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Origin of the Specious
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15107 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1989 |
4,737 Words |
| Author
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Ashley Montagu
Ashley Montagu is the author of The Nature of Human Aggression
(1976) and editor of Man and Aggression (1973), Learning Non-
Aggression (1978), Sociobiology Examined (1980), Science and
Creationism (1985), and many other books. |
THE VIOLENT IMAGINATION
Robin Fox
New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989
204 pp., $22.95
Man is the only 150-pound nonlinear servomechanism that can be wholly reproduced by unskilled labor. Add to this the grim fact that he is wholly without those determinants of behavior called instincts, and therefore has to learn everything he comes to know and do as a human being from other human beings, and you have quite a problem: a helpless creature who is in danger from the moment he is born, and even before. We, of course, share a great many traits with other living creatures, but as human beings we are unique in our incomparable ability to learn, to think, and to speak. In short, we are the most educable of all creatures. Indeed, the dimensions of our educability together constitute, beyond all else, the trait that distinguishes us as a species from everything else on this earth.
The evolution of that unique educability has a history of several million years. During most of that time, humans lived in small bands of between thirty and fifty people, half of whom were children, much, indeed, as do the few remaining hunter-gatherer peoples: the pygmies of the Ituri Forest of Zaire, the Bushmen of the Kalahari, the Australian aborigines, the Andaman Islanders, the newly authenticated Tasaday of Mindanao, and other. Under such conditions the challenges of life are simpler, less complex, and more manageable, if not less strenuous and demanding, than those characterizing more technologically advanced societies. The number and complexity of the challenges in highly civilized societies are vastly greater, more complicated, compelling, and stressful, to the point that humankind is now the most endangered--in fact, the most self-endangered--species on this planet.
The threat of extinction hangs over us all like a dark cloud in the sunlight. And the threat comes not from nuclear weapons but from man-made folly, a folly that is the result of the abuse of that very educability with which we are so generously endowed. For that capacity to learn not only enables us to be taught what is sound but also what is unsound, not only what is true but also what is false; and what is worse, not to be able to distinguish the one from the other. Even more alarming is the ensuing worship of the false and meretricious as if it were true, the acceptance of what is unsound as if it were sound and, by the next easy step, the celebration of evil as if it were good, leading finally to the embrace of the
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