Origins  

During the winter of 1972 which I spent in a snowbound Basque farm-house in the mountains over St Jean Pied de Port, I happened across  two books on the death camp of Treblinka in the village’s tiny municipal library, one  written by a young French Jew as an attempt to understand how his people could have let themselves be led to the abattoirs of Nazi Germany without resistance, the other by a Russian journalist who was present at the liberation of the camp. An  image/scene compounded from these two  books would haunt me over the next twenty years – that of a young woman, naked and trembling from the cold in the snow-bound nightmare of Treblinka, stooping to take her terrorized son into her arms to comfort him as they advanced to their death in the awaiting gas chambers. The image of this immemorial couple, that symbolized for me all the positive values of humanity and their destruction in the organized insanity of a social system gone berserk, interacted with what I had experienced in Vietnam and led me over the following years to attempt to discover the origins of the structural violence of our societies which blight our lives wherever men choose to live. 

In the fall of 1994, I would find them again. But their image, which I had kept so preciously within me throughout these years, was no longer softened by a melancholic resignation, no longer blurred by a condescending nostalgia for the impetuosity of a now-abandoned youthful idealism, no longer faded by time’s inescapable erosive action. It was reality itself, caught in media-transmitted images, as they lay assassinated in a street of Sarajevo, shot down by an unseen Serbian sniper, at less than a two hour flight from my home in southern France. This photograph provoked in me a sense of despair, of panic, as of outrage and revolt that, despite the passage of over fifty years, nothing had changed in our attitudes towards this fundamental denial of basic human values. 

At no moment during this last half of a century have the men who should have been working systematically, frenetically to construct a coherent model capable of explaining the periodic resurgence of human violence in its social manifestations, unequivocally accepted this responsibility. Rather, during my research, I found a quasi- universal refusal among the social scientists to assign themselves this task. To my consternation, there emerged a general consensus, from theoreticians as different in their approach and their academic formation as Wilson (Sociobiology) and Devereux (Ethnapsychanalyze) to consider the elaboration of a general theory of social evolution (with all that implies for the comprehension of the structural functions of human violence) impossible. 

I find such an attitude not only irresponsible but, given the enormous burden of human suffering on earth that this attitude implicitly ignores, criminal as well. Why it should be impossible “a priori” to generate a functional model of social evolution for a single species, Homo Sapiens, that links its psychological and physiological evolution to the economic conditions of the various biotopes that different population groups of the species have been led to exploit, when we have an increasingly precise knowledge (1) of its physiological evolution and (2) of its prehistorical and historical past as well as (3) a direct access to human psychology in so far as our own psychological structures allow us an intuitive means of evaluating human behavior, when modern biologists have developed just such a model for all living forms on earth is a question which is never explicitly formulated, but rather evaded with only the vaguest considerations as to the impenetrable complexity and incoherency of the human experience.

The present essay has only one goal- to impose the idea that such a theory is not only possible, but indeed the principal scientific priority of the next century. In every scientific domain, save the social, we have made spectacular theoretical and technological progress throughout this century. If we find ourselves confronted with increasingly critical problems on a planetary level, often as a direct result of this progress (over-population, pollution, crime, racism, international and intra-national strife, etc.), it is because the social sciences have not proceeded apace. Our abysmal ignorance of the structural functions of human violence and of the macroscopic perturbations they provoke in our social systems prevents us from intelligently integrating this technological progress into social systems which encourage and protect fundamental human values. 

Human beings have always found their limits in the questions they do not ask or do not ask correctly. Our present conception of celestial mechanics began to evolve rapidly when they begin to reject the accepted dogmatic knowledge that was the Catholic vision of the universe. The combined efforts of the most brilliant physicists of the 20th century could not have solved correctly the following problem : Given that the sun and other heavenly bodies turn about the earth. generate an exact mathematical description of their trajectories.

The construction of a new model of social evolution is confronted with just this type of paradigmatic inertia. It must overcome not only the considerable intellectual difficulties inherent  to the creation of any new idea. It must as well overcome the psychological resistance that is activated by any attempt to rethink humanity’s place in the universe that contradicts a socially accepted vision thereof. That such a confrontation provokes a violent reaction can be seen today in the Islamic world, as yesterday in the Communist. It can be found, in the not so distant past, in the Catholic or Protestant repression of any heretical opposition. In general, this social mechanism rejects all behavior or beliefs that place one’s sense of identity in danger. It can be seen operating officially in America today in recent state legislation aimed at imposing a “Creationist” theory of evolution, in express opposition to the Darwinian model, whose modern form is perhaps the most coherent, imposing, and elegant in all of Man’s intellectual history. If we insist here on this phenomenon of psychological resistance, central to our thesis and discussed more adequately arnd extensively in the theoretical development that follows, it is in hope of obtaining from the reader that minimal indulgence, that minimal tolerance necessary for a complete and objective lecture of our essay. This plea for indulgence is not entirely innocent. Such a model as that proposed here is necessarily imperfect, given the inductive, intuitive method of investigation used and the necessity to organize the fabulously abundant quantity of heterogeneous and often contradictory material that anthropologists and historians have accumulated into a simple, coherent, and functional model of social evolution without a firm, scientific description of the biological basis of human behavior (i.e., the biochemical means by which the genetic programs governing different behavioral patterns interact with the existential experience of the individual to create a unique phenotype). 

Such a model, whose primary value is heuristic, could and should have been proposed in the 1930’s, where its tone and general investigative techniques would have contrasted less sharply with the intellectual and technological sophistication of those research workers whose conditional support we wish to obtain and whose eventual collaboration will be indispensable if we are to construct a truly functional theory of social evolution, after the image of its Darwinian predecessor, capable of allowing us to intervene intelligently to eliminate human violence in its macroscopic manifestations as the major component of our most critical social dysfunctions.