The Universal S.A.D.
Two theories of human violence (part I of II)
1.
Men are more aggressive and violent than women. Anyone even faintly familiar with crime statistics or military history, or who applies even minimal pattern recognition to social experience, knows this. The bare fact of a sexual aggression differential (henceforth “S.A.D.”) seems beyond serious dispute. There is no real question that a S.A.D. exists in humans, only—just possibly—a question of why. Why are men more aggressive and violent than women?
2.
This essay is not about psychological violence—for example, verbal denigration, humiliation, threats, intimidation, isolation, manipulation, “gaslighting,” or character assassination through insinuation or lies. It is about overt physical violence—for example, punching, kicking, grappling, stabbing, slashing, bludgeoning, strangling, shooting, suffocating, incinerating, poisoning, or drowning other humans with the intent to harm or kill them.
This is not to deny that psychological violence is real or harmful. It is. Nor is it to deny that physical and psychological violence are closely related. They are. In certain contexts, it may even be useful to consider psychological and physical violence, not as distinct phenomena, but as gradients on a continuum. Nevertheless, it remains the case that when we do look at the physical end of the violence continuum, we unavoidably observe a stark asymmetry in perpetration by sex. This essay explores why.
3.
Broadly, there seem to be two rival hypotheses to explain the S.A.D. They might be termed the social constructionist hypothesis and the sociobiological hypothesis.
The social constructionist hypothesis posits that men are, on average, more aggressive and violent than women because of social conditioning. Boys are exposed to the expectation of male aggression through dominant cultural narratives, which are reinforced and amplified through media such as cinema, television, and video games, and by gendered playthings like toy guns or soldiers. Boys then develop to conform to this expectation. The S.A.D., according to the social constructionist hypothesis, is an expression of enculturation.
The sociobiological hypothesis posits that men are, on average, more aggressive and violent than women because they have an innately greater biological predisposition towards aggression and violence. While culture certainly plays its role in either enflaming or containing violence, it does not operate on human blank slates with equal inborn proclivities for every potential behavior. The S.A.D., according to the sociobiological hypothesis, is an expression of human psychophysiology.
4.
Many female heads of state have led their countries in war. Powerful female rulers challenged the expansion of the Roman empire. Amanirenas of Kush invaded Roman occupied Egypt, halting further imperial encroachment into Africa. Boudica of the Celtic Iceni tribe avenged the rape of her daughters by Roman legionaries by fomenting a massive indigenous uprising that almost succeeded in driving the Romans out of Britain. Septimia Zenobia of Syria seized most of the eastern Roman provinces in battle for the Palmyrene empire. In the seventh century, empress Wu Zeitan of Zhou China presided over numerous conflicts with the Tibetan empire, the Second Turkic Khaganate, and the Khitan peoples. Several early modern European queens left a mark on military history. Isabella I of Spain completed the Reconquista by destroying Granada, the final remaining sovereign Muslim kingdom in Iberia. Catherine de Medici strove against Protestants and ultra-Catholics alike during the French Wars of Religion. Elizabeth I of England contested Spanish imperial power with military force on the Atlantic and the European mainland. Maria Theresea of Austria spent much of her reign defending the Habsburg monarchy from a hostile coalition of states including Prussia, France, Bavaria, Saxony, and Spain. Catherine the Great transformed Russia into a dominant European power by expansionist wars against the Ottoman empire and Poland. Modern female heads of state have also presided over wars. Indira Gandhi oversaw India’s victory over Pakistan in the Indo-Pakistani War. Golda Meir led Israel in the Yom Kippur War against a coordinated attack by Egypt and Syria. Margaret Thatcher led Britain to triumph in the Falklands War over Argentina.
Many women have commanded armies in the field. Fu Hao was among the most preeminent military generals of Bronze age China, leading Shang dynasty forces against the nomadic Yi, Qiang, and Ba peoples. The sisters Trung Trac and Trung Nhi united the Lac Viet tribes to drive the imperial Han dynasty out of Vietnam. Two centuries later, after China had reestablished control, another woman, Lady Trieu, led a second major Vietnamese revolt against the Han. Al-Kahina (“the Priestess”) spearheaded the Berber resistance against the Arab conquest of the Maghreb, vanquishing the forces of the Umayyad Caliphate at the battle of Meskiana before her defeat and death at the battle of El Jem. Inspired by the voice of God (or so she believed), Joan of Arc rallied the demoralized French against the English invaders during the Hundred Years War. Nzinga of Ndongo (in modern Angola) conquered the kingdom of Matamba before waging relentless war against the Portuguese empire. Rani of Jhansi led a major rebellion against British colonial rule in India, surviving several battles before a defiant death at the siege of Gwalior.
Many other women have fought on the battlefield. According to Herodotus, Scythian women rode and fought alongside their men, and could not marry until they had proved themselves by killing a man in battle. Modern archaeology has confirmed that adult Scythian females were often buried as warriors with weapons and armor. Plutarch, Tacitus, and other classical historians noted ferocious women warriors among the Germanic tribes. Strabo claimed female German fighters preferred mass suicide to surrender. The Mongol princess Khutulun, great granddaughter of Genghis Khan, was renown for her skill in archery and wrestling, and for her lightning-like cavalry strikes in battle. A female samurai, Tomoe Gozen, distinguished herself by her military exploits during the Genpei war in Heian-era Japan. She was described as “a warrior worth a thousand, ready to confront a demon or god…” [i] Mai Bhaggo rallied the Sikh resistance against the Mughal empire at the zenith of its power under Aurangzeb. She is revered to this day in the Sikh religion as a warrior saint. A female Russian cavalry officer, Nadezda Durova[ii], fought with distinction at the battle of Smolensk in the Napoleonic invasion and in other campaigns, earning the highest military honors from the Tzar. Ukrainian-born Lyudmila Pavlichenko was one of the deadliest snipers in history. She stalked, shot, and killed more than 300 German soldiers during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.
Women have also perpetrated non-state warfare as pirates. Sayyida al-Hurra of Morocco, Jeanne de Clisson of Brittany, Grace O’Malley or Ireland, and Anne Bonny of Britain were among the many women known to wage war against all flags on the high seas. Zheng Yi Sao of China was likely the most powerful pirate commander in history. She commanded a fleet of 400 ships and around 70,000 pirates, a force large enough to contend against the British, Portuguese, and Great Qing empires for mastery of the ocean. Nor have women been strangers to the duellum, or “war of two.” In the sixteenth century, a pair of Neapolitan noblewomen famously fought with lances, maces, and finally swords over the love of a man. In the nineteenth, two Russian noblewomen mortally wounded each other with their husbands’ sabres. Basque-born Catalina de Erauso escaped from a convent to kill her own brother in a duel, before disguising herself as a man to fight for the Spanish crown in the Americas. During the seventeenth century French dueling craze, opera singer Julie d’Aubigny fought and defeated several men, including three over the course of a single evening.
The examples cited in the paragraphs above are far from comprehensive. Women warriors are a documented fact of history.
Yet, with the fact of exceptions and overlap duly noted, there remains the data. The story it tells is clear. Military history records thousands of battles, spanning continents, civilizations, and millennia. But it does not appear to record a battle, anywhere or at any time, that was ever fought predominately by women. That is, there does not seem to be a known instance of hundreds or thousands of female humans forming an army (with or without male auxiliaries) that ever clashed on a battlefield with deadly weapons against another army of women (or, for that matter, against an army of men). Women have absolutely participated in warfare, often (as we have seen) with outstanding courage and skill. But the fact remains that waging war has always and everywhere been a largely masculine pursuit. The pattern is consistent throughout time, from the stone age to the space age. It is consistent across cultures, from Portugal to Pakistan to Polynesia to Peru.
Relative to the total population of a society, the historical peak of female participation in combat was almost certainly the kingdom of Dahomey (in modern Benin). From the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, regiments of elite women warriors called the Mino fought for Dahomey against rival west African kingdoms such as Oyo, and later against French colonial forces. European observers dubbed the Mino the “Dahomey Amazons,” and recorded their exceptional bravery, ferocity, and effectiveness in both ranged and close quarters combat. But Dahomey was not a society in which the traditional sex roles were reversed vis-à-vis warfare. Dahomey was a patriarchal kingdom. Its armed forces were always preponderately male. Even at their height, the Mino never made up more than a third of the Dahomeyan army.
In absolute numbers, the peak of female combat participation was unquestionably in the Soviet Union during the Great Patriotic War. Confronted with a genocidal Nazi onslaught, the Soviets mobilized women on a scale never seen before or since. Many served in combat roles such as snipers (like the aforementioned Lyudmila Pavlichenko), machine gunners, or tank commanders. Led by aviatrixes such as Marina Raskova, “the Night Witches,” an all-female night bomber regiment, flew over twenty thousand missions, devastating Axis targets under a torrent of bombs and shells. Altogether, an unprecedented 800,000 women enlisted in the Red Army. And yet even then, women still amounted to less than 10% of the total Soviet armed forces. Although the Soviet Union was a formally egalitarian state facing an existential crisis, the Red Army remained 90-95% male.
The contemporary peak of female combat participation is Israel. As many as 40% of the total Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are women, including about 20% of the combat forces (up from 7% in 2015). But most female Israeli soldiers serve in border defense, air defense, intelligence, naval, or support-combat roles. Almost half of IDF combat roles are still closed to women, including maneuvering infantry, armored forces, and most commando units specialized to operate in enemy territory.[iii] Since October 2023, women have increasingly taken part in forward operational deployments. But frontline fighters in high intensity zones like Gaza or Lebanon are almost exclusively male.
Early modern Dahomey, the World War II-era Soviet Union, and contemporary Israel are all outliers in the degree to which they incorporated women into combat roles. And yet in none of them did the rates of combat participation between the sexes ever approach parity. The militaries of all three societies remained substantially male majority. It is also worth noting that, in all three examples, the institution of relatively high levels of female soldiers was motivated, at least in part, by a shortage of available male ones. Dahomey established the Mino to compensate for the vast numbers of Dahomeyan men lost to war and the Middle Passage. Dahomey armed so many of its daughters because slave ships swallowed so many of its sons. The Soviet Union suffered millions of male military casualties to the Nazi invasion. The unprecedented scale of female military enlistment was an act of desperation. Even as Israel widens the scope of its aggression in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, it faces a diminishing proportion of men willing and politically available for military service. (For example, Israel’s growing Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox population, is legally exempt.) It seems reasonable to posit that but for this common lack of manpower, the rate of female combat participation in these outlier societies would have shrunk to levels more typical of the historical norm (as indeed was the case in the Soviet Union, for example, after the conclusion of the Great Patriotic War).
A substantial majority of humans who ever led armies, tribes, or nations in war have always been men. And the overwhelming majority of humans who ever charged across a muddy field towards enemy lines with a bayonet through barbed wire and Gattling-gunfire, or stood up in the stirrups of a war horse at full gallop while thrusting a sabre or lance at an enemy solider, or drove a tank or a chariot on a mission of destruction, or encased their bodies in steel to march across the desert to retake the Holy Land, or crossed through the Kyber pass to raid and pillage India, or dodged projectiles or burning oil while trying to scale a defensive fortification, or hurled a javelin, tomahawk or grenade with lethal intent, or crept like a cat through the night with a bow or rifle to launch a surprise attack, or shattered the skull of another human with a mace, or their bones with a flail or club, or slashed their arteries with a sword or dagger, or severed their limbs with an ax, or impaled them on a spear, or incinerated them with napalm or Greek fire, or strapped bombs to their own bodies to turn themselves into expendable living weapons, or dropped bombs on military or civilian targets from a plane, or intentionally flew a plane into a naval carrier or a skyscraper, or navigated a galley, battleship, or waka taua to settle a feud across the sea, or drilled to fight in a formation such as a tercio or phalanx, or crouched behind a shield wall against a hail of arrows, or drew rapiers at dawn or pistols at dusk to avenge a slight of honor with blood, or brandished a cutlass or flintlock in a piratical assault, or carried away a human head or scalp as a trophy of war, or plotted over a map or schematic to capture a city or a country or a strategic hill, or envisioned, designed, and constructed weapons of ever-greater destructive power —always and everywhere, in every land, in every clime, and in every time, the overwhelming majority of activities such as these have been carried out by men.
5.
Women perpetrate violent crime. They commit assault, robbery, murder, torture, even rape. Women engage in serial murder, usually by “quiet” means such as poison, and/or as covert “angels of death” in their capacity as nurses or caregivers. Some prominent examples here include Giulia Tofana, Mary Ann Cotton, Nannie Doss, Belle Gunness, and Amelia Dyer. Much more rarely, women commit “hot blooded” serial murder, such as Aileen Wuornos, who shot seven men dead at point-blank range. Violent female gangs are a feature of North American prison systems, often as affiliates of male gangs such as the Bloods, Latin Kings, or Aryan Brotherhood. Female sicarias (hitwomen) have carried out assassinations for Mexican drug cartels. Women have participated in sadistic cult murders, such as those carried out by the “Manson Family.” (“Manson Girls” Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel participated in the brutal stabbing murders of five people, including the pregnant actress Sharon Tate.) The seventeenth century Hungarian countess Elizabeth Bathory was convicted of orchestrating the torture and murder of hundreds of girls and women, reputedly to stave off old age by bathing in their blood. [iv]
A template for the female political assassin was set as far back as the Hebrew Bible, which describes the Jewish widow Judith seducing, intoxicating, and beheading the Assyrian general Holofernes. Charlotte Corday stabbed the Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat to death during the French Revolution. A militant Tamil separatist, Kalaivani Rajaratnam, killed Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, along with herself and over a dozen others, by detonating an explosive concealed in her clothing. (Some would-be women assassins were less successful. Fanny Kaplan wounded Vladimir Lenin with two semi-automatic pistol shots, but he survived. Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme misfired a semi-automatic at Gerald Ford.)
More than three thousand women served as prison guards in the Nazi extermination camps. Female Red Guards carried out beatings, torture, and murder during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Women have been directly involved in bombings, hijackings, kidnappings, bank robberies, and shootouts with law enforcement as members of insurgent groups such the West German Red Army, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Black Panthers, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. An estimated fifth of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) were women, who were used extensively as assassins, infantry, and suicide bombers.
In short, female interpersonal violence appears across a wide spectrum. It manifests in examples spanning intimate killings, to ritual combat, to group violence in gangs, to involvement with insurgent and terrorist organizations, or with fascist or totalitarian states. In rare cases, it extends to “hot blooded” predatory homicide. Female interpersonal violence seems to arise from broadly similar causes to that of males: status competition, sexual jealousy, resource acquisition, revenge, territoriality, peer pressure, or political or ideological commitments. As with men, women’s violence may be motivated or exacerbated by rage, fear, desperation, delusion, psychopathy, or sadism. The difference, as in warfare, lies in the statistics.
The only categories of violence which women commit more often than men are infanticide and filicide: lethal violence against infants and small children, often linked to postpartum psychosis. Men dominate all other forms of interpersonal violence. The degree to which men dominate them ranges from large to massive, depending on the type and frequency of the crime. Boys are far more likely than girls to be arrested for violent offenses, or to be disciplined for violence in schools. Men are far more likely than women to escalate disputes into violence under conditions of anger, intoxication, or status competition. Having escalated, conflicts involving men are more likely to result in serious injury or death. Having been convicted of violent offenses, men are more likely to reoffend. Men are far more likely than women to commit aggravated assault, robbery, or manslaughter. Worldwide, about 90% of homicide offenders are male.[v] Men are overrepresented in organized violence by even greater disparities. The vast majority of gang slayings are committed by men. So are the vast majority of bombings, kidnappings, and hijackings. Most direct enforcers of state violence are men. Most insurgent and terrorist violence is carried out by men. The vast majority of assassins of heads of states or leaders of mass movements are men. Men commit almost all rape and serial murder. For every Aileen Wuornos, there are hundreds of documented male serial killers. It is the very scarcity of “hot blooded” female serial killers that made Wuornos a household name.
The S.A.D. can be observed in every country, city, and province on Earth. Anywhere in the world, the more obsessive-compulsive, premeditated, extreme, or prolific the perpetrator of human violence, the more likely he is to be male.
6.
The Age-Crime Curve is among the best replicated findings in social science. It illustrates the statistical reality that, for whatever reason, violent behavior is not evenly distributed throughout male human lifespans. Wherever we have data, rates of violent crime rise in their mid-teens, summit in their late teens or early twenties, then plummet in their thirties and beyond. By his forties and fifties, a man is statistically far less likely to commit violence crime. By his sixties, a man is at least an order of magnitude less likely to commit most violent offenses than men aged 18 to 24.
As usual, one can find individual exceptions. Stephen Paddock was 64, for example, when he unleashed an arsenal of automatic weapons against a crowd of concert goers from a Las Vegas hotel balcony in 2017, committing the deadliest one-man mass murder spree in American history. But Paddock was an extreme anomaly, probably well over twice the median age of the average American mass shooter.
To be clear, the Age-Crime Curve is not sex-specific. A female crime curve follows the same general trajectory as the male one. The difference is that the male crime curve rises much higher and more steeply. As we have seen, men are on average consistently more aggressive and violent than women. But young men across cultures and time are also consistently more aggressive and violent than older men.
Note that the demographic that in every human society is most prone to violent crime—young men—is exactly the demographic that every society throughout history has primarily enlisted to fight its wars.
7.
In an essay entitled “Violence and Human Nature,” [vi] the American historian Howard Zinn argues against the proposition that aggression is rooted in human biology. He poses provocative questions and challenges that behoove any sociobiologist to consider seriously and respond to with care. On a personal note, I will add that Zinn has always impressed me as a sincere man. Everything I have ever read by or credibly heard about him inclines me to believe that he thought and wrote from a stance of love and sympathy for humankind. To all evidence, Zinn was genuinely saddened by needless violence and outraged by oppression from any quarter, in any form. Passionate moral convictions animated his distinguished career. He aspired to create a better world for everyone.
Furthermore, Zinn earned my respect and gratitude for his generosity here to Edward O. Wilson, the author of Sociobiology and long-time boogeyman of social constructionist theoreticians. Although disagreeing with Wilson on many points, Zinn calls him “an important thinker” (which he certainly is), and Sociobiology “an impressive treatise on the behavior of various species in the biological world that have social implications...” Zinn even admits that Wilson has sometimes been misrepresented by his radical critics, allowing that they have attributed to him “more extreme views about innate aggression than he really holds.” (This is something of an understatement, to put it mildly. During the “Sociobiology Wars” of the 1970’s, Wilson’s “radical critics” tried to intimidate and silence him by gathering in gangs to disrupt his lectures at Harvard with bullhorns and Maoist chants. They defamed him as a Nazi, charged him with genocide, threatened him with bodily harm, and assaulted him in public in front of hundreds of witnesses. One respectfully wishes that Zinn had found any of that worth mentioning.)
Near the beginning of “Violence and Human Nature,” Zinn declares he has never been persuaded that human aggression results from some natural instinct. He deplores the influence of philosophers who argued to the contrary, such as Niccolo Machievelli and Thomas Hobbes. The sway of such pessimistic thinkers, he believes, amounts to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Zinn laments that even Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, “two of the greatest minds of the [twentieth] century,” could have been seduced by the myth of a violent instinct in human beings. Against this myth, Zinn marshals his own array of sources and authorities:
The paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould: “What direct evidence for genetic control of specific human social behavior? At the moment, the answer, is none whatever.” (Note Gould says, “genetic control,” not “genetic influence.”)
The biologist Peter Medawar: “By far the most important characteristic of human beings is that we have and exercise moral judgement and are not at the mercy of our hormones and genes.” (Note Medawar says, “at the mercy of” not “influenced by.”)
The Nobel-prize winning biologist Salvadore E. Luria, who “points to the misuse of science in attributing violent behavior to our genes. Moving away from genetic determinism and its mood of inevitability (as too often interpreted, the inevitability of war and death), Luria says that biologists have a nobler role for the future: to explore ‘the most intriguing feature—the creativity of the human spirit.”
“The Seville Statement on Violence,” produced by a 1986 international conference of scientists that convened in Spain to investigate the scientific basis of human violence and the prospects of peace: “It is scientifically incorrect to say that war is caused by ‘instinct’ or any single motivation… Modern war involves institutional use of personal characteristics such as obedience, suggestibility, and idealism… We conclude biology does not condemn humanity to war.”
The psychologist Erik Erikson, who “moving away from Freud’s emphasis on biological instinct and on impressions gained through infancy, has pointed to the fact that, unlike most animals, human beings have a long childhood, a period for learning and cultural influence. This creates the possibility for a much wider range of behaviors.”
The philosopher John Stuart Mill: “Of all the vulgar modes of escaping from the consideration of the effect of social and moral influences upon the human mind, the most vulgar is that of attributing the diversities of conduct and character to inherent natural differences.”
The anarchist Emma Goldman: “Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name. Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flathead parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presume to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature.”
According to Zinn, the belief in a biologically rooted human instinct for aggression is sadly widespread in modern thought, among educated and uneducated people alike. Yet this belief, he insists, is almost certainly wrong. Moreover, it is dangerous. Wrong because there is evidence for it in neither science nor history, nor in common human experience. And dangerous because it “deflects attention from the nonbiological causes for violence and war.”
“There is no known gene for aggression,” Zinn notes. “Indeed, there is no known gene for any of the common forms of human behavior.” [vii] He is skeptical of purported evidence of a general instinct for aggression in primates. Zinn notes that such claims about baboons, for example, have been based on their behavior in zoos, where the animals in question are often strangers. Yet when observed in their natural habitat, baboons are peaceful or, at worst, yell and squabble at each other without inflicting serious harm. [viii] And at any rate, Zinn writes, it is a long jump to extrapolate from baboon to human behavior. “Such a jump does not take account of the critically different factor of the human brain, which enables learning and culture and which creates a whole range of possibilities—good and bad. Those wide possibilities are not available to creatures with limited intelligence whose behavior is held close to their genetic instincts…”
From genetics and ethology, Zinn turns to anthropology. He finds the evidence there equally unconvincing. He notes there have been many studies of so-called “primitive” peoples, from African Bushmen, North American Indians, Malay tribes, and the Stone Age Tasaday of the Philippines—peoples “supposed to be closest to the ‘natural’ state and, therefore, give strong clues about ‘human nature.’” What have these studies revealed? “[N]o single pattern of warlike or peaceable behavior,” Zinn observes; “the variations are very great.” While the native peoples of the North American plains and the Ik of Uganda, for example, were indeed warlike, the Cherokee of Georgia and Mbuti of Central Africa, by contrast, were peaceful. He concludes that such wide disparities in group behavior strongly indicate that aggression and violence come from factors such as the environment and cultural idiosyncrasies, and not from some inborn disposition or drive.
Zinn faults Sigmund Freud for failing to find evidence for an aggression instinct in his own field, psychology. To justify his belief in that instinct, Freud could only offer evidence from history: “The most casual glance at world-history will show an unending series of conflicts between one community and another,” Freud wrote. But what does the persistence of war in history actually prove? “The claim requires that wars be not only frequent, but perpetual, that they not be limited to some nations but be true of all,” Zinn writes. “Because if wars are only intermittent—if there are periods of war and periods of peace and if there are nations that go to war and other nations that don’t—then it is unreasonable to attribute war to something as universal as human nature.” Contrary to Freud, and as we have just seen in the pacific examples of the Georgian Cherokee and the Mbuti, warfare is not a perpetual or inevitable feature of the human condition.
Zinn’s point is not to deny or downplay that war has been frequent throughout history. On the contrary, it is just this reality that he is attempting to explain here. But what then does explain this reality, if not ‘human nature’? What are “the nonbiological causes for violence and war”? Zinn’s answer takes the form of a series of rhetorical questions: “Are there not persistent facts about human society that can explain the constant eruption of war without recourse to those mysterious instincts that science, however hard it tries, cannot find on our genes? Is not one of those facts the existence of ruling elites in every culture, who become enamored of their own power and seek to extend it? Is not another of those facts the greed, not of the general population, but of powerful minorities in society who seek more raw materials or more markets or more land or more favorable places for investment? Is there not a persistent ideology of nationalism, especially in the modern world, a set of beliefs taught to each generation in which the Motherland or the Fatherland is an object of veneration and becomes a burning cause for which one becomes willing to kill the children of other Motherlands or Fatherlands?”
Zinn highlights the consequences of such nationalist propaganda with his own experience as a bombardier during the Second World War. “The bloody deeds we did came out of a set of experiences not hard to figure out: We had been brought up to believe that our political leaders had good motives and could be trusted to do right in the world; we had learned that the world had good guys and bad guys, good countries and bad countries, and ours was good. We had been trained to fly planes, fire guns, operate bombsights, and to take pride in doing the job well. And we had been trained to follow orders, which there was not reason to question, because everyone on our side was good, and on the other side, bad. Besides, we didn’t have to watch a little girl’s legs get blown off by our bombs; we were 30,000 feet high and no human being on the ground was visible, no scream could be heard. Surely that is enough to explain how men can participate in war. We don’t have to grope in the darkness of human nature.”
“It is not surprising that men go to war, when they have been cajoled, bribed, propagandized, conscripted, threatened, and also not surprising that after rigorous training they obey orders, even to kill unarmed women and children,” Zinn writes. “What is surprising is that some refuse.”
And indeed, many have refused. Zinn notes, for example, that widespread public resistance greeted the United States’s entry into the First World War. The American government was compelled to organize a propaganda campaign, sending out about 75,000 speakers to hundreds of cities to persuade the populace of the righteousness of the cause. Yet even then, thousands of American citizens were prosecuted for criticizing the government’s military policies. Over 330,000 men were classified as draft dodgers. Some men went so far as to mutilate themselves to avoid conscription. Later, half a million American men would evade the draft to fight in Vietnam, while another 100,000 enlisted soldiers deserted. “If an instinct really was at work,” writes Zinn, “it was not for war, but against it.”
Alongside the history of warfare, Zinn reminds us there is another history. A history “of the rejection of violence, the refusal to kill, and the yearning for community. It has shown itself throughout the past in acts of courage and sacrifice that defied all the immediate pressures of the environment…. Surely we do not need human nature to explain war; there are other explanations. But human nature is simple and easy. It requires very little thought. To analyze the social, economic, and cultural factors that throughout human history have led to so many wars—that is hard work. One can hardly blame people for avoiding it.”
In sum, “Violence and Human Nature,” presents itself as a rigorous and iconoclastic analysis, a deep dive into history, genetics, anthropology, and psychology that subverts conventional thinking on the origin of human aggression, exposes the bad reasoning or bad motives underlying the fallacious claim that it is innate, and offers an alternative explanation better supported by logic and the facts. Zinn implies that thinkers who do not share his conclusions are, at best, misguided or lazy on the subject of violence. At worst, they are shills for the ruling elite. He exhorts his readers to see through the pessimism and expedient distortion that surround the subject of violence, and to embrace a more inspiring conception of human nature.
Two observations about “Violence and Human Nature:”
(1) It is almost exclusively concerned with one particular manifestation of violence: organized state violence, and particularly warfare. (A title more reflective of its actual contents would be “War and Human Nature.”) Zinn says relatively little or nothing here about homicide, assault, domestic violence, rape, gang violence, robbery, or other forms of interpersonal violence. A study of human violence that treats warfare in depth, while largely ignoring individual violent crimes, omits roughly half of the phenomenon it sets out to explain. [ix]
(2) It supposedly debunks the claim of an intrinsic connection between aggression and human instincts without ever once drawing explicit attention to the universal asymmetry in the perpetration of violence by sex. Zinn wrote a long essay to explain human violence that barely so much as alludes to the S.A.D.
Why not?
8:
Many things can be true at once. For example, it can be simultaneously true that:
war is a racket of ruling elites, who stir up conflicts in pursuit of their own political and material interests, and at the expense of the lives and wellbeing of the masses,
and that it takes persistent propaganda to convince a populace that people who live on the other side of the line on a map are their enemies, who deserve to be hated and ought to be fought,
and that many people are perceptive enough to see through such indoctrination, and understand that fighting, killing, and dying are not in their own political or material interests, nor in the interest of their conscience,
and that many people throughout history, both individually and in groups, have defied the madness of crowds drunk on jingoism, and courageously resisted complicity in the atrocity of war, even at the cost of their own freedom and lives,
and that throughout history rates of violence and warfare have varied widely within and between human societies, owing to local cultural and material circumstances,
and that humans have natural empathy for each other and other sentient beings, which can make them reluctant or unwilling to inflict harm,
and that the human brain is a marvel of evolved complexity that allows humans to abstractly consider circumstances, weigh long term consequences, draw out elaborate inferences, parse fine distinctions, contemplate the perspectives of other minds, cooperate in great numbers, and develop and transmit culture,
and that the culture developed and transmitted by marvelous human brains exerts a profoundly powerful influence on their behavior, permitting humans to override reflexivity to a degree that no other animal can approach,
and that aggression in humans, as in every other animal, originates in organic instinct.
In “Violence and Human Nature,” Howard Zinn makes many true or plausible statements about violence and war. But the conclusions he derives do not necessarily follow from those statements. Few, if any, of the claims Zinn advances to support his argument are actually inconsistent with the existence of a human instinct for aggression. At best, he has convincingly demonstrated here that humans are often antipathetic towards violence. This may be a valid and valuable point. But it is not evidence against an innate human instinct for aggression. Humans may be antipathetic to many facts about their own physiology and behavior. They may resent, regret, or resist many realities of their embodiment, from their pubescent yearnings, to their urge to procreate, to the temptations of unhealthy habits, to their susceptibility to injury and disease, to the inevitability of their aging and death. If humans do have an instinct for aggression, it would not be surprising if any of them ever detested it. It would be surprising if they did not.
Is an instinct for aggression compatible with an instinct for empathy? Very much so. Simple animals such as jellyfish and snails may behave as if driven by a single dominant imperative: towards food, away from danger, and so on. But as animals’ nervous systems evolve in complexity, they develop a greater range of motivations which may be activated simultaneously. For instance, I have many times observed my cat caught in a clear tug-a-war between the urge to attack or run away—a classic illustration of “fight vs. flight.” A more striking example may be that mothers of predator species sometimes nurture the young of prey species. In some cases, the stimuli that triggers maternal behavior seems to override the stimuli that ordinarily triggers predatory behavior. Thus, lionesses have been observed to nurse antelope calves, animals they more typically chase and devour. And domestic cats have nursed or cared for juvenile squirrels, rabbits, ducklings, or chicks. Or for a reverse case, consider rodents such as rats and mice. Like other mammals, rodent mothers instinctively nurture their own genetic offspring. But under conditions of stress, scarcity, or illness, they may eat them instead.
The point of these examples is not that they necessarily prove anything about humans in particular. It is that even much less neurologically complicated mammals than humans may obviously find themselves torn between conflicting instincts. Aggression may clash with fear, for example, or maternity with predation. The more complex the animal, the greater the number of potential urges it will be compelled to navigate to achieve its desires. The human animal is the summit of evolutionary complexity. Our brains are battlefields of multitudinous, mutually inconsistent impulses.
The most revealing feature of Zinn’s essay is an omission. He never mentions the S.A.D. Despite its obvious relevance to any analysis of violence and human nature, he painstakingly avoids ever bringing it up. Not even for the purpose of refuting it. One ventures, especially not for the purpose of refuting it. It is so much easier to deny the existence of a human instinct for aggression if you imply that “humans” are fungible units, with no particular human or group of humans being any more predisposed to any particular behavior than any other. But once you dare to admit that maybe all humans do not have same innate behavioral profiles, your task suddenly becomes a lot more difficult.
What if some humans, say for reasons such as sex or age, are more instinctually aggressive, even on average, than others? Zinn cannot afford to even pose such a question directly. For once asked, it suggests other, even less comfortable questions—at least, to anyone even faintly familiar with crime statistics or military history, or who applies even minimal pattern recognition to social experience: Could human males have a stronger average instinct towards aggression than human females? If not, then why was every battle on every continent in every era fought predominately or exclusively by men? If not, why do men commit a substantial majority of the assaults and murders in every society ever observed or recorded? If not, why are young men at their hormonal peak, in particular, the most dangerous demographic in every society for which we have data? How can you explain the S.A.D. by enculturation when it is evident in every human culture? If an instinct for aggression runs stronger in men than in women, what would the evidence look like?
But what if an instinct for aggression does run stronger in men than in women? Would it not then inescapably follow, assuming men are also human, that at least some humans are predisposed to violence? How can one group of humans (say men) be both more organically aggressive than another group (say women), while at the same time not be organically aggressive at all? And if at least some humans have an instinct towards violence, then isn’t Zinn’s thesis wrong?
It is not surprising that Zinn avoids the (bull) elephant in the room. Drawing attention to the asymmetry of perpetration of human violence by sex, across all cultures and throughout all time, would oblige him to either deny or downplay this extraordinarily well-documented fact, or else to explain how it is consistent with his contention that humans—by which we may infer Zinn means any humans—lack innate aggressiveness. Examined in full light of the evidence, such explanation could only be unconvincing. Zinn would have to square the universal S.A.D. with his theory that human violence is caused by power hungry elites, greedy minorities, and ideology. The attempt would only expose the incompleteness of his case. And so instead, Zinn’s analysis of violence and human nature carefully steers clear of the S.A.D., as if deep down he is aware that it is the iceberg that would sink his argument on impact.
To be clear, I am not accusing Howard Zinn of intellectual sleight of hand. The more plausible explanation, as well as the more charitable one, is that he is deceiving himself. To adapt Hanlon’s Razor, it is better to avoid attributing to duplicity what can be adequately explained by selective blindness. Or as Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “The most common lie is that which one tells to oneself; lying to others is relatively an exception.”
Sources and recommended reading:
Federal Bureau of Investigation. Crime in the United States 2019, Table 42: “Arrests by Sex.” Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, 2020
Pinker, Steven The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature New York, Viking, 2002
Schneider, Tal “Lacking Harendi manpower, IDF turns to womanpower: 1 in 5 fighters are now female” Times of Israel 21 May 2025
UNODC. Global Study on Homicide 2023. Vienna: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2023. https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/global-study-on-homicide.html.
Wilson, E.O. On Human Nature Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1978
Wrangham, Richard W. & Peterson, Dale Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence Cleveland, Mariner Books, 1997
Zinn, Howard Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology New York: Harper, 1991
[i] The quote comes from The Tale of Heike, (translation by Helen Craig McCullough, 1988) an anonymous epic poem written at least a century after the events it describes. Contemporary historical accounts apparently do not mention Tomoe Gozen, leading some to question about her historicity.
[ii] Nadezda adopted a male persona, “Aleksandr Aleksandrov,” preferred masculine pronouns, and identified throughout most of her life as a man. In accordance with the reigning academic conventions, modern western scholars therefor define Nadezda as a “trans man.”
[iii] Schneider 2025
[iv] Some scholars argue the charges against Bathory were exaggerated or even fabricated as a political ploy by the Habsburgs to undermine the political power of her dynasty.
[v] UNODC. Global Study on Homicide 2023
[vi] Zinn 32-47. This section heavily quotes and paraphrases these pages.
[vii] Pointing to the absence of a human “gene for aggression” is a classic red herring. It’s true, but misleading. And while Zinn is also correct that there are no genes for any common forms of human behavior, this massively understates the case. There is no single gene for any behavioral trait of any animal more complex than a fruit fly. Cats have no gene for stalking and pouncing. Roosters have no gene for crowing at dawn. Frogs have no gene for catching insects with their tongues. And yet no biologist would deny these are instinctual behaviors. The behavioral traits of complex animals are polygenic, influenced by the interplay of hundreds or thousands of distinct genes. An attempt to deny organic aggression in humans on the basis that they lack a “gene for aggression” implies the corollary that no complex animal exhibits any instinctual behavior whatsoever. Which is obviously false and absurd.
[viii] In fact, yelling and squabbling between male baboons in their natural habitat are dominance displays, often presaging physical conflicts. Competition is fierce, since a male’s rank determines his access to food and sex. Adult male baboons may weigh up to twice as much as adult females, and come equipped with long, sharp canine teeth adapted for intrasexual combat. Male baboons may inflict deep, sometimes even fatal, lacerations and puncture wounds on each other with those fangs. When a new male bluffs or battles his way to the top of the social hierarchy, he may kill the infants of the troop. This compels the females of his vanquished rival’s harem to reenter estrus, allowing him an opportunity to father his own offspring before he loses rank to a future challenger. Known as “sexually selected infanticide” (SSI), this adaptive behavior has also been observed in lions, bears, and gorillas, among other mammals.
[ix] Since at least the 1960s—and certainly by the early 1990s, when “Violence and Human Nature” was published—global deaths from interpersonal homicide have consistently exceeded direct deaths from armed conflict. Depending on the year, interpersonal homicide has been up to several times deadlier. This includes civilians deliberately or accidentally massacred by combat operations. Counting indirect military casualties, such as through famine, disease, the collapse of vital infrastructure, and long-term excess mortality from displacement and deprivation due to military conflicts, war and interpersonal violence are still, in the aggregate, at least broadly comparable in the amount of death and suffering they inflict on human beings. (UNODC. Global Study on Homicide 2023)