life is based upon the golden mean I will make the case that never fighting means a culture can portrayed as a coward, and that always wanting to fight and thinking violence is the answer to every problem means that culture can be portrayed as a viscious bully, emotionally unstable/immature, non-reflective. The golden mean means that a culture can be portrayed as brave when it knows when to fight and when to talk. What does this have to do with the state of Canada today? Well, we have several tough issues to deal with that will require a relatively aggressive posture to make our actions effective including Covid-19, China, plastic pollution, species extinction, racism/income equality, and the huge pink elephant in the room – climate change – the issue that everybody seems to have forgotten about for the moment. My observation is, after having lived in the USA & Australia, is that our culture is underly-aggressive, the USA is overly-aggressive and Australia is the closest to just right.
Primates
An incident in 2014 that saw a chimp fatally attack a 2-year-old child, stealing the baby from his mother. “A chimpanzee came in the garden as I was digging,” Ntegeka Semata said in an interview with the publication. She noted that her four young children were with her and as she turned her back to get water, the chimp took her child by the hand and ran off. The child screamed, which caused the other villagers to pay attention and chase after him, but it was too late. “It broke off the arm, hurt him on the head, and opened the stomach and removed the kidneys,” Semata continued, adding that the child died on the way to the local hospital. It’s unclear why the chimps are attacking the young children, but the publication mentioned “habitat loss” for the mammals throughout the western part of the country.” The native forest that once covered these hillsides is now largely gone, much of it cut during recent decades for timber and firewood, and cleared to plant crops,” according to the National Geographic story. https://www.foxnews.com/science/chimps-killing-people-in-uganda So why was the chimp aggressive? People had destroyed its habitat and food was much more difficult to get. So, perhaps you may think that chimps are only aggressive when they are stressed, sadly, this is not the case because research has shown that aggression is fundamental part of their social behaviour. Why does that matter to we “advanced humans” today? Well, chimps are our closest primate relatives and, for better or worse, we share very similar behaviours.
In the wild they’re pretty aggressive. They have warfare among groups, where males kill other males, and they have been known to commit infanticide. Aggression is a common part of the chimpanzee behavior, whether it’s between or within groups. They can show tremendous mutilation. They go for the face; they go for the hands and feet; they go for the testicles. To outsiders, they have very nasty behaviors. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-would-a-chimpanzee-at/#:~:text=In%20the%20wild%20they’re,They%20can%20show%20tremendous%20mutilation.
So, we have to admit, aggression is part and parcel of chimp, and thus human, identity. But there is good news. Among chimps if a dominant male becomes leader who is vicious, he will eventually be killed by the other chimps, because he does not develop a sense of trust, comfort, or cooperation that that is needed for a social animal like a chimp or human to survive. Here is a vivid example of what I mean:
It was a gruesome scene. The body had severe wounds and was still bleeding despite having been lying for a few hours in the hot Senegalese savanna. The murder victim, a West African chimpanzee called Foudouko, had been beaten with rocks and sticks, stomped on and then cannibalised by his own community. Thirteen years ago, Foudouko reigned over one of the chimp clans at the Fongoli study site, part of the Fongoli Savanna Chimpanzee Project. As alpha male, he was “somewhat of a tyrant”, Pruetz says.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2119677-chimps-beat-up-murder-and-then-cannibalise-their-former-tyrant/#ixzz6Qa1U6Msq
Honey Bees
I am a beekeeper. Last winter most of my bees died, but my most aggressive hive not only survived, but thrived. This spring its population has exploded and it has already made a lot of honey. Why is that? I really don’t know but it is well known that, often [but not always!] aggressive hives give more honey and survive longer than others. Here is a bit about bee behaviour you need to know to understand honey bee aggression:
Honeybees generally attack only to defend their colony, but will also attack if they are seriously disturbed outside the nest. Common sources of attack stimulus for honeybees include alarm pheromone, vibrations, carbon dioxide, hair, and dark colors.
This makes sense because mammals, which are common predators of bees, are usually hairy, dark colored, and exhale carbon dioxide. If you think about this you will realize that bees are drawn towards attacking sensitive areas around the head of a common predator.
Stinging is the ultimate final act of a honeybee because soon after, she will die. First the bee becomes alerted; she takes on a guarding stance and protrudes the sting, which recruits other bees by releasing alarm pheromone. Secondly, the bee will search for the source of stimulus and orient towards it. Finally she will attack; emitting a high pitched buzz and making body thrusts towards the source of disturbance. In such a defense response, honeybees rarely pursue stimuli for long distances. https://labs.biology.ucsd.edu/nieh/TeachingBee/honeybee_aggession.htm
So you see, for honey bees, aggression is a last resort. They actually avoid stinging if they can: their “diplomacy” is the fact that all animals know [the 2nd time] that disturbing a hive means pain and this threat is often enough to keep them safe. However, it is also true that the Africanized bees that are moving into the southern States are displacing the more peaceful pure European honey bee. Research has shown that when there is competition among nectar- and pollen-feeding invertebrate pollinators and resource partitioning are affected by introduced Africanized Honey Bees. When Africanized Honey Bees compete with other species of honey bees for flowers, the Africanized bees may displace the other bees from the food sources. Yes, Aggression pays….sometimes.
Byzantine Diplomacy: The Key to Its Long Survival
Unlike during the classical Roman Empire based in Rome the Byzantine army was not invincible, they did not have the resources to field a huge army, and they were also constantly being attacked on 2 fronts. This means that the key to their long term survival was diplomacy, an art they perfected and passed onto western Europe after they fell. Dimitri Obolensky, a a Russian-British historian who was Professor of Russian and Balkan History at the University of Oxford, asserts that the preservation of civilization in Eastern Europe was due to the skill and resourcefulness of Byzantine diplomacy, which remains one of Byzantium’s lasting contributions to the history of Europe
After the fall of Rome, the key challenge to the Byzantine Empire was to maintain a set of relations between itself and its sundry neighbors, including the Persians, Georgians, Iberians, the Germanic peoples, the Bulgars, the Slavs, the Armenians, the Huns, the Avars, the Franks, the Lombards, and the Arabs, that embodied and so maintained its imperial status. All these neighbors lacked a key resource that Byzantium had taken over from Rome, namely a formalized legal structure. When they set about forging formal political institutions, they were dependent on the empire. Whereas classical writers are fond of making a sharp distinction between peace and war, for the Byzantines diplomacy was a form of war by other means. Anticipating Niccolò Machiavelli and Carl von Clausewitz, Byzantine historian John Kinnamos writes, “Since many and various matters lead toward one end, victory, it is a matter of indifference which one uses to reach it.” With a regular army of 120,000-140,000 men after the losses of the seventh century,[2] the empire’s security depended on activist diplomacy. Byzantium’s “Bureau of Barbarians” was the first foreign intelligence agency, gathering information on the empire’s rivals from every imaginable source.[3] While on the surface a protocol office—its main duty was to ensure foreign envoys were properly cared for and received sufficient state funds for their maintenance, and it kept all the official translators—it clearly had a security function as well. On Strategy, from the 6th century, offers advice about foreign embassies: “[Envoys] who are sent to us should be received honourably and generously, for everyone holds envoys in high esteem. {Wikipedia]
So, if the Byzantines were so clever, why did they fall to the Turks in 1453? Well, back in 1000’s they were overy-confident and disbanded their standing army which had successfully, after hundreds of years of fighting, defeated the Bulgarians. A generation later the Turks appeared and they were totally unprepared. They had fallen for the illusion that the time of Peace had finally arrived – they could not have been more wrong. Their mantra of “Peace in our Time” sounds eerily like pre-WWII Britain and the results were the same: disaster with a resultant large loss of life because both Empires were not ready to fight when diplomacy failed.
Conclusion
My punchline? Iron sharpens iron. Like a knife, we all need a ‘sharp edge’ to become the best we can be and the harshness of life gives us that edge. It means facing uncomfortable truths and not always going along with the herd. It means becoming fully conscious about the contradiction of the beauty and ugliness of life and not being over-whelmed by it. It means knowing when to fight, and when to talk. Aggression, like all things in life, can be good or bad. Sometimes, when measure and controlled, it can be good. The key word here is “sometimes”. The trick to seeing the good side of aggression is to understand that it must be controlled, directed aggression because let’s be honest – being a door mat only gets you stepped on. However history and experience also informs us that uncontrolled destructive aggression only garners you enemies and while often effective in the short term always gets you killed in the long term. So, it is my hope, that we Canadians are able to find the golden mean between cowardice and viciousness by stopping being so underly-aggressive without being overy-aggressive and then, with any luck, last as long as the Byzantine Empire.
The opposite of bravery is not cowardice, it is conformity.
Even a dead fish can go with the flow.
J.Hightower
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